Friends,

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But there are issues beyond sexual assault, alcoholism, and financial mismanagement of veterans' organizations that are also deeply troubling about Hegseth.

It’s just been reported that Hegseth has been strongly opposed to removing the names of Confederate generals from US military bases, repeatedly saying the names should be changed back.

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Hegseth has written in a book, An American Crusade, that he could imagine a scenario in which the US armed forces would be used violently in American domestic politics.

Hegseth’s book exhorts conservatives to undertake “an AMERICAN CRUSADE,” to “mock, humiliate, intimidate, and crush our leftist opponents”, to “attack first” in response to a left he identifies with “sedition,” and he writes that the book “lays out the strategy we must employ in order to defeat America’s internal enemies.”

Hegseth’s descriptions of leftists, progressives, and Democrats as “internal” or “domestic enemies” should ring alarm bells for anyone concerned by Trump’s repeated threats to unleash the US military, which Hegseth would directly control, on those he has described as “the enemy within.””

Elsewhere in American Crusade he writes: “The hour is late for America. Beyond political success, her fate relies on exorcising the leftist specter dominating education, religion, and culture – a 360-degree holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom.”

Hegseth explicitly rejects democracy, characterizing it as a leftist demand: “For leftists, calls for ‘democracy’ represent a complete rejection of our system. Watch how often they use the word,” adding: “They hate America, so they hate the Constitution and want to quickly amass 51 percent of the votes to change it.”

Hegseth expresses an unstinting loyalty to Trump. At one point in the book, he describes a conversation between the two after Trump, at Hegseth’s urging, in 2019 pardoned three service members who had been charged or convicted with alleged war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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