The Biden administration has declared its first war — a war on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson.

For his part, Carlson might respond by invoking Marine Corps legend Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, who, having learned during the Korean War that his 1st Marine Division had been surrounded by 11 ChiCom divisions, said, “Those poor bastards. They’ve got us just where we want them. We can shoot in every direction now.”

Indeed, it’s a target-rich environment for Carlson. He drew fire recently from our military’s woke supremacists when he pondered whether maternity flight suits actually increase our readiness and war-fighting lethality, but he could just as easily have questioned the commander-in-chief’s obsession with making the military a safe haven for “transgender” individuals. Or of his embrace of anti-American ideas such as antiracism and Critical Race Theory.

Joe Biden had hardly finished hanging the drapes when he rescinded Donald Trump’s ban on “transgender” warriors. As if that message weren’t loud and clear enough, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin took a few moments away from rooting out the 17 white supremacists within the ranks to announce, “Prospective recruits may serve in their self-identified gender when they have met the appropriate standards for accession into the military services. This revised policy will also ensure all medically necessary transition related care authorized by law is available to all Service members and will re-examine all cases of transgender Service members that may be in some form of adverse administrative proceedings.”

Translation: If you’re a biological man who wants be a woman, Uncle Sam not only wants you, he’ll even pay for your sex-change surgery.

As for the military’s newfound fixation on race, “The United States Navy’s most recent suggested reading list includes books that explicitly endorse critical race theory and intersectionality,” reports The Daily Wire. “Among these books is How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi [whose] conclusions about racial equity often raise eyebrows. For instance, he implied last year that Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is a white colonizer for adopting two black children from Haiti.”

Indiana Republican Representative Jim Banks, a Naval Reserve officer since 2012, wrote to Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday to take issue. He asked Gilday for a written response as to how the Kendi book “cultivates a culture of warfighting excellence” or else to remove it from his recommended reading list.

There was a time not too long ago when the American military feared no foe. Among our enlisted ranks and our junior officers, that’s still the case. Ask a Marine 0311, for example, whether he fears jihadists or Taliban fighters. But what is it about the Rainbow Mafia, the feminists, the Critical Race theorists, and the radical atheists that has our tone-setters, our senior leadership, practically crouching in the corner and sucking their thumbs?

Has the wokeness virus now infected our military just is it has our universities and our corporations?

As historian Victor Davis Hanson rightly notes, “There grows a new class rift between the rank-and-file military and the Pentagon’s top current and retired brass. Increasingly, some brass … master the contours of the military-industrial complex and profit from them upon retirement. Many acquiesce to now-orthodox progressive ideology, which is omnipresent among federal bureaucracies and much of Congress. Whereas all administrations used to prioritize traditional military preparedness, leftist administrations now see the military as a tool for accelerating their progressive domestic changes.”

Hanson continues, “Many of our top brass are far more politicized than in the past, and can grow more ideologically distant from lower-ranking officers and enlisted personnel. The extraordinary, thin-skinned Pentagon effort to [attack Tucker Carlson] is an illustration of this larger — and increasingly dangerous — pathology.”

Dennis Prager is fond of saying that leftism destroys everything it touches — art, literature, religion, free speech, education, sports, journalism, the Boy Scouts, even late-night TV. And if we don’t course-correct and remember the historical role of the world’s most vaunted fighting force, we’ll soon be able to add the U.S. military to that sorry list.

And our nation will be far worse off for it.