'Build your army': Trump’s Pentagon pick wants Christian nationalist 'boot camps' for kids

26 November 2024

Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, who President-elect Donald Trump has nominated to be the potential next defense secretary, recently called for radically transforming the public education system in order to accommodate a Christian nationalist vision.

That's according to Salon writer Amanda Marcotte, who highlighted Hegseth's remarks in a November episode of the "CrossPolitic" podcast. In that podcast — which is hosted by two men with close ties to far-right chattlel slavery apologist pastor Douglas Wilson — Hegseth called for an "educational insurgency" of "classical Christian schools."

In the interview promoting his book "Battle for the American Mind," Hegseth agreed with host Toby Sumpter, who said: "I think we need to be thinking in terms of these classical Christian schools are boot camps for winning back America."

"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."

"We call it a tactical retreat," Hegseth added, using overtly militaristic language. "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."

Marcotte pointed out that the conversion of public schools to far-right Christian indoctrination spaces is already underway in some red states. She observed that Oklahoma education superintendent Ryan Walters is mandating that all schools show students a video in which he attacks the "radical left" and "woke teachers' unions" and delivers a lengthy prayer for the protection of Trump. She also noted that Walters has already proposed spending millions in taxpayer dollars on putting Trump's branded Bibles in public school classrooms.

"So far, this flagrant violation of the Constitution hasn't worked. The state attorney general stepped in and declared that Walters cannot mandate the viewing of his propaganda. Some school districts refused, though it's quite possible others gave in out of an unwillingness to fight with Walters to defend their students," Marcotte wrote. "More importantly, this is just an escalation of an all-out effort by Walters to turn Oklahoma's public schools into exactly the 'boot camps' building up the 'army' of Christian nationalists that Hegseth and his cronies imagine."

Click here to read Marcotte's article in full.

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