AP (“Trump Pentagon pick had been flagged by fellow service member as possible ‘Insider Threat’“):
Pete Hegseth, the Army National Guard veteran and Fox News host nominated by Donald Trump to lead the Department of Defense, was flagged as a possible “Insider Threat” by a fellow service member due to a tattoo on his bicep that’s associated with white supremacist groups.
Hegseth, who has downplayed the role of military members and veterans in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack and railed against the Pentagon’s subsequent efforts to address extremism in the ranks, has said he was pulled by his District of Columbia National Guard unit from guarding Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration. He’s said he was unfairly identified as an extremist due to a cross tattoo on his chest.
This week, however, a fellow Guard member who was the unit’s security manager and on an anti-terrorism team at the time, shared with The Associated Press an email he sent to the unit’s leadership flagging a different tattoo reading “Deus Vult” that’s been used by white supremacists, concerned it was an indication of an “Insider Threat.”
If Hegseth assumes office, it would mean that someone who has said it’s a sham that extremism is a problem in the military would oversee a sprawling department whose leadership reacted with alarm when people in tactical gear stormed up the U.S. Capitol steps on Jan. 6 in military-style stack formation. He’s also shown support for members of the military accused of war crimes and criticized the military’s justice system.
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Hegseth wrote in his book “The War on Warriors,” published earlier this year, that just “a few” or “a handful” of active-duty soldiers and reservists had been at the Capitol that day. He did not address the hundreds of military veterans who were arrested and charged.
Hegseth has argued the Pentagon overreacted by taking steps to address extremism, and has taken leadership to task for the military’s efforts to remove people it deemed white supremacists and violent extremists from the ranks. Hegseth has written that the problem is “fake” and “manufactured” and characterized it as “peddling the lie of racism in the military.” He said efforts to root extremism out had pushed “rank-and-file patriots out of their formations.”
“America is less safe, and our generals simply do not care about the oath that they swore to uphold. The generals are too busy assessing how domestic ‘extremists’ wearing Carhartt jackets will usurp our ‘democracy’ with gate barriers or flagpoles,” he wrote in “The War on Warriors.”
In a segment on Fox News last year about Jacob Chansley, a Navy veteran known as the “QAnon Shaman” who walked through the Capitol while wearing a horned fur hat, Hegseth played a misleading video clip from his then-colleague Tucker Carlson that sought to portray Chansley as a passive sightseer.
In fact, Chansley was among the first rioters to enter the building and pleaded guilty to a felony charge of obstructing an official proceeding in 2021. Chansley acknowledged using a bullhorn to rile up the mob, offering thanks in a prayer while in the Senate chamber for having the chance to get rid of traitors and writing a threatening note to Vice President Mike Pence saying, “It’s Only A Matter of Time. Justice Is Coming!”
In a message on Facebook Hegseth posted with an excerpt of the video, he wrote the way Chansley had been treated by the justice system “is disgusting.”
“Trump, Chansley, and many more… the Left wants us all locked up,” Hegseth wrote.
The tattoos in question:
WSJ (“How Hegseth’s Tattoo Got Him Barred From Working at Biden’s Inauguration“) adds:
Hegseth, a former National Guardsman and Fox News commentator who was nominated Tuesday by President-elect Trump to be defense secretary, was pulled from inauguration service. Hegseth later wrote that he saw the incident as a rejection by the military.
“The feeling was mutual—I didn’t want this Army anymore either,” Hegseth said, recounting the episode in his book “The War on Warriors,” published earlier this year. “Twenty years, and the military I loved, I fought for, I revered spit me out.”
In a post on X on Friday night, Hegseth called the reporting on his dismissal from inauguration duty “Anti-Christian bigotry,” echoing an earlier post by Vice President-elect JD Vance, who described the tattoo as a “Christian motto.”
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“Was this really about a cross?” Hegseth wrote in his book, lambasting Army leaders for branding him as an extremist for what he said were religious symbols. “What can one Christian man do to dismantle their agenda? Maybe a lot…I guess we’ll find out.”
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Hegseth has a history of making controversial comments. In 2017, he seemed to defend the white nationalists and their supporters who rallied in Charlottesville, Va. On Fox News, Hegseth said their grievances were a “discussion [that] should be had” and that young white men felt they had become “second-class citizens.”
He also opposed the removal of Confederate statues in the aftermath of the rally, calling it “an attempt to erase our history.” The U.S. Army recently renamed nine military bases that honored Confederate generals.
In his book, Hegseth also described “diverse recruits—pumped full of vaccines and even more poisonous ideologies” as signs of the Pentagon’s weak leadership. “Take it to the racist bank: black troops, at all levels, will be promoted simply based on their race,” he wrote.
He also said that ads promoting diversity in the military to “trannies and lesbians” were putting off the “young, patriotic, Christian men who have traditionally filled our ranks.” In his 2020 book, he wrote admiringly about the “Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes” and raised an alarm about Muslim birthrates.
Just days before the pick was announced, Hegseth said on “The Shawn Ryan Show” that women should not be allowed to serve in combat because “it has made fighting more complicated.”
“I’m straight up saying we shouldn’t have women in combat roles,” Hegseth said, although he added, “I love women service members, who contribute amazingly.”
The Telegraph‘s chief DC reporter, Robert Mendick (“Mapping Pete Hegseth’s tattoos: the Christian ink that got him kicked off Biden’s National Guard team“) decodes Hesgeth’s plethora of tats. The most disputed:
Jerusalem Cross (Crusaders’ Cross)
The tattoo covering his chest dates back to 1099 and symbolises the Crusader kingdom in Jerusalem.
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The symbol, according to academics, has been popularised by the far-Right.
He juxtaposes this with Hesgeth’s characterization in the aforementioned book:
In his 2020 book, Mr Trump’s pick wrote: “In more ways than you can imagine, leftists have surrounded traditional American patriots on all sides, ready to close in for the kill: killing our founders, killing our flag, and killing capitalism.”
In the book’s introduction he wrote: “This time in our history calls for an American Crusade.”
He added: “Yes, a holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom.”
In a podcast he lashed out at “woke generals” and moves to make the armed forces more inclusive.
“The dumbest phrase on planet earth in the military is ‘our diversity is our strength,” he said.
A September 2017 NPR report (“Scholars Say White Supremacists Chanting ‘Deus Vult’ Got History Wrong“) in the wake of the Chancellorsville protests puts it into context:
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: If you’ve watched videos of white supremacist rallies and marches across the U.S., you may have noticed people dressed up as crusaders from the Middle Ages or waving banners with medieval insignias. Professional historians have noticed this, too. And as NPR’s Neda Ulaby reports, those historians are angry.
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DAVIS: (Reading) By using imagined medieval symbols or names drawn from medieval terminology, they create a fantasy of a pure white Europe that bears no relationship to reality. This fantasy not only hurts people in the present, it also distorts the past.
ULABY: Social media teems with homemade videos glorifying a time when heavily armored Christians fought for Europe against swarthy infidels. Racists online have adopted a crusader rallying cry, deus vult. Reductive medieval imagery and language shows up in posts by contemporary Islamophobes.
Oddly, Mendick does not look at the Deus Vult logo, which is the one that most concerned the security chief who reported it up the chain. It’s part and parcel of the same mythology.
A 2019 explainer (“Deus Vult: The Dark Templar Imagery and Language of the Modern Neo-Nazi and Alt-Right Movements.“) from Villanova University librarian Robert LeBlanc:
Burgeoning online hate communities have been developing a new symbolic language in recent years. Seemingly innocuous words and images such as milk (a symbol of racial purity), the upright OK symbol (and abstraction of the initials for White Power), Pepe the frog, and a host of other false symbols were originally adopted by alt-right “trolls” to identify each other or incite outrage and paranoia from the left. Unfortunately, many of these false symbols have been adopted by legitimate racist, misogynistic, nationalistic, and anti-LGBT groups.
However, a handful of hateful symbols were not created by online provocateurs. The symbology and mottos of the medieval order of the Knights Templar have been used by racist organizations for decades. The order of the Knights Templar was a militaristic quasi-religious organization formed between the first and second crusades (c. 1119) and tasked with shepherding European pilgrims to the recently “liberated” holy lands. It is this concept of “liberation at the end of the sword” in the name of God (hence “Deus Vult” or “God Wills”) resulting in the mass slaughter of entire populations of Muslims and Jews that appeals to modern neo-nazi and far-right groups who publicly revile middle eastern culture and religion.
Several esoteric societies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries also utilized these symbols and mottos, notably the openly racist Order of the New Templars and the Thule Society, which formed the underlying racist mystical doctrine of the Nazi party. In recent years, neo-Nazi nationalist groups have co-opted these same symbols to support their xenophobic, racist, anti-Islamic, and anti-Semitic agendas. “Deus Vult” is emblazoned on alt-right parade banners and chanted at rallies. The Templar Cross in either its traditional red cross on a white field or its inverse, white on red, is a popular symbol used in lieu of swastikas, the double SS symbol of the Nazi Gestapo, or the Norse Othala rune. Even though the link between Templars and extreme anti-Islamic violence is not accurate—most scholars agree that Templars were far more religiously tolerant than your average crusader—far right extremists are still attracted to the false ideology of violence and cultural extermination.
A 2018 explainer (“The Alt-Right and Medieval Religions“) from Dorothy Kim, a professor of medieval literature at Brandeis University:
The next medieval religious frame used, abused, and weaponized by the alt-right is the medieval Catholic crusader. The Crusades were an ongoing set of memes during the 2016 election as well as during Brexit. in which #DeusVult has become a rallying cry. The #DeusVult arose from 4chan, meme culture, and video game culture. Video game culture is the gateway for the public to the medieval historical past. The distorted return of the Crusades and the Christian Crusader in imagining the West as the defender of democratic Christian values was redeployed after 9/11 by George W. Bush and his administration’s War on Terror. For a host of different alt-right groups, it specifically evokes an idea of a militaristic and racially-motivated defense of the Christian West against a racist fantasy of Islam and Muslims. All of which is historically inaccurate. The white supremacist use of #DeusVult and a return to medieval Catholicism is to invoke the myth of a white Christian (i.e. Catholic) medieval past that wishes to ignore the actual demographics and theological state of Catholicism today, let alone the doctrinal practices of contemporary Catholicism.
[…]
What the alt-right has done is pull from the medieval past what will align with their vision of a violent white supremacy in order to claim religious space. They are not practicing any form of theologically-informed, doctrinally-sanctioned version of a contemporary religion. They are also deliberately ignoring the majority practitioners of this religion (whether it is the Icelanders or the racially diverse majority in Catholicism). Instead, they are practicing a form of religiously-inflected medievalism that is based on medieval cosplay, video game culture, and internet memes.
I’m a Defense Department employee whose contract is up for renewal in two years under an administration that has signaled loud and clear that it plans to purge those who aren’t loyalists from the ranks. I am nonetheless compelled to declare that Hesgeth is manifestly unfit to serve as Secretary of Defense.
Whatever else one may think of him, he’s a highly intelligent, well-educated man. He holds a BA in politics from Princeton and a Master of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School. While it’s quite possible he doesn’t possess a nuanced understanding of the Crusades and the long history of their symbology, it’s simply inconceivable that he covered his body with white Christian nationalist tattoos not knowing what they broadly represented.
As an American citizen, he has every right to hold whatever beliefs he wants. To the extent the ownership of Fox News sees fit to put him on their channel, he’s absolutely free to broadcast those beliefs to millions every chance he gets. Freedom of expression is meaningless if it doesn’t include ideas most of us find abhorrent.
But it would be unconscionable to put a man who is so vociferously bigoted as to cover his body with these tattoos in charge of the lives and careers of such a massive, diverse force. According to one recent report,
Over two-thirds (68.8%) of active-duty members (897,340) self-identify as White, while approximately one-third (31.2%) of active-duty members (407,380) self-identify with a racial minority group (i.e., Black or African American, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, Multi-racial, or Unknown). Regarding ethnicity, 18.4 percent of active-duty members self-identify as Hispanic or Latino.
And that’s to say nothing of the Muslim, Jewish, and other non-Christian members.
Frankly, while hardly uncommon among male combat arms soldiers, his publicly stated views on women in combat alone disqualify him. They’re completely out of step with longstanding public policy as expressed in federal statute. Women comprise roughly 18 percent of the active duty force, and a significant number of them serve in combat roles. How can he lead them when these clips—from within the past month, no less—will circulate?
