Opinion – In an unprecedented, thoroughly unprofessional, and dangerous move, this weekend the U.S. military suddenly stopped worrying about China and Russia, Iran, and all other critical threats to the U.S., and aimed their biggest guns at an American TV news pundit. The threat?
Tucker Carlson bashed the Pentagon’s new leftist ‘woke’ politics, mocked pregnant women in combat and decried the feminization of the U.S armed forces. However, he never criticized women in the military, just the Pentagon’s obsession with catering to their every whim, in order to recruit more.
Tucker said, as quoted by The Hill: “So we’ve got new hairstyles and maternity flight suits. Pregnant women are going to fight our wars. It’s a mockery of the U.S. military,” adding, “While China’s military becomes more masculine as it has assembled the world’s largest navy, our military needs to become, as Joe Biden says, more feminine, whatever feminine means anymore.”
For that, the U.S. military’s retort against a U.S. citizen expressing his Constitutionally protected right to free speech was furious, fast, and frightening.
Rogue nations can threaten the U.S. with nuclear weapons or assassination against our president without a response, but in today’s America a TV news commentator can’t criticize the Pentagon’s increasingly bizarre obsession with leftist social engineering, without a full nuclear counterstrike by our nation’s top military leaders.
CNN reported on this unprecedented domestic barrage by Pentagon brass which targeted Tucker by name:
Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin shared the same “revulsion” that many military leaders have expressed about the comments Carlson made.
Kirby said the military still had “a lot of work to do” to become “more inclusive, more respectful of everyone — especially women.”
“Women lead our most lethal units with character. They will dominate ANY future battlefield we’re called to fight on,” tweeted the Sergeant Major of the Army, Michael A. Grinston. “@TuckerCarlson’s words are divisive, don’t reflect our values.”
General Paul Funk, head of Army Training and Doctrine Command tweeted that “thousands of women serve honorably every day around the globe.”
“They are beacons of freedom and they prove Carlson wrong through determination and dedication,” Funk added.
The senior enlisted leader at the US Space Command, Marine Corps Master Gunnery Sgt. Scott H. Stalker, called Carlson’s show “drama TV” and said he wished to “remind everyone” that Carlson’s opinion was “based off of actually zero days of service in the armed forces.”
Tucker then fired back at the ‘woke’ DoD leaders with more ridicule, as reported by The Hill, rebuking the “woke generals” for their attacks, saying he and his supporters were not “rattled”:
We were almost rattled. Then we realized if the woke generals treat us like they’ve treated the Taliban, we’ll be fine. Twenty years later, the Taliban are still here. Maybe we ought to promise the Pentagon that we’ll get rid of traditional gender roles on this show. Change the pronouns, defeat the patriarchy, and all that.
While Tucker took the Pentagon’s attacks in stride, all Americans should be deeply concerned. When the U.S. military, arguably still the world’s most powerful force, aims its rhetorical guns at a well-known U.S. citizen for simply expressing his opinion, when can they point those same massive guns at any one of us?
PAUL CRESPO
Paul Crespo is the Managing Editor of American Defense News. A defense and national security expert, he served as a Marine Corps officer and as a military attaché with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) at US embassies worldwide. Paul holds degrees from Georgetown, London, and Cambridge Universities. He is also CEO of SPECTRE Global Risk, a security advisory firm, and President of the Center for American Defense Studies, a national security think tank.
