Originally published at crisis magazine
Pete Hegseth, former Fox & Friends weekend co-host and President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Defense Secretary, is taking heat over reports that in 2021 he was accused of being an “insider threat” by fellow National Guardsman DeRicko Gaither.
The explanation for this accusation? A tattoo of the Latin phrase “Deus Vult,” which means “God wills it,” on his inner bicep. “White-Supremacist use of #Deus Vult 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,” then-head of security Gaither wrote in a letter to his superiors. Disgusted, Hegseth chose to leave active duty shortly thereafter.
Cue the liberal pearl-clutching. NPR’s “domestic extremism correspondent” Odette Yousef explained that “Deus Vult,” was “sort of the battle cry to take back the Holy Land and to slaughter Muslims.” Yousef added that “symbols and language tied to the Crusades are very present in some extremist movements” and that scholars had told her that Hegseth belongs to the “very militant end of the Christian nationalist spectrum.” Sherrilyn Ifill, former director-counsel of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, declared on MSNBC that Hegseth is “known
