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Pentagon declares war on Tucker Carlson over Biden’s ‘maternity flight suits,’ military diversity

'Identity politics is Joe Biden’s priority,' Carlson said 'It’s all that matters.'
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Tucker Carlson

Calvin
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Calvin Freiburger

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March 12, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — The Pentagon may be tasked with overseeing the defense of the United States, but this week it has gone on the offensive against Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson for speaking out against recent actions by President Joe Biden that he argues weaken America’s armed forces.

“There’s much, much more work to be done to ensure that women’s leadership is recognized  and we have more diverse leaders; we reach the top echelons of command for all who are qualified, including all women — all women; and that all women feel safe and respected in our military — period,” Biden said Monday to mark International Women’s Day. “Some of it is relatively straightforward work where we’re making good progress designing body armor that fits women properly; tailoring combat uniforms for women; creating maternity flight suits; updating — updating requirements for their hairstyles. And some of it is going to take — and — you know, an intensity of purpose and mission to really change the culture and habits that cause women to leave the military.”

Carlson took aim at those comments during his Tuesday broadcast:

“So we’ve got new hairstyles and new maternity flight suits, pregnant women are going to fight our wars,” he said. “It’s a mockery of the U.S. military. While China’s military becomes more masculine as it assembles the world’s largest Navy, our military needs to become more feminine, whatever feminine means anymore because men and women no longer exist. The bottom line is it’s out of control. And the Pentagon’s going along with this. This is a mockery of the U.S. Military and its core mission which is winning wars.”

That monologue elicited heated criticism from military officials. 

“I want to be very clear right up front, that the diversity of our military is one of our greatest strengths,” Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby responded Thursday. “We pledge to do better” to “make our military more inclusive,” and “we will. What we absolutely won’t do is take personnel advice from a talk show host or the Chinese military. Maybe those folks feel like they have something to prove — that’s on them. We know we’re the greatest military in the world today and even for all the things we need to improve, we know exactly why that’s so.”

Undaunted, Carlson responded to his critics during his Thursday broadcast:

 

“Perhaps maternity flight suits have been around for a while. We’ve never heard of them,” Carlson said. “That phrase stuck out not because we have some hateful bias against pregnant women flying military jets. We’re pro-pregnancy, as we often say. We’re also open-minded. Maybe pregnant women make the best pilots. The Department of Defense measures everything, so there has to be extensive research on this question. If the Pentagon can show that pregnant pilots are the best, we will be the first to demand an entire Air Force of pregnant pilots.

“The problem is, we’re pretty confident that Joe Biden hasn’t asked to see those numbers,” he continued. “We’d bet money he never even thought to ask. The rest of us depend on the U.S. military to protect our families and to protect the country itself. Joe Biden doesn’t see it that way. Finding the most effective military pilots — or infantry officers, or SEAL teams — is not his priority. It’s not even close to his priority. Identity politics is Joe Biden’s priority. It’s all that matters.”

“Here’s a reminder: the U.S. military exists to fight and win wars. That is its only purpose,” Carlson explained. “The U.S. military is not an NGO. It is not a vehicle for achieving equity. It is not a social experiment. It’s definitely not an employment agency; nobody has a God-given right to work in the military. If you ever hear this show whine that Delta Force is discriminating against paunchy, 51-year-old cable news hosts, you’ll know we’ve lost the thread. It’s not about us, it’s about the country. Making people feel valued and included is a good thing, but it is not the point of the U.S. military. It cannot be the point of the U.S. military, or else we’re done.”

Carlson then turned his focus to Biden’s Secretary of Defense, Gen. Lloyd Austin. “For centuries, our military has been self-consciously non-partisan,” but “Lloyd Austin is openly political,” he said. “In his first days on the job, Austin made the entire armed services submit to a kind of political purity test. Anyone with views that he found ‘extreme’ had to leave … Then Austin set about accelerating poisonous trends already in progress at the Pentagon, the worst of these being the use of irrelevant criteria in hiring and promotion.”

“In order to meet the demands of various Democratic interest groups, the Pentagon has dramatically lowered standards in the services,” Carlson continued. “They officially deny this, but it’s true. Ask anyone who works there. If you press the spokesmen, they’ll tell you that it’s not a big deal because traditional standards don’t really measure anything. Well, then why have them in the first place? Why have standards at all? It doesn’t make sense. They’re lying. And they’re lying because they have to lie. Politicians have demanded it.”

“We’re not playing along, sorry,” Carlson declared. “Every American citizen has a right, maybe an obligation, to know what the military they pay for is doing because our lives may depend on it.”

One of Biden’s first acts as president was to reprioritize identity politics over military effectiveness by lifting the Trump administration’s policy disqualifying individuals with gender dysphoria from military service. Others within the defense establishment have pushed for extending the draft to women in the name of “equality.”

“We are being fed a bill of goods that this is about equal rights, and if women have equal rights then they should be drafted too. All of this is garbage,” female Marine Corps veteran Jude Eden, who served in Iraq, argued in 2016. “Equal rights do not mean that we must do the same things. It doesn’t mean that we can perform the same roles, especially when those roles require intense physical demand. No matter how prevalent feminism becomes, it will not make women’s bones as dense as men’s. It will not give us boundless supplies of testosterone coursing through our veins.”

“I mean, we can juice all our females and send them all to CrossFit, but they’re still not gonna be, against men who want to kill them, that’s not an equal opportunity to survive,” she continued. “They’ll target those women first. Women are higher-value targets not only as POWs, but as video fodder, for video propaganda to demoralize the country, demoralize the units, demoralize the war effort.”

The steady rise of political correctness within the military, which has persisted since the Clinton years despite the presidencies of Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump, appears to be taking its toll on military readiness. This week, Yahoo News revealed a simulation the U.S. Air Force ran last fall to assess America’s ability to handle a Chinese biological attack culminated in disaster — which, according to one official, was not an outlier.

“More than a decade ago, our war games indicated that the Chinese were doing a good job of investing in military capabilities that would make our preferred model of expeditionary warfare, where we push forces forward and operate out of relatively safe bases and sanctuaries, increasingly difficult,” Air Force Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements, told Yahoo.

“At that point the trend in our war games was not just that we were losing, but we were losing faster. After the 2018 war game I distinctly remember one of our gurus of war gaming standing in front of the Air Force secretary and chief of staff, and telling them that we should never play this war game scenario [of a Chinese attack on Taiwan] again, because we know what is going to happen. The definitive answer if the U.S. military doesn’t change course is that we’re going to lose fast. In that case, an American president would likely be presented with almost a fait accompli.”