Jon Stewart DESTROYS Pete Hegseth... This is BRUTAL!

Trump's defense secretary Pete Hegsett seems to have an adversarial relationship with just about everybody he encounters.

Now it is true and has been acknowledged that I don't have a similar biography to defense secretaries of the last 30 years. But as President Trump also told me we've repeatedly placed people atop the Pentagon with supposedly the right credentials. Whether they are retired generals, academics, or defense contractor executives. And where has it gotten us? He believes, and I humbly agree, that it's time to give someone with dust on his boots the helm. A change agent. Someone with no vested

interest in certain companies or specific programs or approved narratives. My only special interest is the war fighter. Deterring wars and if called upon winning wars by ensuring our warriors never enter a fair fight. We let them win and we bring them home.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's team has stopped holding regular Pentagon briefings and they've started posting video on social media instead.

I'm Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson, and welcome to the DOW's Weekly Situation Report.

Hegseth seems to want reporters to toe the same line and repeat the same talking points. This year, his press office has expelled many news outlets from longtime Pentagon workspaces and barred reporters from many parts of the building without an escort.

And now they're going even further.

We're trying to make sure national security is respected and we're proud of the policy.

What Hegseth calls common sense, press advocates call an unprecedented attack. Hegseth is championing new rules for press passes that, quote, appear to violate the First Amendment, according to the Association for Pentagon Beat Reporters.

This is about as packed a news conference as I've ever seen here at the Pentagon.

Those reporters have been working from inside the U.S. military headquarters for decades.

The Pentagon also made it very clear earlier today what their exact goal was, making absolutely no bones about it. It is to get the current regime out of power.

Asking questions on behalf of the public.

Do you commit to making that review public?

And holding officials accountable.

I want to be crystal clear. We did not handle this right.

But Hegseth, bedeviled by leaks, is trying to stop reporters from talking to sources.

Time and time again, classified information is leaked or peddled for political purposes to try to make the president look bad.

Media lawyers say the new rules for accessing the Pentagon would criminalize journalism. So today, in a rare show of solidarity, the country's five biggest TV networks said no. CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, even Fox News, all saying, quote,

the policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections.

Article II, section 2, the president shall be the commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy of the United States and the militia of the several states. So when people are listening to the commander-in-chief they are actually fulfilling their constitutional duty that they took an oath to defend and uphold the Constitution and what these folks are saying is absolutely shameful because when they are calling you incompetent, Mr. Secretary, guess who's listening?

Our enemies. The people that are plotting as we sit in this comfortable room in an air-conditioned, beautiful space, they are plotting the deaths of us, Americans. And it is shameful, and I wish my colleagues would come back in here and apologize

to you personally. I'm sorry to laugh. It's just so in. First of all, the biggest security classified leak threat within the Pentagon is Hexeth himself. I mean, that that dumb ass signal chat where they were just, you know, I think it was the Atlantic, right? Wasn't it? Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic was just added to a group chat. He was like, here's the coordinates of the attack and here's what time we're doing it.

Enjoy. I know that the CIA, I guess, instituted similar kinds of restrictions and people and the loss of access, I think it was James Risen was talking about this. The loss of access was,

he thought the best thing that ever happened to those reporters, because it reshaped the relationship as what it should be, which is slightly adversarial. And is that difficult to do in a building? Dave, when you have these relationships, you know, does it does it color the reporting in negative ways?

So I'd make two points on that, John. One, from the military point of view, again, given the experience that I had in the building, having a Pentagon press corps there resident in the building was advantageous to the Department of Defense because we could call them in a moment's notice when something was happening around the world. We could put together a press briefing in 10 minutes

because they were all there.

My point is they're gonna wanna take the hammer to the head and maybe what it's going to do, they always say like, certain people, if you lose your sight, other senses kind of grow there that maybe it can be a net positive for, you know, I've seen the reporting that Thomas's group does, and that's

with very little access and like really scrappy. And maybe the recognition that, oh, these guys are like, really want it to function like it does in more authoritarian countries is going to spark this sort of much more decentralized kinds of information gathering and reporting.

And it's not just the press who fall in foul of Pete Hegseth. Over two dozen admirals, generals, and other top military officials have been fired or sidelined in just the last nine months, creating an atmosphere of mistrust that the New York Times reports has forced senior officers to take sides. Some leaders were ousted for offering what are called candid military assessments, including Admiral Alvin Halsey, the head of the US Southern Command, who dared to raise questions about

the military strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea. The US military has always had an interesting relationship with the press. The press has provided cover for illegal invasions, shifted public opinion, and pushed disinformation, like for instance, the justifications for the war in Iraq. They've largely proved themselves to be, at least to some extent, a faithful arm of the military propaganda machine. But occasionally reporters stumble on things so shocking that they threaten the seemingly

untouchable top tiers of the Pentagon. What's been different about this administration is that, as Jon Stewart said, most of the supposed leaks are coming from the very top and require basically no digging at all. While Trump is just generally on a tear of disregarding the Constitution, it feels like with Pete Heggsith, he might just be reacting from a place of total humiliation. Remember, he accidentally leaked military plans to a journalist in a single chat, and then he tried to lie about it, and that didn't work, and then he freaked out when there was

no way of covering it up anymore. Restrictions on press freedom are of course a terrifying attack on the First Amendment and a threat of what is almost certainly to come. But what Hexet seems to be missing is how valuable the press has always been to the US war machine. It seems increasingly likely that the US will be trying to justify a war in Venezuela before long and by not allowing the press into the Pentagon, he'll be forced to try to sell the word to people personally.

Journalists working in mainstream media are traditionally hyper enthusiastic about American interventionism and tend to launder the perhaps less polished official excuses for war in seemingly credible publications. By forcing the vast majority of outlets out of the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth may well have severed that deferential relationship forever. Here's hoping. If you enjoyed that, make sure that you never miss another video by subscribing. And if

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