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.
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."
"Obviously, all of this is metaphorical and all that good stuff," Hesgeth claimed, which promoted both hosts and himself to burst out laughing.
