Tucker: Our military leadership has gone 'woke'
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' examines the Pentagon's war on 'domestic extremism'
The Pentagon’s Special Operations Command recently made an announcement from its official Twitter account.
Special Operations Command is very significant in the U.S. military, and in our country. It oversees Delta Force, the SEAL teams and the rest of our most-celebrated, best-trained and most lethal war-fighters. The tweet announced that a man called Richard Torres-Estrada is now the, "Chief of Diversity & Inclusion" of America’s Special Forces.
They included his picture with the announcement. Then, at the very top of its website, the Special Operations Command included a link to its extensive new "diversity and inclusion strategic plan." The one thing we know about that plan is it will result in the dramatic lowering of standards within our elite ranks. It probably already has. How will that make America safer? The generals never said. You couldn’t find that on the website. Instead, they explained that "all of us understand that diversity and inclusion are operational imperatives." They didn’t say how, they just said they’re imperatives. This is the operation that Richard Torres-Estrada will be running.
The question is: wWho exactly is Richard Torres-Estrada? His Facebook page gives us some indication of who he is. On it, you’ll find an attack on the police, you’ll find crude BLM propaganda, you’ll find a picture of Donald Trump holding a Bible in front of a church. Next to Trump is a photograph of Adolf Hitler. The point is, they’re the same. So, this is the guy who now oversees hiring for the SEALs.
If you’re wondering whether our military leadership has gone woke, consider that question settled for good. The Pentagon is now the Yale faculty lounge, but with cruise missiles. That should concern you.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world rolls on and gets more menacing by the day. Tonight, the Suez Canal, one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, is blocked by a stranded container ship. Was it an accident? Maybe. Maybe not. We don’t know. What we do know is the Suez Canal is vital to the world’s economy. That’s not an overstatement. The Suez Canal is one of about a dozen strategic choke points that control virtually all global trade. Now it’s closed.
This is a challenge to America’s critical national interests. How is the Pentagon responding to this challenge to critical American interests? They’re occupied with other things right now. For the last month, the entire U.S. military has been operating under a so-called "stand-down" order issued by the new Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, the defense contractor who is now running the military.
Lloyd Austin believes the real threat to America is not the Chinese government or paralyzed global trade. The real threat is people who didn’t vote for Joe Biden.
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LLOYD AUSTIN, JAN. 19: And if confirmed, I will fight hard to stamp out sexual assault and to rid our ranks of racists and extremists ... The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies. But we can't do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks.
Forty-three Senate Republicans voted to confirm Lloyd Austin, and they have said virtually nothing about him since, because they’re paralyzed. They’re paralyzed because Lloyd Austin has no problem calling his opponents racist immediately.
"Ridding our ranks of racists and extremists." The key question is, how does Lloyd Austin define a racist or extremist? The definition matters. This show has been denounced as a dangerous White supremacist organ for the crime of reading Martin Luther King quotes on the air. So it’s worth finding out what those words mean. But Lloyd Austin doesn’t provide a definition. That’s not accidental, because what you’re seeing is not an attempt to make the military better. What you’re seeing is a political purge of the military.
Consider what’s been happening during the military's training on "extremism." A lot of enlisted soldiers have asked a pretty basic question: Weren't the BLM and Antifa rioters last summer committed by "extremists?" It seems like they were – they murdered a lot more people than died at the Capitol on Jan. 6. They burned businesses. They wrecked cities. In some places, it took the National Guard to stop them. So why aren’t these people "extremists?"
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A man called Ramon Colon-Lopez was called in to tell the troops why they were wrong. Colon-Lopez is the Senior Enlisted Adviser to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. These questions, he conceded, are "coming from every echelon that we’re talking to. Some people may think that, ‘All right, so the events of 6 January happened. How come you’re not looking at the situation that was going on in Seattle prior to that?'"
Yeah, exactly. Kind of an obvious question. Well Ramón Colón-López has an answer. Actually, it’s more of a threat.
"I am concerned about the way that some people are looking at the current environment and what they are thinking, they can do and act upon based on their personal beliefs," he said.
In other words, if you ask questions like these obvious ones, you are, by definition, dangerous.
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Colón-López said he was working hard to, "make sure that military members understand the difference between Seattle and Washington, D.C." What are those differences exactly? Here’s one: BLM, he explained, is a, "social injustice organization," and therefore not extreme. Also, "When the military was called upon to go ahead and support an effort [in Washington], we did. We never got called for the law enforcement issue that was happening in Seattle."
Oh. So the mayor of Seattle never called the National Guard to put down Antifa. Therefore, Antifa isn’t an extremist organization. That’s ludicrous, obviously. In fact, it’s not even true. In fact, the National Guard did deploy to Seattle during the riots last year. But whatever. Colón-López’s job isn’t to make sense. It was to send a political message from the Biden Administration: we’re in charge now.
This week, we spoke to a DEA agent who was fired for being in Washington on Jan. 6. He didn’t riot. He never went in the Capitol Building. In fact, he even defended cops against rioters. He’s on video doing that. But it didn’t matter. He didn’t vote for Biden, so he’s gone. And he’s hardly alone.
Earlier this month, the FBI arrested an Oklahoma man called Anthony Alfred Griffith. According to the FBI, Griffith’s crime was walking into the Capitol Building through open doors, taking some photos, then handing those photos to federal investigators. The FBI's criminal complaint accuses Griffith of "witnessing multiple people trying to break down a door." Oh, he saw it happen.
For the crime of witnessing other people committing a crime, Anthony Alfred Griffith now faces seven years in prison.
But don't worry. People like Anthony Alfred Griffith, our leaders tell us, are extremists. They're White supremacists. And our military needs to be laser-focused on making certain no one who votes like Anthony Alfred Griffith can ever serve in the armed forces again.
SENATOR TAMMY DUCKWORTH, D-ILL., MARCH 18: We absolutely need to look at any type of White supremacists that are still members of the military and how they are being targeted for recruitment by White supremacist groups and we need to weed this out ... This whole idea of police officer on police officer violence with those officers who have been turned by White extremists is really scary to me. And I know it's got to be scary for the other police officers.
SEN. MAZIE HIRONO, D-HAWAII, MARCH 9: I am considering legislation to create a standalone punitive article in the Uniform Code of Military Justice to address violent extremism in the ranks and to send a message of deterrence, that this kind of conduct will not be tolerated in the military.
REP DEBBIE WASSERMAN-SCHULTZ, D-FLA., MARCH 12: We've seen a lot of reports highlighting how many of the attackers were veterans, and there's been really a growing recognition that the military has to do more to address extremism in its ranks.
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It’s really amazing. Hirono and Duckworth are extremists. They’re the most extreme members of the U.S. Senate. They went on television this week to tell us people with the wrong skin color couldn’t be hired for federal jobs. Did anyone at the Capitol on Jan. 6 call for that? Not one person that we’re aware of. And we denounce it immediately. So, they’re extremist by definition, and they’re lecturing us about extremism.
"The military has to do more to address" extremism. And in a way, they're doing that -- by aggressively promoting it. Every two months, senior enlisted leaders in the military gather for something called "the Commanding General’s Stewardship of the Army Profession forum." In January, the forum included a "professional dialogue" on the racist hate tract "White Fragility" by lunatic Robin DiAngelo. No one condemned Robin DiAngelo's obvious extremism. They celebrated it.
Just last month, Lt. Gen. Brad Webb, the commander of the Air Force Education and Training Command, made it explicit. He acknowledged that the Air Force was recruiting candidates with a private pilot's license. That might seem like a wise course -- flying planes is what the Air Force does -- but to Lt. Gen Brad Webb, no, that’s systemic racism:
LT. GEN. BRAD WEBB: One of the other areas in line with that has been aptitude tests. In fact, the chief mentioned that one as well in his talk the other day. But we are deep underway updating pilot tests and also officer candidate tests that, at its root, you know, you get a weighted score ... if you have a private pilot license. Well, that’s a socioeconomic influencer. In other words, if you’re rich enough to afford to have private pilot time, you can get a license. That ought not be weighted in such a way that you exclude, you know, various ethnic groups.
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The real question is: how does a doughy moron like that end up with an important job in the U.S. military? This isn’t the Department of Transportation. It’s not the DMV. This is a serious thing. This is the federal agency to which we give the most money and exists to protect the rest of us from foreign threats. And guys like that have power?
That guy’s the commander of Air Force Education. And it's not just him. In October, the head of Air Force recruiting office, Major General Ed Thomas, published a piece on Yahoo entitled, "86% of Air Force pilots are [W]hite men. Here's why this needs to change."
You have to wonder what the families of the thousands of American White pilots who have died defending this country over the last hundred years think of that. Ed Thomas wants them to know their husbands and fathers and sons shouldn’t have been flying in the first place, because they were the wrong color.
We called Ed Thomas after his piece came out to ask about this, and he was kind enough to talk to us. We had a long conversation, but he never explained the only thing that matters: How his race-mongering was supposed to make the country safer. He obviously didn’t care. He clearly hadn’t even thought about it. How did someone like that get power in the U.S. military? There are a lot of generals like that.
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Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., represents thousands of military personnel, people who joined the services because they love the country and they want to protect it. No one is speaking up for them right now. So at a hearing in Congress the other day, Matt Gaetz did.
GAETZ: How long until MAGA hats are considered an extremist symbol? How long until Catholic or pro-life groups or those who believe in two genders are too extreme for the ruling Woke-topians? Today is about nothing more than cancel culture coming for our military and it is disgusting.
Disgusting. Usually that’s hyperbole. In this case, it’s understatement.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the March 26, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."