SATURDAY: Who the Sam Hill is Anthony Tata?

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2024

Red Nation, separate from Blue: Early this morning, the question arose on our sprawling, mid-Baltimore campus:

Who the heck is Brigadier General Anthony Tata (U.S. Army, Retired)? 

Below, we'll explain why that question arose. For now, we'll simply show you what we found when we turned to the leading authority on this topic.

Who in the world is Anthony Tata? For starters, we'll riddle you this:

Anthony Tata

Anthony Jean Tata (born September 7, 1959) is an American retired United States Army officer, author, and government official. He is a retired brigadier general of the United States Army (1981–2009), and later served as a school district administrator for two large school districts in the District of Columbia and North Carolina. He served as Secretary of Transportation of North Carolina from 2013 to 2015 under Governor Pat McCrory. Tata is the author of the Threat series of thriller novels.

After leaving the Army, he became a regular on Fox News, where he offered pro-Donald Trump commentary and promoted conspiracy theories. He has falsely claimed that Barack Obama is a Muslim and "terrorist leader" and promoted a baseless conspiracy theory asserting that the CIA sought to assassinate Trump.

We can't vouch for the perfect accuracy of every assertion, but that's how the thumbnail began. Wikipedia offers plenty of sources and citations, and then too it goes on to say this, following a truly bizarre passage about an "acrimonious" 1993 divorce proceeding:

Upon his retirement in June 2009, Tata received the Distinguished Service Medal.

After retiring from active duty service, he served as the Chief Operating Officer of the District of Columbia Public Schools from 2009 to 2010. In 2010, he was named Superintendent of the Wake County Public School System. Tata had strained relationships with several members of the Wake County School Board, which shifted to a Democratic majority during Tata's service. Opposition fell along party lines. Citing concerns over his "leadership style" and his handling of student assignment issues in the large school district, Tata's contract was terminated after less than two years, in 2012. The decision to buy out Tata's contract under a no-fault clause was controversial, with two local polls suggesting that a majority of Wake County voters and parents of children in the district opposed the decision to remove Tata.

We can't vouch fort h perfect accuracy of all those statements, We'll note that his post-retirement public school service seems to have predated his many claims about President Obama, the Muslim terrorist leader.

Concerning those many unfortunate claims, the authority goes on to say this:

In Twitter posts and radio-show appearances in 2017 and 2018, Tata repeatedly made the false claim that President Barack Obama was a "Muslim" and a "terrorist leader"; accused Obama of being "an anti-Semite" who wanted to "destroy Israel" and "did not want" to defeat ISIL; and claimed that the negotiation of the multilateral nuclear agreement with Iran was born by Obama's "Islamic roots." Tata accused then-President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama of being "borderline treasonous" during Trump's transition to the presidency. In August 2018, he accused former CIA Director John O. Brennan, a critic of Trump, of being a "clear and present danger" to the U.S. and called Brennan a "communist" on Fox & Friends. He repeatedly pushed the notion that a "deep state cabal" was working to undermine Trump; pushed false conspiracy theories that Brennan ordered the assassination of Trump; and, on another occasion, tweeted at Brennan, "Might be a good time to pick your poison: firing squad, public hanging, life sentence as prison b*tch, or just suck on your pistol." Tata also referred to Islam as "the most oppressive, violent religion"; accused both Obama and former president Bill Clinton of being guilty of "sedition and/or treason"; accused Obama of being a "Manchurian candidate" who supported "Hamas & Muslim brotherhood"; and suggested that "the left" and Obama "hates America." Tata also made various inflammatory Twitter posts attacking Democratic politicians Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters as "violent extremists" and using a racist hashtag to criticize CNN journalist Don Lemon.

Tata deleted several of his Twitter posts after they were publicized by CNN in June 2020, following an investigation by Andrew Kaczynski and others.

We can't vouch for the perfect accuracy of every statement. By now, though, it seems to us that we may be spying the start of a drift.

Why did we decide to research this question today? It all began at 6 a.m. with the start of Fox & Friends Weekend.

Did General Tata once call John Brennan a "communist" on Fox & Friends? We're haven't tried to fact check that claim, but in the first few minutes of today's show, the trio of weekend friends welcomed Tata onto their broadcast.

Once there, he served as the red tribe's program's expert guest concerning yesterday's military strikes on targets in Iraq and Syria.

Yesterday's strikes were "a psyop on the American people," the expert guest instantly said. His commentary turned a bit poisonous from that point forward, with the weekend friends joining in. 

Later, we'll be able to post more examples of what was said. But the poisonous comments by General Tata and the three friends captured what we saw last night as our two separate nations—Red Nation and Blue—listened to "cable news" reporting and analysis about those ongoing attacks.

We live in Tabloid and Broadsheet Nations. We live in Red Nation and Blue. 

Our two separate nations are now thoroughly segregated by viewpoint when it comes to the dissemination of information and news. Tata, he of the earlier poisonous claims, was the person the Fox News Channel chose to present as this morning's first expert guest.

Can a large continental nation really expect to function this way? We will guess that the answer is no, and our White House campaign is now underway, with the constant foolishness of our self-assured blue tribe making it especially hard for our Blue Nation to prevail.

Last night, we saw disgracefully stupid behavior on Fox. The Gutfeld! show was especially ugly, coarse, unintelligent, angry and rank, even by its own basement-level intellectual standards.

Can a large modern nation really function this way? By all that was sacred about the imperfect show Crossfire, the answer almost surely is no.

Intriguing question: Who decided to make this guy the head of the D.C. Public Schools?

We don't recall the answer to that. For the record, he was the immediate successor to Michelle Rhee, she of the apparently fraudulent claims all through her meteoric career.