3/15/21
Brian Stelter of CNN notes that Tucker Carlson, Fox News Channel’s top-rated host, has become the “new Donald Trump” as the leading outrage generator on the populist right. Every night Carlson says something false and obscene: It’s his business model. Last week, Carlson trained his insult machine on the U.S. military. He flashed a picture of a flight suit for pregnant women (actually developed during the Trump administration) and complained, “It’s a mockery of the U.S. military.” He went on to pontificate that “while China’s military becomes more masculine,” our military is becoming “more feminine, whatever feminine means anymore since men and women no longer exist. ... It’s out of control, and the Pentagon is going along with this.”
This earned Carlson, who has never served a day in uniform, a well-deserved upbraiding from the Defense Department. There are 232,000 women serving on active duty, constituting 16.5 percent of the total force, and they routinely go into harm’s way. Indeed, recruiting and retaining women is essential to maintaining the U.S. military’s edge over China and other potential adversaries. Carlson’s sexist comments make that harder given how many troops watch Fox News. (It is routinely on in military gyms and chow halls.) Defense Department spokesman John Kirby pledged that “we absolutely won’t … take personnel advice from a talk show host.”
Carlson can dish out criticism but not take it. He spent the next night whining about how the Defense Department shouldn’t attack him — which he described as declaring “war on a domestic news operation.” (Wonder where he was when President Donald Trump was calling the media the “enemy of the people.”) Has Carlson finally gone too far by taking on an institution revered by the country? It would be nice to think so. Sadly, I don’t see that happening in this instance. The populist right has already made clear that its supposed devotion to the armed forces is entirely transactional: They will claim to be supporting the men and women who keep us safe if by doing so they can score points against the “libs.” Expect to see more anti-military sentiment on the right now that the Defense Department is under a Democratic administration. Tucker and Trump should stop pretending that they give a damn about the men and women who serve America. All they care about is self-promotion. They will happily sacrifice the troops on the altar of their own ambition — and their followers won’t care.
