Tucker Carlson has openly admitted that he prefers Russian President Vladimir Putin to large numbers of Americans and American institutions. While he was at it, Carlson proved he's a fan of disinformation, too.
Last week, Tucker Carlson claimed he was “joking” after he said he was rooting for Russia over Ukraine. Last night, Carlson undercut that claim in a jaw-dropping commentary that was openly supportive of Putin and viciously antagonistic toward Americans.
"Extraordinarily loaded" trust-fund baby and informal Trump adviser Carlson began by disingenuously suggesting he’s not an elitist:
CARLSON: Consider instead how a ruling class views Russia. To them, Russia is the single most important country in the world. Nothing else comes close. Just yesterday on Meet the Press over on NBC, anchor Chuck Todd -- who by the way is a poster child for the modern meritocracy, and therefore by definition a genius, unlike you -- stopped a sitting U.S. senator in his tracks and all but accused him of spying for Russia.
What Todd actually said, as Carlson’s own clip showed, was that Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) was spreading Russian propaganda. And it’s worth noting that Carlson, for all his aging frat-boy jeering, didn’t deny it.
Instead, Carlson moved on to spread his own pro-Russia disinformation:
CARLSON: We now know it's not really a story. It never happened. There was no collusion. Russia didn't hack our democracy. The whole thing was a talking point, a ludicrous talking point, invented by the Hillary Clinton campaign on or about November 9th, 2016 to explain their unexpected defeat in the last presidential election.
"We lost and we shouldn't have lost." From the start that has been the only argument that underpins the Russia conspiracy theory. And now, thanks to a multi-million dollar investigation that extended over a period of years that the rest of us had to endure to the exclusion of everything else, that conspiracy theory has died. It was killed, in fact, by Robert Mueller.
It’s bad enough that Carlson should say this, especially while posturing as some kind of truth-teller. But it’s even worse that Fox News would let him get away with it. These were scripted and pre-approved remarks. And they undercut and contradict Fox’s own reporting that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
Carlson went on with a string of insults, presumably to make you think he’s insightful:
CARLSON: And yet somehow it lives on in the sneering accusations of our mindless public intellectuals and hair hats in the television anchor seat. … Watch poor mouth-breathing Chuck Todd go full Joe McCarthy yesterday. … Not only are these people unwise and hysterical, totally political, utterly dishonest, but also kind of dumb. And because shifting mental gears is hard for dumb people, it turns out the entire on-air staff over at MSNBC is still pretending that Russia collusion is the most important story there is. It's like Robert Mueller never delivered his report.
After deliberately inciting hate against fellow Americans, Carlson segued into portraying Putin as more sympathetic and somehow less anti-American:
CARLSON: What makes Vladimir Putin worse than, I don't know, a whole long list of American allies? Let's try the King of Saudi Arabia, for example, or the people who run the Emirates, the people on whose payroll so many in Washington are right now. Why is he worse than them? They couldn't answer that. For Chuck Todd and the rest of the dummies, Vladimir Putin isn't a real person with actual ideas and priorities and a country and beliefs. No, he stopped being that long ago. He's a metaphor, a living metaphor, he's the boogeyman. Step out of line and you're a traitor in league with Vladimir Putin. ...
The irony, of course, is that Putin, for all his faults, does not hate America as much as many of these people do. They really dislike our country. And they call other people traitors?
Watch Carlson do Putin’s handiwork below, from the December 2, 2019 Tucker Carlson Tonight.
What’s wrong with Russia you ask? Oh, it’s a bit odd Tucker Russia has it’s own Wikipedia page dedicated to murdered journalists. Oh, there’s the coincidence that political rival Alexei Navalny ends up tied up in Putin’s courts right around election time. Navalny’s actually lucky. The Washington Post (I know, Tucker, the failed fake media) ran a story on 10 dead Putin political rivals. And, Tucker, despite you saying Mueller found nothing, he found plenty of evidence of Russian 2016 election meddling. As have our intelligence agencies. All of them. Now we hear Russia is starting all over again for election 2020.
Of course, to you these are all Putin selling points in the era of your corrupt buddy Trump. Trump wishes he could be so brazen as Putin!
The very worst part of this is that it’s all just for ratings. The suits (Murdoch) have decreed that there must be conflict to make money. Ergo, Tucker acting and sounding like a traitor.
Tuk-tuk has put himself way out of the mainstream, even the far-far-far-RWNJ Jim Hoft/Alex Jones mainstream, with his assertion that ‘Russia didn’t hack our democracy’ with or without collusion.