U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth delivered his 2026 “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia last week and said, “We are no longer the woke department or the weak department. Simple translation of that, no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals, just warriors, just tough, ready, committed troops.”

I know Americans with much more impressive military records than Pete Hegseth, and they are all smart enough to know that weirdos built our country.

Everyone has something weird about them. No one is without a strange habit, hobby, fear, or affectation. It could be the way they eat, the kinds of women they find attractive, or how they behave in certain situations.

The more time you live on this earth, the harder it gets to be something you are not. You don’t know how many corporate meetings I’ve been to where I think to myself that the best thing that could happen would be for the person running the meeting to yell out, “Fuck this! Let’s all go to lunch and never come back!”

I’ve spent many a business lunch looking at the restaurant’s surroundings and imagining legendary wrestler Terry Funk diving off the chandeliers onto opponents or being put through a table by Cactus Jack. I specialized in taking long lunchtime walks and still made every deadline as a financial reporter. I will find any excuse to wear a hat. I love watching Christopher Hitchens debates, but I also love deathmatch wrestling, hence my tendency to look for the Terry Funk violence option in everything.

In order to function in polite society, we have to know how to be discreet about the weirder sides of our personality. But suppressing the weird parts of your personality in hopes of fitting in will leave you broken and soulless.

At my current job, people warned newcomers: “You have to be yourself here. Don’t try to be something you’re not; people will see right through it.”

Accept your own weirdness and you’re on your way to success. Being weird doesn’t mean you can’t be strong. The strongest people are the ones who can master themselves and don’t trouble themselves by peering too deeply into the quirks of others.

Defending America is every American’s business. Defending America is every American’s business. America is a country because people took it upon themselves to take up arms to defend our right to self-determination, taking on the world’s largest empire with little more than nerve, hunting muskets and the possibility of help from France. That’s a crazy idea, and it worked. But it worked because we had grit and real discipline, not because we made the military a beauty contest or used a crackpot litmus test to fill our ranks.

If you have the discipline and meet the standards for joining the ranks of the military, more power to you. The political appointees who sneer dramatically for the cameras will be gone and forgotten, and weirdos will continue to build America.