The clowns have taken over.
Charlotte Clymer at Charlotte's Web Thoughts:
On a typical day, more than 26,000 people work at the Pentagon. It’s effectively a large town, roughly equivalent in population to Princeton, New Jersey or Sedona, Arizona or Oxford, Mississippi. It is, in fact, the second largest office building in the world — about 6.5 million square footage of total floor area arranged in five concentric rings (the innermost ring being “A” and the outermost ring being “E”) on five aboveground floors—a mezzanine and basement below those—all of it divided clockwise into ten corridors. Until 2023, it was the largest office building in the world before being dethroned by the Surat Diamond Bourse trade center in the southern peninsula of Gujarat, India.
At the Pentagon, there’s a mini mall and a barbershop and a dry cleaners and a florist and a post office and a very large fitness center and a library with over 250,000 volumes on defense and military topics and a decent food court with all the usual suspects (McDonalds, Popeye’s, Subway, Baskin Robbins, etc.) and smack dab in the middle of the whole thing is an unexpectedly gorgeous, five-acre courtyard with park benches and big trees and lush grass.
(My sole trip to the Pentagon as an enlisted soldier was for some two-hour ceremonial assignment, and we got to briefly walk through the Courtyard, famously a no-salute, no-hat zone. Imagine, if you will, 20-year-old uniformed Charlotte, junior enlisted rank on my chest, passing scores of brass and nearly having to hold my right wrist at my side to keep from erroneously saluting tired colonels getting some fresh air.)
Something that’s also amazing about the Pentagon: the most casual walk will get you between any two points in the building in fewer than 20 minutes and walking with a purpose should get you there in about ten, despite the entire building having about 17.5 miles of walkways.
That’s always been pretty good news for some of the most critical workers there in a country that famously, supposedly values and prioritizes the free press: formerly the occupants of the offices located on the second floor of the E-ring between corridors 8 and 9, what was once known as “Correspondents’ Corner” — dedicated as such by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird on November 21, 1972 to honor journalists who died in combat zones. (It was rather absurdly changed to the very unsexy “Office of the Secretary of Defense Public Affairs” corridor in 2012.)
It was there you’d find defense, military, and national security journalists from the Associated Press and Reuters, The Washington Post and The New York Times, NPR and ABC and NBC and CBS, some dedicated military outlets, a few foreign outlets — most of them sharing unglamorous, small cubicle spaces while doing their damnedest to inform the American public on the workings of the world’s most powerful military.
That all abruptly changed this year. Back in February, after breathtakingly unqualified Pete Hegseth was confirmed as Trump’s defense secretary, the Pentagon announced that NBC, NYT, NPR, and POLITICO would all lose their permanent cubicle spaces, to be replaced, in part, by far-right outlets Breitbart and One America New Network. Less than a week later, CNN, The Washington Post, and The Hill were among those who got the boot, supplanted, in part, by Newsmax and The Daily Caller.
It was pretty clear from the start of Trump’s second term that his defense team were looking to replace seasoned military journalists burdened by professionalism and integrity with folks from friendly outlets that are far more at home as state media propagandists cosplaying as reporters.
In early October, the Pentagon announced a new policy requiring all journalists sign a pledge that they would not gather or release information not explicitly authorized by Defense Department officials, regardless of intelligence classification. It also revoked their previous access to most of the building without an official escort. A failure to sign the pledge would mean a loss of press credentials.
Burdened by said integrity, dozens of reporters refused to sign the pledge and turned over their credentials, walking out of the space en masse where some of them had faithfully worked their whole careers.
That brings us to this week—“New Media Week” as Hegseth’s public affairs team have dubbed it—in which an incoming group of propagandists, charlatans, and grifters have descended on the Pentagon, claiming those very spaces once held by actual journalists, to unapologetically play their roles in Trump’s ongoing state media project. They’re podcasters and YouTubers and social media influencers — not a single real journalist among them. Their job is to parrot what Cult Daddy tells them to say, and in the meantime, they’re free to engage in all the usual, cringey “look, Mom, I’m an edgy populist” antics we’ve come to expect from such sad souls.
[...] Other than being “Yes, Cult Daddy” mouthpieces for this administration, their personal motivation isn’t about our country’s national security or the strength of our military or the wellbeing of our service members and their families or accurately informing the American people. These embarrassing, childish antics are a direct application of what I call “ghost elitism schadenfreude” or GES. It’s the tragic condition of being mediocre, lazy, unremarkable, incurious, and needing to create a target for all that resentment they feel over their failure to achieve success because they weren’t willing to put in the work. GES is the engine of the Trump political machine. These people don’t want security and prosperity for our country. They want someone to blame for their lack of conventional achievement because it could never be their fault. They want to gloat at the expense of professionals upon whom they’ve long projected their deep insecurities. So, they look at seasoned reporters slugging away at the hard work of Pentagon reporting and reframe them with an elitism that never existed. They accuse these professionals of the very thing they know deep down about themselves: they are undeserving and shiftless and dishonorable and that buried truth really fucking hurts to acknowledge.
And their fans love it. The vast majority of Trump supporters love it.
The far-right clowns have taken over the Pentagon’s Correspondents’ Corner.
