Imagine a retired Army colonel who spent decades wearing the uniform of the United States, then turned his public platform into a weapon against democracy itself. That is the strange and troubling position of Kurt Schlichter, a former Army officer turned social media influencer with more than 620,000 followers on X. He is not a fringe commentator or a random online presence; he is a one-man media operation, and he has used that operation to promote the anti-woke agenda of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. According to a Washington Post investigation into the Pentagon’s use of influencers in civilian roles, Schlichter was given an active government email address and assigned to the office of the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. He also appeared in the government database under the designation “HQE,” which could stand for “highly qualified expert.” Schlichter confirmed that he was a civilian government employee, working as part of a task force whose purpose was to root out so-called woke ideologies at the military’s war colleges. That is not a trivial job. The war colleges are where the military’s most promising officers go to be prepared for senior leadership. They are institutions that design the future of the armed forces. The Pentagon did not simply tolerate Schlichter’s views; it invited them into the mission of shaping future generals. And Schlichter’s views, in turn, are not merely conservative. He has praised murderous dictators, called women a “pestilence,” described immigrants as “semihuman savages,” and proposed that voting be restricted to people who have children, serve in the military, and own property. This is the man the Department of Defense was proud to sponsor. The question now is whether the American people understand what has happened to their military.
At first glance, the official response seems straightforward. Kingsley Wilson, the Pentagon’s press secretary, told WIRED: “The Department was proud to have a group of patriotic civilians and veterans like Kurt Schlichter contribute to our Senior Service College Task Force. Nothing is more important than the formation of our future military leaders.” Schlichter did not respond to requests for comment, and it remains unclear whether he is still working with the Pentagon. But the official story starts to crack under the weight of context. This is the same Department of Defense that, under Hegseth, required journalists to sign a pledge that would prevent them from gathering certain information. Most major journalists refused to sign and left the Pentagon rather than accept those conditions. This is also the same institution whose press secretary, before joining, shared extremist content and an antisemitic conspiracy theory on social media. If the people who speak for the Pentagon have themselves embraced extremism, then the word “patriotic” begins to mean something disturbing. It seems to mean someone who advances the cause of the leadership, no matter how authoritarian, rather than someone who upholds the Constitution. The task force claims to be cleansing military education of ideology, but if it welcomes someone like Schlichter, then the real ideology is one of enforced conformity. The men and women who actually serve in the armed forces deserve better than to have their curriculum shaped by someone who believes that political participation should be reserved for property-owning parents, that political opponents should be crushed “by any means necessary,” and that immigrants are “semihuman savages.” The response from the Pentagon is not a defense; it is a symptom.
To understand why this matters, look at what Schlichter actually says when he thinks he is among friends. WIRED has reviewed many of these posts, and they are not out-of-context snippets. In August 2021, he used his X account to demand an authoritarian crackdown on “liberals.” “We must, by any means necessary, force them to be like us. No quarter. No compromise,” he wrote. Then he listed what should be banned: masks, unions, critical race theory, and “leftist media.” This is not a joke or a thought experiment. It is a prescription for using state power to eliminate political opposition. The same thread went further, taking aim at the democratic principle of voting. Schlichter argued that people who do not have children, who do not serve in the military, and who do not own property should not be allowed to vote. “Penalize barren, non-familial lifestyles through taxes and disqualification from political participation,” he wrote, before adding, “Establish property and military service qualifications for voting.” It is difficult to overstate how anti-democratic this is. The United States once had property qualifications for voting, and they were used to keep poor people, women, and African Americans outside the political community. The struggle for democracy in this country has been, in large part, a struggle to remove these qualifications. Schlichter wants to bring them back. His posts were shared a combined 10,000 times, so he is not whispering in an empty room. He is broadcasting a vision of citizenship that would exclude millions of Americans, and he is doing it while being supported by an institution whose first loyalty is supposed to be to the Constitution, not to any faction or theory.
Then there is Schlichter’s love affair with some of the most brutal dictators of the twentieth century. In April 2024, he wrote that Chile’s Augusto Pinochet was “too soft.” Under Pinochet, tens of thousands of Chilean citizens were tortured and thousands of his political opponents disappeared. Schlichter’s only complaint was that Pinochet did not do enough. He has also spent years admiring Spain’s Francisco Franco, the fascist general who seized power after a civil war in which tens of thousands of dissidents were executed and women were systematically raped. In May 2025, Schlichter quoted a post on X that called on Donald Trump to offer asylum to Spanish fascists and added, “Franco did nothing wrong.” By December 2025, he was calling Franco “a Spanish patriot.” It is hard to imagine a more explicit rejection of the values the United States claims to defend. Torture, forced disappearance, political execution, and rape are not blemishes on those regimes; they are their defining features. To praise those regimes is to celebrate the use of violence against civilians as a method of governance. Yet this is the person who was welcomed into a task force designed to inform military leadership. The people selected to shape the next generation of officers are supposed to embody the best of the military profession, not the worst impulses of authoritarianism. If the Pentagon was looking for someone to teach the “warrior ethos,” there are thousands of veterans who understand that true warriors protect the innocent and uphold the law. Instead, the Pentagon got someone who thinks the problem with Pinochet is that he was too merciful.
Schlichter’s record on women and minorities is just as damning, and it reveals the emotional core of his politics. In a Townhall article, he argued that “liberal women” could bring about the end of Western civilization. He called them “self-righteous crones” and described them as “a pestilence, a plague upon Western society, a group of doggedly ignorant feminist/chauvinists playing out their personal psychodramas on the world stage whose antics, if unchecked, will inevitably lead to the fall of civilization.” In the same article, he attacked immigrants as “perverted Third World peasants.” On X, he went further, calling immigrants “Third World barbarians” and “semihuman savages.” This is not a crude joke or an insult made in anger. It is a pattern of dehumanization. When you call people “semihuman,” you are preparing the ground for treating them as less than equal, less than deserving of rights, less than human. And this is not disconnected from the policy environment at the Pentagon. Under Hegseth, the Department of Defense has attacked diversity and inclusion initiatives, halted promotions for Black and female officers, promoted a Christian nationalist ideology, and embraced a narrow “warrior ethos” that values toughness over fairness. The same leadership has fat-shamed troops it considers overweight and pushed out journalists who refused to accept restrictive rules. Schlichter’s words fit neatly into this agenda. They are not merely personal opinions; they are ideological support for a military culture in which women, minorities, and immigrants are treated as outsiders rather than as Americans. That is not just morally wrong. It is strategically dangerous, because the military cannot succeed without the talents of people from every background.
The implications are deeply unsettling. The Pentagon says it was proud to have Kurt Schlichter contribute to the formation of future military leaders, but the public record suggests that the formation is happening in the shadow of authoritarianism and bigotry. There is no clear answer to whether Schlichter still has a government email address or any ongoing role, and the Pentagon has not offered one. But even if the appointment is over, the fact that it happened at all is a statement about the culture of the Department of Defense under the current leadership. We have an institution whose job is to defend American democracy, and it is comfortable hiring people who mock democratic participation, praise bloody dictatorships, and describe entire categories of human beings as less than human. The press secretary’s own history of sharing extremist content and an antisemitic conspiracy theory only deepens the concern. For the people most affected, this is not an abstract debate. For a Black officer whose promotion has been halted, for a female service member watching a culture that calls women a “pestilence,” for an immigrant in uniform who hears his family described as “semihuman savages,” Schlichter’s words are signals about what their superiors think of them. A healthy democracy would never hand the education of military leaders to someone who wants to restrict voting to property-owning parents and thinks Pinochet was too soft. A healthy military would never confuse cruelty with strength or exclusion with excellence. The story of Kurt Schlichter is a warning about what happens when institutions abandon principle for political loyalty. It is a reminder that words have weight, especially when they carry the prestige of the uniform. And it leaves the rest of us with a simple but urgent question: If this is who is forming future military leaders, what kind of military are they building? Which values are being taught? And what will remain of the democratic ideals the armed forces are sworn to protect? Those questions do not disappear when the news cycle moves on. They demand an answer.
