Pete Hegseth is much more than just a Fox News airhead. He’s a man with a plan.
When Donald Trump announced his intention to nominate Fox News host Pete Hegseth to serve as Secretary of Defense, concerns were raised immediately about Hegseth’s undisguised Christian nationalism.
Hegseth, who has admitted that his multiple crusader tattoos got him “deemed an extremist” by his own National Guard unit, has deep ties to misogynistic Christian nationalist pastor Douglas Wilson.
On Monday, Hegseth appeared on the “CrossPolitic” podcast, which is hosted by Toby Sumpter and Gabe Rench, both of whom are closely tied to Wilson and his church.
Douglas Wilson often seems to fly under the radar, but he’s a far-right religious nutjob. Hegseth is cut from the same cloth, apparently. This is not someone you want overseeing the military, especially given his plan to start a culture war.
During the discussion about Hegseth’s book “Battle For The American Mind,” Hegseth said that he is working to create a system of “classical Christian schools” to provide the recruits for an underground army that will eventually launch an “educational insurgency” to take over the nation.
“I think we need to be thinking in terms of these classical Christian schools are boot camps for winning back America,” said Sumpter.
“That’s what the crop of these classical Christian schools are gonna do in a generation,” Hegseth agreed. “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.”
“We call it a tactical retreat,” Hegseth continued. “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.”
He learned a lot in Afghanistan. I don’t think it would be too hard to translate to the USA — one nation infested with heavily armed, rabid Abrahamic fanatics is much like another.
Role models for the religious right
Oh, crap, these aholes are proliferating in government the wake of the orange sphincter’s election! (We shall, henceforth, never use his name)
His ideas clearly define the difference between ‘educating’ and ‘indoctrinating’.
Here’s another rtwingnut xtianterrorist at work:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/oklahoma-orders-schools-teach-bible-every-classroom-2024-06-27/
Oklahoma orders schools to teach the Bible in every classroom
Jun 27, 2024 Oklahoma’s Department of Education ordered every teacher in the state to have a Bible in their classroom and to teach from it, in an announcement on Thursday that challenges U.S. Supreme Court …
YES! These battles of toxic xtian indoctrinatino are ongoing and increasing in frequency and severity.
…I was a counterinsurgency instructor in Afghanistan…
And what did you or your students accomplish in Afghanistan? How did your actions make it a more godly place?
Wait, lemme guess — “Everything was perfect and Heavenly until Joe Biden pulled the plug!” Right?
I bet he calls himself a “patriot” too, because it doesn’t count as destroying the USA if you keep the name, or something.
Welp, I always thought he was a piece of shit, but hooking up with Doug Wilson (the guy trying to buy/ruin my hometown) is just the rancid cherry on top.
Ironic that this all-American Christian Nationalist is taking lessons from Mao.
Detach yourself far enough and all this unfolding of humanity becomes rather fascinating to watch.
If you detach yourself even further, then you don’t much care any more.
Which is where I’m trying to get to.
The US voters chose this.
I cared deeply for over 50 years and look at where it got us.
Not a lot I can do about it for at least the next 4 years.
I heard Wilson speak on classical education and read his book on the subject in the early 2000s. It is seriously flawed. He makes arguments (with a well practiced air of profundity) like “students who take Latin do better when they take other languages” which is of course true but says more about self selection (which he doesn’t understand) than the effects of his homemade pedagogy. (Not unlike saying “students who take multivariable calculus do better in Linear Algebra”.) He is also scientifically illiterate– I have read numerous examples.
to #7 and #8–taking a geologic-time viewpoint helps detach further. I’m a climate-change / agronomist / soil scientist, and I can clearly see the end of human civilization coming soon (at least of any level that allows us to preserve writing and accumulated knowledge). It is depressing, but then i think how excited i used to feel about the last big extinction (e.g. dinosaurs) because of the great radial evolutionary divergences that followed after the dust settled.
I look at the little brown birds at the feeder and the starving, zombified suburban deer, and wonder which ludicrous beautiful traits will arise from the few survivors next time around. ridiculous feathers and horns, or maybe future life will be fungal and insect-oriented for a while. All hail chitin! it will be interesting to someone hopefully, in a few million years or more?
I was a counterinsurgency instructor in Afghanistan
That ended well.
I would not worry about that tattoo on his chest. It, clearly, is the Flag of Georgia showing his allegiance to that country. He was recruited by Georgian intelligence back when he was in high school.
My thoughts, too; but it’s not just the Abrahamic religions. My understanding is that there are fundie Hindus in India and, IIRC, fundie Buddhists in Myanmar; and they always replace basic human decency with pridefullness and hatefullness when they get political power.
I don’t know enough about the Far East to know whether there are fundie Shintoists or Taoists, but I wouldn’t be surprised.