CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Pete Hegseth’s Invasions

Hegseth’s D-Day speech. (Screengrab from video posted to X.)

This week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was on hand in Normandy for the eighty-second anniversary of the D-Day invasion. He made the usual remarks about U.S. dedication to defending freedom, just as he did last year on a similar occasion.

This time around, however, Hegseth veered off into controversial territory.

Not that you can figure this out from the War Department’s anodyne summary of Hegseth’s speech. Unlike last year, the U.S. government hasn’t seen fit to provide a transcript of Hegseth’s remarks. You have to nose around the Internet to find out what Hegseth said that raised so many eyebrows.

Did the Pentagon chief use the D-Day commemoration to denounce the current specter of fascism that is haunting Europe?

Did he warn of the threat that Russia poses to the continent?

Hegseth denounced an invasion of an entirely different sort. “Today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” he said. “Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late?”

Between his speech last year and the one this year, Hegseth has evidently gotten his marching orders. Ever since JD Vance lectured his elders and betters at the Munich summit last year, the Trump administration has united around the theme that immigrants threaten European “civilization.” Vance wasn’t even being original. Both his and Hegseth’s talking points come straight out of the mouths of the European far right. Unlike the usual game of telephone, where the message is garbled through misheard repetition, the fulminations of Trump’s henchmen are loud and clear.

The Trump administration is all about defending white “civilization” from the impertinent contributions of Black and brown people. At home, that means scrubbing all government websites, National Park inscriptions, and federal grants of any reference to “woke” ideologies, which used to be known as anti-racism, diversity, or just plain common sense. It has meant restricting refugee policy to the only group the Trump administration perceives as meeting the need-based criteria—white South Africans. It has meant an industrial-strength deportation campaign.

Abroad, the Trump administration is trying to “save” Europe from the immigrants that are in reality keeping European societies afloat in the face of demographic decline. In this effort, it has joined hands with the most repulsive extremists on the continent. Greg Bovino, who headed up Trump’s immigration crackdown in the United States as the commander-at-large of the U.S. Border Patrol, recently showed up in Europe to headline an event in Portugal populated by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The era of covert alliances and dog-whistling is long past.

But the D-Day speech was something different: a historical commemoration that has usually avoided contemporary politics. Prompted to reflect on present-day “invasions,” the European heads of state listening to Hegseth’s speech might have been thinking of an........

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