It's Over For Him...

This right here is disgusting, and any elected Republican who's okay with this, clearly shouldn't be in the United States government anymore. They are obviously more interested in defending Pete Heggseth and defending Donald Trump than they are in serving the American people and helping out our military members. We are now learning of this twisted revenge plot that Pete Heggseth has taken against a desperate sailor, Nicholas McKelvie, a 19 year old Navy member jumped overboard from the USS Abraham Lincoln in early August. That is the ship that had one of the longest deployments in American history. They were stranded out at sea. They were losing food, losing clean water. The women were losing menstrual products. The mental health aboard the ship was terrible, so much so that people were jumping overboard, and instead of supporting this Navy sailor, Pete Heggseth has decided to punish him. There's so much more to the story. We have to talk about it, and this is something that people should know before the midterms, because Republicans claim to love the military and yet they defend stuff like this. So let's get into it, I am genuinely appalled here. Naval top brass under Pete Heggseth's hard line Pentagon leadership punished a teenage airman after he survived a harrowing 67 foot leap into the ocean. Navy Airman Nicholas McKelvie, 19, was formally discharged on Thursday with leadership branding his desperate mental health crisis aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as malingering and accusing him of faking distress to escape a grueling combat deployment as the ship headed for the Middle East. Think about that. This is a ship that, as we just mentioned, had horrific conditions. We know the morale on the ship was incredibly low. This is a young man, a 19 year old, who jumped 67 feet into the ocean. That's a long jump. That's a jump that could easily injure you if not kill you. And Pete Heggseth and the military and the Navy are claiming that he faked it. That's how they treat our soldiers. Under the terms of his removal, a general discharge under honorable conditions, the young father has been stripped of his GI bill education assistance, crushing his family's hopes of affording a college degree. That's one of the reasons that many people get into the military in the first place. And Pete Heggseth, because he wanted to take his own life, removed it from him. McKelvie had endured 255 consecutive days working 12 hour shifts on the flight deck under a blazing sun aboard an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea, push passes breaking point by severe food shortages, family health crises, and the strain of missing his daughter's birth, which, wow, you know, heartbreaking. The young mechanic sprinted across the deck and jumped into the open water on August 3rd. Quote, "I don't want to be there anymore," McKelvie said, speaking up publicly for the first time. If I was going to die because of it, then that's just how it is. Which is, again, just pulls on the hard strings. McKelvie was pulled from the water 50 minutes later, and officers enforcing Heggseth's zero tolerance culture swiftly framed his cry for help as criminal misconduct. Wow. Wow. It just keeps getting worse. The Navy placed him on suicide watch, ordered him to clean floors the next day, and subsequently hit him with formal charges. A commanding officer found him guilty during a hearing last month, ruling that his leap endangered the vessel. No care for this young man. No care for the fact that he is a father, a man who wanted to serve his country. But instead, yeah, let's punish him. That's Pete Heggseth's rule in the Navy, the military across the board. And to be clear, Mr. McKelvie was not the only one, the Navy has admitted that eight Navy members attempted to take their own lives on the USS Abraham Lincoln. So what are they all trying to damage the United States? Are they all just making it up as Pete Heggseth and his Navy have claimed? And he actually really has claimed that Pete Heggseth during this, during the same month of which Mr. McKelvie tried to take his own life, said that the excruciating conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln that have been talked about extensively and reported on have been completely misrepresented. That's what Pete Heggseth said. Watch this. Completely misrepresented. Listen, we make sure that every shift, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment. Some deployments are longer than others, and I have more respect and gratitude for those sailors than anybody. What they do in those high seas and those austere conditions with less port calls, it's incredible. I mean, Americans don't understand what it's like to do that, so as someone who's not been on a shift like that, but been on long deployments, I feel it. I want them home as soon as everybody else, do I want folks rotating as quickly as possible. I want the best for them. My commanders know that, our service secretaries know that, the president expects that, and so to that crew, all those crews, we're going to do everything we can for you, and we are so grateful for their dedication. Do a lot of platitudes, right, because he's talking about the sacrifice, which there is a major sacrifice made by all of our service members, the dedication from their team. And then when somebody is struggling, when they are struggling with mental health, and they go so far as to try to take their own lives, Pete Hexeth tries to find them guilty of charges brought against them. I mean, I don't, you know, the platitudes are BS. He can go out there and say, we care about our service members so much. What is he doing behind the scenes? Every time he does something like this, it eventually gets leaked, and it shows that he doesn't care. He doesn't care at all. He's never cared. And, you know, the idea that they've been completely misrepresented, the conditions on the ship is just absurd. Matter of fact, a journalist, the V journalist, I should say, who broke the story reported on it went on CNN and called what Pete Hexeth is doing by denying the reports and lying about them gaslighting. Watch this. >> I think too. It's the countless sailors who have reached out to military times. And to other news outlets, they trust with their organic photos, parents who are sharing native chat sessions with their kids, spouses doing the same. These are not fabrications. They're not stretches of the truth. Like he mentioned, back in April when the USA Today broke out pictures on the mists of what any American would quantify as an adequate nutrition for our service members and are all volunteer force of service members who are in extraordinary conditions right now. I think gaslighting our force is disrespectful and in a minimum, it is our transparency and accountability. >> Yeah, at a minimum. And you speak as a native veteran, of course, Natalie. So I guess in that context, I want to ask you about what Hexeth would appear to be his strategy for boosting morale. Now, of course, he denies it's a problem. But to the extent, you know, that he's trying to motivate people, right? There's the videos he's posting on social media where he's lifting weights there and he's working out with US troops. Are he posted that post that, of course, you've seen about, you know, we're going to be testing testosterone and upping the testosterone levels for our force. How is all that landing with actual crew members and members of the Navy? >> Rockily, I think some service members are concerned because altering your hormones, they come with a host of issues that not everyone can predict. >> Yeah, Rockily is right. Well said by the journalist who broke the story. And you know, after all of this, after the USS Abraham Lincoln came home, finally, after this very, very long deployment, 321 days, Pete Hexeth said, "I'm the one who signed the orders to extend you twice. I plead guilty." So he's kind of openly admitting it and I wonder if the Trump administration basically told him to go out there and own it because there was huge backlash to that rightfully so, and they didn't want to blame Donald Trump, you know, so close to the midterms because this was just in August. But then Pete Hexeth, speaking in front of the USS Abraham Lincoln, tried to blame the media for turning it into a symbol. So no recognition of the terrible conditions on the ship, but rather, it's all the media's fault. This is what he said. Check this out. 25 continuous days without a port call, two times extended when you thought you were going home and we asked you to do more and you know what you did, you did more. And it wasn't easy and there wasn't easy resupply and there were contested seas and you were in the west shooting down incoming. It was a dangerous place to be. We landed on the most beautiful of days in the middle of an empty flight deck because all the airwings are gone and you're landing in the middle of the night in a dangerous territory with a full flight deck during combat operations and you didn't miss a beat. That's why we're here. The world needs to understand that, the country needs to understand that. And there were a few folks in the media who tried to turn the USS Abraham Lincoln into some sort of a symbol, a symbol of dysfunction or a symbol of low morale or a symbol of a failed mission. And when I look out at right here and when I talk to your leadership and I have had a chance to talk to a number of you, I know it's the exact opposite. Which is actually what the media does so often. They see success and they see excellence and they see difficulty and challenge that needs to be overcome in extension, a challenging environment. And they want to point at it as a symbol of something that was missed or wrong instead. But this guy's such a bum like he's trying to claim that this is a myth while sailors are jumping overboard and trying to take their own lives. He's such a loser and you know, this is not the only thing that he's failed at recently. His money problems aren't going away. He's been asking Congress, the American people to give the military a $1.5 trillion budget for the next fiscal year. Now for context, that would be $500 billion more than what it is around right now, a reds around $1 trillion. He wants $500 billion more, which is absolutely absurd. Nobody in their right minds thinks that the military should have $500 billion more. We could use all of that money for things like, oh, I don't know, education, healthcare, investing in the American people. American people, but Hegseth said, no, we need $1.5 billion. The problem for him is that the American people don't want that and they don't want him and they don't want Trump. The Pentagon is secretly bracing for an embarrassing Trump defeat, which means that their money might not be coming. Pentagon officials are secretly preparing for Donald Trump's demand for a record $1.5 trillion dollar defense budget to fail, according to a report. For months, the Trump administration, including Pete Hegseth, has called on Congress to fund a mammoth $1.5 trillion dollar Pentagon budget to pay for military projects such as a golden fleet battleship, or a planned golden dome missile defense system, as well as replenishing severely depleted stockpiles used in the Iran War. However, the record-breaking military budget request has struggled to attract the bipartisan sport it needs, with the GOP potentially losing control of the House and the Senate in next week's midterms. The Pentagon is quietly preparing to draft a budget that cuts $400 billion dollars from their president's request, putting it in and around what it is currently. Despite this, Pete Hegseth has been saying that at a minimum, we're going to get $350 billion. That's what we're doing and nobody has anything that they can do to stop it, which is also not really coming true. It's also not really coming true. That money doesn't seem to be on the way. He can claim as much as he'd like in public that this money is coming, but not even Republicans are sitting here saying, you know what, Americans are struggling, things can't be purchased because they're too expensive, but let's give Pete Hegseth $350 billion. The final thing I want to bring to your attention is the fact, I mean, Pete Hegseth's had really bad time right now. The final thing I want to bring to your attention is that him and his people behind the scenes are asking European allies, NATO allies, to stop making fun of Russia. I'm not joking. Pete Hegseth's department wants European allies to start being a bit nicer to Russia, which they absolutely should not be, according to a new report. People familiar with the jaw-dropping plea told Reuters that pentagon officials, including policy chief Elbridge Colby, have urged allies across the pond to cool their rhetoric about the threat posed by Vladimir Putin's regime, warning that the result could compromise continental security, which is utter nonsense. This is just them trying to get Putin, you know, a little bit softer on the world stage, which shouldn't happen. And of course, Donald Trump has done his own part in trying to make that happen. He announced that he has struck an oil deal with Russia. And apparently, you know, hundreds of millions, or I should say hundreds of thousands, millions of tons of oil will be put into the global market and the supply will be boosted and priceless will come down. Problem is here, a couple of things. Number one, this isn't going to drastically reduce the price of gas because the main reason that things are so expensive is because this major trading route, the straight-of-hort moves, is closed right now because of Donald Trump's war of choice with Iran that nobody wants. So this is not going to change much. Number one, that's most worthy of addressing. But also number two, this is directly funding Russia's war against Ukraine. We have sanctions on Russia that people can't buy their oil. We can't buy their oil. Countries around the world have agreed not to buy their oil because in doing so, you are giving them money and they are using that money on missiles, on tanks, on bombs to attack Ukraine, to kill innocent civilians. By Donald Trump doing this, he is using our money to fund Russia's offense. It's. I would go so far as to say borderline traitorous, if not traitorous. You know what? That's what it is. That's what it is. And thankfully, our European allies, countries in Europe, they are not weak, they are not spineless like members of this administration. We have the Estonian Prime Minister saying, "Actually, I'm not going to hold back." Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump, kick rocks. You want me to be nice to Vladimir Putin, a war criminal who is waging an illegal war against Ukraine, not happening. So Pete Hegseth, having a really hard time right now, but this story of him targeting a young man who was pushed to a very, very dark place because of the conditions he found himself in, the things taking place in his life at that time, to punish that man, instead of offering him support, love and care, is appalling. And it further speaks to the incompetence of Pete Hegseth and this administration. I will leave the video there. Thank you so much for watching. Please make sure to subscribe down below. Drop a like on the video. Comment. Let me know what you think about this story and everything we just talked about. Have an amazing rest of your day, and we will talk soon.