ICE just got a new weapon to attack innocent civilians with. As if they need another weapon since they use their guns at will.
It's called the G.L.O.V.E., a $20 million shock glove order. The gloves deliver an electrical jolt with a hidden switch and no warning. Again, what’s the difference between these gloves and a gun? ICE agents simply pull a trigger with no warning, but I digress.
When you grab someone with the gloves, they don't just flinch. They fold. They go down. And for a while, they can't get back up. They are as inhumane as they are painful, which reminds me of someone else with the same attributes.
Shock gloves are nothing new to the Trump administration, and in particular the inhumane and painful Pete Hegseth. He's been running the Pentagon with the same trick shock gloves since his nomination was dimwittingly approved by the Senate.
And metaphorically, Hegseth has been busy grabbing and shocking the entirety of the U.S. military, components of which are now in the process of falling to the ground.
Now, let’s keep in mind that in the last couple of days, in the middle of a war and a catastrophe on a battleship, Hegseth took the shock glove off to campaign in Iowa with RFK, Jr., who has a permanent shock glove around his brain.
Since the disaster of Operation Epic Fury against Iran began in February, the Defense Secretary has kept the armed forces gripped and buzzing, deployed, depleted and directionless, with no stated objective and no exit plan.
The thing about shock gloves is that the damage doesn't end when the gloved hand lets go. The body falls downward, and lays there for a bit, and struggles back to its feet slowly. That's where America's military is headed once Hegseth finally releases his grip, and it is going to take years for the zapped military to stand back up.
His first grip was depleting the arsenal. Patriot interceptors are down roughly two-thirds. THAAD interceptors are down by half, maybe closer to 80 percent. The Army has burned through nearly all of its precision-guided missiles.
Commanders are reportedly letting some Iranian threats through rather than spend what's left. That's a proverbial man being brought to his knees. And he’s going to be there for a while because refilling our weaponry is a long-term process, with a lengthy supply chain.
Three years for new Patriots. Closer to four for new Tomahawks. Every missile fired in this war is a missile that isn't sitting somewhere in a reserve depot waiting to be used, oh let’s say if a crisis with China arose, for example.
Hegseth has zapped the living hell out of our weapons, so how do we “bomb like hell” out of an adversary as the blowhard Trump keeps promising?
His second zapping grip is the one he has on the troops. This was brought to light last week with the catastrophe aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which has spent more than 260 days at sea with almost no port calls, the longest stretch without shore leave in the modern carrier era. Sailors have described mold, food shortages and morale the Navy itself has acknowledged as a mental-health risk.
Hegseth's response, when it surfaced, was to tighten the grip and deliver more shock because he thought it was all a farce. The farce is the maladroit Hegseth.
Meanwhile, the USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy's newest and most expensive carrier, caught fire after its own record-length deployment and is now stuck in dry dock for at least a year. Two flagship carriers, struggling to even stand.
And what has occupied the secretary's time while his fleet burns and his sailors rot at sea? A mandatory testosterone-screening initiative he's branded "warrior ethos," even as a federal judge overseeing his transgender military ban has publicly asked him to explain why hormone therapy is a readiness tool for some troops and a fireable offense for others.
In this case, the judge gripped Hegseth with a shock glove, and the bamboozled, testosterone-laden Defense Secretary simply fell over because he couldn't answer the question.
Hegseth could care less about the troops, and they are feeling it, particularly when they are thrown into a war without a reason, not given an adequate number of weapons and thanked with clogged toilets and mold.
Finally, he has jolted the global respect out of the U.S. military. We are a superpower flat on our back as the world looks on in astonishment at how Hegseth has sucked the juice out of our troops and our weapons.
Our allies are dumbfounded about what’s happening, and they are making their own defense calculations based on these failures. And don’t think for a minute that our adversaries like Beijing and Moscow aren’t licking their chops at our instability.
And so long as Hegseth has his shock gloves wrapped around the military, the longer it’s going to take to get it standing up proudly once again. Hegseth will let go and leave our arsenal, our troops and our dignity lying on the ground, dazed, trying to figure out which way is up.
And it will be that way for a very long time because the grip and shock were so tight.
Because that's what a shock glove actually does. It doesn't just hurt in the moment. It puts you on your back and keeps you there, longer than the person holding the switch ever has to think about it.
When Hegseth finally lets go, the recovery doesn't start with the military jumping back up on its feet. It will take years to rebuild an arsenal that took decades to stockpile the first time. Years to convince the next generation of 18-year-olds that this institution isn’t going to chew them up and spit them out, at a moment when recruiting was already struggling before this war began.
Most worrisome, perhaps, it will take years to convince our allies and our adversaries that the stumble and incapacitation of the last six months wasn’t an aberration and not a proper depiction of how far America’s military can be knocked down.
The gloves ICE is buying cost $20 million and switch off with the press of a button. What Pete Hegseth has done to the U.S. military doesn't have an off switch at the moment.
What it has are metaphorical bodies slumping to the ground, a world watching to see if they get back up, and a long, expensive stumble back to standing upright again.