ANALYSIS – I rarely watch TV news. And I didn’t always agree with Tucker Carlson. Sometimes I strongly disagreed – such as on Russia.
But I often did agree.
And he challenged the left AND the GOP establishment every night on Fox.
He will be missed.
He also challenged the woke leadership at the Pentagon. And for that he should be greatly applauded.
Carlson was never anti-military.
On the contrary, he was opposed to its current emasculation by Joe Biden and his team. Carlson was also opposed to the divisive, destructive, and subversive neo-Marxist ideology being imposed on our troops.
Sadly, the lefty spinmeisters in the media and those same leftist ideologues, partisan hacks, and simply misguided folks at the Department of Defense (DoD) keep trying to paint a different picture.
Politico’s Lara Seligman tries to paint Carlson as anti-military by conflating his criticism of the woke brass with the entire armed forces. In her piece, ‘Good riddance’: Pentagon officials cheer Tucker Carlson’s ouster, she writes:
From maternity flight suits to diversity policies to Ukraine aid, the military was a favorite punching bag for Tucker Carlson. Now that he’s off the air, some Pentagon officials are quietly cheering his departure.
Her flawed journalism is also obvious as she mostly quotes a couple of unnamed (likely Biden Pentagon appointee) sources.
Per her two “DoD officials”:
“We’re a better country without him bagging on our military every night in front of hundreds of thousands of people,” said one senior DoD official, who like others interviewed for this story was granted anonymity to discuss a politically sensitive topic.
“Good riddance,” said a second DoD official.
Seligman goes on to quote these unnamed sources, writing:
Carlson “made a mockery” of the free press and “repeatedly cherry-picked department policies and used them to destroy DoD as an institution,” said the first senior DoD official.
What nonsense. The leftist ideologies in charge are the ones destroying DoD, not a cable TV talk show host.
Still, she voids most of her own reporting when she admits that most of the American military agreed with Carlson, and it’s the Pentagon leadership that is grossly out of touch:
Carlson’s criticism of Biden-era personnel policies appealed to many of the rank-and-file, which has a large bloc of conservative members. But at the upper levels of the Defense Department, news of Carlson’s firing from Fox News on Monday was met with delight and outright glee in some corners.
Then there is the un-self-aware liberal executive editor of Defense One, Kevin Baron, who never served in the military, who absurdly claimed “Tucker Carlson Helped Turn Americans Against the Military.”He writes: “For all the ways Tucker Carlson left his mark on U.S. politics, few are as startling as helping to turn right-wingers against the troops they once revered.”He also ignorantly called the notoriously independent Carlson a “partisan firebrand” when he criticized GOP establishment politicians almost as much as the left.
Well, I can tell Baron that, as one of those ‘right wingers’ who still reveres the troops – and was once one of them – he is a lefty ideologue.
And sadly, Baron doesn’t realize it.
That makes him a biased, partisan journalist who tries to appear not to be.
Every point he makes is suffused with his anti-Trump rancor and lefty disdain. And many of his arguments are unsupportable, false, or make the opposite case.
Baron writes:
Right-wing scholars and editorial boards interpreted the data to say that Biden’s “woke” policies were to blame, noting that half of respondents said it was a contributing factor. But that ignores the partisan cross-section: 68% of Trump voters were more upset about wokeness, while just 44% of Biden voters were. That’s the Carlson effect.
Well, that gives a cable TV talk show host with 3 million viewers a lot of sway in a country of 330 million and a dozen liberal media outlets that reach many tens of million.
But Baron best undermines his own case most when he concludes:
The most recent Reagan Forum poll found that 80% of Biden voters and 83% of Trump voters said they still have either “a great deal” or “some” confidence in the U.S. military. That shows that even his audience knows the difference between the performance art of partisanship and the apolitical service to one’s country.
Yes, Mr. Baron, we absolutely understand. Sadly, you clearly don’t.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
