Fox News host Tucker Carlson sharply criticized the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Thursday, calling him a “pig” and “stupid” and saying he got his job because he was obsequious and told his superiors what they wanted to hear.
The stark remarks came a day after Gen. Mark Milley offered a defense of reading about critical race theory in the military. Carlson has been a staunch critic of critical race theory, an area of academia that examines the intersection of race and law.
After playing a segment of Milley’s remarks to a House panel on Wednesday in which he defended reading a wide range of ideas, from Karl Marx on communism to critical race theory, Carlson laughed and said, “He’s not just a pig, he’s stupid.”
“So Mark Milley reads Mao to understand Maoism and he reads communists to understand communism, but it’s interesting that he doesn’t read white supremacists to understand white supremacy,” Carlson continued.
Carlson speculated that Milley would be fired if he was caught reading white supremacists and said “getting fired is the one thing he doesn’t want.”
During the segment, Carlson also claimed that Milley did not get the job because he deserved it, but because he was “he knows who to suck up to.”
“Mark Milley is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He didn’t get that job because he’s brilliant, or because he’s brave, or because the people who know him respect him,” Carlson said as a Fox News chyron read “Military leaders push their ‘woke’ obsession.”
“He is not, and they definitely don’t. Milley got the job because he is obsequious,” Carlson stated. “He knows who to suck up to, and he’s more than happy to do it. Feed him a script and he will read it.”
During Wednesday’s House Armed Services Committee hearing, two Florida Republicans — Reps. Matt Gaetz and Michael Waltz — cited a slide on “white rage” used in a voluntary lecture at West Point and a book titled “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction” that was found on the syllabus of one class.
Milley later told the panel that he believed it was important “for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read.”
“I want to understand white rage, and I’m white,” Milley said at one point.
“Hard to believe that man wears a uniform. He’s just that unimpressive,” Carlson said, before adding “Notice he never defined white rage.”