If you thought you’d heard every ridiculous excuse for why we still need to honor and celebrate the Confederacy — even though they lost the war and were traitors to their own country — Fox host Pete Hegseth proved that there’s yet another level of ridiculous during an appearance on Fox Business Thursday.

Hegseth was asked by Stuart Varney about what he called “the cancel culture,” which led Hegseth to respond:

“This is the logical extent of the left. Unfortunately, I wrote a whole book about it called ‘American Crusade’ and it’s happening faster than anyone thought.

“It all starts with America is an evil place. America is a bad place, it was stolen from Native Americans and built on the black — on the back of slaves and as a result, everything that has been done in our country is considered a sin and an evil and you must erase it all.”

That’s almost exactly what President Donald Trump himself insinuated when he told Bill O’Reilly in 2017 that the United States wasn’t innocent:

“There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”

What Hegesth said next is almost guaranteed to leave you shaking your head in disbelief and disgust:

“But we’re at a really, really bad spot because our corporations are captured, social media is captured, our education system. What we’re teaching kids in government schools today is the sins of America. And when you do that, you get people that don’t love the country that they’re supposed to defend.”

Hang on a second! Weren’t most of the new military recruits taught about the many sins of America? And yet they enlisted anyway. That kind of destroys Hegseth’s absurd claim.

Perhaps sensing that he’d just made a fool of himself, Hegseth then tried to walk some of what he’d just said back, insisting that we have to know the history of the United States so we can realize how much progress we’ve made:

“By teaching about the Civil War that we had, about what it took to free the slaves, we are educating the next generation about what America has had to go through to get to a place where we’re the most free, most tolerant, most diverse, most prosperous country in human history.”

Slavery was the original “sin” of America. It was also the root cause of the Civil War. And it remains deeply embedded in the collective psyche. Consider this undeniable fact: The Civil War ended 155 years ago. But we’re still trying to make sure that every American is equal under the law. So just how “free” are we?

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