A retired Army^[1] officer and conservative commentator who could not be approved for a Pentagon job during the first Trump administration because of past Islamaphobic and conspiratorial statements has been confirmed by the Senate to be the Pentagon's personnel chief in the second Trump administration.

In a 52-46 party-line vote Tuesday afternoon, the Senate confirmed Anthony Tata to become the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, the top official overseeing the health and well-being of the more than 3 million uniformed and civilian personnel working for the Defense Department.

Tata is a retired Army brigadier general whose post-military career includes serving as a school district administrator in Washington, D.C., and North Carolina and as North Carolina's secretary of transportation, a job he abruptly resigned from.

Read Next: Here Are the 596 Books Being Banned by Defense Department Schools^[2]

More recently, he has been a steady presence on Fox News as a political and military commentator.

Toward the end of the first Trump administration, in 2020, Tata was nominated to be under secretary of defense for policy, essentially the No. 3 position in the Pentagon. But his nomination was withdrawn after Republicans who led the Senate Armed Services Committee canceled his confirmation hearing amid mounting controversy over incendiary statements, including calling former President Barack Obama a "terrorist leader."

At his confirmation hearing in May^[3] to become Pentagon personnel chief, Tata expressed regret for the comments that doomed his previous nomination and said they were "out of character."

But he also defended more recent comments that Democrats grilled him about. Those more recent statements include social media posts in which he said that all four-star officers appointed by former President Joe Biden should be fired and that the Posse Comitatus Act, the law that prohibits the military from conducting domestic law enforcement in most cases, should be "suspended."

Democrats argued that those statements, coupled with his past comments, are disqualifying.

"I respect and I appreciate his military service, but his record of public statements and behavior toward individuals with whom he disagrees politically is disqualifying for a position of this significance," Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on the Senate floor Tuesday. "I am concerned Mr. Tata has a misguided and discriminatory view of the military and civilian workforces he would oversee."

At the hearing, Tata claimed that his reference to Posse Comitatus was meant to be a call for better border security and that he did "not know" whether the law should be suspended. Tata also maintained that his call to fire officers was about reinforcing the need to follow lawful orders regardless of politics and that he would not support a "blatant purge" of military officers.

While Republicans recoiled at Tata's comments the first time he was nominated, they dismissed his comments this time around.

"The thing I've learned about Tony is that he takes responsibility for his words and actions," Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said in May while introducing Tata at his confirmation hearing. "He learns from his past mistakes, which is a testament of a good leader."

Related: Nominee for Pentagon Personnel Chief Grilled Over Comments Calling for Purge of Generals^[4]

MP Materials, which runs the only American rare earths mine^[1], announced a new $500 million agreement with tech giant Apple on Tuesday to produce more of the powerful magnets used in iPhones as well as other high-tech products like electric vehicles.

This news comes on the heels of last week’s announcement that the U.S. Defense Department agreed to invest $400 million in shares of the Las Vegas-based company. That will make the government the largest shareholder in MP Materials and help increase magnet production.

Despite their name, the 17 rare earth elements aren’t actually rare, but it’s hard to find them in a high enough concentration to make a mine worth the investment.

They are important ingredients in everything from smartphones and submarines to EVs and fighter jets, and it's those military applications that have made rare earths a key concern in ongoing U.S. trade talks^[2]. That's because China dominates the market and imposed new limits on exports after President Donald Trump announced his widespread tariffs^[3]. When shipments dried up, the two sides sat down in London.

The agreement with Apple will allow MP Materials to further expand its new factory in Texas to use recycled materials to produce the magnets that make iPhones vibrate. The company expects to start producing magnets for GM's electric vehicles later this year and this agreement will let it start producing magnets for Apple in 2027.

The Apple agreement represents a sliver of the company's pledge to invest $500 billion domestically^[4] during the Trump administration. And although the deal will provide a significant boost for MP Materials, the agreement with the Defense Department may be even more meaningful.

Neha Mukherjee, a rare earths analyst with Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, said in a research note that the Pentagon's 10-year promise to guarantee a minimum price for the key elements of neodymium and praseodymium will guarantee stable revenue for MP Minerals and protect it from potential price cuts by Chinese producers that are subsidized by their government.

“This is the kind of long-term commitment needed to reshape global rare earth supply chains," Mukherjee said.

Trump has made it a priority to try to reduce American reliance on China for rare earths. His administration is both helping MP Materials and trying to encourage the development of new mines that would take years to come to fruition. China has agreed to issue some permits^[5] for rare earth exports but not for military uses, and much uncertainty remains about their supply. The fear is that the trade war between the world’s two biggest economies could lead to a critical shortage of rare earth elements that could disrupt production of a variety of products. MP Materials can't satisfy all of the U.S. demand from its Mountain Pass mine in California’s Mojave Desert.

The deals by MP Materials come as Beijing and Washington have agreed to walk back on their non-tariff measures: China is to grant export permits for rare earth magnets to the U.S., and the U.S. is easing export controls on chip design software and jet engines. The truce is intended to ease tensions and prevent any catastrophic fall-off in bilateral relations, but is unlikely to address fundamental differences as both governments take steps to reduce dependency on each other.

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Associated Press writers David Klepper and Didi Tang in Washington and Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed.

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.

Read Next: Retired Army Officer Pleads Guilty to Leaking National Defense Info on Foreign Dating Website^[1]

Over the^[2] years, numerous^[3] top military leaders^[4] -- including some that have gone on to have a role in Trump's political movement^[5] -- 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."^[6]

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^[7] 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^[8] 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^[9] 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."^[10]

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."

Related: Bragg Soldiers Who Cheered Trump's Political Attacks While in Uniform Were Checked for Allegiance, Appearance^[11]