Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has vowed not to back down from celebrating America’s “proud” Confederate history.
“We recognize our history,” Hegseth told Fox News host Will Cain on Thursday. “We don’t erase it. We don’t follow the woke lemmings off the cliff that want to tear down statues… We’re proud of our history.”
Hegseth was defending the decision to restore a Confederate monument in Arlington National Cemetery that critics say whitewashes the history of slavery in America.
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Shortly after rebuking those who want to remove Confederate symbols, Hegseth made it clear that he is willing to do whatever it takes to defeat his opposition.
“Our job is to ensure our enemies know exactly what we will do to them if they threaten us up to and including total war,” he said.
The monument in question is Moses Ezekiel’s Confederate Memorial. It features an inscription in Latin that describes the Civil War as a “lost cause” that was honorable for its noble principles and resistance to tyranny.
The sculpture also depicts Black people as supporting the Confederate soldiers, implying that they wished to remain enslaved.
The 32-foot-tall monument offers “a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery,” according to an archived version of the National Cemetery website.
It was erected in 1914 and taken down under former President Joe Biden in 2023.
The move to restore the sculpture is part of a broader push by the Trump administration to restore references to the Confederacy across the government.
The National Park Service announced earlier this week that it is bringing back a statue of Confederate Army Gen. Albert Pike, who once wrote that the “white race, and that race alone, shall govern this country. It is the only one that is fit to govern, and it is the only one that shall.”
The administration has also restored the names of a number of army bases named for Confederate leaders.
