Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, seems to be taking orders from notorious far-right hate account “Libs of TikTok.”
On Thursday afternoon, Libs of TikTok tagged Hegseth in a post targeting a military doctor whose LinkedIn page listed her title as the “EMF-Bravo Navy Deputy Medical Director for Transgender Healthcare.”
“Yikes. This she/her Navy Commander is apparently a medical director for ‘transgender healthcare’ at a Naval center in California. Can you please look into this?” the post read.
Hours later, Hegseth tweeted back, writing, “Pronouns UPDATED: She/Her/Fired.”
It’s so wonderful that the man running our military can make a grammatically unsound joke after potentially ruining a Navy doctor’s life.
It’s unknown whether Janelle Marra, the doctor in question, was actually fired by Hegseth, but the speed with which she went from anonymously serving her country to being the target of social media hate, to possibly even being fired for her beliefs by a federal official, is staggering.
Libs of TikTok is run by Chaya Raichik, who has been designated an extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center for her rabid anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda. On Bluesky, lawyer Alejandra Caraballo called Libs of TikTok “the digital stasi,” comparing the account to the East German secret police. “It’s all a spectacle packaged as content. Destroying people’s lives for profitable ideological bloodsport.”
She continued, “Anything as innocuous as a pride flag can cause a federal investigation now or people to lose their jobs.… The spectacle is there to create fear in everyone else that they need to comply or they are next.”
The post Why Is Pete Hegseth Taking Orders from Libs of TikTok? appeared first on New Republic.
