On November 12, Trump announced his selection of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of “Defense,” to head America’s massive military machine. Before we get into Hegseth, here is a crucial understanding about the oppressive system we live under, from Bob Avakian in his social media message REVOLUTION #105, “NO: Accepting, and Refusing To Resist, This Trump/MAGA Fascism, Will NOT Make Things “OK!”:

Despite constant attempts to mislead people away from a true, scientific understanding of this, the rule of the capitalist class, in any form, is actually a dictatorship: it is the monopoly of political power by the capitalist class—and in particular its monopoly of “legitimate” armed force and violence, by its police and military. This dictatorship is based on the domination of the economy by the capitalist class: its ownership and control of what is produced, how it is produced, how goods and services are exchanged (sold) and the profits that come from this.

In the “democratic” form of this capitalist dictatorship, people are, to varying degrees, allowed certain rights, and the “rule of law” is applied as a general principle, even while all this is based on, confined within, and conforming to the rule of the capitalist class and the oppressive relations of the capitalist system. (In today’s world, this is the system of capitalism-imperialism. Capitalism-imperialism refers to the fact that capitalism has, for some time, been an international system of exploitation and oppression.)

In the fascist form of capitalist dictatorship, the “rule of law” is essentially what the fascists say it is, and the rights of people are more or less openly limited to what is allowed by the fascists, while such rights are only extended to those who go along with the rule of the fascists.

All this makes Trump’s selection of Pete Hegseth to head the military machine at the heart of this dictatorship extremely serious. 

Trump said after naming Hegseth, “With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice—Our Military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down.” 

Let's translate this:

By “Our Military will be Great Again,” Trump means organizing and unifying the armed forces on a fully fascist basis—male-supremacist, white-supremacist, ultra-nationalist, openly aggressive and terroristic. 

By “America’s enemies,” Trump means anyone living in the U.S. who opposes the fascists, and any group or country in the world that gets in the way of or challenges U.S. economic and political domination.

By “America will Never Back Down,” Trump means unleashing this increasingly Nazified armed force against these “enemies,” at home or abroad—with China especially being identified as the enemy that must be defeated. 

Think about it: Pete Hegseth is being put in command of the most powerful military in the world, and tasked with transforming and leading it as the “iron fist” enforcing fascism “at home” and U.S. domination around the world. 

Let’s look deeply at what “qualifies” Hegseth for this crucial position.

Pete Hegseth—100% Christian Fascist

Hegseth is a Fox News “personality” and a military veteran whose first post was as a guard at the U.S.’s Guantanamo torture camp. And he was part of the U.S. war crimes machine in Afghanistan and Iraq. But what is most important about Hegseth is that he is a straight-up Christian fascist. 

In his 2022 book Battle for the American Mind, Hegseth yearns to turn the clock back to the 1500s in Europe when large parts of society believed that “Truth was discoverable through God’s revealed word (the Bible) and His revelation.” He sharply criticizes the Enlightenment movement of the 1700s, which spread the understanding that we figure out what is true by studying what is happening in the real world and then applying reason and logic to analyze it. Or, in other words, science!

To Hegseth, this is where everything started to go bad. “God’s word” was no longer at the center of human thought and action. In his view, this “problem”—helped along by a “plot” by “Marxists” and “Progressives”—grew worse and worse, and after 200 years has finally “metastasized” (like cancer) and taken over American society, leaving it on the brink of catastrophe, and needing to be rescued by a Christian reconquest.

Recohering the U.S. Military on a Fascist Basis

The U.S. military is central to the economic and political power of the U.S. imperialist system, but there are sharp contradictions that run through it. First, the military is basically “cohered” (held together) by loyalty to one’s squad and comrades, and secondarily also through patriotic belief in the “freedom and equality” supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution. But it is also saturated with the male supremacy and white supremacy that this country was built on. At the same time, nearly half the military is made up of Black, Latino and other oppressed nationalities. These contradictions can undercut the “coherence” and fighting capacity of the military—and in periods of intense crisis can lead to serious splits in the armed forces as began to happen toward the end of the Vietnam War and as top commanders feared could happen around the uprising in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd. 

In recent decades, the U.S. rulers have leaned towards handling these kinds of problems with modest concessions to oppressed groups—promoting more Black people and women, “allowing” gay people to openly be who they are, and so on. But the fascists despise these measures. And they couldn’t utilize them even if they wanted to, since “concessions” like this are completely at odds with their whole agenda of reasserting open white supremacy and male supremacy, not to mention “god-ordained” sex and gender roles. Their plan is to cohere around religion, patriotism and fascism, to recruit more people on that ideological basis. And to the extent they “allow” women, gay people, and others in the military, it will be on an openly subordinated and humiliating basis. 

This approach is revealed in the following disgusting and bigoted remark from Hegseth: 

For the past three years, the Pentagon… has embraced the social justice message of gender equity, racial diversity, climate stupidity, vaccine worship and the LGBTQA+ Alphabet soup in their recruiting pushes. 

Only one problem: there just aren’t enough trannies from Brooklyn or lesbians from San Francisco who want to join the 82nd Airborne. Not only do the trannies and lesbians not join, but those very same ads turn off the young, patriotic Christian men who have traditionally filled our ranks. (emphasis added)

Speaking of senior officers who supported or went along with “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion)¹ programs, in 2023 Hegseth wrote, “The next president of the United States needs to fire them all—or at least most of them—and install leaders with real fidelity to the Constitution.” Trump is reportedly preparing an executive order to facilitate this as soon as he takes office.

An Ardent Champion of War Crimes and War Criminals

Despite the fact that the U.S. military carries out massive war crimes and that this is integral to how it fights wars, and despite the fact that it has worked to cover up its own war crimes, it has at the same time pretended to be a fighting force that respects the rule of law. This is bullshit, but it has meant that when certain crimes, like the open slaughter of defenseless civilians, are dragged out into the light of day, at times the U.S. military has been forced to prosecute individual soldiers or officers. 

But even this is too much for Hegseth. Near the end of Trump’s first term, six Navy Seals had turned in a senior member of their squad for repeated atrocities, including intentionally shooting civilians and stabbing to death an unarmed, wounded and medicated prisoner. Hegseth used his Fox News platform to launch a loud campaign for pardons for the accused Navy Seal officer and three other convicted U.S. soldiers, denouncing their prosecution as “Monday morning quarterbacking” that would be “deadly” for U.S. military operations. 

Trump pardoned them.

Hegseth has written that rules of war are “why America hasn’t won a war since World War II.” He says that “We are just fighting with one hand behind our back—and the enemy knows it… If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?!” 

Hegseth proposes this approach to enemies instead: “If you surrender, we might spare your life. If you do not, we will rip your arms off and feed them to hogs.”

All this points to a U.S. military relying even more heavily on terror, torture, and wanton slaughter, and completely unrestrained by international law or “public opinion.”

Who Are the Targets of the Fascist Military?

First, there are the enemies “at home.” Trump wanted to unleash the military against George Floyd protesters—“shoot them in the leg.” He has said that he wants to invoke the Insurrection Act on day one of his upcoming term, which would allow him to use the U.S. military to attack protests against his regime. And Trump and members of his administration insist that they will deploy the U.S. military to help carry out the mass deportations of millions of undocumented immigrants. (On November 8, Trump reaffirmed that he “will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”)

Hegseth has gone even further in his eagerness to wield what he describes as “the only powerful, pro-freedom, pro-Christian, pro-Israel army in the world.” In his book American Crusade, he writes, “In more ways than you can imagine, leftists have surrounded traditional American patriots on all sides, ready to close in for the kill: killing our founders, killing our flag, and killing capitalism.” He describes “irreconcilable differences between the Left and the Right in America leading to perpetual conflict that cannot be resolved through the political process.” (Emphasis added.) While claiming he’s not calling for violence, he telegraphs the opposite: “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.” (Emphasis Hegseth’s)

Preparing for War with China

For a number of years, the whole U.S. ruling class (fascist and “mainstream” sections) have been united in viewing China as the main threat to U.S. imperialist global domination and have been preparing for war. 

To take one dramatic example, in 2024, the Biden administration called for a 31 percent increase in spending on nuclear weapons programs with an eye to China’s increasing nuclear capacity.² 

The fascist position is even more aggressive and explicit. Hegseth says that China is “building an army specifically dedicated to defeating the United States of America.” And that “They have a full-spectrum long-term view of not just regional but global domination… The only way they can implement a structure that can serve them is by defeating us.”

Project 2025 (a game-plan for the initial six months of fascist consolidation drawn up by forces close to Trump) says straight out that Army school courses need to “concentrate on preparation for large scale land operations that focus on defeating a peer threat.” And in case anyone is unsure who that “peer threat” is, Project 2025 says that “U.S. defense strategy must identify China unequivocally as the top priority for U.S. defense planning.”

What Is Needed NOW!

It’s important that people get real! Fascism is not (as Bob Avakian pointed out recently) “a ‘swear word’—or just some kind of negative label to put on your opponent in the course of an election.” It is a marked change in the form of rule capitalism-imperialism, bringing with it even worse horrors. 

At the same time, all of these dramatic changes can serve to shock people, and reveal the ugliness at the heart of this system and this country that has given rise to and nurtured this fascism. AND, every one of these moves—imposing Christian fascism; open white supremacy and male supremacy; firing generals; putting federal troops on the ground in the U.S.; moving ever closer to war with China—is going to be fraught with danger for the regime and for the system itself. Every one of these holds the possibility of sharpening conflict both within the ranks of the ruling class, including within their core institutions, and between the fascists and the masses of people. All of these can be potential openings for people to sharply challenge this system and the misery it inflicts.

To quote Bob Avakian, "This is not the time for demoralization and despair, it is a time for righteous anger and revolutionary determination."

Join with the revcoms (revolutionary communists) in taking up the revolutionary struggle to defeat this fascist regime as part of fighting for a real revolution and a whole new and better world.

In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America.

A Better World IS Possible.

The Existing Capitalist-Imperialist System And Institutions Of Government In This Country Must Be Abolished And Dismantled—And Replaced By A New, Socialist System Based On The CONSTITUTION FOR THE NEW SOCIALIST REPUBLIC IN NORTH AMERICA.