From anti-anti-Putin to openly pro-Putin
Tucker Carlson finally takes the mask off.
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Tucker Carlson’s recent grand tour of Russia was easy to mock.
A far less pleasant version of Rick Steves, Carlson wandered around Moscow, gushing over the clean, efficient subways (never mind that Stalin built them!) and the noticeable absence of homeless people. He raved about the modern marvels found in a local grocery store, such as coin-operated shopping cart locks, suggesting he personally hasn’t entered a US market since 1993.
Filling his cart with eggs, bread, wine and other middle-class necessities, he was oblivious to how much it would all cost — so much so that he and his crew made a game of it, like Lucille Bluth pricing bananas.
In a clip from his grocery store excursion that you can watch above, Carlson referred to his relative spending power in Russia and proclaimed, “That’s when you start to realize that ideology maybe doesn’t matter as much as you thought.” (News flash: Things are generally cheaper in poorer countries.)
“If you take people’s standard of living and you tank it through filth and crime and inflation, and they literally can’t buy the groceries they want, at that point maybe it matters less what you say or whether you’re a ‘good person’ or a ‘bad person,’ you’re wrecking people’s lives and their country,” he continued. “And that’s what our leaders have done to us.”
Carlson is a millionaire posing as a populist, so “our leaders” haven’t wrecked his standard of living. His crew is apparently doing fine, as well.
“Coming to a Russian grocery store, the ‘heart of evil,’ and seeing what things cost and how people live, it will radicalize you against our leaders,” he added. “That’s how I feel, anyway, radicalized. We’re not making any of this up, by the way. At all.”
Tucker was in fact making things up. The median monthly Russian salary, after taxes, is about R35,000 (approximately $480). The average Russian spends almost 60 percent of their income on food, and it’s not all Beluga caviar and vodka. The Moscow Times reported in 2019 that two-thirds of Russian households can only afford food, clothing, and the bare essentials, and the situation has only worsened after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.
Russia’s rate of inflation hit 11.9 percent in 2022 and 7.4 percent in 2023 — almost double the US rate that year. While Carlson raves about Russian grocery prices, Putin has publicly apologized for the rising cost of chicken and eggs. So why is Carlson, after his obsequious interview with the dictator, providing free PR services?
Freedom is dictatorship
Carlson paints a rosy picture of Russia that’s a stark contrast to the dismal version of America he peddles to his viewers.
During a monologue on his former Fox News show, Carlson said, “Think back to the America you grew up in. There are three things you knew about that country. It was a free country. It was a middle class country, it was defined by small business and it was a constitutional country. Our politicians were limited by the guardrails in our founding documents. They couldn't go past that. So, it was a happy place.”
This was back in March 2022, while Carlson was in the habit of railing on a nightly basis against covid public health measures, portraying the government’s good-faith efforts to minimize illness and death as a form of fascist control.
“Masks were a training exercise,” he said. “Mandatory masking was a shock collar designed to teach Americans unquestioning obedience. And of course, it worked because shock collars do work.”
Carlson, like many other entitled right-wingers, insisted that the most minor covid restriction was a goose step toward fascism. After Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer extended the state’s stay-at-home order in May 2020, Carlson claimed “Whitmer wants this moment to last forever.” He later called Dr. Anthony Fauci “an even shorter version” of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, and when President Joe Biden announced plans to address the Omicron variant in December 2021, Carlson declared, “Tyranny is coming unless someone stops Democrats' covid power grab!”
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Russia wasn’t absent covid precautions at this time, even as officials there worked to cover up the pandemic death toll. Businesses and public spaces were closed. Students moved to remote-learning. Social distancing was practiced. While Carlson smeared Whitmer as a power-mad despot, Moscow residents were only allowed to leave their homes for medical emergencies or to purchase vital necessities.
Putin imposed stay-at-home orders well into 2021, when the nation’s covid deaths reached a new record. Putin actively urged Russians to be “responsible” and get vaccinated (albeit with the country’s shoddy vaccines). Meanwhile, Carlson criticized vaccine mandates and spread baseless conspiracies about them. Russia didn’t end its own mask mandate until after Carlson’s “shock collar” rant, but he never provided his viewers with this important context. Instead, he presented US covid restrictions as a uniquely leftist plot to impose a police state.
Carlson was also a leading proponent of the baseless conspiracy theory that January 6 rioters were innocent victims of political persecution from the Biden administration. With help from then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, Carlson promoted unhinged conspiracy theories about the Capitol attack.
“These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers,” he insisted, adding that the rioters were “not destroying the Capitol, they obviously revere the Capitol.”
It’s reasonable that an American would hold their government and its leaders to a higher standard than Russia’s, but Carlson shows far less contempt for Putin — an actual tyrant who regularly arranges his political opponents’ purely coincidental, accidental deaths — than he does for Biden.
Last Friday, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in prison. Few doubt Putin’s responsible, though some more ghoulish Republicans have compared Navalny’s death to Donald Trump’s lawful prosecution. The Kremlin targeted Navalny, who survived a poisoning in 2020, because he exposed the government’s widespread corruption. But the thought of Biden shutting down Fox News or orchestrating assassinations of his Republican foes is ridiculous. Meanwhile, hundreds of Russians have been arrested simply for publicly mourning Navalny.
Egyptian journalist Emad El Din Adeeb confronted Carlson last week during the World Government Summit in Dubai about his recent Putin interview: “You didn’t talk about freedom of speech in Russia, you did not talk about Navalny, about assassinations, about restrictions on opposition in the coming elections.”
Carlson said he didn’t bother because after all, “Every leader kills people, including my leader. Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people. Sorry.”
In Carlson’s view, Biden and Democrats are thus morally no different from Putin’s regime. This grotesque false equivalence (which Trump has also made) is how Carlson minimizes Putin’s atrocities while selling Putin’s Russia to the American Right.
The price of “cleanliness”
At that same event in Dubai, Carlson even suggested Russia’s cities are superior to those in his own homeland.
“What was very shocking, very disturbing, was the city of Moscow, where I’d never been,” Carlson told Adeeb. “It was so much nicer than any city in my country. [It’s] so much cleaner, and prettier aesthetically — its architecture, its food, its service — than any city in the United States.”
Carlson’s comments are loaded with less-than-subtle white nationalist coding. He’s obsessed with what he describes as the “filth” in US cities. He asked then-President Trump in 2019 why US cities have "a major problem with filth.” He told The Atlantic in 2020 that the Potomac River “has gotten dirtier and dirtier and dirtier and dirtier. I go down there and that litter is left almost exclusively by immigrants.”
He painted San Francisco as an urban dystopia in a 2020 docuseries: “Civilization itself is coming apart in San Francisco right there in broad daylight on the city sidewalks, which are littered with junkies and feces and dirty needles.”
Carlson notes that Moscow has relatively few homeless but he doesn’t mention that the Russian constitution in theory includes a right to shelter. If someone is evicted, they are provided with an apartment from the city’s funds. Predictably, Carlson has blamed rising homelessness on cities making life “easier” for the homeless. When Seattle’s 2022 municipal budged included more than $150 million for homeless programs, Carlson denounced the figure as “an awful lot of money per bum.”
However, the way Russia manages its own homeless crisis in practice probably appeals to Carlson. The number of homeless in Moscow reportedly grew to almost 80,000 during 2020, but they had vanished from the city streets within a year. It’s unclear what happened to them. Russia has draconian drug laws and imprisons more people (or “junkies” as Carlson would say) per capita for drug crimes than most of Europe. This might not make its cities “cleaner,” but it certainly makes them less free.
Carlson repeatedly paints diverse US cities as dystopian nightmares, where “Soros-funded prosecutors” give violent criminals free rein. Crime is reportedly low in Moscow — if you believe statistics from Russia. Reminiscent of how Trump complained about covid deaths being over reported, it’s likely Russian police underreport crimes, especially homicides, to bolster Putin’s “tough on crime” image.
That’s not just cynicism. Criminologists Alexandra Lysova and Nikolay Shchitov observed that while reported murders fell during the 2000s, the recorded number of “unidentified bodies” dramatically increased. Maybe the mysterious corpses were vampire victims, but that doesn’t seem “safer” than New York City. Contrast this to how Carlson promoted the baseless claim that people vaccinated against covid were “dying suddenly” from blood clots. He’s far more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to Putin and the Russian government.
Sen. Thom Tillis, one of a dwindling number of anti-Putin Republicans in Congress, recently called Carlson a “useful idiot,” but this flatters Carlson with the innocence of ignorance. He doesn’t cluelessly spout pro-Russia propaganda. His lies suit a larger, more insidious purpose. He’s spent the past decade convincing his audience that Democrats and liberalism have ruined a once-idyllic America, turning the country into a violent fascist state, where true Americans (white people) are actively persecuted.
Now, Carlson’s twisted funhouse mirror depicts a version of Russia so benign it should “radicalize” them against America’s Democratic leaders. In reality, Russia is a brutal dictatorship, but the people giving the orders look a lot like Carlson. There are few women or people of color in major positions of power — certainly no one who’s openly queer. Perhaps that’s the reality Carlson’s eager to embrace while shopping for melons in Moscow.
That’s it for today
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I watched Carlson's excursion to the Russian supermarket and laughed. I spent 20 years living and working in Russia and became bi-cultural in the process. Very, very few Russians actually shop at the show-case supermarket but go to the open markets throughout the city where they negotiate prices for vegetables, sour cream, meat, and other products. Most groceries are trucked from the far south and brought to Moscow and other Russian cities. The farther south you go in Russia and Central Asia, the better the fruit. Watermelon found in this part of the world is sweet and delicious, where the watermelon in the U.S. tastes like - well "water." The city is clean because everyone - even older adults - are assigned a job like sweeping the sidewalks. What Carlson experienced in Moscow was mostly facades, and anything said to him by Putin was fake propaganda.
I wrote From Democracy to Democrazy (by Graham) and it provides a narrative about life in Russia and other dictator-led countries. Most importantly, it provides the American public the evidence, the facts, and the truth about Donald Trump's relationship with Russia and how the influence of Putin's strategies quietly attempts to reshape the trajectory of American politics. Putin wants to destroy our country and our democracy. Tools used for this destruction include hatred, violence, lies, coercive mind manipulation, and even racism, antisemitism and his number one tool is Donald Trump. We see this happening now in our country - American Nazi's marching on the streets in Tennessee, MAGA elected officials still following Trump's insane instructions, and millions upon millions of Americans worshiping a madman.
Putin blames the U.S. for the downfall of the Soviet Union AND he wants revenge. Putin will do what ever it takes to put Trump back in office. The reason is that Trump has been compromised by Russian KGB/FSB. There are three tools used in Russia to entrap a foreigner: flattery, money, and women. Every single hotel room where a foreigner stays throughout all of Russia has cameras and listening devices in the walls and ceiling. Chances are good - considering Trump's past with professional women, that he was caught and photographed with his pants down. Second, Russian banks - totally controlled and managed by the KGB/FSB give large sums of money to a foreigner to: (1) launder black cash into another country's economy, and (2) to compromise (kompromat) that foreigner to work for Russia. As far back as 2008, the "Trump boys" openly discussed the fact that the Trump organization had received $100 million from Russian banks. (www.businessinsider.com) In reality, this means that about ten years prior to sleeping in the White House, Trump was on the KGB payroll. Wake up folks and learn the truth about Trump. Russian banks also gave Marie LePen $9.8 million to overthrow the French government. She is the foremost opposition presidential candidate in France.
The shadow cast by Putin over the landscape of American democracy, and his influence and control over Trump grows larger and darker by the moment. Both Putin and Trump are consummate liars, but their web of lies cannot withstand the light of truth. Every voting American - aside from the brainwashed MAGA, must vote for Biden as if their life depends on it - because it does.
“What was very shocking, very disturbing, was the city of Moscow, where I’d never been,” Carlson told Adeeb. “It was so much nicer than any city in my country. [It’s] so much cleaner, and prettier aesthetically — its architecture, its food, its service — than any city in the United States.” So why doesn’t he move there? I’ve been to Moscow and apart from Red Square and a few other enclaves it’s mostly made up of drab, dilapidated, faceless apartment buildings that would make most housing projects in the US look luxurious. Inside the apartments are 2-3 tiny, cramped rooms with equally tiny kitchens and bathrooms. And as far as safety goes? The average Russian surely wouldn’t recognize Carlson’s rosy view of low crime, most have at least 3 strong locks on their doors. Carlson may be a useful idiot to some but I would leave out the useful part, if this is the best Putin can do that’s pathetic.