Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin on Wrong History and Bad Religion
Tucker Carlson provided a platform for Vladimir Putin to sprout non-sense theories on history and push ridiculous propaganda about Russian religious tolerance
I spent two hours watching Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News pundit, interview Russian President Vladimir Putin about the “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine and the state of global affairs.
While Carlson did ask some good questions of Putin about Ukraine, Nord Stream, and Geopolitical matters, Carlson failed to bring-up the hard questions that someone needs to ask Putin about!
The murder and imprisonment of Russian opposition leaders.
The mass imprisonment of Russian citizens opposing the war.
The biological attack in Salisbury, UK.
War crimes committed by Russian troops in eastern Ukraine.
The aborted coup by Yevgeny Prigozhin and Prigozhin’s subsequent death.
In a nutshell, Carlson’s interview with Putin was not about posing some tough questions to Putin, but about trying to galvanize the Republican base to oppose continued American support for Ukraine’s resistance against the Russian invasion.
This is why Putin stressed: (1) How his repeated offers to negotiate with Biden and Zelensky to end the war have been rebuffed; (2) His admiration for George W. Bush and Donald Trump; (3) America should focus on its surging debt and border crisis rather than intervene in the affairs of other countries; (4) The US government is taxing Americans to pay for Ukraine’s Nazi-government; (5) The sanctions against Russia are having a reverse effect by weakening the US dollar; (6) For the Viktor Orbán fans, Putin implied that Hungary would be within its rights to take a bit of Ukraine for itself since segments of Ukraine have ethnic Hungarians (i.e., Magyars); and (7) The big spiel at the end about how Putin is a Christian and Russia is a Christian nation doing its best against the godless American and European elites. It was all red meat to the MAGA crowd!
At the end of the day, Putin was pushing fanciful myths, conspiracy theories, non-sense claims, predictable tropes, and delusional sentiments, and Carlson was the enabler of it, giving it an international audience, and trying to furnish Putin’s fantasies with an air of legitimacy.
Look, I don’t have a problem with the fact that Carlson interviewed Putin. A journalist interviewing a controversial leader is no big deal, whether it’s an interview with Nicholas Maduro (Venezuela) or Xi Jinping (China), it’s what journalists do! However, to be brutally honest, based on the contents of the interview, and Carlson’s softball questions to Putin, I haven’t seen a western journalist shill this hard for a Russian dictator since Walter Durant, the New York Times man in Moscow, became one of Stalin’s useful idiots and helped the Soviet Union hide the truth about the Ukrainian famine in the 1930s (watch a video about Duranty here). Carlson, much like Duranty, is a tool for Russian misinformation and trying to portray Russia as the victim of American aggression. Carlson and Duranty represent two sides of the same coin: journalists shilling for a corrupt, cruel, vicious, and violent Russian regime.
And that wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst part for my mind was what was said about Russian history and Russian religion.
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