There’s nothing more entertaining in public life these days, especially with Trump in retirement, than Tucker Carlson’s quarterly incitement of leftoid vitriol online. This week it was middle-aged generals acting like middle-school girls, after Carlson suggested on air that perhaps pregnant women are not the ideal candidate for combat roles in the military. To respond, military leaders, in uniform, published selfies on Twitter citing Carlson’s lack of military experience, the supposed unseriousness of his profession in comparison, his age, and many more peripheral, arbitrary, and mostly untrue aspects of his character and tone: anything but the actual merits of his point.
To borrow a jargony phrase from the academics who brought you the woke revolution, there’s a lot to unpack here.
First, Tucker’s broader point about the institutional feminization and relative unseriousness of the military was proven embarrassingly accurate by their own hysterical, social media-based response. How weak are the wokerati’s sacred cows, which can be slaughtered simply by pointing out their absurdity. And how venomous is the NPC vipers’ spittle-lipped “clapback.” It’s almost as if their career is built around toeing the line.
This brings us to another point: how thoroughly and successfully the lackeys of woke ideology have infiltrated the military: a historic institutional touchstone for conservatives. Any long-harbored illusions about the ideological imperviousness of the military, much like the judiciary, should be dashed by this moment. Frankly, it’s a shame that heartland boys keep joining up, imagining that whatever vestige of masculinity that remains will provide a path to honor and brotherhood, considering that the American military’s reigning ideology makes a mockery and an enemy of them. What better fodder for the endless wars than men you’d like to see dead anyway?
Finally, especially as a recently pregnant woman, the thing that strikes hardest about the entire discourse is the degree to which adult men are willing to completely ignore the fact of women and infant’s prenatal vulnerability. I’m not sure a meaningfully large contingent of our military needs a maternity flight suit, but to the extent that a woman requires such a thing, she is a delusional, malignant careerist and in a sane world would never find herself in such a position. That any one would condone the idea that a mother and child in that precarious period of both of their lives (or any part of their lives postpartum) should be anywhere near guns, helicopters, or big boom boom machines of any sort, let alone areas of the world known for rapist enemy combatants, demonstrates that there is something deeply wrong with their understanding of life itself.
We have forgotten why wars are ever fought in the first place. It’s understandable within the broader context of fighting pointless ones endlessly that America has lost the script. Lest we have forgotten completely: war is often about death for the sake of life. War is politics by other means, propelled by fear, honor, and interest, of course, but undergirding any classical definition is the fact that wars are fought so that a people can continue to exist how they please. Women, as conduits of new life in the world, have no place on the front lines of war because they are the thing—the precious, precarious, transcendentally beautiful and powerful channel for the continued existence of the species—that men will go to any lengths to preserve to ensure the honor of his legacy and his progeny. The happy warrior writes himself into the past so that his children may have a future.
Maternity flight suits are symptoms of the spiritually suicidal state. We are a nation of womanly men, mannish women, and disposable children. Those three have everything to do with one another. The culture of death marches on.
