Today in Quantico, Virginia, Trump and Hegseth gave what will go down as the most treasonous speech since the South’s Declaration of secession in the 1860s, when South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas declared the end of their allegiance to the United States of America.
There are already plenty of commentators noting just how traitorous their words were, but also for the record, I’d like to point out that Hegseth utterly misrepresented none other than Thomas Jefferson’s actual contribution to the Declaration of Independence.
On the subject of toxic leadership, which Hegseth either unironically fails or flatly refuses to grasp is actually epitomized by himself and every last member of this administration, he claimed that: “Real toxic leadership is promoting destructive ideologies that are an anathema to the Constitution and the laws of nature and nature’s God, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.”
The trouble is that to Hegseth, who is a Neo Nazi, ”nature’s God” is actually code for white people’s Christian God. To be sure this isn’t conjecture, look no further than the tattoos inscribed on Hegseth, including his “Deus Vult” *tattoo,* which is Latin for “God wills it,” and which is said to have originated from the first Christian Crusades of the 11th century.
Hegseth, or whoever else wrote his speech, must have thought they were being very clever by invoking Thomas Jefferson, a dead white forefather, in their attempt to pretend like they were simply carrying out “his vision” in 2025. But Jefferson is actually not credited for authoring this portion of the Declaration, and rightly so, since he actually wasn’t even known to believe in the Christian god. In fact, perhaps the most diplomatic quote of Jefferson’s on the whole idea of it goes as follows:
“Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man’s and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend’s or our foe’s, are exactly the right.”
But if you believe, as I do, that Jefferson was a simple statesman for the press when it was time, but far more complicated in his thought processes during his privacy, then the following quote from the Jefferson Monticello archives feels like a more accurate summation of his thoughts on Hegseth’s apparent religiosity:
“The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.”
In other words, it should be clear to any modern reader that Jefferson at the very least appreciated how much religious wars wreaked havoc on the world in centuries past, which is why he and the founding fathers enshrined the U.S. as a secular state through the 1st Amendment (1791). Thus, there should be no doubt that Hegseth’s conflagration of Jefferson and god in the Declaration of Independence is the very type of foolishness and hypocrisy Jefferson abhorred.
Nonetheless, Hegseth, like Stephen Miller, is ahistorical and has no interest in freedom of thought or religion, but seeks the very opposite of these things. Their sermonizing in Quantico today was a thinly veiled attempt to have the military fall in line for the latter’s vision of a white Christian ethnostate, which it should go without saying is the very anathema to the Constitution the “Secretary of War” was originally and actually supposed to stand against.
The gloves are officially off, then, but to be forewarned is to be prepared.
Let the city, each state, and every last one of the American people know.
J.T.
*This photo showing a partial view of Pete Hegseth’s right forearm, which includes the “Deus Vult” phrase, was taken by Gage Skidmore at an event by Turning Point USA in 2021.*