Pete Hegseth Is Ignorant as F*ck: The Flu Doesn’t Care About Your Politics
The Pentagon chief may be able to ignore experts, but influenza has spent centuries proving it doesn't negotiate with anyone.
Pete Hegseth Is Ignorant as F*ck: The Flu Doesn’t Care About Your Politics
The Pentagon chief may be able to ignore experts, but influenza has spent centuries proving it doesn't negotiate with anyone.
The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #941: Monday, June 22nd, 2026.
There is an old rule that applies to gravity…bullets…and viruses.
They don’t negotiate.
They don’t care what your ideology is.
They don’t care whether you voted red…blue…or purple.
And they certainly don’t care whether a politician thinks a preventive measure is inconvenient.
Reality always gets the last word.
Which brings us to the news out of Lackland Air Force Base.
Less than two months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ended the military’s longstanding requirement that service members receive annual flu vaccinations… nearly 160 trainees have reportedly been sickened in a major outbreak.
One trainee is dead pending final determination of the cause.
And suddenly…the same base that was told mandatory vaccination was unnecessary has been granted an exception requiring recruits to be vaccinated.
Read that again.
Think about that.
The policy was changed.
The outbreak occurred.
Then an exception was created to reverse the policy where the outbreak occurred.
If that sounds like a fire department abolishing smoke detectors until a building burns down…that’s because the logic is remarkably similar.
The most frustrating part?
None of this required a crystal ball.
No one had to be Nostradamus.
No one had to be a genius.
Anyone with a passing familiarity with military history could have seen it coming.
The military is, by design…one of the most efficient disease-transmission systems ever created.
Thousands of young adults.
Shared sleeping quarters.
Communal dining facilities.
Close-contact training.
High physical stress.
Limited sleep.
Constant exposure.
If you were designing a laboratory environment for respiratory viruses to spread…you would struggle to improve on basic military training.
This is not controversial.
It is not political.
It is biology.
And biology…is undefeated.
For generations…military leaders understood this reality.
That is why armed forces…have historically embraced vaccination…long before many civilian populations did.
The reason wasn’t ideology.
The reason was readiness.
An army cannot fight…if it is sick.
A pilot cannot fly…if he is bedridden.
A recruit cannot complete training…if she is running a fever.
Military organizations exist to generate combat effectiveness.
Everything else is secondary.
Which is why this story is so remarkable.
Somewhere along the way, a simple question was apparently forgotten:
“What problem are we trying to solve?”
The military’s vaccination requirement existed because outbreaks cost readiness.
That was the reason.
Not because military leaders enjoyed paperwork.
Not because doctors needed something to do.
Not because somebody wanted to inconvenience recruits.
The policy existed because it worked.
And when policies that work are discarded…reality begins keeping score.
The scoreboard at Lackland is already lighting up.
The truly maddening part is that we have seen this movie before.
Repeatedly.
History is filled with examples of disease proving more dangerous than enemy armies.
Throughout history…disease has crippled campaigns…weakened nations…and killed more soldiers than combat.
Military leaders learned painful lessons from these disasters.
They adapted.
They changed procedures.
They embraced preventive medicine.
Not because it was fashionable.
Because failure was expensive.
George Washington understood this during the Revolutionary War.
Smallpox threatened the Continental Army so severely that Washington took extraordinary steps to inoculate troops despite the risks and controversy of the era.
He did not do so because it was politically convenient.
He did it because preserving the fighting force mattered.
The mission mattered.
The country mattered.
The enemy was not interested in ideological debates.
The enemy was interested in winning.
The disease was interested in spreading.
Washington recognized reality and acted accordingly.
Leadership often comes down to exactly that.
Recognizing reality.
Not wishing reality were different.
Not demanding reality conform to a preferred narrative.
Recognizing it.
Then acting.
That is what effective leadership looks like.
The opposite is equally easy to identify.
It occurs when leaders assume consequences won’t arrive.
When they imagine longstanding safeguards exist for no reason.
When they remove a barrier and then act surprised when the thing it was designed to prevent suddenly appears.
The outbreak at Lackland raises a larger question.
How many modern institutions are quietly dismantling systems that were built from painful historical lessons?
Because that may be the most dangerous habit in public life.
Taking inherited safeguards for granted.
Assuming they were arbitrary.
Treating them as obstacles instead of solutions.
The irony is almost always the same.
The very success of a preventive measure convinces people it was unnecessary.
The bridge stands for decades.
People begin asking why it was built.
The levee prevents floods.
People wonder whether it was ever needed.
The vaccine prevents outbreaks.
People forget what outbreaks look like.
Until one happens.
Then reality refreshes everyone’s memory.
Painfully.
Expensively.
And sometimes tragically.
The lesson here extends far beyond one military base.
Every institution depends on decisions made before a crisis occurs.
Once the crisis arrives, most of the important decisions have already been made.
Preparation is invisible.
Consequences…are not.
Nobody notices the outbreak that never happened.
Nobody celebrates the training cycle that wasn’t interrupted.
Nobody writes headlines about recruits who never got sick.
Success is boring.
Failure gets coverage.
And now…failure is getting coverage.
The larger question is whether anyone is willing to learn from it.
Because reality is delivering a very clear message.
The flu does not care about ideology.
Viruses do not watch cable news.
Pathogens do not participate in culture wars.
They simply exploit opportunities.
And…when leaders create those opportunities…nature does what nature has always done.
The bill eventually comes due.
The outbreak at Lackland may ultimately be contained.
It probably will be.
But the broader lesson should not be ignored.
Policies should be judged by outcomes.
Not slogans.
Not tribal loyalties.
Not political branding.
Outcomes.
And…when a longstanding readiness measure is removed…followed almost immediately by a major outbreak that forces an exception to the new rule…reasonable people are entitled to ask whether the original policy existed for a very good reason.
The answer may be staring us directly in the face.
Reality doesn’t negotiate.
Reality doesn’t care what we believe.
Reality simply waits.
Then…it demonstrates who’s right.
#HoldFast
Back soon.
-Jack
Jack Hopkins
P.S. The recruits who never get sick during the next training cycle won't make headlines. Neither will the readiness that quietly holds. That's the cruel thing about prevention…it only becomes visible the moment it's gone. Keep that in mind as more "unnecessary" safeguards come up for removal in the months ahead. The flu was just the one that announced itself first.
Sources
“Flu sickens scores of troops at Air Force base in Texas after Pentagon ends vaccine requirement,” NBC News
“Air Force unit in Texas faces flu outbreak weeks after vaccine requirement dropped,” CBS News
“Flu outbreak at Lackland Air Force Base: Over 160 troops ill,” The Hill
“Two months after Hegseth’s regressive move, Air Force base faces major flu outbreak,” MSNBC / Rachel Maddow Show (opinion)
- Pete Hegseth renames Department of Defense to the Department of War.
- He names himself the Secretary of War.
- He fights one war.
- He loses.
Exactly.