West Point

West Point Trying to Derail Their Next Boss, Pete Hegseth

11 December 2024

STARRS

Concerning stories about West Point don’t happen often, but when they do, they’re always a doozy and USMA really stepped in it this time and blew up the internet. They accuse the MacArthur Society (and thus STARRS) of only publishing bad stories, but USMA does just fine creating bad stories all by themselves. We just observe and report what they do.

ProPublica, a left-wing media outlet (funded by Soros) was trying to find angles to torpedo Pete Hegseth’s nomination for SECDEF. They decided to go back 25 years and look at Pete’s claims he was accepted into West Point but decided not to attend.

“We were recently looking at Pete Hegesth’s different statements over the years about West Point, where he has said he was admitted. First stop: West Point.”

Really? They thought they could catch him in a lie about something 25 years ago and make a big deal about it?

The reporters contacted West Point Public Affairs to ask if Pete Hegseth had indeed been accepted at West Point. A West Point spokesperson came back to them and said,

Before going on to the next part, remember that Pete Hegseth has been nominated to be the next Secretary of Defense. It’s all over the news, including all the attempts by the propaganda media to bring him down. Pete Hegseth is super high profile right now and he’s in line to be West Point’s top boss.

Who at West Point thought it was a good idea to answer this political hot potato question from a reporter of whether Hegseth was lying or not?

And that West Point said TWICE that no, Hegseth had not applied to West Point thereby confirming to the reporter who would then report it to the world that Hegseth was lying?

West Point saying their potential new boss was a liar. Did they really think this was a good idea?

A politically sensitive subject like this would/should have to be reported, checked, approved by higher ups in the command chain to go out first. To paraphrase a famous quote from Watergate, “What did the Superintendent know and when did he know it?”

ProPublic thought they had Hegseth and caught him lying, and they contacted Pete’s spokesmen to tell them they were going to write a story on this. The spokesmen discouraged that and said Pete was accepted and had the acceptance letter. Then Hegseth produced the receipts on X:

After that, ProPublica decided not to publish their story because it no longer fit their narrative/goal to disparage Hegseth. An uproar on the internet ensued, forcing West Point to issue this statement:

Oooops.

It’s a good thing Hegseth kept those documents because otherwise, we’d be sitting in a week-long legacy news cycle about Hegseth telling a lie, with only his word that the story was false, creating yet more doubt in people’s minds. Which is the playbook:

This scandal of West Point providing false information to reporters about Pete Hegseth went viral on X and kept trending as a top story. Just like when West Point removed “duty, honor, country” from their mission statement, Americans are really angry.

These are just a small fraction of the tweets and comments:

Col Kurt Schlichter, USA ret: “This may have been the stupidest thing West Point could’ve possibly done to the incoming Secretary of Defense. The academies, and the war colleges, need to be power washed of incompetence, wokeness, and civilian nonsense anyway. They’ve made it personal with @PeteHegseth. Great move, geniuses.”


Sean Parnell, combat vet: “The real question & story here is **why** West Point lied to you. Because it seems the motivation was to hurt Pete’s chances at becoming SECDEF. Which in turn could mean a military officer wanted to undermine a President-elect. And this folks, is precisely why we need Pete.”

Comments from various tweets:

“This so infuriates me. I’m a wife & mom of Service Academy Grads! (USNA ‘72 & 2010). I want OUR Academies free of such blatant prejudice/DEI/political correctness. Dear God please clean house through Hegseth & others to get back to our warfighting mission.”

“100%….having attended the war college and then overseeing joint education prior to retiring, the roots of our institutions are filled with the worst kind of academics who would rather pedal their ideologies than teach warfighting.”

“West Point has been a factory of progressive ideas for a generation. Most civilian professors need to go, the athletic program re-amateurized, and an emphasis on producing combat arms officers restored. Right now it’s basically a public university with a dress code.”

“They can either choose to be a military institution committed to turning out robust military personnel and continue receiving federal monies or be an arm of liberal propaganda and agendas and exist on private funding, but they can’t have it both ways- we need to demand they decide!”

“It speaks volumes to how woke the academies have become. They need to be brought down to the studs and rebuilt.”

“I can’t imagine Pete is going to forget this. What a stupid move. I think many of the woke left think it’s still 2016.”

“A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do.”

“Sounds like Pete is going to need a Secretary of the Army that is willing to clean house at West Point.”

“West Point needs a hard reset of culture, of mission, and of leadership.”

“The nation’s military academies should be citadels of honesty, integrity and honor. If they are not our entire American ethos is diminished.”

“I hope the @WestPoint_USMA Superintendent is personally investigating this situation. If true, this is a violation of the Code of Conduct, the Values and the Ethos that are the foundation of the Academy and our Army.”

“It’s time to take a close look at the Service Academies. As a grad and father of two graduates I hear lots of stories about the goings on for the last twenty years or so. Along with other Classmates I am not giving the USNAAA a dime until things change. Go Navy – Class of 1980”

“West Point is a woke dumpster fire.”

“Would love to see some karma for West Point’s Public Affairs office. Obviously, the intention was to let the story go out, do its destruction, then put out a one sentence correction late Friday or Sunday night when no one is looking. They never dreamed Pete would keep his letter.”

“We all know what happened here. Journalist reaches out to West Points Comms dept. Comms dept forwards to a higher up for review. Higher up speaks with his anti-Hegseth buddies. They collude to make Hegseth look like a liar. Higher up wants to thwart Hegseth’s nomination and tells comms dept he never was accepted . Comms dept does what they’re told and tells journalist “we have no records”.

“Even West Point is compromised?! Is there any American institution not marred by partisanship?”

“Why would a journo even reach out about such a specific event from 25 years ago unless they were bread-crumbed to it by someone from WP to begin with?”

“It wasn’t as simple “oversight” it was another attempted and coordinated smear campaign that Pete hedged off because he was wise enough to keep his records.”

“West Point needs to be de-woked.”

“Good! One more Woke organization has blatantly exposed themselves. One more organization that the Trump administration can clean up in the next 4 years.”

“.@WestPoint_USMA has gone woke. It’s no longer the “go to” institution it once was, especially after they mandated all applicants & students get the vaccine in 2020+. I know a brilliant kid who got into West Point and opted to go elsewhere. Best decision for him and his family.”

“I work in higher Ed. If I released info, accurate or not, I’d be fired immediately. This violates FERPA.”

“The military has a lot of deep state actors controlling it. The average person has no idea how far left the military actually is.”

“@WestPoint_USMA used to be an honorable institution.”

“What happened to West Point?”

“This is why the majority of Americans don’t trust the media and we hold them in such deep contempt. This exemplifies their activist, biased approach. They wanted the story when Hegseth was not admitted or when he lied about his admission. When it became true that he was admitted – and that the great West Point got this wrong – all of a sudden dogshit Pro Publica stood down. No longer interested. We cannot revile legacy media enough. Those clowns are never going to learn. We just have to agree NOT to pay for their work.”

“All the academies have to be gutted. I know for a fact the U.S. Air Force Academy has gone down hill quick!”

“Imagine where Pete would be if he didn’t keep that letter. West Point is a federal School and lied to the media.”

“The very people that are destroying our military are lying about and defaming the man that has been appointed to remove the rot within. Is everyone paying attention?”

“West Point needs a cleaning too. Let’s not forget the West Point communist a few years ago.”

“If Pete Hegseth hadn’t held onto his West Point Acceptance letter from over two decades ago there’s zero chance that West Point’s admissions office would have suddenly “found” his documentation all of a sudden. They’re only sorry they got caught.”

“Imagine being the public affairs officer at West Point and personally offending and lying about the incoming Secretary of the Department of Defense. Wow.”

“Journalism would be publishing a story about how a public affairs bureaucrat at West Point lied on the record (twice!) about Hegseth to a journalist. But none of these outlets are interested in journalism. They’re political operations. They care about power, not the truth.”

“Ironically, @eisingerj and @propublica just did more to get Pete Hegseth confirmed than conservative Media could ever do. Thanks to their crackerjack reporting, we now know that West Point deliberately lied in what can only be surmised was an act of political interference against the incoming Administration. This of course confirms why a disruptor such as Hegseth is desperately needed to clean out all the partisan, political rot that has infected our military.”

To ProPublica editor: “So the actual scandal here is that West Point Public Affairs lied to you in an effort to help you run a hit piece on the nominee for SecDef and you are just going to give them a pass because your smear campaign is DOA. You hacks are the worst.”

“You don’t make a mistake on someone high profile like this. No one’s going to believe that.”

“West Point has become a failed institution. At one point it meant something, but especially during the end of my tenure in the Army it was sad the product a once great institution was producing. Used to be exception to the rule for a bad officer from there, now it’s the opposite.”

“That is the same guy who got rid of Duty Honor Country, removed Robert E Lee and gave Obama an award.”

“You used to hear that someone went to West Point and it was a great honor. Now you assume the worst. Same with the FBI. That badge meant something. Now it means something else.”

“Cleaning up the service academies next on the list.”

“@eisingerj was writing a hit piece. When the hit didn’t work, he dropped it. This is activism, not journalism.”

“West Point tried to sabotage Trumps nomination. Think about that.”

“I am ashamed of my alma mater. It was not like that before. Obama and Biden destroyed its warrior ethic.”

“West Point lied, repeatedly, in an effort to tube the nomination of their next boss. Mass firings should result.”

“West Point has been DEI’d, ESG’d and CRT’d into oblivion.”

“West Point has turned into a DEI swamp that panders to the left and is creating weak future military leaders.”

“Time to clean house from the top down at woke, DEI infected West Point. Many heads MUST roll. Get back to training Warriors.”

“I got a hand it to West Point … If you’re going to screw up, this is like the perfect storm of screwing up.”

Many brutal comments re the Hegseth scandal on this goofy beat Navy video, currently the latest tweet on USMA’s X account. Over-ratio’d negative against USMA. West Point, are you listening to the People?

Promoting the Brand, Protecting the Brand (West Point, 9 Nov 23)

. . . . To receive the access needed to play their role in shaping the public’s view of the Academy, the media—everything from local newspapers to national cable programming—must first receive permission and coordination from the West Point Office of Public Affairs and Communications, which operates under the Department of the Army regulations.

“We receive approximately 1,200 media queries a year, everything from obtaining a photograph for publication or fact checking West Point information to arranging a full-blown, multi-hour national television program,” says Theresa Brinkerhoff, Public Affairs Division Chief for the United States Military Academy.

Public Affairs’ mission is to communicate and promote the overall USMA mission: “to educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets so that each graduate is a commissioned leader of character committed to the values of Duty, Honor, Country and prepared for a career of professional excellence and service to the Nation as an officer in the United States Army.” “

We utilize every possible means to disseminate the value of the Academy to the American public,” says Brinkerhoff, “including external media.”

However, before releasing the resources of the Academy to external media for their own readership or viewership, Public Affairs considers how the media will shape public sentiment of West Point in four specific areas:

1) as the premiere leadership development institution;
2) as a national symbol of selfless service;
3) as a cultivator of character growth;
4) and as a community that is dedicated to excellence.

“Everything we’re about impacts at least one of these four areas,” says Brinkerhoff. “It’s how we determine what media events and activities are supported in addition to the 250 mission assignments the Academy’s G3 office tasks to PAO.”

So, for each specialty project that would potentially shape how the nation and world see West Point (documentaries, entertainment events, media coverage, etc.), Public Affairs first asks, “Do these provide an opportunity or engagement to showcase USMA’s mission in one of the four key areas?”

“We’re extremely lucky that we’re asked all the time to participate in media engagements; however, knowing we can’t support everything, all productions must provide significant benefit back to the Academy to tell our story, meet legal and DA-level approvals, and receive a green light by the Superintendent,” says Brinkerhoff. “Protecting the status of the West Point brand is definitely our most important job.” . . . .

. . . You can throw anything at us, such as the flooding disaster that occurred in July, and we can respond quickly and effectively,” says Brinkerhoff. And, unlike any other college’s or university’s public affairs office, Brinkerhoff and Cocchia work for a place that is not only an academic institution but an Army garrison and a historic site as well. West Point is also federally funded, which brings standards and challenges that other institutions do not have to face. “We constantly have to secure and protect West Point’s national and international reputation,” Brinkerhoff says.

In her division, Brinkerhoff is responsible for media relations (about 50 on-site visits annually), media response, documentary requests, community engagements (everything from support to veterans groups and requests for assets such as the West Point Band, Color Guard and jump team to arranging personnel to participate in West Point Speakers Bureau events), public queries (approximately 3,200 emails annually), parent relations, command information (e.g., the Pointer View, West Point’s news resource), and five official Academy social media platforms (creating and disseminating fresh content on multiple platforms every day). . . .

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1 Comment

  • Absolutely effing unbelieveable!! No head(s) seem to have rolled yet. I continue to look forward,andpray for, a thorough and complete”housecleaning” to get rid of ALL the detrius!! Cannot occur sooner than yesterday.

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