Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Friday, in a move historians will easily recognize, that the Pentagon is severing all military training, fellowships, and certificate programs with a targeted university. His reasoning deserves to be read carefully:
…heads full of globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks.
This particular brand of rhetorical fear-mongering carries a well-known slogan of Nazis.
Hegseth… holds Nazi-like views on Muslims. He makes Donald Rumsfeld look like Mahatma Gandhi. He should not be anywhere near power, even if every single one of the behavioral allegations against him was proven conclusively false. … It is fair to say that if Hegseth said any of the things about Judaism that he says about Islam, it would be transparently obvious that he held neo-Nazi beliefs that could easily justify genocide. But there is a double standard on the treatment of the two religions, so that one can get away with horrific comments about Muslims that would (rightly) be career-ruining if spoken about Jewish people. He specifically says that the very presence of Muslims in a society is harmful.
Well, here we are. Globalist means Jews. His sentence has a precise historical precedent, and it isn’t subtle.
And just to be clear, Hegseth is self-loathing in the worst possible way. While he was at Harvard he wrote papers and worked his political ties like this:
“Ensuring low-income and minority children have the same opportunities as more affluent majority students is an essential goal and worth pursuing with vigor and substantial investment,” Hegseth wrote, according to The Boston Globe. “Our country and state must strive for equal opportunity for all, regardless of race, class, geography, or gender.”
Hegseth also wrote that closing racial achievement gaps is a “laudable goal,” and advocated for cooperation with state lawmaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat who had been vocal on education, The Boston Globe reports.
Hortman and her husband were assassinated in their home three months ago. Their murders, which authorities called “politically motivated,” received little attention from the current administration.
Hegseth at Harvard wrote papers with Hortman advocating for minority opportunity. Then Hortman was assassinated by a man using a hit list of Democrats. Hegseth running militant machinery of state is targeting the institution where that collaboration happened, using language that labels the values they shared as contamination.
That’s the convert pattern known as a Nazi Heidegger move. The person inside who uses the institution’s value to destroy it anyway is more useful to Nazis than someone who never valued it at all.
Also, “received little attention” framing totally undersells what actually happened. Trump didn’t ignore the assassination of a lawmaker that Hegseth drew attention to, he reposted conspiracy theories calling it a false flag trying to implicate their political foe Governor Walz. That’s not inattention, it’s active disinformation for exploitation. The administration weaponized a political assassination into a false narrative advantage. That’s far, far worse than neglect.
That’s information warfare.
Trump Playbook
In 1933, the Nazi regime began its “anti-woke” equivalent of Gleichschaltung — the “coordination” of institutions under state ideological control. Universities were important targets. The mechanism wasn’t violent because it could be administrative: funding cuts, loyalty requirements, the dismissal of faculty deemed ideologically unreliable, and the replacement of independent education with regime-aligned formation.
The regime never framed their imposition as imposing their ideology. Like with Hegseth today, all of it was framed as removing ideology, purging “globalists” (Jewish physics) and “radical” (cosmopolitan) influence. It called Germans “un-German” in order to claim institutions suddenly had been “captured.” The regime radically shifted the political narrative in order to falsely announce itself, on the extreme right, as a neutral position. Independent thought, let alone anything except the most extreme loyalty to the dictator, was branded contamination.
Read Hegseth’s statement again. Harvard is “radical.” As if renaming the War Department is not. Officers return “globalist” as if contaminated by Jews. Hegseth treats non-white, non-Christian, members of society as the source of unapproved thoughts. The rhetorical structure is identical between Nazi Germany and Trump America.
The Loading Sequence
The Nazi coordination of universities followed a specific order:
| Nazi Gleichschaltung | Trump/Hegseth vs Harvard |
|---|---|
| Ideological demands framed as correcting institutional bias | Demands framed as correcting antisemitism |
| Financial leverage applied to force compliance | Billions in federal funding cut |
| Escalating penalties for defiance | Financial penalties doubled to $1 billion for noncompliance |
| Severing state personnel from independent educational institutions | Military education severed |
| Threats extended to peer institutions | “Similar programs at other Ivy League universities will be evaluated in coming weeks” |
That’s not a rough parallel. It’s the precise playbook in the same order.
The Targeting
The Nazis targeted Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, for example. It was Germany’s most prestigious institution, the intellectual crown jewel. It was attacked early and visibly. Not because it was an offender at all but because forcing capitulation would signal to every lesser institution what was expected. Berlin’s compliance meant resistance elsewhere was pointless.
Harvard serves exactly the same Nazi targeting function. Every university president in America is watching what happens to an institution that says no. The bully lesson is being taught in public: Constitutional principles mean death, obey Trump or die because if you’re dead you didn’t obey.
Germany Failed Because of This
The self-inflicted damage from Nazi purges is the most thoroughly documented case of ideological stupidity producing strategic catastrophe in modern history. Even more than Stalin. Even more than Mao. Hegseth is getting into a long line of dictator purge idiocy.
The physicists driven from German universities such as Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, James Franck, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann went directly to the Manhattan Project and built the atomic bomb for the Allies.
Ernst Boris Chain, a Jewish biochemist who fled Berlin in 1933, co-developed penicillin at Oxford. Countless German soldiers died of the infections that Allied soldiers survived because of the U.S. Army “globalist” strategy.
Germany collapsed rapidly from the world’s leading scientific nation to forever second-tier. In a single generation the Nazis wrecked the nation permanently. The countries that absorbed its expelled talent rose rapidly. America abruptly jumped to the dominant superpower for the next century, thanks to the enemies of Hegseth.
When the Nazi Education Minister asked mathematician David Hilbert whether the University of Göttingen had suffered from the departure of Jewish colleagues, Hilbert replied:
Suffered? It hasn’t suffered. It simply no longer exists.
Does American defense strategy even exist anymore? Rebranding of “war” and statements about war crimes and resource extraction being execution of Trump’s demands, suggests… nope.
“The War Department” was officially retired in 1947 when it became the Department of Defense. a deliberate signal that America’s military served a strategic purpose instead of just starting wars. Hitler was famous for reversion. The Nazi flag used colors of past empire, with a Swastika symbolizing its past racism. Reversion was the entire message.
Hegseth’s reversion is a tell. He’s not interested in the institutional framework that won World War Two and then the Cold War. He’s interested in a military that defines itself by the kind of ideological obedience that lost by 1942 and then spun up the worst of the Holocaust while losing more and more. Soldiers will be educated exclusively in institutions the executive controls to expedite losing, like the rush to kill hundreds of thousands of people in concentration camps in the last days before their liberation.
Officers who went to Harvard and started “looking too much like Harvard” are officers who might think and act with intelligence. That’s the actual fear of Trump.
Return to Sender
Hegseth earned his master’s degree from Harvard. In 2022, performing for Fox News cameras, he wrote “Return to Sender” on his diploma with a marker and symbolically returned it. His office resurfaced the clip this week.
It’s a theme commonly used by Nazis. Go back. You don’t belong. Return to where you are “from”. Raus, raus!
The Nazis had a term for intellectuals who turned against the institutions that formed them and used state power to destroy them. They were considered the most valuable converts, as proof that even the enemy’s best products recognized the regime’s superiority.
Friedrich Wilhelm University was eventually renamed Humboldt University, because the institution that existed under that name had been so thoroughly compromised by Nazis that postwar Germany needed to signal a break from what it had become. More precisely, Nazis said the professors of Friedrich Wilhelm University were “geistiges Leibregiment der Hohenzollern” (intellectual bodyguard regiment of monarchs and dictators), exactly what Hegseth wants to build. This is not coincidence.
The Humboldt name was chosen specifically because Wilhelm von Humboldt stood for Freiheit der Wissenschaft (freedom of science) and the postwar consensus was that a university serving Hegseth-like concepts of an intellectual arm of state power had to be symbolically destroyed to protect democracy.
Hegseth is writing “Return to Sender” on American higher education with the full weight of the Nazi Gleichschaltung behind the marker.
The question is whether the American understands what’s being returned, and what is lost when it’s gone.