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Tucker Carlson under fire after mocking the idea of pregnant women serving in the US armed forces

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Fox News host Tucker Carlson is under fire after mocking the idea of pregnant women serving in the nation’s armed forces.

During his Wednesday night show Carlson mentioned that President Biden had acknowledged that military uniforms had been tailored during his International Women’s Day remarks. Carlson said that the armed forces have “got new hairstyles and maternity flight suits. Pregnant women are going to fight our wars. It’s a mockery of the U.S. military. While China’s military becomes more masculine, as it assembles the world’s largest navy, our military needs as Joe Biden says become more feminine … The bottom line is, it is out of control, and the Pentagon is going along with this.” Carlson went on to say that the move was “a mockery of the U.S. military and its core mission, which is winning wars.”

His opinion quickly drew criticism from active military members, veterans and veterans groups. Perhaps even more surprisingly the Pentagon took an unprecedented shot at Carlson with Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby saying in a news briefing on Thursday, “What we absolutely won’t do is take personnel advice from a talk show host or the Chinese military,” Kirby also said that, “Maybe those folks feel like they have something to prove — that’s on them. We know we’re the greatest military in the world today and even for all the things we need to improve, we know exactly why that’s so.”

The official Army Twitter account took a more veiled jibe at Carlson when it tweeted a picture of a woman service member saluting with the caption “I am an American Soldier. I am a Warrior and a member of a team.”  Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth who is a recipient of the Purple Heart and who lost both legs during a deployment in Iraq displayed her outrage on Twitter when she posted “F*ck Tucker Carlson. While he was practicing his two-step, America’s female warriors were hunting down Al Qaeda and proving the strength of America’s women,”     

Following a firestorm of criticism Carlson announced on Twitter that he would respond to the comments made by the military on his Thursday night show saying in the tweet that the Department of Defense had treated his show like “a hostile foreign power.” In his response Carlson said that whenever Biden spoke about the flight suits and hair styles he said that the “phrase stuck, not because we have some hateful bias against pregnant women flying military jets. We’re pro-pregnancy as we often say.”

He then went on to say that he was “open-minded” and that “maybe pregnant women make the best pilots. The Department of Defense measures everything so there’s gotta be extensive research on this question. If the Pentagon can show that pregnant pilots are the best, we will be the first to demand an entire air force of pregnant pilots.” Carlson asserted that the only problem he found with the changes was that he believed it was unlikely that President Biden would have looked at such figures and that Biden had only made the changes because of “identity politics.”

ARTICLE: NATHAN REID

POLITICS EDITOR: CARSON CHOATE

PHOTO CREDITS: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

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