A Bad Story from Fox News

It can be difficult to know the truth when different media outlets don’t even agree on the basic foundational facts of the story – or when they don’t even cover the same story so coverage can be compared. Establishing reliability by checking the sources does little good since the sources might not be reliable either. However, sometimes one can know when they are being lied to, and count this against the credibility of the source on other things.

Tucker Carlson ran a story on 27 March 2021 called US military has gone full woke, waging war on those who disagree with them, but he did a lousy job of supporting his case.

Tucker quotes Lloyd Austin warning us of extremists, but extremists are never defined. For all I know, “woke” extremists are meant to be included. Yet, Tucker finds it a problem that the word isn’t defined and uses this as evidence for the worst-case scenario, claiming that even those who merely voted for Trump would be seen as extremists, while obvious extremist groups Antifa and BLM would not be.

Tucker quotes two senators and a congresswoman speaking against white supremacy and extremism, but these are never defined either and there is no hint in these quotes that these labels are meant to be used against Trump supporters or those who would question the establishment.

Tucker quotes Ramon Colon-Lopez, who seems to make a distinction between extremists of the left and right, but the quote is too broken up and mixed with Tucker’s opinions to understand for sure what he is saying.

Tucker mentions a man fired from the DEA merely for being in DC on January sixth and a man charged with a crime by the FBI merely for witnessing some of the events of January sixth. If true, these stories certainly do make the DEA and the FBI look bad, but not necessarily the military.

Tucker links to a military PDF supporting “diversity and inclusion.” Most of it is platitudes and corporate-speak that can be interpreted any number of ways. It is not overtly “woke.”

However, this operation will be run by Richard Torres-Estrada, and this is where it begins to get a little bit interesting. According to Tucker, this man has some questionable Facebook posts, and I do not have the time to confirm this. However, assuming Tucker is telling the truth, it is disturbing that this man is in any sort of leadership position in the military.

Furthermore, Tucker quotes Lt. General Brad Webb saying that “…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.” There is no mention of how pilot licenses should be weighted, and there is no overt claim that the current system excludes and has to change, but how else other than lowering standards can we be sure it won’t exclude in the future? Lowering standards just to have a more ethnically diverse military sounds awfully “woke.” It is General Webb’s statement that is the most troubling.

While Tucker does a lousy job of making his case that the military has gone “woke,” he still does a much better job than the AP did when they claimed that the military was racist. Tucker at least has dubious quotes from those in high leadership positions. The AP only had quotes from those claiming they had experienced discrimination low in the hierarchy.