Jul 26 JDN 2461248

Since the very beginning, journalists have been sanewashing Trump and his cronies: Whenever he or one of them says something absolutely absurd, they always try to find some more sensible way of rephrasing it as a vaguely-similar concept that might actually be a potentially reasonable government policy.

To use one of many examples I could have pulled from, when Donald Trump gave an incoherent rant about immigrants invading our country to barbecue our cats and dogs, many news outlets reported it as things like “Trump escalates rhetoric on immigrants.” Is that what he did? Is it?

I even understand the impulse: In most circumstances, trying to be charitable and steelman your opponents’ ideas is healthy, productive, and good.

But sometimes, when someone just says something completely crazy, you need to quote them verbatim. You need people to know that what they said was, in fact, completely crazy. As journalists, you do the world a disservice otherwise.

Indeed, I think this was one of the reasons Trump was able to be so successful; low-information voters often only heard the sanewashed version of his ideas, and so he sounded like a fairly typical Republican: tough on crime, tough on immigration, serious about boosting the economy.

And while some news outlets are—slowly, all too slowly—getting better about this, spending more time quoting Trump directly and showing videos of him actually speaking and how demented he appears when doing so, there are still some mainstream outlets that are trying to sanewash him and his cronies.

I give you, Exhibit A: The Economist.

“Pete Hegseth’s testosterone-screening plan is unusual, not crazy”, they write.

Is that so? Is it?

They point out that soldiers are at elevated risk of hypogonadism, likely due to the extremely high physical and psychological stress of warfare. This much is absolutely true. But is it even relevant? Is that what Hegseth’s testosterone plan is actually about?

Clearly not. WIRED has their heads on straight: “Pete Hegseth’s Plan for ‘High T’ Troops Is a Junk-Science Fever Dream”.

Pete Hegseth did not consult a group of military endocrinologists or read the latest scientific research on stress-related hypogonadism when devising his latest policy. Nor, indeed, would he have come up with this policy had he done so: Military doctors already know how to screen for endocrine disorders, it is not difficult or expensive to do so, and they generally do so whenever a soldier exhibits symptoms that are consistent with such a disorder. Most soldiers obviously don’t need such screenings, and those that do, would need to be tested at multiple different times of day to track their hormone cycle (male hormone cycles are higher in both frequency and amplitude than female hormone cycles, so it’s honestly pretty weird that we think of women as “hormonal”), not simply get a one-time test every six months to see if the number is high enough. And even if a soldier does suffer from hypogonadism, any good endocrinologist will tell you that you don’t just jump straight to testosterone replacement therapy before trying anything else.

Thus, mass testing everyone in the military for testosterone and immediately offering hormone replacement therapy is neither necessary nor sufficient for actually treating the genuine physiological risks of warfare.

What it is necessary and sufficient for is something much, much stupider.

Testosterone is manly. Manly is good. Warriors must be more manly. More manly warriors win wars.

That, my friends, is the level of reasoning that went on inside Pete Hegseth’s pathetic, immature brain.

This is not a carefully considered medical policy developed under consultation with experts. This is a man physically has the body of an adult but never mentally matured beyond the age of 13 and still thinks that the ideal soldier looks like a GI Joe doll. (Excuse me, “action figure”.) He’s probably insecure about his own testosterone level (as that does tend to drop as you get older), likely is on (unnecessary) testosterone replacement therapy himself, and thinks that everyone should do this, because it’s just obvious to him that more testosterone equals more manly equals better.

Imagine a Neanderthal who had been given some vague inkling as to what testosterone is, enough to know that men have lots of it and women don’t. That is the kind of person we are dealing with here.

So, I say to you, The Economist, and every other news outlet:

STOP IT. STOP IT NOW.

You should have stopped 10 years ago, but better late than never. Stop it now.

When they do and say crazy things for crazy reasons, say that. Tell people. That is your job. Yes, we all wish that low-information voters were more responsible about gathering knowledge before voting (and thus stopped being low-information voters). But they aren’t going to do that any time soon, and it’s even understandable that they don’t (life is busy!). So please, make it easy for them: When the guy on one side of the aisle is a raving maniac, tell them that. Don’t expect them to figure it out for themselves.

(Really, I just wish that ignorant people would stop voting. If you can’t cast an informed vote, don’t cast a vote at all! You aren’t helping!)