Before he became a top Trump administration attack dog on all things DEI, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was a Harvard University master’s degree candidate who lauded efforts to close racial achievement gaps and backed “equality, diversity, and accessibility.”
Hegseth’s 2013 thesis for the Kennedy School of Government displays a moderation absent from Hegseth’s current persona as a culture warrior in President Trump’s Cabinet — a persona embodied in a recent speech in which he declared the military wouldn’t tolerate “more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses.”
Twelve years ago, Hegseth was promoting the idea of establishing a top-notch public math and science high school in his home state of Minnesota. His paper called for allying with state Representative Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, who had championed the issue and was one of a dozen people he interviewed for his research and figured prominently in his thesis.
Read the thesis in full below.