George Washington’s Woke Vaccines

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE PETE HEGSETH yesterday took time out of his busy schedule of committing war crimes and firing generals to focus on the real enemy: vaccination.

The Defense Department is “is once again restoring freedom to our Joint Force,” he tweeted. “We are discarding the mandatory flu vaccine requirement, effective immediately.” In a video, he explained the reasoning, if that’s the right word, behind the move:

Under the disastrous Biden administration, this Pentagon waged an unrelenting war on our warriors on many fronts, including when it came to denying them simple medical autonomy and the freedom to express their religious convictions. . . . You know what I’m talking about, what happened: COVID-19 and the vaccine. No more. That era of betrayal is over. . . . We’re seizing this moment to discard any absurd overreaching mandates that only weaken our warfighting capabilities. In this case this includes the universal flu vaccine and the mandate behind it. . . . Our new policy is simple: If you, an American warrior entrusted to defend this nation, believe that the flu vaccine is in your best interest, then you are free to take it; you should. But we will not force you. Because your body, your faith, and your convictions are not negotiable, your health.1

I will leave it to others to weigh Hegseth’s claim in the video that letting service members skip the vaccine “pose[s] no threat to our military readiness”; I instead want to focus on his assertion that mandatory vaccination violates service members’ “freedom to express their religious convictions” and represents an “era of betrayal.”

A decade into the age of Trump, there are all kinds of things we can say about the way MAGA and MAHA have infected branches of evangelical Christianity in the United States. It can be difficult to know where QAnon bullshit ends and the church begins—as I’ve written over and over and over again. So this time, I want to try to explain just how stupid Hegseth’s decision is in terms even he can understand, by putting it in the context of the American founding, especially in this 250th anniversary year. Because if vaccine mandates truly represent an “era of betrayal,” then I guess George Washington’s woke vaccines are the root of it.Continue reading…