A review of “Battle for the American Mind” by Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for Defense Secretary

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I took time out of my busy schedule of reading Project 2025 this weekend to catch up on one of Donald Trump’s appointees, Pete Hegseth. Hegseth is the author of at least five books, so I chose the most recently published: Battle for the American Mind.

Hegseth and coauthor David Goodwin take on education in America.

And we all know something’s wrong, don’t we?

Critical race theory, DEI, gender equity, moral relativism. We all know something’s been off in the education system.

Get ready to have your mind blown because Hegseth and Goodwin have traced the roots of the corruption back, past the disgusting, filthy hippies in the 1960’s to the corruption of Progressivism over a hundred years ago. That’s right. Progressives have been waging a war on the American culture for over a century and it feels like only just now we’ve started to take notice.

Hegseth opening is a little uneven, a little “just-wait-until-I-tell-you” until he hits his stride in part 2 of the book where he outlines the history of American education. He uses the Greek term paideia (pie-day-ah) which sort of means zeitgeist and sort of means culture, but is actually deeper than that, delving into, perhaps, the collective soul of a culture. Paideia is passed on through education and influences everything. Politics may be downstream of culture, but paideia takes precedence above all of it.

Hegseth gives a brief history of Western civilization from the ancient Greeks onward. He documents how the Greeks, because of their paideia, were susceptible to conversion to Christianity.

The paideia that started in America is what Hegseth calls the Western Christian Paideia. The Bible, Christ, truth and beauty were all intertwined with a liberal (lower case ‘L’) arts education. It defined our virtues. We studied the Greek philosophers, the Roman poets, the German composers, that Western civilization birthed. But that didn’t fit what the Progessives wanted.

In the early 1910’s, John Dewey began revolutionizing education. School went from a place of learning to a place for job training. Yes, reader. As much as the Left today likes to cry about how schools changed into factories to pump out workers, that capitalism is to blame, it was actually the Progressives who did it.

Why?

Because workers are stupid and will vote for progressivism.

Even today, the focus on STEM is not to improve children’s minds, it’s to prepare them for work.

The Progressives replaced WCP with the American Progressive Paideia. They replaced God and Christianity with country and nationalism. They replaced virtue with the more nebulous concept to values. It is the first step replacing Christianity with atheistic humanism, solidifying a moral relativism and equity over a true sense of right and wrong.

During WWII, the Marxists from the Frankfurt School fled Hitler, came to America, and started spreading their crappy ideas at Columbia University. Those crappy ideas, namely critical theory, were spread to a new generation of educators.

This, along with Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s, finalized the removal of God from the classroom and gave us what we have today: Cultural Marxist Paideia.

It’s not just about the Marxist nonsense. Hegseth discusses how our education system doesn’t seem to understand beauty anymore. It doesn’t understand that Truth is not what you get at the end of a science experiment. We are more than just meat bags. The current paideia is not addressing something fundamental to humanity. We are not feeding our souls.

Part 3 of the book identifies how to take back our institutions. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be short. If you’re a parent who’s looking for some solutions now, Hegseth has suggestions.

Not everything is lost. To reform the culture, we must reclaim the institutions. And the first step to recovery is identifying the problem. Maybe one thing you can start with is studying the ancient Greeks, the philosophers. Taking a little Latin. Listening to Bach and reading some Byron. And, like the C in WCP suggests, integrating Christianity into education.

Critical race theory, a subdivision of critical theory planted by the Frankfurt School, has made a generation of white Americans believe that they do not have a culture. Opinion pieces in CNN claim that Western civilization isn’t inherently white. Even the Smithsonian got into the game. Remember the Whiteness chart?

White people are now associated with supremacy and privilege. They are the oppressor in every scenario. White = Imperialism and Imperials = bad. American = white, and therefore America is bad. These are the ideas that have seeped into our education. These are the things that need to be rejected. European countries used to acknowledge that Jesus was Lord. The kingdom was not imminent; the kingdom was already here. Seeking the perfection of God defined virtue, beauty and truth. All these things have been cauterized by Progressives.

The history of the educational system is interesting and thorough. Hegseth’s writing is engaging. He probably could have trimmed down the opening and delved deeper into the rot plaguing our education system, but I think he covered the topic pretty well.

If the Left was freaking out about Hegseth’s appointment as Secretary of Defense, they would have had it ten times worse if he’d been appointed to the Department of Education. Hegseth targets the teachers’ unions as well as the Progressives (but, they’re the same, aren’t they?) with a justified hatred.

I’ll probably have to read The War on Warriors next, since that aligns more closely with the department to which he was appointed.

You know. After I finish Project 2025.

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Kate works in production at LwC. She is an author. When she isn’t writing…who are we kidding? She’s always writing. You can find her here on X.