Tucker Carlson: Mouthpiece to Evil
Conservative infotainment's top clown found a new low after interviewing Vladimir Putin.
One of the main themes of this Substack has been that principled, honest, responsible, and results-oriented voices are a dying breed in conservative media, largely replaced by unscrupulous grifters morally and ethically indistinguishable from the mainstream media propagandists they made their bones dismantling in a saner time. But as far as the norm has fallen in the MAGA era, Tucker Carlson’s hideousness remains in a league of his own.
In previous columns, we’ve covered how Carlson covers for his favored political campaign’s vile behavior by deflecting to lies about the actual conservatives in the race, peddles demagogic lies about “fellow” conservatives for the sake of pandering to crackpots, gives cover to the ex-president most responsible for the very problems he claims to be incensed by, and promotes obvious frauds and asinine conspiracy theories solely to attract an audience of the gullible and the unhinged, no matter how dumbed down the share of the electorate he influences gets in the process.
However, with his much-hyped interview last week with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin (full video, full transcript, compilation of key quotes), and pretty much everything he’s said stemming from it since, Carlson resoundingly demonstrates what puts him in a cesspool all his own.
The general consensus is that, one gentle obligatory shout-out to Russia’s imprisonment of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich aside, the interview was a softball display that gave Putin largely free rein to peddle World War II revisionism, muse about history, and self-servingly propagandize without meaningful pushback.
But you don’t have to take someone else’s word for it that Tucker gave Putin a compliant propaganda platform; Carlson himself later told the World Government Summit in Dubai that his purpose was, while not to “promote Vladimir Putin,” to deliver an interview “that contained the most amount of Vladimir Putin talking” without his own “grandstanding” getting in the way of getting that information out there for the public to assess for themselves.
As lame as that is (what’s the meaningful difference between promoting Putin and giving Putin the opportunity to promote himself on your platform?), it’s also the least objectionable part of this farce. If Carlson wouldn’t ask tough questions to an out-of-office US president whose bark has always been worse than his bite, it was never realistic to expect him to seriously challenge a literal dictator while sitting in the capital of his regime, armed guards doubtlessly just off-camera. Indeed, Carlson implicitly prepped viewers not to expect much when he pledged before the interview that it would be released “unedited,” something he could only possibly guarantee if knew in advance the Kremlin wouldn’t object to any of his questions.
So let’s allow that some journalistic value still could have been gleaned from letting Putin spend hours lying to Tucker’s face and to Tucker’s cameras if, once safely back in America, Tucker had dissected those lies for his audience, thereby bringing a much-needed dose of reality to a segment of rank-and-file conservatives that desperately needs it.
Alas, that was never in the cards either, for the simple fact that Carlson—who settled into a harshly anti-Ukraine position fairly early in the invasion, while still on Fox pushed numerous false and misleading narratives meant to undermine sympathy for the victims, and has probably done more than any other major media figure to popularize disgruntled ex-Army colonel (and frequently Community Noted) pro-Kremlin propagandist Douglas Macgregor—is one of the chief reasons why they need a reality check.
So it should come as no surprise that Carlson’s first post-interview commentary took Putin’s lies at face value:
Russia is not an expansionist power, sorry. You’re not supposed to say that because all the Victoria Nulands and all the liars and ideologues who run the State Department want to make him into this, you know, Hitler, imperial Japan, but the truth is that that’s just false, it’s just stupid, actually, you have to be an idiot to think that.
Russia is too big already. It’s the biggest landmass in the world. They only have 150 million people. And they’ve got, you know, 80-some effectively provinces or semi-independent states, but different nationalities and religions and languages, and I mean, imagine managing all that. They’ve got more than enough natural resources, they’re swimming in natural resources. They don’t have enough people, in their view. So the idea that they want to take over Poland, why would you want to do that? They just want secure borders. Maybe they’re too paranoid about it, totally possible, again not taking sides.
Oh, good to know Russia isn’t expansionist two years into Russia literally engaging in violent, unprovoked military expansionism.
Carlson is essentially arguing that Russia must not be expansionist because he wouldn’t consider expanding practical if he were in Vlad’s shoes. That’s one of the host’s hallmarks: sophistry that makes intuitive sense as long as you don’t know anything about the subject at hand. In this case, it requires not knowing about ex-KGB man Putin’s public lamentations about the fall of the Soviet Union, his well-established desire to reacquire countries he has decided comprise “Historic Russia,” his conviction that much of Ukraine belongs to Russia for cultural reasons having nothing to do with NATO or missiles on borders, or evidence that he’s been planning to seize it by force since as far back as 2010.
He [Putin] was willing to admit that he wants a peace deal in Ukraine and sort of give it away and just say that out loud. He said it a couple of different times. Again, maybe he’s lying in ways I didn’t perceive, but he kept saying it, and I don’t know why he would say it if he didn’t mean it.
And of course there is, as a matter of fact, there is evidence, overwhelming, that there was a peace deal, or part of a peace deal with the beginning of peace talks, a settlement of some sort on the table a year and a half ago that the former prime minister of Great Britain, Boris Johnson, scuttled on behalf of the Biden administration and convinced Zelensky and the Ukrainian government not to enter into these talks. I mean, that’s kind of an established fact. The Israelis were there. They revealed this. That happened.
It’s hard to decide what’s more astounding here: Carlson acting surprised that the aggressor in an invasion would “say out loud” something that would make him seem reasonable rather than bloodthirsty while trying to favorably spin his actions, or a purported journalist playing dumb as to “why he would say it if he didn’t mean it.” Was Code Pink ever this dense at their height? As Andrei Illarionov, Center for Security Policy analyst and former economic adviser to Putin himself, put it in November after going through a list of “peace deals” Putin agreed to then used as toilet paper, “we don’t have any document that he would not violate.”
Ah, but Carlson has an example of how Vlad hasn’t always been the unreasonable one, in the form of Johnson supposedly tanking negotiations that would have ended hostilities just a few months in. Certainly that sounds better for the Kremlin than the discovery of a civilian massacre around the same time souring the victims’ confidence that the aggressor is acting in good faith, but in point of fact, Ukrainian negotiator Davyd Arakhamia (who Putin claims blamed Johnson) denied that Johnson forced him to reject a proposal he didn’t have the authority to agree to anyway, and said the real reason it was rejected was that the Ukrainians didn’t trust Moscow to hold up its end of the bargain (gee, I wonder why). Separate comments by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett initially presented as pinning the blame on Boris were misconstrued, as well.
(Side note: that last link goes to an article at liberal swamp Republican vanity project The Bulwark, which I’ve bashed for years—including butting heads with the piece’s author, Cathy Young. I debated whether to include it, but I had to admit it was the most thorough treatment of the subject I found. I trust Conservative Standards’ readers will be astute enough to separate content from messenger, and take this as simply another example of why conservative media shouldn’t give our enemies a monopoly on covering and correcting these things.)
But Carlson saved his sickest for the aforementioned Dubai event, including a spot-on impersonation of Hollywood leftists doing PR for Marxist dictators:
What was radicalizing, very shocking and very disturbing for me was the city of Moscow, where I'd never been, the biggest city in Europe, 13 million people, and is so much nicer than any city in my country. I had no idea. My father spent a lot of time there in the 80s when he worked for the US government, and it barely had electricity. And now, it is so much cleaner, and safer, and prettier aesthetically, its architecture, its food, its service, than any city in the United States, that you have—and this is non-ideological, how did that happen? How did that happen?
And at a certain point, I don’t think the average person cares as much about abstractions as about the concrete reality of his life. And if you can't use your subway, for example, as many people are afraid to in New York City because it's too dangerous, you have to sort of wonder like, isn't that the ultimate measure of leadership? And that’s true, by the way, it’s radicalizing for an American to go to Moscow. I didn't know that. I've learned it this week, to Singapore, to Tokyo, to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, because these cities, no matter how we're told they're run and on what principles they're run, are wonderful places to live that don't have rampant inflation, where you’re not gonna get raped, what is that?
The Washington Examiner’s Christopher Tremolite attests that he experienced the same thing during a 2018 study abroad trip, where as a student he presumably did not get the VIP treatment Carlson surely received, so we can stipulate that Moscow probably is cleaner, and perhaps even safer (from private criminals, at least), than many US cities Democrat mismanagement have turned into hellscapes. But Carlson didn’t frame the above as a narrow critique of certain urban centers; he favorably compared Moscow to “any city in my country.” And all that superficial beauty hides far more substantive ugliness when it comes to basic freedoms of speech, religion, press, assembly, elections, and to not be murdered for criticizing the government.
Which brings us to the last bit of insanity I have the stomach to cover here, Carlson’s response to his interviewer, Egyptian journalist Emad Eldin Adeeb, asking why he didn’t ask Putin about any of those bits of unpleasantness:
I didn’t talk about the things that every other American media outlet talks about exclusively. Because those are covered, and because I have spent my life talking to people who run countries in various countries and have concluded the following: that every leader kills people, including my leader. Every leader kills people. Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people, sorry. That’s why I wouldn’t wanna be a leader. That press restriction is universal in the United States, I know because I lived it. Ask my former employers....I’ve had a lot of jobs, and I’ve done this for 34 years and I know how it works, and there’s more censorship in Russia than there is in the United States, but there’s a great deal in the United States.
And so, y’know, at a certain point it’s like, people can decide whether they think, you know, what countries they think are better, what systems they think are better, I just wanna know what he thinks, that was the whole point.
The above illustrates the entire Tucker con in a nutshell: say things that are manifestly insane if you think about them for two seconds, but say them vaguely enough that he can hide behind a pretense of meaning something innocuous. His crackpot fans hear “every leader kills people” and they think, Yeah! America assassinated JFK and Epstein and Scalia and who knows who else, so how is Putin any worse? Meanwhile, “leadership requires killing people” provides a fig leaf suggesting he’s referring to much grayer matters, such as drone strikes on terrorists with questionable legal backing or having to accept civilian collateral damage in war. Sure, that preposterously implies Putin’s murders belong in the latter category, but that’s where the other part of the Tucker con comes in: never appearing in a venue where you’ll have to worry about someone confronting you about these things.
More generally, this is moral relativism of a sort that used to exclusively be the Left’s territory.
As sick as American culture and corrupt as the federal government currently are, morally there’s still no contest between us and Putin’s Russia. While the American Democrat Party is absolutely evil, and I have no doubt they would emulate the Kremlin a lot more if they could get away with it (see Democrats’ support for abortion and the weaponized Biden Justice Department, for starters), the fact remains that they have yet to even attempt to cross most of the lines that Putin not only crossed long ago, but is so far beyond they haven’t been visible in his rearview mirror in decades.
The Right is an incoherent mess on Ukraine policy, divided between isolationists and their populist panderers reflexively shrieking that any more financial aid is tantamount to skinning the family dog in front of their children, and obstinately tone-deaf establishmentarians who blithely declare supporting Ukraine one of their top priorities without bothering to make the case to their constituents for how it serves American interests—all over aid that will be managed by a White House of bumbling incompetents. But to untangle that mess, we first need honesty and clarity about the basic facts. The easiest moral and journalistic bar to clear, by far, is to not just take a murderous tyrant’s word for it when he offers justifications for slaughtering innocent people and turning their cities into rubble.
Easiest, that is, unless you’re Tucker Carlson. Or if your reliance on clicks from his fans compels you to pretend not to notice the black hole of decency he’s chosen to become.