Ted Cruz and Army IG agree: Generals shouldn't be Twitter-trolling Tucker Carlson

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A senior Army officer has his retirement plans on hold amid an inspector general investigation into social media interactions with conservatives, including an online spat with Tucker Carlson.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) agreed with the finding that Maj. Gen. Patrick Donohue had acted inappropriately.

“The conclusion is good for the integrity of our armed forces” because “it is incredibly dangerous when our military is politicized," Cruz told the Washington Examiner in an interview. "Our fighting men and women and especially the brass in leadership should stay out of culture wars, and stay out of political battles.”

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The senator from Texas said he doesn’t want a military that is aligned with, or promotes view oints from either political party, only one that “trains to protect America to keep Americans safe, and if needed to kill our enemies.”

The saga that engulfed Donahoe began in March 2021 when Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused the military of being “more feminine,” while “China’s military becomes more masculine.”

The army leader was among a multitude of service members who pushed back on Carlson’s claims and defended women’s service online. Donahoe’s actions prompted an Army Inspector General report that found his tweets “exhibited poor judgment“ and that the “subsequent media coverage drew national attention … and it cast the Army in a negative light,” according to Task & Purpose, which first reported on the unpublished results of the investigation earlier this week.

Another social media comment that the IG report included was Donahoe’s back-and-forth with Josiah Lippincott, a conservative Marine veteran who frequently criticizes the military online. Donahoe had promoted service members to get the coronavirus vaccine while Lippincott claimed that restrictions on people’s daily lives “is a way bigger killed than the virus.”

Donahoe responded that Lippincott’s “false equivalency of suicide compared to the virus doesn’t hold up,” and in a follow-up on another one of Lippincott’s responses, he tagged Hillsdale College, the private conservative college where Lippincott was getting a Ph.D, and telling them to “come get your boy.”

At the time, Cruz wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin arguing in part that, “The campaign was launched in response to criticisms by Carlson that linked gender-based reforms in the military, which are being justified using the language of social justice, with widely-recognized vulnerabilities and erosions in the military's warfighting capabilities, including and especially in the context of Great Power competition.”

“While potentially admirable,” the Army IG report says, “[Donahoe’s] post brought a measurable amount of negative publicity to the Army, enough that [the Office of the Chief of Public Affairs] warned [the Secretary of the Army] of the fallout.”

“The media and public outcry demonstrated MG Donahoe had not thought about what he typed before he posted his tweets to Mr. Carlson, or Mr. Lippincott, nor had he given any consideration of the impacts given their larger audience of followers,” the investigation found. “The provisions for dignity and respect in AR 600-20 apply to ‘all people,’ ‘in all aspects of life.’”

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Earlier this week, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said that general officers should be present on social media but be aware of risks of getting pulled into “the inflammatory kind of environment that, frankly, Twitter really lends itself to,” days after the details of the IG investigation into Maj. Gen. Donahue was released.

“One of the things I think that’s most important to [Army Chief of Staff] Gen. [James] McConville and I is keeping the Army apolitical and keeping it out of the culture wars,” she said. “Because frankly, we have got to be able to have a broad appeal. When only 9% of kids are interested in serving, we have got to make sure that we are careful about not alienating wide swaths of the American public to the Army.”

Wormuth later denied knowing what it "woke" means and said, "I think woke means a lot of different things to different people,” adding, "If ‘woke’ means we are not focused on war-fighting (or) we are not focused on readiness, that doesn’t reflect what I see at installations all around the country or overseas when I go and visit.”