The Pentagon has pulled a host of top military officials from attending a major security conference in Colorado that was set to start Tuesday, arguing that the event is anti-American and goes against the values of the Trump administration.
“The Department of Defense has no interest in legitimizing an organization that has invited former officials who have been the architects of chaos abroad and failure at home,” Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said in a statement.
The conference in question is the Aspen Security Forum — an event put on annually by the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit organization — and it is one of the most high-profile events for top officials in the national security space. Its attendees have historically included top military leaders, lawmakers and officials from both political parties.
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Over the years, numerous top military leaders — including some that have gone on to have a role in Trump’s political movement — have appeared at the conference.
This year’s final event at the conference is slated to feature a conversation between Condoleezza Rice, a top Bush-era official and co-chair of the group hosting the event; Robert Gates, a former secretary of defense for both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama; and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser for President Joe Biden.
The program also advertised a host of top military officials who had been slated to speak, including Adm. Samuel Paparo, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command; Gen. Bryan Fenton, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command; and Lt. Gen. John Brennan, the deputy commander of U.S. Africa Command.
Wilson, however, went on to say that “senior representatives of the Department of Defense will no longer be participating in an event that promotes the evil of globalism, disdain for our great country, and hatred for the president of the United States.”
Wilson’s statement was first reported on Monday morning by the outlet “Just the News.”
The Anti-Defamation League notes that the word “globalist” is a term that is frequently used “as an antisemitic dog whistle” and can be wielded “as a codeword for Jews or as a pejorative term for people whose interests in international commerce or finance ostensibly make them disloyal to the country in which they live.”
Wilson has a yearslong history of making social media posts on her personal social media account that trafficked in a variety of extremist rhetoric, ranging from antisemitic conspiracy theories to white nationalist talking points. While some comments were made as far back as 2021, others are far more recent.
In August, Wilson posted a decades-old antisemitic trope questioning the facts behind the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was wrongly convicted of raping and murdering a child more than a hundred years ago in Atlanta.
That post was still available at the time of this story’s publication.
Later Monday, Pentagon officials released a second statement, this time attributed to top Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell, that took a much softer line on the conference, instead saying that its “values do not align with the values” of Pentagon leadership.
Kingsley told Military.com that, despite the new remarks from her boss, she still stood by her statement.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seemed to also approve of the choice to use the term “globalist” because he posted a photo of a headline featuring the word with the comment “correct.”
The institute that holds the annual conference says on its website that its “mission is to convene decision-makers in resolutely nonpartisan public and private forums to address key foreign policy challenges facing the United States.”
Meanwhile, Hegseth took the unusual step of appearing at a Turning Point USA rally on Friday.
Turning Point USA is an influential right-wing nonprofit organization run by Charlie Kirk, himself a key figure in the world of Trump and Republican politics.
Speaking to a crowd at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit, Hegseth claimed that “we don’t do politics” at the Defense Department, while also saying that NATO was “freeloading off of America.”
When asked whether the Pentagon would also pull its participation from the Reagan National Security Forum, another major national security conference, an official for Hegseth’s office said that they had “nothing to announce regarding Reagan at this time.”
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