Tucker: Pentagon isn't doing anything about these threats
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host questions why military leadership is 'purging their ranks' instead of focusing on unknown space threats
The United States has been the most powerful country in the world. That’s the good news. What’s interesting, is that this country has occupied this position for so long, that relatively few Americans have considered what would happen if we slipped from that perch. Would it matter if America became subordinate to other nations? There’s a debate about that. Let’s see. At work, does it matter to you who the boss is? It probably does matter. That’s the person who can fire you. The world isn’t so different from that. The top countries give the orders, the rest of the planet takes the orders, whether they like it or not. We’ve lost sight of that, because, for more than a century, America has effectively been in charge of the world. That’s exactly why we’ve stayed rich and free for that time. Most Americans on some level understand this is an arrangement worth preserving, if only because the options to it are so much worse. How’d you like to be forced to obey the Chinese Communist Party? Not so much. How do you feel about surrendering the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and going bankrupt? No thanks. Most of us would like to avoid outcomes like that.
That’s why we spend more than any county in the world on our military. There’s a reason the Department of Defense is our largest government agency. It’s not just because defense contractors are powerful, it’s because we all agree it’s really important. In exchange for all that money and power, we expect, in return, the Pentagon will stay up late thinking of ways to keep America strong. The question is, have they been doing that? You can judge for yourself. Most of the generals we see quoted in the press seem more committed to meeting some counterproductive diversity goal — hiring more pregnant air force pilots, assembling the world’s first transgender SEAL team — than on defending the United States. The conflicts the Pentagon says it's preparing for seem comically small and outdated, whether it’s wrangling with illiterate tribesmen in Afghanistan, ramping up for some new "war" against a remote group of buildings in Syria, wherever the hell Syria is. Can poor, irrelevant countries really be America’s gravest enemies? We act like it. But they’re not. And that’s been confirmed tonight, by the way. This nation’s most formidable foe, the new secretary of defense just announced, is the weather itself. Going forward, the U.S. military has declared a hot war on global warming:
LLOYD AUSTIN: Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis. We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does.
CONTROVERSIAL BIDEN PENTAGON PICK CONFIRMED BY SENATE
That’s Lloyd Austin, of course. Austin is a former defense contractor, not surprisingly, and a full-time ideologue as well. Having Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon is like handing control of the US military to the editorial page of the New York Times. Austin that the scariest risk our soldier face is the possibility they might serve alongside Americans who didn’t vote for Joe Biden:
LLOYD AUSTIN: 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.
He’s a joke and a mediocrity, and of course, he was confirmed by the Senate as if he was impressive, but he’s not, and the results are entirely predictable. A new report in Revolver News puts a finer point on what exactly is happening at the Pentagon under Lloyd Austin. Austin has hired an activist called Bishop Garrison as the head of the military’s vast "diversity and inclusion" apparatus – a group of offices that has nothing to do with fighting and winning wars. Spend five minutes Googling Bishop Garrison. Treat yourself. He’s a lunatic. A few years ago, he announced that anyone who supports Donald Trump — tens of millions of American citizens, many of whom have served in the military — is a white supremacist. And he said "there is no room for nuance" on that question. Garrison wrote a lot of things like that. You could google them, and you should. Now he’s one of the most powerful officials in the U.S. military. Democrats in Congress are thrilled as they watched this. Their party now has all the tanks and drones. What's strange is Republicans don’t seem to have noticed that it happened. They’re still giving the same vacuous speeches about "the troops" and signing off on ever-expanding defense budgets with no oversight. The effect: The same fighting force that for generations we have been so proud of – the people who stormed Saipan and Guadalcanal - has been captured without a shot by rejects from the Google HR department, and its defenders, the defenders of the troops, can’t be bothered to say a word about it. Do they have a television? Have they seen the Army’s latest recurring ad?
AIR DEFENSE ENHANCED EARLY WARNING SYSTEM OPERATOR EMMA: This is the story of a soldier who operates your nation’s patriot missile defense systems. It begins in California with a little girl raised by two moms…Although I had a fairly typical childhood--took ballet, played violin--I also marched for equality. I like to think I’ve been defending freedom from an early age…A way to prove my inner strength, and maybe shatter some stereotypes along the way.
ARMY RECRUITMENT VIDEO FEATURES LESBIAN WEDDING
"I also marched for equality." Oh, shut up. Who cares? Please stop talking about yourself for once. It’s boring and irrelevant and insulting. This is not just your country, it belongs to all of us. Your job is to defend it, please do so. It’s becoming clear they have no interest in defending it. Here’s the latest evidence. It comes from CBS in a clip from a 60 Minutes report on UFOs and the military.
BILL WHITAKER: A Navy aircrew struggles to lock onto a fast-moving object off the US Atlantic coast in 2015. Recently released images may not convince UFO skeptics but the Pentagon admits it doesn’t know what in the world this is…or this…or this…"
Oh, UFOs, they’re spooky and kinda funny. Crazy people believe in them. Up until you get to the line, "The Pentagon admits it doesn’t know what in the world this is." That’s all you need to know. From a national security perspective, that’s a very big problem. How big a problem is it? One Navy pilot said military observed unidentified objects maneuvering in restricted airspace off the coast of Virginia "every day" for two years:
BILL WHITAKER: The Pentagon confirms these are images of objects it can’t identify. Lt Graves told us pilots training off the Atlantic coast see things like that all the time.
LIEUTENANT RYAN GRAVES: Every day. Every day for at least a couple years.
BILL WHITAKER: Every day for a couple years?
LIEUTENANT RYAN GRAVES: Mm-hmm.
Flying in restricted airspace is not a small thing. Try that in your Cessna 172 off Virginia Beach sometime. You’ll get very wet, very fast. You’ll be killed, actually. Yet the Pentagon did nothing after two full years of daily incursions. Why didn’t they? We’re guessing, but one possible explanation: they couldn’t. Our military was completely outmatched technologically by whatever these were. And whatever they were, they weren’t weather balloons.
UFO REALLY NO LONGER A QUESTION, IT'S A QUESTION OF WHAT THEY ARE: FILMMAKER
Here’s what Lue Elizondo, the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program said:
BILL WHITAKER: You know how this sounds. It sounds nutty, wacky
LUIS ELIZONDO: Look I’m not telling you that it doesn’t sound wacky. I’m telling you it’s real…Imagine a technology that can do 600 to 700 G-forces, that can fly 13,000 miles an hour, that, that can evade radar and can fly through air and water and possibly space, and oh, by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces and yet still can defy the natural effects of Earth’s gravity. That’s precisely what we’re seeing.
Sound like a potential threat? You think? So what has the Pentagon done about it? Well, we don’t know the full story as of tonight. But we don’t know that they’ve done anything about it, and then cover the fact they ignored it by declaring the whole subject classified for decades, then spending the rest of the day thinking about how to bomb Syria again and rid the marine corps of people who voted for Donald Trump.
The sad thing is, we have a whole new branch of the military perfectly designed to assess what these things are, and figure out if they’re a threat or not, and maybe respond. If there was ever a reason to have a Space Force, this is it. But Space Force is otherwise occupied these days. They’re busy conducting political purges of their own ranks, as all the branches of the military are. Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier, commanded a Space Force unit until the White House decided his politics were unacceptable:
MATTHEW LOHMEIER: Since taking command as a commander about 10 months ago, I saw what I consider fundamentally incompatible and competing narratives of what America was, is, and should be. That wasn’t just prolific in social media or throughout the country during this past year, but it was spreading throughout the United States military. And I had recognized those narratives as being Marxist in nature."
So, every day for two years, unidentified flying objects behaving in ways that seemed to contradict what we know about physics, and the U.S. military is spending its time purging its ranks. What does this remind you of? Maybe the Soviet army 1938: A clear and present threat appears on the horizon, but the people in charge are so obsessed with political purity and loyalty to the Party, they can’t respond, because they’re absorbed in attacking their own organization. When they say that all revolutions are the same, they’re right.
FORMER NAVY PILOT RECALLS SEEING HUNDREDS OF UFOS, CALLS THEM SECURITY THREAT
UFOs, it turns out, are real, and whatever else they are, they’re a prima facie challenge to the United States military. They’re doing things the U.S. military does not allow, and they’re doing it with impunity. And they appear to be focused on the U.S. military. UFOs for decades have appeared to have clustered around our military installations – our ships and aircraft, with no real response from the Pentagon except more secrecy. At one point, unidentified flying objects apparently shut down a nuclear weapons facility at an air force base in Montana. Ten ICBMS – Intercontinental ballistic missiles - were temporarily knocked offline -- at the same time base security noticed a glowing red object floating in the sky. It sounds like it was out of a movie, but it happened. That was decades ago. Many more UFOs have been sighted near our nuclear weapons facilities since.
According to journalist George Knapp, quote, "All of the nuclear facilities—Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia, Savannah River—all had dramatic incidents where these unknown aircraft appeared over the facilities and nobody knew where they were from or what they were doing there." For decades this has happened. Apparently, no one knows why. No one seems especially alarmed. In the 1950s some people were worried about this. A declassified FBI document from 70 years ago describes unknown flying objects measuring approximately 50 feet in diameter in the vicinity of the Los Alamos labs.
More recently, the Pentagon has declassified footage from a UFO incident in 2004, and two UFO incidents from 2015. Those incidents were recorded by Navy pilots during training flights, right now on your screen. We have no explanation for what these objects are.
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Just days ago, the Pentagon confirmed that an 18-second video of three UFOs harassing a U.S. warship -- the USS Russell -- is real. The footage was shot back in July 2019 and collected by the Pentagon’s UFO Task Force before it was obtained by journalist Jeremy Corbell.
So the question is: what are these things? Why are they buzzing our skies? Why do they seem attracted to our U.S. military? And above all, why isn’t the Pentagon more focused on this? It seems like a threat if there ever was one.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the May 17, 2021, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."