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President-Elect Donald Trump is shaking things up with unorthodox nominations for his forthcoming administration, and right on cue, media propagandists like CBS’ Norah O’Donnell are citing “unnamed sources” to smear long-time veteran and Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense, with damaging rumors to derail the nomination of a man who threatens the Deep State’s lucrative war machine and woke military leadership. Among these ugly accusations (passionately refuted by close associates who have worked and served with Hegseth for years), is the Left’s shameful attempt to link the Christian symbolism of Hegseth’s tattoos to white supremacist groups.
As Hegseth notes in his New York Times bestselling book The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, the controversy began when he was a member of the Washington D.C. National Guard tasked with supporting the 2021 inauguration of Joe Biden. Curiously, on the day prior to the event he was singled out and ordered to stand down. Suspecting a political motive behind the revocation of his assignment, Hegseth resigned in angry protest.
It wasn’t until much later that a senior leader in his unit confided to him, “You were not brought to the inauguration because… they dubbed you as a white nationalist and an extremist. You got flagged by two soldiers who had been trolling your social media. They saw your tattoo. And the tattoo was what they flagged you on.”
The tattoo which got him labeled a domestic terror threat, a flabbergasted Hegseth learned, was of a Jerusalem Cross. As Hegseth writes,
The Jerusalem Cross represents Christ’s sacrifice and the mission to spread his gospel to the four corners of the world. There is one large cross in the middle and four smaller crosses at each corner. This was part of the coat of arms after AD 1203 and the 104-year reign of the Jerusalem Kingdom. I got it after I saw it on a church while walking the streets of Jerusalem.
The cross has other symbolic interpretations as well, such as the five crosses representing Christ’s wounds, and the four smaller crosses representing Matthew, Mark, Luke and John of the Gospels. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was the principal one of the four Crusader kingdoms established in the Holy Land after the First Crusade in 1099. It lasted nearly 200 years until Acre, the last remaining outpost, fell to Muslims in 1291. Below is a photo I took myself last year of a Jerusalem cross in Jerusalem itself:
Hegseth went on in his book to note, “It’s a religious symbol, not a white nationalist symbol.” Nevertheless, because some contemporary white supremacists have appropriated the symbol and other emblems from the medieval Crusades, progressives pounced to connect their bigotry to Hegseth, a public figure who has never once expressed or demonstrated white supremacist leanings.
But it wasn’t only the Jerusalem Cross tattoo that was problematic. Reuters reported last month that one of the soldiers who reported him was now-retired Master Sergeant DeRicko Gaither, who at the time was the unit’s head of physical security. Gaither had sent then-D.C. National Guard Commander Maj. Gen. William Walker an email with a photo of Hegseth’s tattoos.
Gaither’s barely literate email, published by the Associated Press, warned his superior officer that he had uncovered information that was “quiet [sic] disturbing”:
MAJ Hegseth has a tattoo of “Deus Vult” on his inner arm (bicep area). The phrase “Deus Vult” is associated with Supremacist groups in which 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. Disseminated in the form of hashtags and internet memes, Deus Vult has enjoyed popularity with members of the alt-right because of its perceived representation of the clash of civilizations between the Christian West and the Islamic world, Crusader memes, such as an image of a Knight Templar accompanied by the caption “I’ll see your Jihad and raise you one crusade are popular on far-right internet pages.
Gaither, who is black, went on to argue falsely that Hegseth’s “Deus Vult” tattoo violated U.S. Army regulations prohibiting “extremist tattoos” symbolizing “extremist philosophies,” and that he should be flagged accordingly as a domestic threat. Of course, under the Biden administration’s woke military leadership, Christianity is an “extremist philosophy.”
“Deus Vult,” or “God wills it,” was indeed a rallying cry for the tens of thousands of Christians inspired by Pope Urban II’s call at the Council of Clermont in 1095 to undertake the First Crusade to wrest Jerusalem and the Holy Land back from Muslim control. If some fringe white supremacists have appropriated it, so what? Why surrender anything to them? Why give bigots of any political persuasion the power to claim our cultural symbols? Their perversion today of Christian symbolism belonging to Crusaders a thousand years ago, who sold their possessions to finance the epic journey to protect the Holy Land and Christian communities there, should in no way sully the symbols, the Crusaders themselves, or warriors in defense of Christendom today, like Pete Hegseth. Expecting everyone today to distance themselves from such historic symbols is as ludicrous and cowardly as expecting everyone to stop using the “OK” sign with one’s fingers simply because it too has been appropriated as a white supremacist dog whistle.
The just response to such appropriation is to reclaim it from the fringe bigots. Pete Hegseth’s tattoos are a personal statement about his faith, the symbols’ historic roots, and his commitment to stand for what they symbolize; if white supremacists try to lay claim to those symbols after the fact, is Hegseth supposed to get the tattoos removed? I have a Jerusalem Cross from the Holy Land on my office wall – am I supposed to take it down or be smeared as a white supremacist?
Army veteran and former Trump administration official Earl Matthews, who is black and served with Hegseth in the D.C. National Guard, hailed the latter as “an exemplary officer” who “performed his assigned duties flawlessly, without limelight or fanfare and he always treated others with dignity and respect.” Matthews called accusations that Hegseth is a white supremacist “patently absurd”:
Why would a white supremacist voluntarily join the D.C. National Guard which was disproportionately black and then commanded by two black general officers (both appointed by President Trump)? Hegseth served honorably in Lafayette Square during the BLM riots, just as he did in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he was prepared to do the same during the Biden inauguration.
Even Michael LaRosa, former press secretary for Jill Biden, objected, writing on X, “This shit has to stop. Opposing DEl initiatives does not make you a white supremacist. Voices like this on the left are turning the Democratic Party into a joke.”
But Left-wing propaganda outlet National Public Radio (NPR) helped revive the rumor. On November 14, 2024, NPR’s domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef (yes, NPR actually has a “domestic extremism correspondent”) claimed that “Deus Vult” was “sort of the battle cry to take back the Holy Land and to slaughter Muslims.” Hegseth “is very big,” Yousef warned, “on this notion of a modern-day American Christian crusade. You know, one of his books is titled, ‘American Crusade.’” Gasp! So we can’t use the word “crusade” now anymore, either.
Yousef cited, as “evidence” of Hegseth’s “deep antipathy toward Islam,” the progressive smear organization Media Matters for America, which “highlighted Hegseth’s connections to Freedom Center founder David Horowitz, “a prominent American Islamophobe.” Islamophobia, of course, is a Muslim Brotherhood-weaponized neologism which suggests that legitimate criticism of Islam stems from an “irrational fear” of it.
Yousef went on to cite unnamed “scholars” who claimed that Hegseth is part of a movement at “the very militant end of the Christian nationalist spectrum,” whatever that means (but to NPR’s upscale white progressive audience it must sound scary!), which “seeks to reestablish Old Testament Biblical law.” Someone named Julie Ingersoll from the University of North Florida chimed in on NPR to fear-monger that “this tradition is deeply patriarchal. Men are in charge, and women exist for the purpose of assisting their men in their exercise of dominion.”
Yousef then attempted to link this purported “patriarchal tradition” to “what Hegseth has said in interviews about wanting to remove women from combat roles” – as if keeping women off the front lines stems from some kind of misogynist oppression rather than from a commonsense understanding of how women in combat adversely impact the unity, efficacy, and safety of battle units. Keeping them out of the fight also protects them from the monstrous war crimes typically committed against women, such as those the world witnessed in Israel on October 7, 2023.
The NPR segment, in addition to serving to subvert Pete Hegseth’s nomination as SecDef, also demonstrated how the multiculturalist Left has in recent decades undertaken an historical revisionist mission to paint the Crusades as a barbaric campaign waged by Christian fanatics against Muslim innocents in the Holy Land. As Casey Chalk wrote at Crisis, “Only someone entirely ignorant of the Crusades and medieval Catholicism could utter something so risibly stupid.”
Or someone intentionally recasting Christian Crusaders as the aggressors and colonialists, and Muslims as innocents defending their homeland. In fact, the opposite is true. Within 100 years of the death of its prophet Muhammad, Islam had carved out an empire larger than Rome’s had ever been, spreading the religion by the sword and claiming territory from Spain to Saudi Arabia as theirs for all time. Jerusalem fell to Muslims in 637. Throughout subsequent centuries Muslims attempted to expand their conquests through repeated military incursions into continental Europe (including nearly seizing Paris before being repelled by Charles Martel at the history-making battle of Tours) and multiple sieges of the nearly impregnable Constantinople, which eventually fell to Muslims in 1453.
The Crusades were a belated response, then, to hundreds of years of Islamic colonialist aggression; the goal was “to take back the Holy Land” as Yousef put it, but not to “slaughter” Muslims per se. Yes, slaughter was the order of the day in the Middle Ages, as it has been in every culture throughout history, but progressives always conveniently neglect to acknowledge the slaughter of Christians carried out by medieval Muslims (just as they conveniently neglect to acknowledge the slaughter carried out by Muslims today, whether in Israel or India or throughout heavily Islamized areas of Western Europe, not to mention the ongoing eradication of Jewish and Christian communities throughout the Middle East).
As Rodney Stark concludes in his must-read case for the Crusades, God’s Battalions:
The Crusades were not unprovoked. They were not the first round of European colonialism. They were not conducted for land, loot, or converts. The Crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the cultivated Muslims. They sincerely believed that they served in God’s battalions.
As does Pete Hegseth. Leftists like those at NPR target the Crusades and Crusaders past and present with revisionist propaganda because they, not Pete Hegseth, are the ones with a “deep antipathy” – not toward the supremacist ideology of Islam, but toward Christianity, a faith that is at the core of the Western civilization progressives are hell-bent – literally – on deconstructing.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior