A Politico report on the reaction to the departure of Tucker Carlson shows what has been evident for a while, and doesn’t show what its authors thinks it shows.

"From maternity flight suits to diversity policies to Ukraine aid, the military was a favorite punching bag for Tucker Carlson. Now that he’s off the air, some Pentagon officials are quietly cheering his departure” the report states, adding that “Carlson’s criticism of Biden-era personnel policies appealed to many of the rank-and-file, which has a large bloc of conservative members. But at the upper levels of the Defense Department, news of Carlson’s firing from Fox News on Monday was met with delight and outright glee in some corners."

The story went on to quote senior Defense officials outright cheering the sack of one of the most popular political voices opposed to them, with one saying “we’re a better country without him bagging on our military every night in front of hundreds of thousands of people” and another simply saying “good riddance.”

Consider a couple of eye-opening things. Nowhere is Carlson factually wrong. It is a fact that the DoD, once a bastion of purest patriotic meritocracy, has now turned to a social club and is inordinately interested in a gynarchic culture, from prioritizing pregnant air warriors (a ridiculous and uncivil idea on its face) to “diversity officers” talking about “abolishing whiteness” and “caudacity” without any repercussion. 

The leadership and elite prioritize top-down and often revolutionary LGBT policies, "abortion rights," and trans issues including tax-funded sex-change operations, while rank-and-file soldiers are increasingly disillusioned about both radical social changes at home and constant social engineering abroad. 

Amidst the constant outcry about declining military recruitment, no one has pointed out the most obvious reasons that hard patriotic men are not queuing up to war for their country anymore: first, they don’t recognize the value of their country or their country’s military policy, and, second, they are disillusioned and uninterested in fighting for a revolutionary force whose values are increasingly at odds with their own.

Carlson is clearly hated by a section of the brass precisely because he pointed that uncomfortable fact out. He was the loudest and often the only voice doing so. He did for the defense establishment what Chris Rufo and Libs of Tiktok did for higher education. He illuminated the top-down cultural revolution promoted, propagated, and practiced by the Defense Department, with a dedicated and extremely competent propaganda arm leaking to friendly regime mouthpieces in the press, under what can broadly be described as an informational hegemony.

The crux is this: Carlson put a mirror in front of them, and the reality was out in the open for the masses to see, evident from the growing popularity of his show in an age of cable news fatigue. Caliban was duly enraged by the face he saw in the mirror.

Carlson’s departure—hopefully to better pastures such as founding a realist media company, heading a formidable policy think tank, or even working in presidential communications—and the political and bureaucratic reactions to it once again led me to think about a pet pastime of mine. Like most history nerds, I am occasionally obsessed with uncovering the sources and character of the regime and order in which I live. I alluded to that in my last column about a similar instance in the older island.

Where is the true source of power, and who wields it? What is the character of the system of governance that is currently in operation? Because whatever this is—dual legal standards, regime punishment for ideological traitors through means of proxies, relentless propagation of ideology and foreign interventions, court scribes masquerading as adversarial and neutral media, and praetorian guards celebrating the decapitation of an ideological enemy—can be a lot of things, but a non-interventionist and aloof republic as envisaged by the Framers it is not.

The designs and the pomp are there. But the internal governing dynamics are totally unrecognizable. It is also neither a pure democracy nor a hereditary aristocracy with a narrow, fixed set of interests to defend. And the irrelevance of public opinion for and by a section of the ruling elite is now clear. Unless conservatives think more about the order they live under, any desire to alter or shape that order for the better will be practically futile.