Type II Liabeetus
The bald-faced epidemic gripping America's executives
I.
I’m going to start by debuting a new term. You won’t find this term anywhere else. Certainly not anywhere credible. Because I made it up while watching Judge Judy.
The term is Liabetes. Or, in keeping with the meme-driven parlance of our time and with a gentle nod to the late Wilford Brimley, Liabeetus.
It’s a disease of compulsive dishonesty. Like many diseases, it is mistaken as pure wickedness, but is really an addiction. Someone lies, they get rewarded for it, they experience a dopamine hit and material enhancement, and so they do it again.
Soon, they habitualize this behavior, addicted to the feeling it gives them and the apparent absence of any downside.
There are three types of Liabeetus, in ascending severity.
Type I. Subject experiences positive impacts of lying but is not yet addicted. They can be honest, but the tendency to lie is a growing hazard.
Type II. Lying is an addiction, and therefore a default behavior. The symptoms can be controlled with public accountability, but there is no cure. Sufferers are routinely indecent and no longer behaving within social norms, but their position and status may create inappropriate deference to this. Type II Liabeetus is an epidemic among executives in public and private enterprise. It is rare to find an executive who is not clinically exhibiting the disease.
Type III. The subject is a bizarro version of George Washington. They cannot tell the truth. Any honesty is rare and accidental. Career politicians, dictators, comic book villains, professional con artists, trained spies, cats who just ate pigeons, kids who just fondled cookie jars, talk radio entertainers, and the 1919 White Sox are in this category.
*Some of you are thinking George Washington did not actually say “I cannot tell a lie,” which makes holding him up as a model of integrity itself dishonest. It’s astute observation. Bear with me for now and I promise we will revisit.
For now, back to the picture.
II.
Each of the men in this picture engaged in capital dishonesty at crushing expense to the lives and fortunes of people who trusted them. Each has landed in a separate zip code of Hell, and each bears a different mark of the beast.
For one, the stubborn, ever-hanging stench that comes with occupying public office.
For another, the life scar of a dozen years of felony incarceration.
For the third, a self-applied stain of legalized corruption, commonly borne by professional lobbyists.
*Lobbyists have celebrity status in Hell. Deep in the hollow catacombs under K Street, Beelzebub chuckles, his teeth sweating as he dines on the decomposing souls of legislators. Lobbyists keep him well fed, and he keeps them fat and giggly.
Incidentally, one cannot be admitted to the lobby profession without a confirmed diagnosis of at least Type II Liabeetus. Exceptions are sometimes made for sociopaths.
I started writing this piece because of something Pete Hegseth did that really pisses me off. It’s just rotten, even by the fetid and festering standards of executive irresponsibility in our times.
But as I tried, unsuccessfully, to get any of the media outlets who allegedly report on military matters to report about it, I couldn’t ignore that there is a bigger story here.
It’s the story of Liabeetus, and how its pervasive spread is introducing into public agencies levels of fraud and shameless hucksterism previously reserved for corporate CEOs, used car dealers, and insurance adjusters.
In the story I’m about to chronicle, Pete Hegseth is merely the new driver of a trainload of shit that was put in the tracks by Lloyd Austin and kept chugging by shovels of coal from Congress.
Thinking about cabals of lying toads got me revisiting the wayward plight of Jeff Skilling, the disgraced former CEO of Enron. It occurs to me that executives like Austin and Hegseth are merely adapting the dark arts modeled by Skilling to the exploitation and eventual ruin of the public offices they hold.
These three men are all liars. But they didn’t break from American executive tradition by lying. They situated themselves neatly within that tradition. While we’re becoming more aware of it now, Type II Liabeetus has always been with us, and we’ve been unwittingly feeding this ravenous, soul-munching malady by giving the stricken positive reinforcement for displaying their symptoms.
Ever since George Washington didn’t chop down a cherry tree, didn’t get confronted, and didn’t respond with “I cannot tell a lie,” we’ve been far more drawn to saccharine lies than salty truths. The more responsibility someone has, the more we expect them to lie and reward them for doing so.
American executives, be they public or private, don’t “get away” with lying. It’s how they win.
My modest objective is to remove the “unwittingly” qualifier from the preceding diatribe. Once we know we’re making things worse, maybe we’ll stop. Or maybe I’m wish-casting again.
III.
This isn’t the moment for a full exposition on the fall of Enron. Others have already done a masterful job telling that tale. To learn a lot (and get pissed off) quickly, check out Alex Gibney’s documentary, or read the book by Bethany McLean, whose reporting blew the lid off the Enron crisis. Back when investigative reporting existed and media outlets published news instead of breaking into the zoo to dance with the monkeys.
In summary, Enron started as an energy company seeking to capitalize on the deregulation of public utilities in the 1980s. It grew into an energy-focused financial services and futures trading company, dabbling in numerous other ventures. As Enron’s core business failed, the company’s executives continually devised new ideas capable of exciting and enticing investors, which kept new money flowing into the company and preserved the image of a cutting-edge corporation.
At some point, executives crossed the line into criminality by falsifying financial reports. Their fraud was well concealed by the admixture of legal accounting techniques and just enough successful ventures to sustain an ornate and silken cloak which hid the decay of Enron’s solvency.
Eventually, the veil pierced by external probes and internal leaks, Enron collapsed. Decline wasn’t gradual. It was like a satellite pulled from orbit, swiftly plummeting and burning into nothing. In a few weeks, $63B in market value was erased.
Investors lost their fortunes. Pension funds, including many supporting public utility workers, went broke. Employees who invested their life savings in the company got wiped out. 20,000 people lost their jobs and nest eggs.
Amidst the commotion, Enron executives siphoned out $1B for themselves. They got while the gettin’ was good. But not before costing California taxpayers billions by manipulating their power grid to fix prices, holding the state to ransom with rolling blackouts.
The details of how this all happened are complicated, dense, and financially technical. But the essence is actually quite simple, requiring little more than a grasp of human ego and high school mythology to grasp.
Many liars lied, and many among them conspired to pool their lies together and to keep those lies concealed. It worked for a long time, and when it started to not work anymore, some of the liars grabbed satchels of money and fled before the pitchforks were issued.
Some, distracted by gazing into the mirror at their own genius, did not manage to escape. Some later committed suicide. Others died for other reasons, which we might call an undeserved mercy.
A few were snared by the government’s purposely holy net and held in some way accountable, including CEO Jeff Skilling.
He’s pictured in the middle below being released from prison in 2019, two years early from an already reduced sentence. Reports at the time speculated he finagled early release by supplying black market donuts to certain prison guards.
My interest in Skilling is the specific techniques he showcased as an expert fraudster. He was exceptionally good at what he did. It’s obvious from the expertise of today’s executives they were watching and learning.
In the process of inflating and blowing up Enron, Skilling demonstrated two particular skills which set him apart as a virtuoso swindler.
(1) He created and exploited reasonable presumptions in others.
Skilling knew the image of Enron was more important than actual performance. An image of epic financial success would create the reasonable presumption that Enron was competent, lucid, and rock solid as an investment. It would keep wallets agape.
So he built corporate cathedrals. He interrupted meetings to assess fabric swatches for new corporate jets. He brought reporters to his yacht to take pictures.
He told everyone Enron was a big deal, that he was a big deal, and that if the Navy Seals had any self-respect, they would be more like Enron. He got laser eye surgery and hair implants to look less like a dweeb and more like a big deal. He wore Italian suits. He told people he could boil minute rice in 58 seconds, that he invented the question mark, and that Enron was mining a limitless supply of the shaving cream atom, allowing the world to avoid a crisis of unkempt facial hair.
With the reasonable presumption established that Enron was a mysterious, planet-steering Jedi collective, Skilling exploited it by insisting upon unquestioned opacity and secrecy concerning how Enron’s business model actually worked. It was a “black box" he said. How Enron actually made money was a matter of proprietary secrets that, if spilled, could not only put cream in the coffee of Enron’s competitors, but unleash seventeen years of persistent insect swarms.
Skilling was an expert at fronting things out. He dressed himself in a Genius CEO Indent-a-Kit, said all the right things, carried himself and his company with finely-tuned, charmingly arrogant bravado, and instilled confidence in Enron across the entire investment ecosystem.
He leveraged the resulting freedom from scrutiny to build many new chicanes. The pressing matter for Enron was finding ways to actually generate revenue before its internal decrepitude became undeniable, and funded latitude was key to that.
Eventually, Skilling lost that race. But not before putting on a master class.
As a fun aside, here’s an interesting headline from 2024. History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
(2) Skilling extracted immediate gain from delayed promises.
When he took over as CEO, Skilling’s first demand was a move from standard accounting methods to alternative methods which would allow Enron to instantly book the present value of future transactions. He persuaded his accountants and the SEC to approve the method, which was abused to make Enron’s earnings appear artificially favorable.
For example, in 2000, Enron signed a deal with Blockbuster to develop and field video-on-demand technology. The venture failed. Enron claimed $110M in future profits from the deal anyway, and continued to reflect revenues on the balance sheet even after the parties dissolved the agreement.
Skilling supervised the creation of shell subsidiaries which used low-interest debt financing to buy assets from Enron that would be transferred at a future date. The sales were booked as revenue immediately but the assets were never transferred.
This pattern fit perfectly with Skilling’s persona, which blended intellectual arrogance with emotional insecurity. He was brilliant and he knew it. But he was also a childhood nerd damaged by being uncool and unpopular. The only girls who would talk to him had moustaches, perhaps explaining his subsequent follicular fixations.
Skilling seemed desperate to prove himself to himself, which was only possible via external validation and rock star status. This toxic cocktail of overconfidence and desperation led him to take extreme risks. He figured if the bets he was making didn’t pan out, he would come up with some other ingenious scheme before the point where it would matter.
But pride, a common hallmark of advanced Liabeetus, always comes before the fall.
Hold that thought for a moment while I tell you two things many of you won’t want to believe.
IV.
First, let me tell you why Lloyd Austin is just like Jeff Skilling.
Second, let me tell you how military service is somewhat like working for any old company, from a landscaper to a hardware store to a dental practice, only with longer wait times.
Before I do either thing, let me express (a) disappointment, (b) a total lack of surprise, and (c) renewed exasperation on behalf of many I know feel the same about Lloyd Austin spending decades building the trust and confidence of Americans only to lurch through the DC revolving door like every other pigeon-obsessed cat that ever traded on his public service to get rich.
The fact this has become a sick tradition, that they all go after the easy money the instant they retire, tells us some things.
Something about the character of the military leaders we’re raising, or the lack thereof.
Something about the craven and tireless scavenge for material reward despite a pension generous enough to provide a comfortable life.
Something about what kind of experience base leads public servants to choose wealth over virtue time and again.
But I digress.
Not even six months removed from public service, Austin has finished Sith indoctrination and begun enriching himself as an influence-peddling distortionist. We know he has Liabeetus, because all lobbyists do.
Before submerging into the murk, Austin told an important lie about an important thing, and inflicted a lot of damage. Which brings us back to the two things some of you won’t want to believe.
(1) Lloyd Austin is just like Jeff Skilling because he developed and exploited reasonable presumptions.
Austin’s decades spent honorably discharging his soldierly duty earned him masses of trust. He established the presumption he would carry out his duties with fidelity and fairness. The trust he enjoyed meant that in moments of ambiguity, he would be given the latitude to exert authority expansively.
As Secretary of Defense, Austin used this latitude in 2021 to compel every service member in every military service component, active, guard, and reserve, regardless of specialty or status, deployable or not, to be vaccinated against coronavirus.
Like Skilling, Austin shielded the actual reasoning and machinations of his decision from scrutiny. In his case, the black box was already built as a standing feature of military life.
As a default, military members do not question orders they are given, because they understand doing so is a cul-de-sac of legal and professional jeopardy likely to ruin them at worst or make them an obscure village martyr at best.
Decades of dysfunctional advice, idle doctrine, and purposeful inertia have taken the critically important question of how a military order qualifies to be lawful and subjected it to constant abrasion, forming an impenetrable legal callous. We have now lost track of the distinction separating lawful and unlawful commands.
Before I explain why and how that matters, let’s touch on the second thing some of you won’t want to hear.
(2) Military service is, in some respects, more analogous to giving rake advice at Home Depot than dismounting a Higgins Boat on Omaha Beach.
There is this idea that military service is totally different from any other kind of employment, and that you service requires submission to the dictates of a unique profession 24 hours of every day.
This idea is advanced by senior military officials themselves. It becomes their default flex to make people do things with authority that they wouldn’t do merely as a business convenience.
Like delay their vacation, or work without a weekend for a few months, or cover for an injured teammate by doing back-to-back deployments.
Or submit to a vaccination against a particular illness because someone says so, regardless of how it connects to their actual job, or doesn’t.
But the fact is, military service is not a blood oath requiring total obliteration of individual agency or any hint of a non-work persona.
What Congress has intended through various legislation is that service be different in many ways than civilian life, and thus subject to certain limitations and the surrender of some personal latitude.
No drug use. Deploy and fight when ordered. Be assigned and located where we say. Be fit and look professional. Do not foster disrepute in the civilian community.
But in other ways, Congress intended service to be pretty much like any other job. We know this because it established a distinction between lawful and unlawful orders which rests mainly on the connection of an order to military duty.
To be lawful, an order needs to meet five requirements.
Pertains to a military duty.
Has a legitimate military purpose.
Is clear and specific.
Does not violate the statutory or constitutional rights of individuals.
Is issued by someone with the authority to do so.
Each of these criteria has been tested in specific cases and interpreted in more detail. With each test, the zone of lawfulness has expanded, giving commanders more authority.
We’ve reached a point where pretty much any order is considered lawful, resulting in some truly absurd examples.
The Air Force ordered first-term airmen to attend sex education courses where they practiced putting condoms on wooden cylinders. Lawful.
Trainees in formal courses were told that if they suspected students and instructors had crushes on one another, they must report it. Lawful.
Facilities at a particular base were precluded from serving Diet Coke in the dining facility because the commanding general didn’t like it. Lawful.
These are just the funny examples. There are less jovial ones involving the targeting of US citizens abroad without due process, the suspension of ordinary liberties for fake reasons, and administrative punishments for personal relationships that are deemed inappropriate despite having no bearing on military readiness or operations.
A decade ago, the Air Force’s most senior officer, with competent legal advice, told airmen to refrain from using unprofessional language, even in their personal text messages. He warned they could be disciplined if their text messages were viewed by someone who found them offensive. This clearly violates civil liberties. Yet not one of the service’s other generals, senior NCOs, or lawyers stood up to challenge it.
The main reason absurd orders retain their force is the presumption of lawfulness. This means any order is presumptively lawful when issued by someone with authority, and the burden rests on the individual receiving the order to prove illegality.
Ambiguity is resolved in favor of authority, and anyone challenging an order can expect to be instantly isolated and perhaps administratively sanctioned while it gets sorted out. This is justified under the umbrella edict to maintain good order and discipline, which is disturbed when authority is challenged.
Some orders are clearly lawful. Report for duty at 0530.
Some are clearly unlawful. Attack that busload of nuns.
But many orders fall somewhere in the middle, with some ambiguity about whether they are connected to a valid military purpose.
Here are some actual examples.
Report for weekend duty to take part in a community fund-raising event.
No donuts for 60 days so you can improve your run time.
I order you to stay away from Mrs. Smith even though she is divorced. She is trouble.
Do not buy that sports car. You have a history of financial irresponsibility.
Colonel, do not give away your parking space so airmen can have less walk time.
The blue carpet in the club needs to go. It better be gone when I am back here again.
In this variously gray middle, whoever is in charge can leverage ambiguity to get people to do pretty much anything short of a war crime, knowing it’s highly unlikely they’ll be challenged and even less likely the challenge will come to anything.
Indeed, military members raised in an authoritarian environment will look at the examples above and see no ambiguity at all, because they’ve long since lost perspective. The services don’t train NCOs or officers much on these criteria, which keeps everyone in ignorance-fueled lockstep.
All of which means there are a lot of bullshit orders handed down in everyday military life that no one challenges. The less people challenge, the more expansive the legitimized zone of lawfulness grows.
This cannot be what was intended, because if any order is lawful, then Congress would have created conditions to qualify an order which don’t actually mean anything. That would be a legal nullity.
Since we cannot interpret that Congress intended a nullity in passing a law, we know there is and must be such a thing as an unlawful order which exists outside the zone of total clarity, where the application of the criteria determines the unlawfulness.
Which brings us back to Austin’s vaccination order.
Mandatory vaccination was built on the lie of false necessity.
I say this without commenting on the advisability of the vaccine, or whether vaccines in general are a good/bad idea. I say it without commenting on the broader skirmishes about the pandemic and how it was handled within and beyond the military.
None of that is necessary to reach a conclusion that making the vaccination mandatory for everyone was heavy-handed, excessive, and ultimately unlawful.
The health and readiness of the youngest, fittest members of American society did not require the vaccination. No evidence said so. At its zenith, infection rate among active personnel was around 0.2%. Less than 100 military members died with an infection across the entire pandemic, out of a total force size of 1.33 million.
By contrast, 519 service members were lost to suicide in ‘21 alone.
The US was not at war. As Austin was signing the order, withdrawal from Afghanistan was wrapping up, ending the last of active hostilities. This removes any foundation for legality based on a couple thousand people being non-deployable for a week or two while recovering from infection.
Some countries in which US military personnel were stationed or routinely transited required vaccination for entry. In these cases, a valid military purpose and connection to military duty could exist, and vaccination could be lawfully ordered. This is akin to legacy vaccination programs requiring certain shots to deploy to certain places.
But this did not rationalize forcing everyone to be vaccinated.
Guard and Reserve personnel not on active orders bore no valid military purpose for the vaccination. Nor trainees. Nor staff personnel. Nor really anyone in any walk of military life spending time in garrison in a state or country where a legal mandate did not exist and deployment readiness was not required.
Even for those with a military reason, it’s possible forcing them to submit to inoculation could violate a religious or medical consideration implicating their civil rights. By opting for a one-rule-fits-all approach, Austin failed to recognize this set of limitations, which made his edict over-broad.
Someone will cite public health or the cost of health treatment as justifications. But like the elastic rationales tested above, these too are over-broad. The fact military members receive health care in government facilities with limited resources cannot be legally cited as a reason to make them eat more fruit or refrain from smoking. Nor can it be used to compel vaccinations that have no valid military purpose.
The order didn’t even account for those who’d already established immunity.
None of this means the vaccination was a “bad idea.” Many smart people with good intent got vaccinated and felt others should too. But their feelings are not legal justification for someone else’s involuntary injections.
Austin’s unlawful order carried echoes of many given before. In this case, the politically charged and divisive context triggered more resistance than usual.
The military response was predictable. Under the guise of preserving good order and discipline, those refusing vaccination were removed from their teams and administratively sanctioned. A small number later relented and received vaccines to avoid discharge.
Many tens of thousands acquiesced before getting into trouble, receiving shots they didn’t believe were justified. They went along to preserve their careers and livelihoods.
Around 8,200 held out. Some flat-out refused the order as unlawful. Others claimed exemptions that were not granted. All were discharged involuntarily for failing to obey a lawful order.
Lloyd Austin knew or should have known the order was not actually lawful. He knew this was more preference than necessity. He knew the services should persuade, encourage, and incentivize, but not coerce.
He relied on the fact the order wouldn’t be questioned. He relied on the fact no one questions orders because doing so successfully has historically been nigh on impossible.
He knew he had established reasonable presumptions that he could be trusted, that orders he gave were valid, and that in the event of ambiguity, it would resolve in his favor.
He exploited those presumptions to get a bunch of people to do something they should not have been required to do. It was an employer preference lacking a clear connection to military duty and purpose, and was, many argued, an encroachment upon other protections.
You know who agreed?
Lloyd Austin.
Such is the grip of Liabeetus that even when a lie is exposed, the patient will often root around for a lie about the original lie rather than admit to dishonesty and risk interruption of their dopamine supply.
Seventeen months after issuing the vaccine order, Austin rescinded it. Congress had inserted language in the 2023 defense spending bill requiring the removal of adverse administrative actions from the personnel files of those who had refused.
Congress did not reinstate those who’d been discharged or formally declare that the vaccine order had been unlawful. More on that in a moment.
Suffice to say Austin had a choice to make.
Insist upon the military necessity of the original order. Resign.
Agree he had been wrong about the original order. Say so out loud. Obey Congress. Work to get discharged members reinstated. Energetically remediate the records of those punished.
Demonstrate a lack of principle by pretending both orders could be right.
Austin chose (3), exhibiting the sort of oily, slithering, shape-shifting tendencies that place him squarely in the tradition of the contemporary executive. He and Jeff Skilling are more alike than we want to believe.
Most of all, they are alike in their disregard for the orphans created by their bullshit.
Which brings us to current events.
V.
Politicians, no matter how much they pretend to hate one another, are all on the same side. Ordinary schlubs like you and me are on the other side.
They encourage us to get ornery with one another over age limits to purchase imported meats, whether transsexual horses should be permitted in water polo, whether dough is legally pizza before it comes out of the oven.
That kinda stuff keeps us busy. If we’re busy, we might not notice them cooperating to screw us over.
Lloyd Austin was running with a lie called “the covid vaccine is a military necessity.” Congress tackled him. He fumbled it. Hegseth came along and scooped it up.
Shrewdly recognizing he exists in an era where lies get you touchdowns and the truth gets you sacked, he started hauling it downfield.
Let’s go back to the language Congress planted in the FY23 spending bill. It’s key. It required repeal of the vaccine mandate and removal of adverse actions from personnel files.
But what’s important is what it didn’t require, and the authority it therefore did not grant.
No new administrative resources for the services to remediate personnel files.
No funded reviews to make whole those who lost promotions or career opportunities due to invalid sanctions.
Congress did not formally declare the original order unlawful.
Congress did not reinstate those discharged for refusing the vaccine. It left the military services to clean up the mess.
The result was 8,200 people discharged for refusing the vaccine and left in limbo.
Hegseth came along and promised them deliverance.
Instead, they are marooned in purgatory.
Whenever there is a gap between a claim and reality, the needle on a polygraph twitches. If Hegseth were attached to a polygraph now, it would be mistaken as a seismograph. The needle would melt.
Let’s review the claim, which was delivered in four barrages across four months.
(1) Hegseth in January:
“Tens of thousands of service members were kicked out because of an experimental vaccine. They will be apologized to. They will be reinstated, reinstituted with pay and rank.”
That same month, President Trump signed an Executive Order which represented itself to be reinstating military members involuntarily discharged for vaccine refusal. A press release used the word “reinstated,” cleverly positioned in the White House website under a link to “fact sheets.”
The Order did not reinstate anyone.
It created no new right or process and carried no legal force. It was simply the President reminding his team do what was already within their power, which was to “make reinstatement available.” This had already been done in the previous Administration.
(2) In February, the Department of Defense started sending apology letters to discharged service members, explaining the process of applying for reinstatement.
(3) In late April, Hegseth signed a memo issuing “additional guidance” to his staff.
A few notes about this memo:
Removal of adverse actions had already been directed by Congress and implemented by Austin back in 2023.
“Discharge upgrades” are not within the authority of the Secretary to grant. Nothing prevents the Department from advising service members on how to pursue one.
“Appropriate remedies” are fact-specific and case-specific. They typically take months or years while bureaucratic reviews get done and approvals are secured. To the extent anyone suffered unfavorable performance reports or foregone promotions, a correction to their record will take a long time, probably years. SecDef sponsorship won’t hurt, but there’s a “fast track” in the same way there’s a fast track for release of the JFK files.
(4) But it’s a week or so later, in early May, that Hegseth earns his place in the pants-on-fire pantheon with this social media post. For today’s purposes, ignore everything except the highlighted bit.
This is a lie.
Hegseth has made statements, he’s issued guidance, he’s directed apology letters to be sent. His boss has signed an executive order inviting people to apply for reinstatement.
But Hegseth has no more authority to reinstate someone whose been discharged than he has to order Ohio State to ditch the Buckeye as a mascot. He can sneer and gesticulate the day is long about how no one knows what a buckeye even is. And he would have a point. But having a point and having authority are two different things.
Hegseth has a point that these people should be reinstated immediately. But he doesn’t have the authority to make it so.
He doesn’t have the authority to do anything more than roll out the red carpet and invite those discharged to follow a process prescribed by law.
He knows this is the case. He’s discussed the fact there are process barriers that he and his staff are confronting. He’s issued guidance to his staff to explain the process to people.
Which means he knows there’s a process. And he acknowledges he does not control that process. He cannot cancel it, bypass it, or circumnavigate it.
So whether anyone gets reinstated is up to someone else. Not Pete.
Which means when Pete claims he has reinstated someone, he’s lying.
Specifically, he’s claiming success for something right now that might happen later. Just like Jeff Skilling’s dodgy accounting tricks, Hegseth is harvesting popularity and perceptual credit he doesn’t deserve and hasn’t earned. Just like Skilling, he seems to need that popularity. It’s classic Type II Liabeetus.
Thus far, barely 100 people have applied for and successfully earned reinstatement. There are good reasons for that.
Which brings us to reality.
I’ve said repeatedly Pete Hegseth lacks the legal authority to reinstate service members unilaterally, and so does his boss. That’s because reinstatement is one of those rare zones of military affairs where Congress has asserted itself, codifying a process which deliberately adds friction to reinstatement after involuntary discharge. If a commander felt discharge was appropriate, the system sets a high bar to overturn that commander’s judgement.
So when someone caught in the vaccine dragnet applies for reinstatement, they don’t get a welcome basket delivered to their door along with a fresh set of uniforms and a corrected DD214.
Instead, here’s what happens.
Application to a Board for Correction of Military Records (BCMR). This is an administrative panel which reviews a petition, applies the rules, and decides whether someone’s official record is incorrect.
The individual assembles evidence and builds an argument. No memo or Executive Order changes the law governing a BCMR, and Congress has also not changed that process. It requires the applicant carry the burden of proving they were discharged and/or sanctioned improperly
Applications that illustrate a service member sought a religious, medical, or administrative exemption to the vaccination are most likely to succeed. Other applications which show the discharge resulted from a vaccine-related administrative sanction also stand a good chance. Remember, Congress told the military to rescind the vaccine mandate and scrub adverse actions from records, but stopped short of saying Austin’s original order was unlawful. Which means the presumption of lawfulness remains, and the petitioner carries the burden of proving otherwise. If someone filed for exemption at the time, this means they thought the order was unlawful by its impairment of some other right guaranteed to them. Two branches of government have since given support to this rationale. But service members who simply refused the vaccine and were discharged as a result are by no means guaranteed to succeed at a BCMR.
The BCMR process is long-winded. There is a massive backlog. No new resources have been granted to deal with this issue. Wait times are around 18 months on average to start a review. When I spoke recently about Hegseth over-promising on this issue, a good friend of mine messaged to tell me he’s just passed the two year mark in his wait for a BCMR to review his much simpler issue.
After a long wait and a longer review, those who are successful will receive a decision and an offer of reinstatement.
This is where many will be asked to swallow the bitterest pill of all.
Hegseth has promised they will receive back pay for the time they should have been serving. But he hasn’t requested additional funding to cover outlays, which theoretically could run into the hundreds of millions.
I say theoretically because Hegseth also has not requested, nor has Congress provided, any change to how back pay is calculated in cases of reinstatement.
Here’s how that works.
BCMR calculates how much pay was foregone between a break in service and a planned reinstatement date, inclusive of any foregone promotions.
From that number, any civilian earnings during the break in service are subtracted. Any veteran benefits used during the break in service are also subtracted, along with any other debts owed.
If the remainder is above zero, the service member will receive that amount upon reinstatement.
If the remainder is zero, the service member is reinstated with no back pay.
If the remainder is below zero, the service member owes the government that much money upon reinstatement.
There is no interim step allowing the service member to review or contest the math before receiving a final decision. Some may learn they’ve been successful, but will have to decide if they want to rejoin the service owing thousands for the privilege.
I’ve oversimplified the foregoing for the sake of this article and your sanity.
The requirements set out in 10 USC § 1552(c), interpreted by the Defense Department’s Financial Management Regulation (FMR), are applied to each situation. How taxes on military and civilian pay are calculated, and even where in the calculation any VA benefits are considered, can drive wide variations in the final numbers. There is ambiguity in how these calculations are done. Entire legal specializations exist to guide petitioners through a Byzantine process more impervious to educated guesswork than a day at the dog track.
All of which illustrates why Secretary Hegseth is full of shit when he says these people have been reinstated.
This lie is particularly cruel and exploitative. It falsely inflates the hopes of thousands who have served their country, which will compound their disappointment and emotional trauma later. He’s extracting from these people and a broader segment of the general public a measure of approval, and thus political leverage, for writing checks his body can’t cash.
When it all comes crashing down, he’ll blame the prior Administration. Or Congress. Or the faceless bureaucrats of the BCMR. Or lawyers. Or his own staff. Almost certainly his own generals. At some point, Jeffrey Epstein will be referenced. Likely Elon Musk too. After Hegseth is inevitably fired for some reason, he’ll blame President Trump. Or the Avon Lady.
Probably all of the above.
But that won’t change that he lied. He knew he was lying. He enjoyed it. He got dopamine and approval for it, feeding his addiction to it. Classic Liabeetus.
While Hegseth continues a life meretricious, arms akimbo in rare press appearances punctuated by feverish “hey look at me” social media reels drafted amid mirror-gazing entrancement, the reality I’ve described here has begun to hit.
The story below details a BCMR denial, expresses the dissonance created by Hegseth over-promising what the BCMR later under-delivered, and even gets a jump on the predictable move of blaming others, singling out Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George for his failure to help.
No doubt George deserves scorn for his silence on this matter if nothing else, alongside the rest of the self-muzzled joint chiefs who seem comfortable in their foxholes while their people are abused as pawns in culture wars.
But the author is missing the point. He’s pitting Hegseth against George when neither have the authority to solve this. He should be criticizing Congress for failing to legislate it, Hegseth for failing to request they do so, and everyone for lying like it’s going out of style.
VI.
The decline in American confidence in institutions coincides with the rise of Liabeetus. This epidemic has almost completely impaired the executive levels of organizations across the spectrum of business and government.
When Jeff Skilling realized during the flaming plummet of Enron that he’d almost certainly be going to jail, a great many concerns likely ran through his mind. Not dropping the soap. The long walk from the cafeteria to the gym. How to rapidly determine which guards were dumb enough to be bribed with Enron stock.
He probably didn’t expect to be held in the same esteem as future cabinet secretaries. Such has been the speed and savagery of the Liabeetus epidemic. It’s no longer shocking to observe lumpen liars impersonating one another regardless of the public trust. Indeed, that trust is the source of the liar’s leverage and dopamine.
Trusting them only deepens the addiction and leads to more fraud. We knew this long before Liabeetus had a name.
Each of these men committed fraud. One of them met the legal definition because we write laws to police misconduct in business. Public positions assume responsible and ethical conduct, pretending oaths bind people the same as laws.
We’re dumb to assume this. We know we’re dumb to assume it, but we choose being dumb to being hopeless. We choose to believe what we don’t think, perhaps because we desperately want to believe decency and stable expectations can once again feature in our civic traditions. Perhaps because we hope arming some official or another with our trust will inspire them to break the cycle.
But it’s the hope that kills.
These people are addicted to lying. The only way to truly fight Liabeetus is to remove the source of the addiction. Stop approving. Stop believing. Stop applauding. Stop trusting without factual verification. Stop choosing sides, which is a lie we tell ourselves to simplify the world, but feeds Liabeetus sufferers until they can no longer tell the truth and we can no longer tell shit from oatmeal.
Taking credit now for something that might happen later is lying. Not actually trying to make the thing happen is like molting out of your own lying skin, leaving behind a decaying reptilian dermis while you move to safe perch, oily paws gripping binoculars, so you can get off on watching people cry as they are broken by your deception.
Creating and exploiting reasonable presumptions in others is also lying, with a gross element of grooming as a slimy frosting on top. Exceeding your legal authority when you know it can’t be challenged is equally predatory.
It’s almost like we’ve been looking for our government officials in all the wrong places. Like down at the Liabeetus treatment center.
We’re not going fix all of that or even any of that in this article. But someday, when someone’s trying to understand how we fucked ourselves into a societal and planetary cocked hat, they’ll have these chronicles to help reconstruct the deconstruction.
Fraud is trending as an accepted path to success, regardless of worldview, politics, or vocation. Soldiers, entrepreneurs, and talk show hosts are rising to the top of our societal hierarchy not by displaying virtue, but by expertly exhibiting the opposite.
But here’s the thing about fraud. I don’t just hate it because it’s wrong and disgusting. I hate it because it’s stupid and doesn’t work. We burn down a lot of goodness to take shortcuts that don’t even lead the fraudster to their intended destination.
Eventually, every fraud collapses. Sometimes it’s fast enough that we get to watch the fraudsters suffer a little, perp-walked to jail cells or roasted in ritual public smack downs. Often, the fraudsters avoid accountability, usually by identifying and leveraging fellow Liabeetus sufferers who understand their addiction and help them lurk away quietly, leaving only a slime trail.
In Hegseth’s case, the artifice he’s chosen is wired to 8,200 grenades, with each detonation cord a slightly different length. Some of them might go off quickly, while he’s still in the frag pattern, which could stain his suit or mess up his hair.
I have a feeling he’s going to feel the wrath of those who believed his promises sooner rather than later.
If it helps call attention to the long-rotting fraud of false military necessity to turn an employer preference into an enforceable law with criminal jeopardy attached, it’ll be constructive. If it simply means Hegseth has to gather and deliver a flaming bag of excrement to the next Liabeetus-stricken nominee, then less so.
In the meantime, we’ll just hope the guy entrusted with our most delicate and complex strategic matters keeps himself too frantically myopic and hysterical to do any real damage.
Either way, it’ll be entertaining.
And ain’t that the point?
So long as we’d rather be entertained than have our affairs responsibly administered, Liabeetus-stricken actors will continue to get the big jobs.
In a sense, we are all Hegseths. We claim to want truth and responsibility, but we’re addicted to entertainment. We face a situation where it would be hard to make things worse, but we can do it if we try. Extinguishing the flickering flame of truth would be the only way to tighten this death spiral. Paraphrasing Chairman Mao, it’s always darkest just before it goes totally black.
But if you’re jockeying to be one of truth’s final holdouts, the task is clear. Watch for the moment when Liabeetus has so gripped us that the logic of scarcity reverses, making truth once again the coveted and sought-after rarity it has most always been. As we get deeper into this pit of lies, a nugget of truth will become more valuable than a nugget of platinum.
When you see truth, herald it. Champion it. If we can get ourselves addicted to it, diversion therapy might become an option.
Tony is an independent writer, lawyer, and military veteran.