Fox News host Tucker Carlson lashed out at Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley for defending the teaching of critical race theory in military service academies.

The opinion host dedicated part of his show Thursday night to a viral moment during a congressional hearing on Wednesday in which the general addressed inquiries from Republicans to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin regarding this year’s “stand-down” order to address extremism in the military and how the Defense Department should "think about critical race theory."

“On the issue of critical race theory, etc., a lot of us have to get much smarter on whatever the theory is. But I do think it's important, actually, for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read,” Milley said. “I want to understand white rage, and I'm white.”

“I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military, our general officers, our commissioned [and] noncommissioned officers of being ‘woke,’ or something else because we're studying some theories that are out there,” Milley added. “I've read Karl Marx, I've read Lenin, that doesn't make me a communist.”

Carlson featured the general’s response in a wider segment about what he claims is anti-white racism being taught in U.S. institutions.

“[Milley] didn’t get that job because he’s brilliant, or because he’s brave, or because the people who know him respect him. He is not, and they definitely don’t. Milley got the job because he is obsequious. He knows who to suck up to, and he is more than happy to do it,” Tucker said.

He criticized Milley’s comments about “white rage,” saying the very term is analogous to scientific racist beliefs of the 19th century.

“He’s not just a pig. He’s stupid,” Tucker said following a clip of Milley saying there was no difference between studying communist thinkers to understand communism and reading about “white rage” to understand white supremacists.

The Fox News host took issue with this comparison, claiming the analogy was inconsistent because the general was not reading the works of white supremacists to understand white supremacy in the same way he would read the works of communists to understand communism.

The exchange is the latest in the saga of the cultural fight over critical race theory, also called CRT.

CRT is a branch of critical studies, an intellectual tradition dating back to the Frankfurt School of the 1920s. According to Wisconsin University at Milwaukee professor Nicholas Daniel Hartlep, CRT broke off into its own field in the 1970s. It came from the movements of “radical feminism” and critical legal studies, “the legal movement that challenged liberalism, denying that law was neutral, that every case had a single correct answer, and that rights were of vital importance.”

CRT aims to take this a step further by putting race at the epicenter. Hartlep listed the five tenets of CRT as: “One, the notion that racism is ordinary and not aberrational; two, the idea of an interest convergence; three, the social construction of race; four, the idea of storytelling and counter-storytelling; and five, the notion that whites have actually been recipients of civil rights legislation.”

It asserts Civil Rights legislation is made to benefit white people and claims rhetoric of “color-blindness” and “meritocracy” is actually intended to uphold white supremacy, he added.

Many conservative figures take issue with CRT, claiming it is racist and that its race-centered view of U.S. history will further divide Americans. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, wrote, “CRT weakens the public and private bonds that create trust and allow for civic engagement.”

Liberal figures defend the concept as simply examining American history and society through a different lens while maintaining that conservatives are fearmongering over a concept they do not understand.

According to Pew Charitable Trusts, GOP legislators in 15 states so far have introduced bills banning the teaching of CRT in grade-level schools.

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Tags: Critical Race Theory, Tucker Carlson, Mark Milley, Joint Chiefs

Original Author: Brady Knox

Original Location: Tucker Carlson calls Gen. Mark Milley ‘stupid’ and a ‘pig’ over critical race theory comments