Never Trumper: If a Member of The Squad Called Gen. Milley ‘a Stupid Pig,’ Tucker Carlson Would Be Having a Hissy Fit
Right-wing media types piled on America's top general after he defended critical race theory
Just imagine the outrage if one of the most progressive Democrats in Washington — like Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, known as “AOC,” — were to call the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff “a stupid pig.”
No doubt the right-wing mediasphere would be beside itself in righteous anger — day after day, and night after night — pillorying that hapless progressive until the incident had become a full-blown scandal.
That's what Max Boot, a one-time high-level Republican operative turned independent Never Trumper, asked his readers to consider in a recent column.
Because, in reality, the opposite occurred.
It's been American so-called “conservatives” through right-wing media outlets who have been denigrating Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff appointed by former president Donald Trump.
These far-right media types, who Boot correctly noted, rarely have spent a day in uniform are spewing their performative outrage because Milley had the temerity to defend the study of critical race theory by US servicemembers.
Critical race theory, which has been an academic field of inquiry for decades, has only recently become a right-wing bugaboo in the political right's ongoing “culture wars.”
And, as a result, Fox News host Tucker Carlson — associated with white supremacists and white nationalists — publicly described Milley as “a stupid pig.”
“It’s pretty obvious that people like Tucker Carlson would be having a hissy fit if it had been a member of The Squad — AOC or Ilhan Omar or somebody else — who had called America’s top general a stupid pig, right? You can easily imagine people like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity and all the rest saying these are remarks that show this person is a traitor, they’re un-American, they ought to go back where they come from,” Boot said in a recent interview. “And yet Tucker Carlson gets away with this vile name-calling and there is not a heap of protest on the right. Remember, Tucker Carlson, who has never served a day in uniform in his life, is calling our top general, somebody who is not only a graduate of Princeton and Columbia University, but has served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, who has risked his life, who has been away from his family for years at a time, Tucker Carlson is saying he’s a stupid pig, and the right seems perfectly okay with that. That to me is just vile and unacceptable, but it’s a sign of where the Republican Party is today in the post-Trump era.”
For Boot, who served as an advisor to the Republican presidential campaigns of John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney four years later, such behavior is just a sign of how Donald Trump's debased Boot's former party.
“I think this is another example of how Donald Trump has transformed the Republican Party for the worst. All Donald Trump cares about is personal loyalty to Donald Trump, and so therefore he has been willing to trash the military when he feels like they’re not doing exactly what he wants,” Boot said. “In fact, we have had some recent revelations of that in a new book by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender, who writes about how Trump demanded last summer that the military crack the skulls of civil rights demonstrators, and he was furious when General Milley and other generals refused to go along.”