Friday, Tucker Carlson kicked off a firestorm.

His monologue focused n the barking shambles that Joe Biden has made of the Department of Defense in less than two months.

His theme was the degree to which the Biden bunch is focusing on making the military a test bed for woke orthodoxy and putting combat readiness, particularly readiness to confront Joe Biden’s paymasters in Beijing, in its rearview mirror. He took, as a point of departure, Biden’s mumblings on the occasion of “International Women’s Day.”

Carlson’s strongest point was directed at Biden’s decision to appoint a secretary of defense who is not only beholden to the defense industry but a rabid partisan

Joe Biden has put a man called Lloyd Austin in charge of the Pentagon. Biden plucked Austin from the cynical world of private equity, but you’re not supposed to notice that. You’re supposed to notice only that Lloyd Austin is Black. The real headline, however, is that Lloyd Austin is the second defense secretary in a row to have been on the payroll of Raytheon, the massive defense contractor. If you saw something like this happen in a Central American country, you would call it corruption, and you would be right.

For centuries, our military has been self-consciously non-partisan. In a democracy, it has to be that way. No country can survive if its armed forces become the tool of a specific political party. We know that because it happens all the time, all over the world, and the consequences are always horrifying. It has never happened here.

However, Lloyd Austin is openly political. 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. The rest of us watched as this happened, and once again, no one said anything. The left approved, the right felt hamstrung because they support the troops. Of course, if you support the troops, you should probably speak up when they’re being abused.

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.

Then Carlson narrowed in on this one quote.

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:

That women are — making sure more diverse candidates are considering — being considered for career-advancing opportunities at every single level.

That women aren’t penalized in their careers for having children.

That women aren’t just token members, but integral parts throughout all branches and all divisions.

And that they can completely, fairly engage in promotion and compete all across the board, including on the — on age and gender neutrality and the physical fitness test.

Let’s be serious. If you take time out of your career to have children, you should be penalized unless male officers (or homosexual officers) are also given a “sabbatical.” When lieutenants are selected for promotion to captain at somewhere around the three-year point of their time in service, it isn’t reasonable, or equitable, to have male officers who have served three years competing equally with women who have only served only about two due to pregnancy and maternity leave.

If women take any physical fitness test based on “gender neutrality,” they aren’t going to be, as a group, terribly competitive. The Army had a “gender-neutral” physical fitness test directly modeled on tasks soldiers are required to perform in combat, but it is being trashed because 65% of women in the Army can’t pass it. I suspect that Biden uses “neutrality” to mean that performance levels are skewed to “norm” the test to compensate for lack of physical ability.

And he highlighted the monumental lack of seriousness in all of this, again quoting Biden:

You know, some of — 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.

Nothing here makes sense. How do you justify the expense of designing, producing, and distributing body armor that “fits women properly?” Why create “maternity flight suits” when pregnant women can’t be on flight duty (this also goes back to the promotion penalty issue)? Are male hairstyles being updated to allow man-buns?

This is a sign of a military that has lost its way and has no greater purpose than to ensure the correct kind of person is promoted to the highest possible level of command. As an aside, a few months ago, I visited the US Army Museum at Fort Belvoir, VA. If you get the chance to visit, it is well worth the time. In the “hall of fame” was this “first”:

Keep in mind that this is a military service that has as its service academy motto “Duty, Honor, Country” and a credo of “a cadet does not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do,” and which preached “integrity” all the time honoring a woman who lied and cheated to advance her career because she was successful in pulling off her deception over a long period of time.

The Department of Defense’s reaction and the military services to Carlson’s was something out of a horror movie.

My colleagues have commented on it, see Tucker Brings Straight Fire and Truth in Response to DOD’s Unprecedented Political Attack, Tammy Duckworth Is Immensely Triggered by Tucker Carlson, but Her Response Is Still Garbage, Official Military Twitter Accounts Start Attacking Tucker Carlson in Shocking, Highly Politicized Display, but suffice it to say the response was unprecedented in its grotesque lack of professionalism. Never before have serving general officers weighed in on commentary by a cable news talk show host in such a juvenile way. Never before has a military organization’s public affairs apparatus been enlisted to stir up social media invective directed against that host.

This is what happens when you have active duty senior leaders on video, in uniform, on official accounts, leading fm the front to signal their domestic political fancy

The junior people will follow. Not sure where the civ/mil folks are but if this is the precedent you want… pic.twitter.com/fqYBGbDYhK

— cdrsalamander (@cdrsalamander) March 13, 2021

This is a disgrace. https://t.co/C1tuJFX64D

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) March 13, 2021

The vehemence of the reaction and the chosen subject show that Carlson hit the point. The Armed Forces’ senior leadership is now as much an arm of the Democrat party as the typical university gender studies department. They’ve stopped caring about training and have zero self-discipline, so you can expect that is now the coin-of-the-realm in the lower ranks. They knew they couldn’t defend Austin or counter Carlson’s critique of what is happening, so they manufactured a “Tucker Carlson hates women in the military” narrative. If you think this happened organically without official direction from the SecDef’s office, you need to take a deep breath. The invective directed against Carlson comes from the official accounts of military officials.

Italian communist Antonio Gramsci is often credited with coining the phrase “the long march through the institutions.” This describes the process whereby communists undermine a nation by slowly taking over its institutions. This episode is a clear indication that the US military has followed Hollywood and academia and the civil service into the camp of institutions that can no longer be counted upon to defend this nation or its laws.

My advice to the next Republican president would be to carry out a thorough purge of the officer corps of all branches of the military and get rid of anyone remotely connected with this imposition of wokeness on our Armed Forces.