Crusades, Christendom, and Pete Hegseth’s Tattoos - A Deep Dive
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Brad discusses the controversial tattoos of Pete Hegseth and their implications with Spencer Kunz, a PhD student at Florida State University. The conversation covers the history and modern context of Crusader symbols, their usage among alt-right groups, and the concept of sacred hierarchies. The episode also addresses concerns about Hegseth's affiliations with radical far-right ideologies and their potential impact on American society, especially in positions of power like the Department of Defense.
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Axis Mundi Axis Mundi Transition team did not respond to requests for comment about Hegseth and his beliefs, but Hegseth and others have said that those tattoos are ones that a number of veterans have.
They've also argued that his Christian beliefs are not extremists.
How do you respond to that?
Well, what I would say is that the evidence shows us that those who don those tattoos are prone to take part in extremist communities.
It can be hard to pin intentionality on people, but when somebody says that they think we should fight like we're in a modern-day crusade, and then they don the symbols of that crusade, I think we should take them seriously.
I also want to ask you about the specific church that Hegseth has attended in Tennessee.
It's part of a denomination founded by Doug Wilson, a pastor in Moscow, Idaho.
What beliefs does that denomination promote and why are they significant?
Doug Wilson is a firebrand pastor and theologian.
He is somebody who reaches millions of people through his podcast, through his writings, through the schools that he's founded, and the denomination of which Pete Hegseth Church is a part.
Wilson is known for radical beliefs about gender.
He doesn't believe that women should have any authority in the home or in society, much less the church.
He has said that the time of enslavement in this country was a time of harmony between the races.
If you don't share the same hymn book as Wilson, then you can't be mayor.
If you're a Hindu or Muslim, you simply can't hold any kind of authority in our public square.
Hegseth not only attends a church that is part of Wilson's denomination, but he's claimed Wilson as a kind of spiritual mentor.
So if we have Wilson saying that non-Christians shouldn't hold positions of leadership and Hegseth claiming him as a spiritual mentor, it makes me wonder that if Hegseth is Secretary of Defense, can the non-Christian, the Muslim, the Hindu, the agnostic, or the atheist in our armed services rise the ranks to positions of authority?
Can they be captain?
Can they be sergeant?
That's yours truly, talking on PBS NewsHour last week about Pete Hegseth and his tattoos.
There's a lot of talk about Hegseth and what those tattoos mean in the ether, but today I want to provide the definitive deep dive on the crusader identity in the contemporary American context.
I speak with Spencer Kuntz, a PhD student at Florida State University, whose research really investigates online crusader identities The ways that these identities and motifs make their way into real-life militias and alt-right groups.
Spencer explains the deep and wide context from which Hexas symbols come, and he also outlines the ways that there are additional symbols on Hexas' body that speak to affinities with militias and other sub-ideologies, many of which were present at January 6th.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
As I just said, today we're going to set the record straight on Pete Hegseth and those tattoos.
You've probably heard a lot about them.
You've heard me talk about them, perhaps.
But I think we have somebody here today who has the research to really give us the definitive deep dive on that.
And that is Spencer Kuntz, who is a PhD student at Florida State University.
Spencer, thanks for joining me.
Brad, thanks for having me.
It's great to be here.
So you gave a great presentation at the American Academy of Religion this year, was able to read it and to go through it, and was just so impressed.
I was on PBS NewsHour the other night.
I mentioned to you, as these things happen, they edited it out.
So here we are, and hopefully now we get just a chance to go through some of your great work.
Let's start by saying this.
We're going to get into Hegseth and the tattoos.
There's actually tattoos that people aren't talking about that are...
Also on his body that help us understand where he's coming from in his worldview.
So let's begin here though.
What is your research?
How did you get into this?
You know, you spend time, God bless you, monitoring the far right and kind of hyper-masculine nationalist movements in online spaces.
Tell us about that so we know how you're coming at this research.
Yeah, that's a good question.
So I came to this originally as a dyed-in-the-wool medieval historian.
I was doing work in the archives with chronicles and whatnot.
But as I spent more time with the history of the Middle Ages, I noticed that most often the ethos, the imagery of the Middle Ages was manifesting itself in far right circles in the contemporary moment.
And I found that to be so as I scratched at that, I found that when it came to the far right, it was sort of crusades all the way down.
If you want to say I think?
The image of the Crusader and the idea of an American Crusade was ubiquitous.
And so I sort of pivoted away from pure medieval history and came to this odd blend of religion and politics and culture wars.
When I'm looking to study contemporary manifestations of the Crusades within alt-right, far-right circles, I use an ethnographic approach online.
I am monitoring publicly available chat rooms, forums, social media platforms that advertise themselves as free speech alternatives.
And I am collecting material, building an archive of screenshots and downloads to catalog the arc of the Crusader ethos in the contemporary far right.
So you you really think that there's kind of two reasons, as you say, that it's the Crusades all the way down.
And just to be clear, you know, I've spent my time doing medieval studies, mainly with medieval mystics and theology.
You are somebody who started out as a medieval historian.
The medieval period is expansive.
It's heterogeneous.
There's so many ways you can study the medieval period, like anything, whether that is through class, through empire, through sickness, through disease, through gender, through sexuality.
But as you say, when you approach the far-right, the alt-right, Christian nationalists, etc., Their fascination with the medieval period is the Crusades all the way down.
And in your work, you really give two reasons for that.
You talk about traditional modes of life being under attack, and you talk about an aristocratic status.
Let's talk about the first one.
Why do the Crusades provide folks who are in these spaces, Christian nationalists, white nationalists, folks who are wanting to build another Christendom, What is it that they think is under attack in terms of traditional modes of life?
And why did the Crusades help them with that fight?
That's a good question.
I think if there's one takeaway that I want to give people, it's that the Crusades and the image of the Crusader functions as a permission structure to respond to things that are perceived to threaten traditional ways of life with violence.
I refer to these in my presentation as sacred hierarchies.
These are dynamics of power that are traditionally maintained.
I know in the past, you and Dan have talked about sort of default Identities, default power relations.
These sacred hierarchies are those.
These are power dynamics that privilege native-born individuals over immigrants, that privilege heteronormativity over queer identities.
These are often white identity, white whiteness being privileged over non-whiteness.
But more broadly, this is the idea of a racialized Western traditionalism And when I say Western traditionalism, I'm talking about culture and ideals of militant masculinity and the idea of a homogenous Christian supremacy.
This Western traditionalism being favored over anything else that is coming from a non-Western positionality.
And what the Crusades offer is a precedent Where people who came from a position or who are imagined to have come from a position where they were hyper-masculine, They were militant.
They were willing to engage opponents with force.
They were willing to take up arms.
They represented an idealized, unproblematized Christian hegemony.
These individuals were willing to take up arms against those who threatened these traditional ways of life.
And as evidenced by the siege of Jerusalem in 1099, were able to succeed.
Now, what I will tell you is this, these groups that idealized the Crusades and the Crusader aren't going to pay much attention to the historical record past the first Crusade because, as just about any medieval historian will be able to tell you, the Crusades become as just about any medieval historian will be able to tell you, the Crusades become disastrous Yeah.
But there is one sort of shining example in the siege of Jerusalem, where Jerusalem is taken by the Christians and the Crusader states, Utramir, are established.
That is the permission structure that these Christian nationalists, white nationalists, hyper-masculine, manosphere-type characters are engaging with.
So we have this sense of two things, a permission structure for violence against the enemies of traditional Western Christian society.
And that permission structure gives folks who think that they are defending patriarchy, masculinity, European heritage, and Christianity all mixed into one, the permission to look at others with a sense of the only way for us to move forward and the permission to look at others with a sense of the only way for us to move forward
The other thing you talked about that I think is really interesting here, and I do think Hegseth plays into this, and we will get to Hegseth more in depth here in a minute, is the aristocratic status of the feudal knight.
That there are ways that we've talked about on this show that men are feeling a sense of insecurity, whether justified or not.
They are feeling a sense of threat, especially white men in the country, in terms of the rising numbers of non-white people, housing costs, whatever it may be.
Why would it be so attractive to play the role of a feudal knight who is of a certain status and has a kind of certain chivalric code and interpret social presentation?
How does class and kind of etiquette and a sense of calling play into the crusader motif?
Well, I mentioned that the Crusader is a permission structure that legitimizes violence, but the Crusader is also this vehicle for self-transformation.
Because the far-right image of the Crusades is divorced from the historical realities of the period because it is an idealized conception, These crusader personas that often men, mostly men, on the far right will adopt, serve to mobilize them socially, politically, economically, right?
You have an idealized version of a crusader who inevitably belongs to one of the military orders of the crusade period.
Now, the military orders are going to be groups like the Knights Templar, the Teutonic Knights, the Knights Hospitaller.
These are elite monastic orders of warrior monks who Held a disproportionate amount of prestige within the Crusades era.
It's important to note that not everyone who participated in the Crusades was a member of these military orders.
In fact, the vast majority of people who participate in the Crusades do not belong to these military orders.
But within the far-right idealized version of the Crusades, everyone, regardless of your social status, regardless of whether or not you've gotten your high school diploma,
regardless of whether or not you've gotten your BA or an advanced graduate degree, regardless of whether or not you feel like changing social norms and cultural expectations have left you behind, You're able to imagine yourself wearing the helmet of a monastic warrior who is a hero, right?
Who is a hero and who is envisioned as this last line of defense to hold back the onslaught of cultural adversaries who would infringe upon this Western traditionalism.
It brings me to two points, and I want to ask you about the second point.
Hegseth first is somebody who is elite in some sense.
He went to Princeton.
He comes from some sort of background that allowed him to arrive at one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
Nonetheless, what we've heard about him and what he's been accused of is untoward behavior in the form of drinking in inappropriate times, of being somebody who loves to attend strip clubs and get dead drunk and act in ways that are even appropriate for a strip club.
Somebody who has been a serial adulterer, marital infidelity, and what's probably the worst accusation is that of sexual assault by a number of people.
But Hegseth, he doesn't present himself that way, Spencer.
He presents himself as somebody who is always pulled together.
He looks handsome.
He looks rugged.
He's got tattoos on a muscular, masculine frame.
And you can sort of see in him the kind of aristocratic, chivalric, monastic warrior that a lot of the people online who are taking on the persona of the Crusader would like to emulate.
You can see him as being the paragon of this kind of modern American Crusader.
And secondly, something you point out in the paper I think will help people make sense of folks like Hegseth and others who bow the knee to Trump.
There's this sense here that if you are the kind of chivalric warrior, if you are part of an elite monastic regiment of crusaders, then you're playing a role that has so much nobility, so much reverence, so much elevation.
That yes, you are answering to your king, to the liege lord, to the president, to whoever, but you're doing so with so much clout that you don't mind because it's kind of hot and powerful and sexy to be the knight who is bowing the knee to the king and going out to defend the kingdom and Christendom As he does.
My point here, Spencer, is you can almost see why people don't mind bowing the knee to a wannabe king like Trump, because they think they're playing the role of something that's actually full of elite status, rather than simply bowing down in a kind of surrender to this wannabe dictator with the bad hair and the bad tan.
Wondering what you think about that, and if that makes any sense in terms of your research about the modern-day crusader identity.
I think you're absolutely onto something.
First, I like the fact that you use the word aristocrat, right?
The crusader is a way of self-knighting, right?
You put yourself through the knighting ceremony and you come out the other side once you've cultivated this feudal chivalric persona.
As a member of this martial, holy aristocracy, there is an organization that I monitor that calls itself the neo-aristocracy that represents this fusion of Western supremacy and traditional militant there is an organization that I monitor that calls itself the neo-aristocracy that represents this
They build themselves, I'm reading here from their website, as a co-op of traditionalist, free-thinking families from 13 different countries and And their website says, because of things like high culture, the Western ideal, because of men who are red-blooded, rugged men like Hegseth, It is, quote, theirs by right to rule over the rest of the globe.
And here they weave in a subsection that is distinctly Christian, the Knights of Christos.
They weave in a subgroup, the Odin's Guard.
Odinism, of course, is a classic white power paganism.
But you see this weaving together of A divine right, a mandate to belong to the aristocracy because one is a banner carrier for Western tradition and militant masculinity.
And I think that is the reason, this militant masculinity, I think that's the reason that Hegseth certainly doesn't mind bowing the knee.
Number one, you've got to bow the knee to be knighted.
Number two, there's something so much more Viscerally, masculine, about being the one who is the knight, right?
Not the king.
The king has soft hands and sits back on the throne.
The knight, the military order, is the one who is defending the front lines, who is carrying the banner, who is riding into battle, taking up arms against the enemies.
And so I certainly think that Hegseth is comfortable Putting himself in what may be seen as a position of subservience because ultimately it cements him as this paragon of masculine willingness to take up arms.
First of all, fantastic explanation.
And I think just so lucid.
I really appreciate that answer.
It's really helpful.
Let's jump into the things they think they're fighting against.
So here's the knight who's going out to protect Christendom.
And they believe that they're fighting in the contemporary context, in the 21st century.
They believe they are the guardians of a purified sexual ethic.
How does guarding a sexual ethic and guarding gender hierarchies lead us to the saying deus volt and a permission structure to enact violence against queer and trans people?
Well, I think that within this sort of Christian nationalist constellation, whether that is skewing towards white nationalism, whether that is skewing towards a pro-natal Christian nationalism, the family is the building block here.
The atomic unit of Western Christendom is the family.
And the family is both perpetuated and endangered by sex.
If sex is used correctly, right?
Gender identity, sexuality, practices of sex.
If those are implemented correctly, correctly there in scare quotes, you can certainly expand and maintain this empire of Western Christendom.
Every, every organization that falls within this matrix of Western supremacy, Christian supremacy, masculine supremacy is going to advocate for men serving as strong fathers, defending the home, having lots and lots of children.
They're going to talk about things like nonwhite birth rates, great replacement conspiracy theories, this idea that nonwhite bodies are having more children and are thus taking over.
But this has, this has been a talking point for some time within, within American right wing spaces.
We've been quibbling over bathroom bills and gender-affirming health care for years now.
What the crusade brings to the table, and this is outlined quite explicitly in Hegsitt's book from 2020, American Crusade, appropriately named, the crusader is a permission structure to engage people that are perceived as the crusader is a permission structure to engage people that are perceived as sexual deviants, whether they are queer or trans folks, whether they are practicing
The crusader allows you to engage these people with violence, right?
There are explicit calls for violence against trans folks, for the deaths of trans folks online, to which the response is almost invariably Deus volt.
Deus volt, of course, being the response when Pope Urban II first calls for a crusade in the 11th century.
The people respond, Deus volt.
God wills it.
And so you see this infusion of holy fervor, of divine sanction into existing calls for violence against non-normative gender and sex practice.
That justifies taking up arms and spilling blood in a way that we haven't always seen before, right?
This is new in this crusade resurgence of the last 20 or so years.
This fight against sexuality and gender in terms of what they take to be deviations from traditional forms is coupled with a fight against those who are non-Christian.
Of course, in the historical crusades going back a thousand years, How does the contemporary crusader identity envision folks who are Muslim, who are Jewish, and those of other minority religious traditions in the United States?
That's a great question.
Online, we see frequent depictions of idealized crusaders who are drawn, who are generated with AI, attacking, killing, stabbing Jewish Muslim bodies.
But this isn't just a phenomenon that we see online.
I'm going to take you back to American Crusade, Pete Hegseth's book from 2020. Within that book, he has a number of different meditations on why the U.S. needs to institute another crusade.
Now, this entire book reeks of bad theology and Islamophobia, and nowhere is that more present than chapter 12, which he entitles Islamism, the most dangerous ism.
Now, each of his chapters begins with an epigraph.
He has a quote that is intended to either scare you into action or inspire you to action.
And the scare quote that precedes chapter 12 on Islamism is this.
Muhammad was the 10th most popular name for newborn boys in the United States in 2019 and the most popular boy's name in England.
And so the clear idea here is that non-white, what Hegseth perceives to be non-white, non-Christian bodies are multiplying.
And they're multiplying at a rate that the traditional Western Christian family unit can't keep up.
And this is an existential threat.
It was an existential threat, Hegseth tells us, in the 11th and 12th centuries.
And it's an existential threat now.
He goes on.
If Islamism is to continue unchecked by American patriot crusaders who are willing to do what needs to be done, if those American patriots don't step up, he tells us, American freedom, freedom globally, is on the chopping block.
America will cease to exist.
Western freedom will cease to exist.
Quote, next to the communist Chinese and their global ambitions, so of course communist reading is non-Christian, Chinese reading is non-Western, next to the communist Chinese and their global ambitions, Islamism is the most dangerous threat to freedom in the world.
It cannot be negotiated with, coexisted with, or understood.
It must be crushed.
Just like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the 12th century, American crusaders will need to muster the same courage against Islamists today.
Now, this is very clearly ignoring the fact, again, that the Crusades were largely a disaster for the Christians during the 12th century.
So be it.
We won't hold Pete Hegseth to standards of historical accuracy when it comes to the Crusades.
But, clearly the subtext here is that non-white, non-Christian bodies are multiplying.
Too rapidly for Western Christendom to compete with.
And the answer is a crusade with all the implications of violence and massacre and masculinity that the historical precedent offers.
That's Hegseth's solution.
And that's what the crusade ethos writ large is seeking to emulate.
I want to come back to Hegseth because he has some tattoos other than the Crusader cross and the deus volt phrase that I think play into everything you're talking about here.
But before we do that, let's talk about the ways the Crusader identity makes its way offline in manners that are frightening.
And so you have a plethora of examples here that I think we could discuss, whether it's the Proud Boys, whether it's a fraternal order of alt knights within the Proud Boys Whether it is various automatic weapons that have medieval sayings on them, whether it is terrorists like Anders Breivik or the Christchurch shooter in New Zealand who referenced the medieval period in their acts of terror.
Would you just give us some examples here of ways that the permission structure for violence in the crusader identity has made its way offline and into real life?
Certainly.
So yeah, like you're saying, when someone is first radicalized by these perceived threats against Western traditionalism and a need to mobilize oneself through this aristocratic knightly persona, they'll develop an online avatar of a crusader.
Eventually, This bleeds out into the real world.
In Louisiana, we see what are known as the call to chivalry camps, where young Catholic boys are taken to camp, and they'll dress as crusaders, and they'll sing crusader hymns, and they'll stage mock battles.
We see a whole cottage industry emerging in the firearms sector of crusade-themed weaponry, right?
These are meant to equip modern-day crusaders who aren't wielding swords like their 12th century counterparts, but are instead wielding assault rifles that come with custom crusader packages.
Maybe they're emblazoned with the Jerusalem cross.
Maybe they're emblazoned with dates of key sieges.
One assault rifle, like you mentioned, features three different modes.
We have POX, Latin for peace, which is the safety mode.
We have Bellum, Latin for war, which is the semi-automatic mode.
And we have Deus Volt, which is full automatic.
We see groups who are known for engaging in anti-state or anti-democratic violence.
The Proud Boys, Vanguard America, making use of medieval symbols and imagery, like you mentioned.
The Proud Boys have what they call their, quote, tactical defense arm, which is the fraternal order of alt knights.
And we see, unfortunately, the reality that, given enough time immersed in a worldview that teaches these men, these would-be 21st century crusaders, If they spend enough time consuming rhetoric that tells them they are racial holy warriors, they will commit acts of racial holy war.
In 2016, a militia group called the Three Percenters had a splinter group Calling themselves the Crusaders, arrested for plotting to bomb a community of Somali immigrants.
Again, these are targets that represent non-white, non-Western, non-Christian bodies.
We see the Christchurch shooter emblazoning key dates of the Crusades and battles from the Crusades on his weapons before he enacts violence on non-Christian bodies.
We see Anders Breivik, who writes a 1500-page manifesto and puts the logo of the Knights Templar on the front.
He refers to himself as the, quote, Justiciar Knight Commander for Knights Templar Europe and one of several leaders of the National and Pan-European Patriotic Resistance Movement.
So again, Fusing this medieval knightly ethos with patriotic, anti-state, against non-Christian, against non-white bodies, fusing these ideals together.
He publishes this manifesto shortly before killing 77 people in an act of terrorism.
And what I think we are to take away here is that I think?
Leads to men who believe themselves to be agents of a divine, racialized, existential conflict, committing acts of violence in the name of that conflict.
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I am so grateful, Spencer, for your research and your clarity.
I feel like there's a lot of noise out there and a lot of people who are speaking about these things without a full understanding of what it all means.
And God bless you for hanging out in all these alt-right forms because most of us don't want to do that.
So I appreciate you doing that research and really keeping an eye on things.
What's the best way that people can keep up with you if they'd like to make sure they understand what's going on with your work and things you might be putting out into the world in the future?
You can find me in the faculty directory of the Florida State Religion Department.
And I suppose if anyone's coming to the Southeast Regional AAR in March, I'd love to chat further.
That's great.
Yeah, that's great.
You know what I love about people whose work is online is you're often offline people, right?
So you have to spend so much time online that you're like not hanging out on social media all the time and doing all of that.
So that's good.
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