You Can Prob Guess Who Just Blocked 2 Women and 2 Black Officials from Their Pentagon Promotions

The ugly details of Secretary of War Defense Pete Hegseth’s anti-women, anti-people-of-color army somehow keep getting worse. 

On Friday, the New York Times revealed how—based on the accounts of 11 officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity—Hegseth removed two female and two Black officers’ names from a one-star promotion list in the military, even though he’s really not explicitly allowed to do so. Same freak who once fantasized about removing women from combat roles in a podcast, BTW. And who literally ordered a review of the effectiveness of women in combat roles in January. 

Typically, the one-star list is proposed by senior generals and reviewed by the White House before it goes to the Senate—and part of its approval process means getting either a complete approval or rejection from the defense secretary. (To avoid politicizing the military, there is no picking and choosing.) The list is comprised of about three dozen officers.

But, for months, Hegseth reportedly pushed to remove the four names but received pushback from Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, who refused to comply because the officers—who served for decades—were all qualified. So Hegseth reportedly went and removed their names on his own. 

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because Hegseth also ousted the Navy’s first female chief in February 2025; fired a three-star admiral from her post in August (who’s now running for Congress); and is also rumored to have inexplicably blocked another female Navy captain from her promotion in November. And according to the NYT, shortly after Driscoll promoted Maj. Gen. Antoinette R. Gant to lead the Military District of Washington, Ricky Buria, Hegseth’s chief of staff, disapproved. He said he didn’t think Trump would want to stand next to a “Black female officer” at military events—a hunch that was corroborated by a senior White House official. Speaking to the NYTimes, Buria denies the conversation ever happened

Hegseth & Trump:

-fired the Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, replaced him with a less qualified white man
-purged a bunch of generals, almost entirely women and minorities
-had memorials to women and minorities torn down at the Pentagon
-this

I’m sensing a pattern here …

[image or embed]

— Hal 10000 (@hal10000.bsky.social) March 27, 2026 at 1:15 PM

One of the Black combat veterans is suspected to have had his name removed because, 15 years ago, he wrote a paper—investigating a trend of African American officers opting for support roles over frontline ones in the military. Another one of the delisted officers was a female logistics officer who served in Afghanistan during the U.S.’s abrupt withdrawal in 2021, an operation that’s drawn particular ire from Hegseth for being “disastrous and embarrassing.” According to her colleagues, however, she’d done her job exceptionally well throughout the chaos. It’s not clear why the other two individuals had their names struck. 

But perhaps the only explanation needed is that Hegseth’s been on a mission to transform the military’s “foolish” and “woke” culture, and—consequently—deliberately push women and people of color out of his army. I’m sure his collection of Christian nationalist pastors have nothing to do with that…

---