At U., candidate led troops, made enemies

“Diversity is a noteworthy discussion topic, yet highly overvalued at this University,” Hegseth wrote in the April 2002 issue of the conservative magazine. “As the publisher of the Tory, I strive to defend the pillars of Western civilization against the distractions of diversity.”

Even today, less than a month after Hegseth returned from a tour in Afghanistan — as a captain in the Minnesota National Guard — and less than a week after the Republican announced his candidacy for a U.S. Senate seat in Minnesota, he stands behind the core of what he wrote during his college years.

“Diversity is a good thing, but it’s not the only thing,” Hegseth said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. “And we can’t be selective about the kind of diversity we’re pursuing ... I would expand that [prior] statement. It’s not accurate and simply written.”

The 31-year-old Hegseth probably will not unseat the popular Democratic senior senator, Amy Klobuchar, who he will face this November, political analysts say. The columns he wrote in the Tory are unlikely to be the deciding factor in the Upper Midwest. But his undergraduate years tell the classic tale of a young politico who leaves a paper trail — and disgruntled classmates — in his wake.

As the figurehead of a magazine that forcefully and aggressively argued the conservative position on campus, Hegseth made his fair share of enemies. If Hegseth seeks to pull off an upset, some classmates say that he will be forced to confront the legacy left by his own words.

Both ardent followers and fierce detractors of Hegseth remembered a student who seemed to invite — and even relish in — the ire and controversy he sparked while at the University. Hegseth was the leader of the campus’ conservative movement, they said, and he intended to use the bully pulpit of the Tory to his cause’s benefit.

John Andrews ’05, who succeeded Hegseth as publisher of the magazine, called him a “big sibling role model.” Andrews said that despite the space Hegseth occupied at the epicenter of campus conservatism, he still managed to personally connect with those opposed to his politics.

“You could be partisan while still being friendly,” Andrews said. “Even a lot of the big liberals on campus were friends with him personally.”

Owen Conroy ’05, president of College Democrats while Hegseth led the Tory, said Hegseth was personable and friendly. But most of the campus knew Hegseth primarily by what the Tory was publishing.

Though he was active on campus in a variety of other ways — he was a member of Cap & Gown Club, a player on the basketball team and involved with ROTC — he was first and foremost Pete Hegseth of the Princeton Tory.

Evan Baehr ’05, a colleague of Hegseth’s at the Tory who still communicates with him regularly, argued that Hegseth’s campus identity was a bit more complex than the way Conroy portrayed it. Baehr said his campus perception was a composite of his basketball, military and political commitments.

“He was able to pull off sitting in the middle of the social scene and the varsity sports scene, while at the same time being extremely admired and being the leader of the conservative activity at Princeton for several years,” Baehr said.

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Former politics professor Patrick Deneen, who advised Hegseth’s thesis, noted that Hegseth was always interested in political persuasion, which may explain his commitment to the conservative magazine. Hegseth’s thesis analyzed presidential rhetoric during the Cold War.

“It reflected on Pete’s part a real interest in the way that speech influences the direction of political democracies in the modern time,” Deneen said. “His interest was how do you move people, how do you persuade people in democracy?”

But for all his non-political commitments, it is with the Tory that Hegseth’s campus profile, nine years after graduation, lives on. The Tory under his leadership was slick and tart, as quick to zing Democrats in Congress as it was to contradict Nassau Hall.

Each month, Hegseth and the other editors would sit around beers and draft “The Rant,” a series of acerbic paragraph takedowns of liberalism, on-campus and beyond.

It was here in The Rant where the Tory’s top editors frequently struck their sharpest — and most contentious — blows.

“Congratulations to Halle Berry for her Oscar-worthy achievement this year. We only wish the performance itself was considered as important as the racial identity of the actor doing it,” the editors of the Tory wrote in April 2002, criticizing Berry for “accepting the award on behalf of an entire race.”

In September, Hegseth and the other editors reacted to The New York Times’ announcement that it would print gay marriage announcements in its pages by arguing that the Times could then logically print announcements of other “marriages.”

“The [New York Times’] explanation sounds nice on the surface, but its logic is dangerous,” The Rant read. “At what point does the paper deem a ‘relationship’ unfit for publication? What if we ‘loved’ our sister and wanted to marry her? Or maybe two women at the same time? A 13-year-old? The family dog?”

When asked in the interview if he stood by everything the Tory wrote under his tenure, Hegseth said he, as publisher, did not see his job as censoring the viewpoints of his writers, giving them the opportunity to be aggressively conservative.

“We were pushing the envelope and a lot of times we gave our writers a lot of latitude and that’s going to come with differences of opinion,” he said.

However, Hegseth said that in retrospect, some specific wordings may have missed the mark.

“There is obviously some phraseology or terms or language that [was] maybe too sharp,” he said.

Occasionally, the language in the Tory prompted counteractions that fed the paper’s publicity. In the October 2002 issue of the Tory, Hegseth and his colleagues wrote in The Rant that, “Boys can wear bras and girls can wear ties until we’re blue in the face, but it won’t change the reality that the homosexual lifestyle is abnormal and immoral.”

In response, USG president Nina Langsam ‘03 asked Hegseth and Tory editor-in-chief Brad Simmons ’03 to avoid attacking homosexual students specifically.

The leadership of the Tory accused the USG president of censoring the publication and sent a press release detailing Langsam’s actions to local media. In an email to the ‘Prince’ on Monday, Langsam declined to comment on the incident.

But perhaps no writing triggered a firestorm of the magnitude sparked by Hegseth’s comments about diversity. The Publisher’s Note that Hegseth wrote argued that the University suffered from a “gratuitous glorification of diversity” at the expense of what he said was the University’s original focus: the classic Western and religious canon.

Hegseth did explain in the column that he was not opposed to diversity, but rather believed that it had been “overstretched.” Regardless, the comments hit a nerve.

Erin Wade ’03 responded in the following month’s publication, writing that Hegseth misunderstood the value of global perspectives. Wade, who studied abroad in Hong Kong and majored in the Wilson School, said in an interview with the ‘Prince’ that this was the only letter she ever wrote in any campus publication.

“Whatever he wrote must have really pissed me off, because I was not active in that way,” Wade said. “I felt his views were embarrassing to the University, and frankly I still think they are.”

Caroline Bone ’03 also reacted sharply to Hegseth’s comments, writing in a letter to the editor in the ‘Prince’ that, after reading his column, she went back to double-check that Hegseth was actually a student at the University.

Both Hegseth and Baehr defended their brand of on-campus conservatism, noting that the University’s political environment made it difficult for conservative arguments to break through.

“We were an edgy publication,” Hegseth said. “We pushed back against the liberal orthodoxy of Princeton. People are going to fight back at it. We were taking on conventional wisdom.”

Baehr attributed the campus reaction to Hegseth’s commentary in the Tory to the campus political climate, explaining that conservatism at the University was an “embattled position.” Baehr explained that the backlash to Hegseth’s comments about diversity specifically was motivated by the optics of the small town Minnesotan’s background.

“There is something about Pete being a handsome white male from the American midwest critiquing diversity that I think leads people to not actually process the argument he is making, so they sort of shut them down because of who he is as a person,” Baehr said.

But to campus liberals like Wade, Conroy and the numerous others that reacted intensely to Hegseth’s conservatism, Hegseth’s arguments reflected more than the natural discord between a political minority and the political majority.

“It is fair to say that the Tory was known for publishing what a lot of people would call offensive statements during the time he was publisher,” Conroy said.

He added that he thought the Tory included offensive statements in order to draw attention to their publication, a strategy Conroy admitted he thought was successful. Hegseth said that by the end of his senior year, it had become the most read publication oncampus after the ‘Prince.’

These offensive statements, Conroy said, will likely play a role in the Senate race in Minnesota.

“I would guess that’s something he will have to deal with in his Senate campaign,” Conroy said. “The quotes probably speak for themselves.”

Hegseth and his colleagues at the Tory, though, defended his words. When asked if the material in the Tory would impact the race in Minnesota, Hegseth said in a follow-up email that while he didn’t necessarily agree with everything printed in the magazine, he supported the diversity of conservative opinion that the Tory offered the student body.

David Schultz, a professor of political science at Hamline University in St. Paul, said that while the comments will not hurt Hegseth among Minnesota’s socially conservative constituencies, it probably will not help him overall in the state.

“If this is a candidate who has a track record of making statements like [those in the Tory], it may not play well except among voters who are already sympathetic or predisposed to those positions,” Schultz said.

Schultz noted that social issues — like those Hegseth wrote about — will be at the forefront of the Minnesota election season because of a constitutional amendment passed last May in the state to define marriage as between a man and a woman. Minnesotans will vote on the amendment this November.

But to Ben Golnik, the former executive director of the Republican Party of Minnesota, Hegseth’s comments from almost 10 years ago are unlikely to play a role in the 2012 Senate race.

“I think going back to college writings that may or may not be attributed to him is probably a stretch,” Golnik said.

Larry Jacobs, who heads the Center for Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said these comments could be especially harmful to Hegseth’s campaign because they cut against the image Hegseth has created of a “clean-cut” veteran without the traditional baggage of a voting record.

Because he is such an unknown to Minnesota voters, Jacobs explained, there will be significant scrutiny of the paper trail from his college years.

“The kind of comments that he made are relevant, timely and quite controversial in Minnesota. I think it’s the kind of the thing that very few people know,” Jacobs said.

Jacobs added that because of Hegseth’s age, it will be difficult for Hegseth to dissociate himself from these writings.

“The comments he made could well be described as youthful indiscretions, but for many will be relevant because he is youthful,” Jacobs said. “Youth is so close to him that it will be difficult to keep these kinds of comments at arm’s length.”