This morning, FOX & Friends ran a segment on the importance of forcing children to say the Pledge of Allegiance in a way that would be horrifying if we saw the same clip in, say, North Korea.

Host Pete Hegseth hilariously claimed the Pledge, with its lies about this being a nation “under God” and one with actual “liberty and justice for all,” was a unifying force in public schools. He never brought up why some students — not just atheists — choose to sit it out or not say it at all.

One of the many children used as props for the piece gave away the game, though, when she told Hegseth why it’s so important to say the Pledge:

Well, this is my home, and one of the parts [of] the Pledge of Allegiance says that “One Nation Under God” which teaches me this is a Christian nation, and that our Founding Fathers believed we would answer to God.

Yep. It’s Christian propaganda. That’s why the many of us don’t say it. This isn’t a “Christian nation,” in any sense of the word, and someone lied to that girl about what the Founders wanted. They were fighting for religious freedom, not trying to push their beliefs on everybody. Many of them weren’t even Christian.

Colby Hall at Mediaite says this whole segment was just “bizarre and unnerving“:

Hard to describe this bizarre segment in a pithy manner, but [it’s] easy to imagine future historians pointing to it as the peak (or nadir) of a larger culture war, the winner of which will determine the outcome.

Hegseth ends the segment by telling the kids, “Keep saying the Pledge. Keep loving this country”… as if the two are synonymous. They’re not. If you’re looking for true patriots, look to the people fighting to make it better, not the people blindly repeating a loyalty oath because there’s pressure on them to do so.

Someone should let him know the Pledge was written by a Socialist and didn’t include “under God” in its original version. That, just like rules mandating daily recitation of the Pledge, was a political move by conservatives.

You don’t have to say the Pledge. More importantly, there are many good reasons not to. You just won’t hear about them on FOX News.

