This position requires Senate confirmation
Summary:
The nomination of Pete Hoekstra to the position of U.S. Ambassador to Canada signals Trump’s continued willingness to promote those with anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-LGBTQ+ views. Throughout Hoekstra’s time in elected office, which stretches back to the 1990s, he was an early adopter of these themes, supporting what were once fringe positions, but are now central to the MAGA movement. He has long vehemently fought against LGBTQ+ rights, supported anti-immigrant policies and border vigilante groups such as the Minutemen, and argued for the privatization of education. During the first Trump administration, he was Ambassador to the Netherlands, a time he spent mired in scandals for his opposition to LGBTQ+ rights, past anti-Muslim comments alleging non-existent “no-go zones” in the country, and support for local virulently anti-Muslim politicians such as Thierry Baudet and Geert Wilders, who have both been sanctioned for their bigoted speech. He also insulted the Jewish community by visiting a WW2 cemetery for German soldiers. His past comments signal his belief in racist conspiracy theories such as the white supremacist “Great Replacement” and “Eurabia,” which both allege European and American elites’ are secretly engaged in transforming the demographics of their countries by way of immigration. His current position at the anti-Muslim Gatestone Institute demonstrates that his anti-Muslim views have not changed.
In His Own Words:
“The Islamic movement has now gotten to a point where they have put Europe into chaos. Chaos in the Netherlands, there are cars being burnt, there are politicians that are being burnt … and yes there are no-go zones in the Netherlands.”
- Hoekstra, Speaking on a David Horowitz Freedom Center panel on “Muslim Migration into Europe: Eurabia Come True?” November 2015
“As Wilders receives still new fatwas, we would do well to recognize the price that he and others have paid for expressing their points of view. As the powers that be continue clamping down on the free speech we all should cherish, we must recognize the value and strength that people like Wilders, and even those who burn flags, bring to the public square. We may or may not agree with their views, but should recognize that through their freedom of expression they enrich the debate and discourse. They make us stronger, not weaker.”
- Hoekstra, “More Islamic Death Threats in Europe: Dutch MP Targeted Twice,” Gatestone Institute, May 11, 2022
“Republicans and Democrats have been dismantling that paradigm for the last 50 years. In that time, local schools have shifted from safe zones where parents could assume that values taught at home would be reflected at their local government school. Instead, government schools are being forged into the latest tool used to indoctrinate our children with Marxist ideology. To them, parents are no longer an integral part of the learning process, parents have apparently become an impediment.”
- Hoekstra, “Parents Teaching or Government Indoctrination – You Choose,” Gatestone Institute, October 26, 2021
“While the media may portray this as a battle about COVID mandates, American history, or the teaching of sexuality, those are just the scrimmages that we are witnessing. The real battle is for who the teacher will be in our children’s lives — parents and loving local individuals who know our children’s names, or faceless government bureaucrats hell-bent on indoctrinating our children with their particular worldview. This is an attack and disruption of the nuclear family as prescribed by Black Lives Matter.”
- Hoekstra, “Parents Teaching or Government Indoctrination – You Choose,” Gatestone Institute, October 26, 2021
A Far-Right Pioneer
Cornelis Piet Hoekstra, more commonly known as Pete Hoekstra, is a Dutch-born politician who came to the United States as a child. Hoekstra’s political career first began when he unseated the Republican incumbent House Rep. Guy Vander Jagt, who had represented Michigan’s 2nd district for 26 years, in a 1992 Republican primary. It was known for being the state’s most right-wing district. He later went on to win the general election against his Democratic and Libertarian competitors. During his time in Congress, he served as the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 2004 to 2007, and Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee until January 2011, after which he left Congress.
During his time as a Representative, Hoekstra had a very right-wing voting record, supporting efforts to make it more difficult to bring lawsuits against gun manufacturers, voting against the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban, pushing back against LGBTQ+ rights, and pursuing harsh policies against immigrants. In an effort to court supporters from the then-rising Tea Party Movement, Hoekstra became one of the founding members of the Congressional House Tea Party Caucus in 2010, alongside far-right and rabidly anti-LGBTQ+ Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), a constituency that would later join the MAGA Movement.
Hoekstra eventually decided against running for the House of Representatives in 2010 and chose to run for the governor of Michigan, where he lost in the Republican primaries to challenger Rick Snyder. He then ran for the U.S. Senate in 2012, with the endorsement of Bachmann, and lost to the Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow in the general election. His defeat was widely believed to have been due to a racist Super Bowl ad he aired which depicted a Chinese national in China thanking his opponent, Stabenow, for the “money” and “jobs” that they take due to her policies.
Between 2011 and 2017, Hoekstra joined a number of organizations such as the D.C. law firm Dickstein Shapiro, the Heritage Foundation, and the anti-Muslim group, Investigative Project on Terrorism.
During the first Trump administration, Heokstra was nominated and subsequently sworn in as Ambassador to the Netherlands in 2018 and stayed in the position until January 17, 2021. His time as ambassador was marred by a number of scandals related to his previous anti-Muslim comments, and his proximity to Dutch far-right, rabidly anti-Muslim politicians such as Thierry Baudet and Geert Wilders.
Dutch LGBTQ+ advocacy groups were unsettled by Hoekstra’s nomination as ambassador due to his long record opposing LGBTQ+ rights. In July 2020, Jewish advocacy groups were outraged after Hoekstra tweeted about visiting a cemetery for German soldiers, where many Nazis were buried and where neo-Nazis frequently go to honor them. In September 2020, Hoekstra organized a party at the U.S. embassy for anti-Muslim politician Thierry Baudet and his supporters, which led to Dutch politicians complaining of “election interference.”
On January 20, 2024, Hoekstra became the chair of the Michigan Republican Party. After Trump won the November election, Hoekstra was nominated for the position of the Ambassador to Canada.
Anti-LGBTQ+, Christian Nationalist Views
Hoekstra has a long history of opposing LGBTQ+ rights. In 2004, he voted in support of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, and in 2006 supported a proposal to amend the Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman. He was a co-sponsor of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman for purposes of federal law, and allowed states to not recognize the marriage status of same-sex couples from other states. In July 1999, he voted to ban adoptions by same-sex couples in the District of Columbia, he opposed a proposal to prohibit job discrimination based on sexual orientation in November 2007, and voted against a proposal to include anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes as a category in the FBI’s hate crime statistics in April 2009.
On questions related to religion, in December 2003 Hoekstra was rated “100 percent” by Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, made up of conservative fundamentalist Christians. Heokstra voted in favor of only giving federal aid to schools that allow voluntary prayer in March 1994, voted to allow school prayer in November 2001, and voted to prevent the courts from deciding on the inclusion of “God” in the Pledge of Allegiance in July 2006. He is also in support of private charter schools, and voted in 1997 to allow vouchers for private and parochial schools.
Project 2025 and the Dismantling of the Department of Education
The Heritage Foundation’s rights-stripping authoritarian Project 2025, put together by more than 100 far-right organizations (see Global Project Against Hate and Extremism’s (GPAHE) previous reporting on Project 2025 here), argues for the Department of Education to be shuttered. They advocate for this, in large part, due to their desire to remove “woke” material in school curriculums that they consider injects “racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.”
Although they do not mention his specific contribution, Heokstra is listed as a contributor to Project 2025. In the document, a House of Representatives subcommittee report that he co-authored in 1998 was cited in the section on the Department of Education titled “Education at a Crossroads: What Works and What’s Wasted in Education Today.” In it, Hoekstra concluded that the Department of Education had become a bloated, costly, and inefficient institution that needed reforming. In an effort to shift the blame from the underfunding of public schools, the authors of the 1998 report concluded that “successful schools and school systems were not the product of federal funding but instead were characterized by parents involved in the education of their children.” In the minority response to the report entitled “Crossroads Hearings: A Republican Assault on Public Education,” the authors critique what they referred to as a “predetermined agenda” to seek “witnesses to verify or validate” their desired findings.
In a later piece for the anti-Muslim think tank Gatestone Institute, Hoekstra wrote that schools were being used to “indoctrinate our children with Marxist ideology,” a reference to cultural issues related to Covid restrictions, and the teaching of history and sexual education. Another part of the “indoctrination” Hoekstra referred to was “the nuclear family as prescribed by Black Lives Matter (BLM),” a reference to a page on the BLM website which called for the disruption of “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another.”
Anti-Immigrant Views
On immigration, Heokstra received a “100 percent” rating in 2003 from the anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), founded by white nationalist John Tanton. Years before Trump proposed the idea, in 2006, Hoekstra voted to build a fence along the Mexican border. He voted in support of declaring English as the official language of the United States in January 1999 and February 2007, and voted to report to immigration officials undocumented migrants who receive hospital treatment in May 2004.
In the early 2000s, Heokstra showed support for the Minuteman Project, a radical group of militarized border vigilantes based in Arizona upset at immigrants coming from Latin America. The Minutemen, who stationed armed protestors on the Arizona border, would ultimately inject their anti-immigrant hatred into the Tea Parties and then the GOP. In June 2006, he voted to prevent American authorities from reporting to their Mexican counterparts the activities of the members of the Minutemen Project operating in California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
Controversies in the Netherlands
Hoekstra’s many controversies involving the Netherlands began the moment he was confirmed as Ambassador during the first Trump administration. Being a very accepting country for LGBTQ+ people, Hoekstra’s presence in the country was unsettling for many Dutch people. The pro-LGBTQ+ activist group COC Nederland stated at the time that “the position of Mr. Hoekstra on these [LGBTQ+] issues goes against the Dutch policy of promoting acceptance and equal rights for LGBTI people.”
During an interview by Dutch media program Nieuwsuur on December 22, 2017, a reporter asked him why in a debate he referred to “no-go zones” and about “cars and politicians” being “set on fire” in the Netherlands. The quote originated from a November 2015 panel on “Muslim Migration into Europe: Eurabia come True?” organized by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an anti-Muslim organization. The panel’s title was a nod to the racist “Eurabia” conspiracy theory, a predecessor of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which alleges that elites from Arab and Muslim countries, with the cooperation of European elites, are secretly planning to take over Europe through immigration. Hoekstra claimed that the quote was “fake news,” citing the then common Trump comment. The reporter then showed him a clip of the quotation in question. In it, Hoekstra stated: “The Islamic movement has now gotten to a point where they have put Europe into chaos. Chaos in the Netherlands, there are cars being burnt, there are politicians that are being burnt … and yes there are no-go zones in the Netherlands.” He later issued an apology for the incident on Twitter, though did not explain precisely what he was apologizing for.
While Ambassador to the Netherlands, Hoekstra also courted controversy due to his ties to local far-right groups. In July 2020, Hoekstra visited the Ysselsteyn cemetery where a Nazi soldiers are buried, a place where neo-Nazis frequently visit to honor them, which prompted outrage from the Jewish community. In a Twitter post, he wrote: “Walked among the graves at Ysselsteyn, a ceremony for German soldiers from WWI and WWII. A terrible reminder of the cost of going to war and why we must always work towards peace.”
Source: Twitter
In September 2020, it was widely reported that Hoekstra organized a party for the far-right politician Thierry Baudet and 30 to 40 members and wealthy supporters of his anti-immigrant political party Forum voor Democratie (Forum for Democracy, FvD) at the US Embassy in The Hague. The FvD is known for Baudet’s wild conspiracy theories about “reptile control” of the world, support for Vladimir Putin, constantly comparing the Covid lockdowns to the Holocaust, and when its youth wing was found to have shared messages praising the Nazis, Baudet stepped down as party leader in November 2020.
The event at the embassy caused an international incident after Dutch politicians complained of election interference by violating the 1961 Treaty of Vienna. Hoekstra’s ties to the FvD date further back than this incident. In December 2019 he was a speaker at the 2019 FvD party congress and spoke about the ties between the United States and the Netherlands.
As recently as April 2024, Hoekstra stated that he supported the Netherlands far-right politician Geert Wilders, known for being one of the foremost anti-Muslim politicians in the European Union, and claimed to have met Wilders on several occasions. He has written opinion pieces for the Gatestone Institute praising the politician, citing all of his most hateful, anti-Muslim comments as if they were worthy of praise, such as Wilders’ quotes saying that “Islam is the Trojan Horse in Europe,” that “there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam,’” and that “the more Islam that we get in our societies the less freedom we get.”
Positions at Anti-Muslim Organizations
This connection to far-right, anti-Muslim groups in the Netherlands is in line with Hoekstra’s connections to anti-Muslim groups in the United States.
In January 2014, Hoekstra joined the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) as a senior fellow, “specializing in national security, international relations, global terrorism and cyber security,” and would stay in that position until he was nominated as ambassador in 2017. The IPT was started by anti-Muslim activist Steve Emerson who has a long history of demonizing Muslims in the United States by publishing “studies” that paint Muslims as being execptionally-prone to terrorism. Like Hoekstra, Emerson also became notorious internally for claims that there were “no-go zones” in Birmingham, England. IPT later became known for their involvement in a spying scandal in December 2021 involving a “mole” in the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who “spent years secretly recording CAIR network meetings and passing confidential information regarding CAIR’s national advocacy work” to the IPT. Notably, during his time at IPT, Hoekstra would write two pieces on CAIR referring to them as a “front group for the Muslim Brotherhood” with a long “Islamist history.” After returning from the Netherlands, Hoekstra briefly returned to the IPT to write two pieces in 2021. The IPT site continues to refer to him as a “Senior Fellow with the Investigative Project on Terrorism.”
On August 21, 2016, Hoekstra was a speaker at the anti-Muslim group American Freedom Alliance (AFA) conference that regularly conflates radical Islamism, the political ideology, with the religion of Islam, and claims that Muslims are incapable of integrating into American society. In his speech, he claimed that the members of the Obama administration “partnered with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt” to “get rid of [former Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak,” stated that individuals who “wore masks,” a reference to headscarves common in the Muslim world, were incapable of integrating into Western societies, and derided critics who called the group “white supremacists.”
Hoekstra began working for the anti-Muslim Gatestone Institute sometime around June 2021. The Gatestone Institute has published pieces that promote the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, including a December 2021 piece titled “Germany’s Multicultural Suicide” and another from September 2017 called “Europe: The Great White Death?” The organization regularly features opinion articles from anti-Muslim politicians and commentators including Sebastian Gorka, Frank Furedi, Douglass Mourray, Ingrid Carlqvist, and Wilders.
At the Gatestone Institute, Hoekstra has been especially fixated on Iran. He has a rather conspiracist view of the role of Iran in the global system, blaming the country for conflicts in Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Venezuela, Yemen, and Sudan. He has also claimed that former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden had “embraced many groups and individuals that the U.S. had previously shunned because of their links to radical jihadist movements and theology.” Given Hoekstra’s very open support for rabidly anti-Muslim conspiracy theories and politicians, this obsession with radical Islamist regimes abroad appears to be animated more by anti-Muslim sympathies than any actual geopolitical insight.
