Pete Hegseth, the politically inexperienced weekend Fox News host whom Trump has tapped to lead the Pentagon, has been embroiled in scandal over the past week. The controversy has largely centered on reports that Hegseth paid off a woman who accused him of sexual assault, while he claims the encounter was consensual. (NBC obtained a copy of the police report; a spokesperson for Hegseth said, “The incident was fully investigated and police found the allegation to be false, which is why no charges were filed.” The police did not provide a reason for the decision not to file charges.)
However, Hegseth’s actual politics have gotten far less attention, and in particular his apparent ties to Christian nationalism. That issue came into focus initially because two of Hegseth’s tattoo are associated with far-right extremist groups (Hegseth has said that the accusation is “anti-Christian bigotry”). Hegseth is doing little to dispel the perception of extremism, as earlier this week he called for an “educational insurgency” to take over American schools.
As Right Wing Watch flagged, Hegseth made his comments Monday on a right-wing podcast while discussing a book he published in 2022, in which he and his co-author vowed to give “patriotic parents the ammunition to join an insurgency that gives America a fighting chance” against educators. Hegseth has ties to Christian nationalists, who see religiously affiliated schools — some of which receive public funds — as key to their efforts to blur the line between church and state.
On the podcast Monday, Hegseth agreed when one of the hosts suggested Christian schools should be seen as bootcamps to groom children for the so-called insurgency.
“That’s what the crop of these classical Christian schools are gonna do in a generation,” Hegseth said. “Policy answers like school choice, while they’re great, that’s phase two stuff later on once the foothold has been taken, once the recruits have graduated boot camp.”
Hegseth continued:
We call it a tactical retreat. We draw out in the last part of the book what an educational insurgency would look like, because I was a counterinsurgency instructor in Afghanistan and kind of the phases that Mao [Zedong] wrote about: We’re in middle phase one right now, which is effectively a tactical retreat where you regroup, consolidate and reorganize. And as you do so, you build your army underground with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way.”
“Obviously, all of this is metaphorical and all that good stuff,” Hegseth added.
Ask yourself: In a country where school violence is commonplace, do Americans really need a defense secretary who has promoted a war — figurative or not — on American schools? Consider the message this might send at a time when right-wing religious extremists already portray schools as enemy territory. And then consider how it looks to have the top civilian leader of the United States military affirming their views.
It’s typical for defense secretaries to have battle plans, of course, but if he’s confirmed, Hegseth will be unique in that the war he’s most prepared to wage isn’t against a foreign combatant but against institutions and people he’ll be sworn to protect.