Hegseth Has Gutted the Entire Joint Chiefs and Replaced Them With People Whose Primary Skill Is Clapping

The Man Who Hit a Drummer With an Axe on Live Television Is Now Swinging at Four-Star Generals During a War, and Nobody in Washington Will Tell You Why

In 2015, during a live Flag Day celebration on Fox News, weekend host Pete Hegseth threw an axe and hit a member of the West Point drumline named Jeff Prosperie, who sued for “severe and serious personal injuries” and “permanent effects of pain, disability, disfigurement and loss of body function,” which, to be fair, is exactly what you would expect to experience after being hit with an axe. The lawsuit was quietly settled in 2019, and Hegseth went on to bigger things, by which I mean he is now the United States Secretary of War (formerly Defense, but we apparently renamed it because “Defense” didn’t sound aggressive enough, kind of like how a restaurant renames its “value menu” to “the feast collection” except with nuclear weapons), where he is in charge of the most powerful military force in human history despite a personal military career that peaked at the rank of Major in the Army National Guard, leading a platoon of roughly 30 soldiers, which is fewer people than most Applebee’s employs on a Friday night.

I mention the axe incident because Pete Hegseth is back to swinging at people, except now they’re four-star generals, he’s doing it during a war with Iran, and the Pentagon’s official explanation is (and I want you to appreciate this) nothing. They said nothing. They just wished everyone well in their retirement, the way you might wish someone well after running over their mailbox with your car and then driving away.

WHAT HAPPENED

On Thursday, Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George along with two other generals. George is a West Point graduate, class of 1988, who served in Desert Storm, Iraq, and Afghanistan, commanded the 4th Infantry Division, and was confirmed for the job by the Senate in a vote of 96 to 1, which, given that this is a legislative body whose members cannot agree on whether lunch should happen at lunchtime, is basically the governmental equivalent of a standing ovation. He had a year and a half left on his term. Republican Rep. Rich McCormick, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, went on camera and said, “General George is a brilliant mind. I’ve never heard him say anything contrary to what the president is trying to achieve,” and called the firing “concerning,” which in Congressional English translates roughly to “WHAT THE ACTUAL (expletive deleted).”

This is not an isolated incident. Hegseth has now removed more than a dozen of the most senior military officers in America, including the Joint Chiefs Chairman, the Chief of Naval Operations, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the head of the NSA, among others. He has remade nearly the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff. Two original members remain. George’s replacement is Gen. Christopher LaNeve, a former Hegseth aide who got on Trump’s radar by calling into the inauguration ball from South Korea and delivering a compliment so enthusiastic that the president remembered his name months later, which in this administration qualifies you to run the Army in the same way that remembering a waiter’s birthday qualifies you to manage a Michelin-starred restaurant. The Pentagon described LaNeve as someone who will carry out the administration’s vision “without fault.” Those are the actual words. WITHOUT FAULT. In a military context.

WHY (THE VERSION THEY’LL ADMIT TO)

The official explanation, per NBC News and nine U.S. officials who were willing to talk about it as long as nobody used their names (naturally), is that Hegseth has been blocking promotions for Black and female officers across all branches, and George refused to pull names off a promotion list when ordered to. The DIA head was fired because his agency produced an assessment of U.S. strikes on Iran that had the misfortune of being accurate instead of flattering, which in previous administrations would be considered “doing your job” but in this one is apparently a termination offense.

WHY (THE VERSION THEY WON’T)

These generals were not fired for being “woke.” They were fired because they were loyal to the republic instead of the regime, and that distinction is about to matter more than anything has mattered in 250 years.

If you are attempting to take over a country by exploiting the mechanisms of its own democracy (which is a move that has about as much honor as a pickpocket at a funeral, but which works disturbingly well because the system was designed to assume good faith from its participants and therefore has the structural integrity of a screen door when someone shows up without any), you do not announce your intentions. You start by removing the people who could stop you. You gut the military officers who command the troops that might push back. You do it during a war, because wartime is the one moment when firing a general feels patriotic instead of criminal.

This has happened before. In 1934, Hitler purged the SA leadership in the Night of the Long Knives. By 1938 he had systematically removed every professional officer who might have said “sir, this invasion of Poland seems ill-advised” and replaced them all with men whose continued employment depended entirely on agreeing with whatever came out of the boss’s mouth, which is a management style familiar to anyone who has worked at a startup run by a CEO who describes himself as a “visionary.” The officers who might have stopped the madness were gone. The ones who replaced them had learned the only lesson that mattered.

I am not calling anyone Hitler. I am pointing out that the sequence is identical, and that ignoring an identical sequence because you don’t like the comparison is how you end up on the wrong end of history, which is the end where your grandchildren ask you what you were doing while it happened and you have to admit you were typing “TDS” and screaming “RINO” at fellow Republicans whose only crime was not wanting billionaire sex perverts to enslave America.

And the man they’re cheering for is not the one running this. Donald Trump is not Caesar. (Caesar personally led his own armies across Gaul. Trump is a real estate developer whose father handed him an empire at eighteen and whose primary talent is being famous for being famous, a skill he shares with roughly half the cast of any show currently airing on Bravo.) Trump is the puppet. The audience watches the puppet. The hand belongs to Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Silicon Valley’s billionaire class, and what they’re building has had a name since 1933.

WHAT THEY’RE BUILDING

If you haven’t read my previous article (”The Technate of America: The 1940 Nazi Blueprint Behind Trump’s Iran War That Makes My Brain Want to Explode”), go do that. Short version: in 1933 a fascist-adjacent organization called Technocracy Inc. published a map of the “Technate of America” stretching from Greenland through Venezuela, calling for the complete conscription of men, machines, and wealth, to be managed by a technical elite who would replace democratic government. Members wore matching grey suits, drove grey cars, and saluted each other, because apparently even rational scientific utopias need a dress code and a secret handshake. The Canadian chapter head was Joshua Haldeman, a Nazi sympathizer whose grandson is Elon Musk.

The map Pete Hegseth unveiled at Southern Command in March 2026, which he called “Greater North America,” has the exact same borders as the 1940 Technate map. Same territories. Same language. Eighty-six years apart.

Musk spent the first five months of this administration gutting the civilian government through DOGE. Hegseth has spent the last year gutting the military. Both halves of the machine that could resist a technocratic takeover have been hollowed out and restaffed with people who will carry out the vision WITHOUT FAULT, which is a phrase that should be embroidered on a pillow and placed on the grave of American democracy if we don’t start paying attention.

THEY ARE BUILDING ROBOT ARMIES

Right now, today, there are still people inside the federal government and the military who are loyal to the American people and not to the regime, not to Silicon Valley, not to Technocracy Inc. (which, the more I research it, looks less like an independent movement and more like another tentacle of the same Masonic network that has been running these schemes since before anyone reading this was born, but that’s a whole other article and my blood pressure can only handle so many revelations per week). These are people who took an oath to the Constitution, not to a billionaire with a rocket ship, and they are the only human beings standing between you and a future where policy disagreements are settled by machines that don’t care what you think because they weren’t programmed to. Musk gutted thousands of them from the civilian side through DOGE. Hegseth is gutting them from the military side one star at a time. Every general who gets forced into early retirement is one fewer person who could have looked at an illegal order and said “no,” which is a word that has stopped more atrocities than every weapon system ever built, and which becomes completely meaningless the moment the thing receiving the order doesn’t have a mouth to say it with.

People seem to think the Nazis lost World War II and then just sort of evaporated, like a fart in a windstorm, which is a comforting thought if you don’t spend thirty seconds thinking about it.

We still have no idea where the bulk of the wealth they looted from an entire continent ended up. We still have no verified accounting of where the senior Nazi leadership actually went, beyond the handful who were famous enough to get caught or vain enough to shoot themselves. Operation Paperclip brought over 1,600 Nazi scientists to work for the U.S. government, which we acknowledge openly and apparently consider fine. The ideological infrastructure didn’t disappear just because Berlin fell. It relocated, rebranded, and waited, which is exactly what well-funded extremist movements do, because extremism is patient in a way that democracy almost never is.

And now the ideological grandchildren of those movements are building autonomous weapons systems that run on local onboard AI, don’t need a satellite link that some 14-year-old Russian kid with a $200 laptop can hack, and will follow orders with the kind of perfect obedience that every tyrant in history dreamed about but could never achieve because human soldiers have this inconvenient tendency to develop moral objections at the worst possible time. Every dictator who ever lived was limited by the same problem: eventually you need a person to pull the trigger, and sometimes that person won’t. AI fixes that. Permanently. And the people building these systems are the same people whose intellectual forefathers wore matching grey suits and published documents arguing that democracy was too inefficient to survive and that the continent should be managed by a technical elite, which is a fancy way of saying “us.” Once these systems are operational, it doesn’t matter how many Americans wake up, because waking up doesn’t help when the thing standing in your doorway doesn’t sleep.

THE MAN WITH THE AXE

So here’s where we are. A Fox News weekend host who once threw an axe on live television and hit a drummer (his name was Jeff Prosperie, he sued for permanent disfigurement, and he deserved better than to become a footnote in someone else’s political career) is now the Secretary of War, confirmed by a single tie-breaking vote, with a military career that topped out at leading 30 guys in the National Guard, and he has personally fired or forced into retirement more than a dozen of the most senior, most experienced, most decorated military officers the United States has ever produced, during an active war with Iran, without providing a single public explanation for any of it, and replaced them all with loyalists whose defining credential is that they will execute the administration’s vision WITHOUT FAULT, while the grandson of the Nazi sympathizer who drew the original version of the map now hanging on the Pentagon’s wall has dinner with the president at Mar-a-Lago and writes checks for the midterms.

The people who could have stopped this are being marched out of the Pentagon one by one. The people who are building the machines that will make stopping it permanently impossible are the same people funding the administration doing the marching. And the American public, the people whose republic is being disassembled and sold for parts in front of their faces, are either cheering because they think the guy on the stage is their guy (he’s not, he’s a puppet, the hand belongs to someone else, and puppets don’t save people, they entertain them while the real show happens backstage), or they’re too busy screaming “TDS” at anyone who tries to warn them to notice that the building is on fire and the fire department just got laid off.

He missed the drummer. He is not missing the generals. And once the robots are ready, he won’t need generals at all.

Share this article. Share the companion piece. Send them to the person you are most afraid to send them to, because that is the person who needs them most, and because being uncomfortable for five minutes is better than being a serf for a thousand years. We are running out of time to care about being polite.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

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Companion piece: “The Technate of America: The 1940 Nazi Blueprint Behind Trump’s Iran War That Makes My Brain Want to Explode” covers the Technate blueprint, the Musk/Haldeman connection, and the four billion dollars. Read them together. Then do something.