Recasting Christians as aggressors and colonialists, and Muslims as innocents defending their homeland.
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 them 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 in order to wrest Jerusalem and the Holy Land back from Muslim control. If a few 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 the noble ideals they represent; 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”: --->READ MORE HERE
It’s a new game, and they’re running the old playbook.
The regime media is circling around Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump’s other outsider appointees to do the bidding of the establishment to make sure the status quo stays safely undisrupted. But this is a new game, and they are running the old playbook. With Hegseth, it’s alleging a sex scandal that’s no scandal at all. They do it by selectively quoting from a police report that led to zero charges and by ignoring the myriad facts within that would cause most fair-minded individuals to conclude this was a hookup instantly regretted by a horny wife whose husband and kids were just a few hotel rooms away. The regime media reports, of course, exclude the many exonerating details that recovering lawyer Megyn Kelly in particular has gone over in-depth and which totally exonerate the nominee. They don’t care about the truth; they want to frame him to stop him. But you know what? This kind of smear does not matter anymore to anyone who matters.
If you remember the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, you saw a bunch of wavering Republican senators who failed to dismiss the ridiculous claims against him out of hand. It’s easy to waver when you lack a spine; they almost did what Republicans usually do and defaulted to assuming the credibility of what appeared on the tube or the front page of the regime media. The wacky charges were all over the three networks, all over the New York Times and Washington Post, and all over cable, too. And the squishes were on the verge of panic and rout. Only Kavanaugh’s refusal to quit and Trump’s refusal to back down saved the nomination.
But this time it’s is different. It’s six years later, and everything has changed. The first change is that all but the weakest Republicans seem to have figured out that the Democrats’ go-to plan is to smear our nominees because they cannot win on the merits. We saw that from Russiagate all the way to the ridiculous criminal cases against Trump that are now in the process of finally falling apart completely. It was all lies, all the time, and the Democrats – with their regime media catspaws – had no compunction about destroying their political enemies. Even the dumbest GOP senator is eventually going to wonder why the wolf the Democrats are always crying about never seems to show up.
But the key change is that the regime media ain’t what it used to be. It used to be all-powerful, but it is on the way to being all over. Quick, name one of the three networks’ nightly news anchors. Just one. Most folks have no idea who any of them are, but back in the day, any non-comatose adult could identify Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Peter Jennings, or even a pre-being caught lying Dan Rather. When that scuzzy weasel got beat up by some babbling weirdo in 1986, he was culturally important enough for REM to write what turned out to be its last good song, “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” Now, you wouldn’t know a news anchor if he came up to you with a sign reading “Will Work for Nielsen Rating” – well, maybe you remember David Muir because he intervened in the debate for Kamala Harris. I think he might be a news anchor. I don’t know. Maybe he’s a different type of jerk.
And how about The View? Who watches that? Only SSRI-ridden suburban wine women who are always going to support the commies anyway. And the cable networks? CNN and MSNBC’s ratings are totally in the toilet. They would be thrilled to get a million viewers out of 330 million Americans. Johnny Carson averaged 17 million a night when America had half the people. He mattered; these nobodies don’t.
This Hegseth faux-scandal may be a huge deal in the regime media, but who’s watching the regime media anymore? This last election wasn’t the regime media election. Since the mid-50s, television and newspapers have dominated the discourse and set the narrative during our election cycles. Now? Now, it’s Joe Rogan. Now, it’s any number of podcasters. Now it’s Elon Musk by creating a truly free public square in the form of Twitter—I just can’t call it “X.” --->READ MORE HERE
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