'Totally wrong': Historian flags Trump defense pick's racist conspiracy theories
Donald Trump's nominee for defense secretary has made ahistorical Muslim rhetoric a major theme in his writings, and many of his views resemble those expressed by white supremacist mass murderers.
Fox News host Pete Hegseth was tapped by the president-elect to lead the Pentagon, and experts sounded the alarm over his past writings about Islam as troubling and disqualifying, reported The Guardian.
“By the eleventh century, Christianity in the Mediterranean region, including the holy sites in Jerusalem, was so besieged by Islam that Christians had a stark choice: to wage defensive war or continue to allow Islam’s expansion and face existential war at home in Europe,” Hegseth wrote in his 2020 book "American Crusade." “The leftists of today would have argued for ‘diplomacy’ … We know how that would have turned out.”
“The pope, the Catholic Church, and European Christians chose to fight – and the crusades were born,” added Hegseth, who has a tattoo of the crusader slogan "Deus volt," or "God wills it," which associated with Christian nationalism, white supremacist and other far-right tendencies. “Enjoy Western civilization? Freedom? Equal justice under the law? Thank a crusader,” having written the same thing again earlier in the chapter.
However, aside from Hegseth's apparent sympathies to far-right extremist rhetoric, a historian said the conservative broadcaster doesn't seem to know what he's talking about.
“There were absolutely no incursions into mainland Europe,” said Matthew Gabriele, a professor of medieval studies in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. “If anything, Islam was kind of on the retreat in Iberia and other places as well. So there was no large geopolitical shift or any kind of immediate threat of Islam taking over Europe.”
“The Crusaders lost," Gabriele added. "They lost everything. The idea that they kind of like emerged victorious is absolutely false."
Hegseth's book presents Islam as a natural enemy of the west, traffics in "great replacement"-style conspiracy theories and claims leftists and Muslims were trying to subvert the U.S., and the historian said those ideas are drawn from the same extremist ideology that has motivated mass murders.
“This narrative of the crusades as a defensive war, where if the Christians didn’t launch this offensive towards Jerusalem that Europe would be overrun has been a bog-standard narrative on the right: it’s something that was espoused by Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, in 2011 and by the Christchurch shooter a few years ago," Gabriele said.
“It’s the worst kind of simplistic thinking,” he added. “Anybody who tells you these simple stories is selling something.”