Believers in Uniform: 5 Handpicked Right-Wing Colleges for Hegseth’s Next Generation

On Monday, the Department of War is creating an “America’s Corps of Cadets,” and the name sounds more harmless than the thing itself. Pete Hegseth has told the Pentagon leadership in a memo that from now on he wants to work with selected colleges to train officers, more of them, above all “more patriotic” ones. Armies take shape in lecture halls long before they are needed on a battlefield. That is exactly where Hegseth is stepping in now.

Five schools are on his list. First up is Louisiana State University, founded in 1853 as a military school, back then the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy, so the direction was built in from the start. Then come 2 names anyone in the right-wing education world knows by heart, evangelical Liberty University and conservative Hillsdale College. Add Tuskegee University and Mississippi State University. Each of these schools will be elevated to “Distinguished Military College” status and, in the wording of the plan, is expected to maintain “exceptionally high standards of cadet discipline, tactical training and military organization.” As an “Honor School,” its graduates would get priority for officer commissions. Five addresses personally chosen by the secretary, each with a shortcut into the leadership of the armed forces. The rest of the country gets to watch.

Hegseth supplied the reason himself in his “State of the Force” speech. From elite universities to most liberal arts colleges, the country’s schools had become “anti-American, DEI-worshipping factories of wokeness.” Courage and grit had been traded for political correctness, God and country for Che Guevara and critical theory. 2 trigger phrases, not much more sits inside that diagnosis, and that is exactly the point. Once you have declared half the education system the enemy, all that remains is to harvest the next generation somewhere else. From now on, they will be drawn from places where the right worldview is already part of the curriculum.

Read our article from today as well: “Lord, Send Me”: Hegseth Calls in Quantico for a Heavenly Fight Against Communists, Redcoats, the Media and Islamists

It looks like administration, a few cooperation agreements. Behind it sits a grab for what comes next. What is taught today at 5 addresses will be sitting in command posts 20 years from now. You do not turn an army overnight. You can turn its intake, slowly, one graduating class after another. That is why this Monday weighs more heavily than the dry line used to announce it. Loyalty cannot be ordered. It can be grown, if you pick the seed early enough, and that is exactly what he is doing here.

What he wants sounded like an advertising brochure for a world that no longer exists. They needed “students of Western civilization and the pillars of our Republic,” officers “who understand the faith of Jerusalem, the philosophy of Athens, the power of Rome and the liberty of Philadelphia in 1776.” Freedom as a required subject, tested on young people he has already sorted by belief. He wrote the punchline himself.

The old military colleges got their praise, Texas A&M and the Citadel, for the “patriotic and selfless service” taught there. A secretary who divides colleges into models and factories of decay inspects schools as if they were recruits. Obedience then counts for more than teaching, conviction for more than ability. The current state of the officer pipeline was good, he said, the future would be even better. By hardwiring discipline into new institutions and expanding the cadet corps, the Department of War would give the Republic even more officers “of unshakable character, patriotism and toughness.”

One word is missing from that list, the most important one, judgment. An officer trained for unconditional loyalty is useless in the one moment that matters, when an order is unlawful and requires a no. History has seen plenty of armed forces selected for the right creed, and afterward the Constitution they were supposed to protect was rarely still standing. Selection like this produces believers in uniform whose loyalty belongs to the man who picked them, not to the country. Hegseth is not building an officer school. He is building a cadre factory for the convinced and one day putting weapon and command into the same hand.