Fox’s Pete Hegseth on The Battle for the American Mind

BUCK: One thing we’ve been talking to you about for the whole year that we’ve been on the air together is the Mom Brigades, parents getting more and more fired up about what their kids are being taught in schools, the agenda of the left — increasingly radical but also increasingly exposed by a lot of people good work coming from people on the right — and one of them is our friend who joins us right now, Pete Hegseth, veteran of the United States Army, cohost of Fox & Friends Weekend. His new book is Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation. Pete, great to have you back, man.

HEGSETH: Hey, guys, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

BUCK: Tell us about this one, because we think that there are few issues that get a lot of attention — and they should, right? Crime, border, economy, those are probably the big three for us. But right up there and maybe right alongside one or two of those would be education, what’s going on in the classrooms, what’s going on in the universities, and the apparatus of the left, what it’s doing to kids. Tell us about the book.

HEGSETH: Especially now. Yeah. I mean, we call that realization that’s occurred in the last couple of years “the covid 1619 moments.” Parents had their kids at home and laptops and they saw the curriculum, and it wasn’t what they thought it was. And it’s because largely in conservative-Republican circles, we’ve been asleep at the wheel fighting other fights while the progressives have executed what I would call full consolidation of government schools, public schools. I salute the parents protesting at school board meetings. I think it’s immensely important.

I think parents need to get involved. But we describe it in the book as it’s like charging a fortified machine gun nest with Nerf guns. We salute your efforts, but we’re all gonna die if we think that’s gonna change the trajectory of what’s happening. The pipeline for over 100 years has been what they’ve focused on and burrowed in on and they’ve been wildly successful. Hemingway once wrote about bankruptcy, it happened gradual and then suddenly, and that’s what the book uncovers, is it happened gradually over a hundred years, very concertedly.

They wrote about it intentionally, and now we’re seeing the quick aspect of it as they press their advantage going from bias to indoctrination now to full-on activism for our youngest of kids who are always the target. And the reason we wrote the book is the first step to recovery is understanding the depth of your problem. And for the parents and grandparents out there, we just want them to come to grips with the fact that, you know the old adage, “I love my congressman but I can’t stand Congress”? It’s that same thing. “I know public education is messed up, but my school’s okay.” No, it’s not. Not yours, not mine, not the one I went to. I was a public-school kid. They’re pressing the advantage don’t want parents to know about it and the book shares what you can do about it.

CLAY: Pete, appreciate you coming on. I was also a public-school kid. What do you think the impact will be — based on moves, for instance, that they’re making in Florida with Ron DeSantis, the battles that are being fought there — if, as we anticipate, we get a Red Wave or Red Tsunami, potentially, in November? Does that help to change the trajectory here?

HEGSETH: It helps on the political level, but it only helps on the margins. Winning elections is not gonna change the nature of the classroom. When you understand what John Dewey and the progressives did, how they first removed God, replaced it with a forgery — an allegiance to the state — and then the Marxists show up through the critical theorists at the Frankfurt school at Columbia University, pushed it through the teachers colleges, then the unions consolidated their power — all of these institutions, by the way, led by socialists and atheists, eventually Marxists.

Then the Supreme Court kicks God out, then the department education is created by the teachers unions quite literally, and then you get the federal consolidation through Common Core and what we see today. Winning a school board election or even a gubernatorial election will help in preventing the current manifesting of one or two theories, but they will always try to find a way to slip in. Take, for example, this book, Battle for the American Mind. It’s been number one in the country for three days.

A book called How to Raise an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi came out the same day as my book. No one’s gonna read it. However, every teachers union, every teachers college, every publication is gonna press it down the pipeline as the curriculum or the pedagogy — how teachers teach — in the diversity, equity, and inclusion lens in local public schools, middle schools and elementary schools. That book will have more institutional impact than this expose because that’s how they think. So I love winning elections, but we can’t count on elections. We’ve gotta do it ourselves.

BUCK: Speaking to Pete Hegseth now. He’s Fox & Friends Weekend cohost and he’s got this book out you should check out. Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation. Pete, do you think that maybe at some level, some of them — not all of them, right? The true believers reality doesn’t exist for them so what somebody does anything that we see make to them.

But do you think that the current battle that we’ve seen playing out in Florida over the trans agenda as it pertains to very young children added also to the left’s insistence on what feels like a phenomenon that came on out of nowhere and now is everywhere, the Drag Queen Story Hour and Drag Your Kids to Pride stuff that we’ve seen in schools, in libraries, and all over the place. Has the left gone too far? And do you think that they recognize that this is an error for them politically?

HEGSETH: Old school liberal Democrats know they’ve gone too far. And they have electoral power right now, say in Congress, and they want to send up the warning flares about how detrimental that will be to them politically. But culturally, this is a reflection of the confidence they have that not only won’t they be held accountable, but they can’t be held accountable.

Because they’re so insulated inside their education departments, inside their teachers colleges, by their teachers unions, by the folks that write the tests, the folks that make the standards, the accreditation agencies. Every single one of those is controlled by not Democrats but the hard activist left. So they don’t believe they will be held accountable for this.

You see school districts defending what’s happening or explaining it away by saying, “We do diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which is a phrase invented by critical theorists — later critical race theorists and critical gender theorists — to mask over their Marxist secular agenda. So yes, they’ve overreached culturally at this current moment. But they’re counting on a pipeline of kids being pumped out. You might say, “Oh, this has been happening for decades.” Yes, it has. But we’re in uncharted territory when we’re telling 7 and 8 years old to question their gender and not teaching any history other than “America is bad.”

You see the progressives knew that it was the youngest the kids that were the most pliable and that’s why they focused school on the youngest to begin with. They didn’t really happen to get to the youngest until right about now, but that’s because they believe they have the power to do it and no one will hold them accountable. There are politicians doing some of that, and that’s good, but it doesn’t change the prerogatives and incentives and the institutions that feed the classrooms full of teachers and counselors and advisers who get paid to push this stuff.

CLAY: Pete, you’ve got kids. I’ve got kids. I was having a conversation recently with my wife about the idea of a 5- or 6-year-old kid being able to pick their gender, and I’m sure you’ve had conversations like this too. We won’t even let our 5- or 6-year-olds pick what they get to eat for a meal because they would have ice cream or cake (chuckles) for every single meal if they could.

HEGSETH: Yes.

CLAY: How wildly outlandish has a become that you’re supposed to let a 5- or 6-year-old pick their gender? I mean, I just… It’s inconceivable to me that we could have ever ended up in a place where any adult would make that argument.

HEGSETH: I know. It is a gradual erosion, because you’ve so eroded the idea of objective truth, of standards higher than our own human instincts or human identity that now it’s gotten to the point where… I’ve got a 6-year-old who legitimately believes he’s got a shot at being Batman when he grows up.

CLAY: Yep. Yep.

HEGSETH: This is the identity and understanding that they have, the maturity level. But that’s the point, is the left believes… You know, if they’re only getting to ’em in college, you know, they’re gonna convert plenty of them, you know, but there’s gonna also be plenty of God-fearing conservative kids that go to college and reject the woke content. If your teacher — who is an authority figure. I remember when I was 15, 16, if the teacher said it, it seemed like gospel to me.

Those are more innocent days in that sense. If a 6-year-old or 7-year-old hears it, it’s absolute gospel, and you’re told your parents are out of step, they’re old, they’re rubes. So I think it is… There’s not a lot of teachers don’t want to do this. This is the activist class driving it. But it’s always the loudest voices, the most radicals voices, that drag institutions that particular direction. And that’s what you see in the pipeline.

And that’s how it ends up maybe not in the curriculum, but certainly in the pedagogy chest philosophy of how you teach through diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is, “If one student feels uncomfortable, you teach to that level to all the students,” and that’s how it becomes Bitcoins, not just in Massachusetts and California but in Missouri. We had the attorney general on Fox & Friends this morning pointing out it’s happening everywhere.

BUCK: Speaking to our friend Pete Hegseth. The book is Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation. Pete, congrats on the sales so far, a lot more coming your way, and appreciate you joining us.

HEGSETH: Appreciate you guys. Thank you.

CLAY: That’s Pete Hegseth.