In Pete Hegseth’s Totalitarian Vision, Opponents of Christian Nationalism Are Commies and Political Enemies
Trump’s defense pick will help him pave the way to an authoritarian America
President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is in trouble. While initial reactions to his nomination focused on the absurdity of this former Fox News anchor being elevated to second in command of the military, the main obstacles to Hegseth’s confirmation remain his various problems with women: a sexual assault allegation from 2017, disparaging comments about women in the military, and a newly surfaced 2018 email from his mother berating him for habitual mistreatment of the opposite sex.
But even more alarmingly: Hegseth is an ideological extremist who views political opponents as “the enemy” and political differences as war by another name. Worse, he’s a Christian nationalist of the stridently militaristic kind, which raises disturbing questions about his potential willingness to misuse the U.S. military for political purposes. This is not a characterization pieced together from the odd soundbite or two—Hegseth himself tells us who he is in his books. The image of Hegseth that emerges from The War on Warriors (2024), Battle for the American Mind (2022), and American Crusade (2020), is of a militant Christian extremist who is obsessed with the Crusades and whose highest aspiration is redesigning the U.S. military into his ideological mold.
Hegseth the Crusader
The central idea of American Crusade is that the survival of the United States as a free country requires a “holy war” to achieve “a single paramount objective: the categorical defeat of the Left.” Hegseth accuses the left—by which he doesn’t just mean an extremist fringe but the Democratic Party and its supporters in general—of seeking the “utter annihilation” of true patriots. “We are two Americas; a house divided,” he declares, and the other half is full of people whose “ignorance and ideologies threaten America’s very survival.” Hegseth writes: “Only the categorical defeat of the Left will secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. We must reelect Donald Trump in 2020 and continue the cultural counterattack until Leftists are no longer electorally viable.” The implication is clear: liberty requires one-party rule. This is far from an unrepresentative line. In The War on Warriors, complaining that “the Left has never fought fair,” Hegseth lists “electing Obama” among its dirty tricks, despite the fact that Obama won a greater share of both the popular and the electoral vote in 2008 and 2012 than Trump did in 2016 and 2024.
In addition to treating a broadly defined “Left” as the enemy, American Crusade also heaps scorn on ostensibly patriotic but overly complacent “fifty-fifty Americans.” The term comes from Theodore Roosevelt, who is quoted in the epigraph to the first part of the book: “There is not room in the country for any fifty-fifty American, nor can there be but one loyalty—to the Stars and Stripes.” The quote appears to be a garbled amalgam of several passages in Roosevelt’s speeches and writings, all of them from a very specific context: divided loyalties among some German-Americans during World War I. Hegseth’s “fifty-fifty American,” by contrast, refers to a well-meaning non-combatant in the culture war: a “squish” who disapproves of the perceived excesses of the progressive left but shrugs them off in the hope that “common sense will prevail,” or who doesn’t want to be “overly political,” or who thinks his or her local public school is great. For all his talk of reverence for America’s founding ideals, Hegseth’s version of Americanism sounds at times more like proto-totalitarian French Jacobinism, whose ideologues asserted that not only “traitors” but the “indifferent” and the “passive” must be punished.
Besides Hegseth’s quasi-totalitarian demands for complete fealty to the right and intensely held animus toward the left in the culture war, there is also the troubling question of just how literally he takes the “war” part. American Crusade, after all, explicitly invokes the medieval Crusades as a model for the fight against “the Left.” Although Hegseth acknowledges that the history of the Crusades is “complicated” and includes nasty episodes, such as horrific violence toward Jews, he sees in them a model for civilizational conservation against an existential threat. He even justifies them based on a bizarre alternative history in which they served the cause of peace: “After centuries of fighting … Christianity in Europe was saved, Jerusalem was liberated, and Christians did not seek further war with Muslims.” In fact, Jerusalem was captured by Christian forces in the First Crusade in 1099 but recaptured by Muslims in 1187; seven subsequent Crusades over the next century were unsuccessful, and Jerusalem remained under Muslim rule—first by North African sultanates, then by the Ottoman Empire—until the 20th century.
Hegseth’s caveat that he is using the Crusades analogically and not calling for actual violence is at least somewhat belied by his suggestion that a future phase of this conflict may involve literal war. He writes in his 2020 book: “[O]ur fight is not with guns. Yet.” One may also ask if Hegseth believes that the time for guns has now come?
American Crusade was in large part a plea for the reelection of Donald Trump, whose victory he saw as essential to repelling the leftist menace. The War on Warriors comes after the 2020 election, which Hegseth fervently believes was rigged and stolen. Hegseth was among the few Fox News personalities who defended the Jan. 6 insurrectionists the very next day, with only a cursory “I’m not saying it was okay” disclaimer. The book also comes after the racial justice protests and riots of the summer of 2020, which Hegseth—who was in the National Guard in Washington, D.C. during the violence in the capital—treats as akin to actual war: an organized assault by the coordinated “troops” of Black Lives Matter and Antifa. He asserts that the nation’s capital had not faced such a threat since the British razed the White House in 1814 and claims that the 2020 rioters wanted to “destroy the White House” and “get their hands on Trump.”
The War on Warriors also pointedly asserts that the duty of the military is to “defend [the nation] against all enemies—both foreign and domestic,” and makes it clear that “Marxists” and others on the left are “not political opponents, but real enemies.” But those terms are used quite loosely: as Jonathan Chait notes, “pretty much all of [Hegseth’s] political opponents turn out to be Marxists. ... These include, but are not limited to, diversity advocates, newspapers, and ... almost anybody involved in public education.” For example, Hegseth refers to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune as a “communist” paper. Would he be in favor of soldiers using deadly force against American protesters, including those who are peaceful or use only low-level violence such as throwing water bottles? While The War on Warriors notes that soldiers must follow only “lawful orders,” the term “lawful,” just like “domestic enemies,” can be dangerously stretched.
The War on Warriors also discusses an episode that looms large in Hegseth’s narrative of victimhood—both his own and, more broadly, that of America’s true “warriors”: In January 2021, his orders to join the National Guard units providing security at Joe Biden’s inauguration were revoked at the last minute. A senior officer later told him he had been flagged as a “white nationalist and an extremist” after being reported for crusader-themed tattoos popular on the far right. While Hegseth says his Jerusalem cross tattoo was the issue, records provided by the National Guard member who made the report show that it was the motto Deus Vult, “God wills it.” As Annika Brockschmidt and Thomas Lecaque explain:
During the First Crusade, it was raised as a battle cry. This is its univocal origin and context, and Hegseth knows it well: In American Crusade, he refers to it as “the rallying cry of Christian knights as they marched to Jerusalem,” a summons to “followers of Christ to take up the sword in defense of their faith, their families, and their freedom.” It provides the last words in American Crusade: “See you on the battlefield. Together, with God’s help, we will save America. Deus vult!”
The question of Hegseth’s tattoos has been extensively explored; regardless of their historical origins, their present-day far-right associations are fairly clear, as many of us can attest from social media experience. What’s far from clear is whether these tattoos were the sole basis for removing Hegseth from the units providing security at the inauguration: surely, his vocal defense of the Jan. 6 rioters and support for Trump’s stolen-election claims could have easily marked him as a security risk.
Hegseth’s Christian Nationalism
We do not know whether Hegseth was really labeled a white nationalist to his superiors. There is no indication that he is one. But the label that does apply is Christian nationalist. His writings on education are the clearest example of his Christian-nationalist commitments. The central idea of his 2022 book Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, co-written with David Goodwin, a promoter of “classical Christian education,” is that the left destroyed public education by detaching it from its Christian foundation.
Moreover, Hegseth suggests that the seeds of this destruction were unwittingly planted by some of America’s founders—deists like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, whose beliefs helped put America on an “early, almost imperceivable course away from Western Christian culture.” While he lauds more traditional Christian founders such as John Jay and Samuel Adams without mentioning that some of them had startlingly illiberal views (Jay, an Episcopalian, wanted to erect “a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics” and to bar Catholics from public office), he saves his rebuke for the deists: “[W]ith all due reverence and gratitude for the founding generation, the diminished role of Christ’s kingdom in America’s founding would unintentionally create structural vulnerabilities that progressives eventually exploited.”
Throughout the book, Hegseth pays lip service to tolerance toward other religions. He even includes, despite his general hostility to Islam, a portrayal of a sympathetic Muslim, a patriotic Iraqi immigrant named Omar (though his insertion is mainly an opportunity to set up a good Omar/bad Omar contrast in order to attack Minn. Rep. Ilhan Omar). But the book also leaves little doubt that Hegseth’s America is one whose national identity and educational system are inextricably enmeshed with Christianity—as is the patriotic crusade for which he calls: “We need an American Crusade. Christians—alongside our Jewish friends and freedom-loving people everywhere—need to stand up for our faith, defend our freedom, and defeat leftism in all its forms.”
There you have it: Jews and other freedom-lovers may be included as allies, but Hegseth’s American “we” is distinctly Christian. If this isn’t Christian nationalism, what is?
The War on Women Warriors
Some criticisms of Hegseth have been wide of the mark. New York magazine’s Sarah Jones derides his assertion that the earnings gap between men and women today is the result of family-related choices. But this view is widely shared by economists, including Harvard professor and Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin. Historian Timothy Snyder’s contention that Hegseth is akin to architects of “Gilead,” the theocratic regime in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale which reduces women to sexual and domestic servitude, is hyperbolic.
In The War on Warriors, Hegseth’s criticism of women in combat is limited to infantry and other ground combat positions requiring physical prowess; he has said that he has no objection to female pilots on combat missions. According to Hegseth, women should serve in ground combat units if they are good enough to be effective soldiers; as he sees it, when the combat ban was lifted in 2015, women were ushered into those jobs without adequate preparation and with watered-down standards.
The subject of physical standards for women in the armed forces is an ongoing debate, and some of Hegseth’s specific claims may or may not be accurate. But his general discussion of women in the military also veers into some bizarre and highly ideological territory. Take, for instance, his assertion that women who historically served in combat roles, nearly always as “supplanters” for dead or incapable males, generally came to a bad end and did not accomplish “anything close to a positive military outcome.”
To make his case, Hegseth cites the failure of Queen Boudicca’s rebellion against the Romans in first-century Britain (as if male leaders who went up against the Romans fared better!) and the tragic fate of Joan of Arc. Yet he leaves out an impressive gallery of medieval queens and feudal noblewomen who were surprisingly effective leaders during a period of constant warfare, and not only organized military operations but sometimes took part in battles—such as Countess Matilda of Tuscany, one of the most formidable rulers in 11th-century Europe. Nor does he mention at least two women who successfully “supplanted” their fallen husbands as gunners on the battlefield during the American Revolution, immortalized in the collective image of “Molly Pitcher.”
Hegseth asserts that women have been mainly utilized in combat by “totalitarian nations (save for Israel).” You’d think that the Israeli experience would warrant some examination given Hegseth’s strong pro-Zionist views—but no. Hegseth also erroneously suggests that Nazi Germany sent women into combat. And while he points to “Russia’s adventure in Ukraine” as illustrating the importance of supply lines and communications to emphasize that women can perform essential military functions in non-combat roles, he makes no mention of women’s combat service in the Ukrainian army.
Ultimately, Hegseth’s objections are not just about efficiency but about ideology. “Women are life givers, regardless of what the abortion industry might want us to think,” he writes, in one of several passages suggesting that turning women into killers is a transgression against nature. (How that squares with his praise for the biblical heroine Jael, who uses the motherly role of offering milk to a weary enemy leader to lull him to sleep and crush his skull with a tent peg and a hammer, is unexplained.) He also worries that putting women on the battlefield will undermine men’s protective instincts and erode chivalry at home. That’s rather ironic, since, even granting Hegseth full presumption of innocence on the sexual assault charge in a blurry alcohol-fueled situation, the police report includes accounts of Mr. Chivalrous drunkenly pawing unwilling women at a hotel bar during a Republican women’s conference.
Pass on Pete for the Pentagon
Character and qualifications aside, Hegseth’s writings should raise multiple red flags about putting him at the head of the Pentagon. He is a culture-war ideologue. He also has intense grievances, on his own behalf and on behalf of those he regards as fellow patriots. He has, or at least professes, a cultlike devotion to Trump, who is mentioned 242 times in the 352-page American Crusade and is hailed as the “crusader in chief.” He also regards Trump as a God-sent savior in the battle against the left: Trump’s first election victory is repeatedly described as “the miracle of 2016.” Finally, Hegseth quite literally treats political opponents as domestic enemies and seems disturbingly comfortable with the idea that the culture war against the left could escalate into more literal warfare.
In other words, if Trump were planning to turn his presidency into an authoritarian regime, Hegseth is exactly the sort of person he’d pick as Secretary of Defense.
© The UnPopulist, 2024
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It amazes me that the label of “Christian” can be self-applied without the slightest sense of shame by someone who clearly expounds the most un-Christian attitudes and lives a most un-Christian existence. The violent vanquishing of those who disagree with you is most definitely not a Christian virtue. Nor is humiliating or cruel behavior to your neighbor. Along with Hegseth’s selective historical facts and disinterest in the parts that don’t support his paranoid ideas, he seems to have a deep ignorance of Christianity. The America he envisions more than anything resembles Putin’s Russia—nominally Christian, but only insofar as he can make it justify totalitarian government.
A trend in Trumpland is many of these people have clearly had more books published than they’ve read.