MSNBC’s Ali Velshi Shows Tucker Carlson Being Aired as Russian TV Propaganda — Complete With Hilarious Translation
MSNBC’s Ali Velshi aired clips of Tucker Carlson Tonight that have been exploited by Russian state television as propaganda, complete with a translator doing his best to mimic Tucker Carlson’s uniquely performative and ironically detached style.
Sitting in for an on-hiatus Rachel Maddow, Velshi hosted Monday nights’ show from Budapest, Hungary. The third segment of the show focused on Russian state television relying on U.S. conservative media as propaganda for its citizens.
Over the weekend, David Corn reported for Mother Jones that a leaked Kremlin memo directed Russian television outlets to feature more Carlson.
According to his critics, the Fox News host has consistently offered a pro-Putin point of view, in the run-up to the invasion and the actual conflict which has led to the deaths of likely thousands of civilians and inevitable charges of war crimes against Vladimir Putin.
Producers of The Rachel Maddow Show were not content to take Corn’s reporting as is. So they dug up specific Tucker Carlson clips translated for Russian viewers, and the results are absurdly hilarious. And also somewhat frightening.
Or, as Velshi explained, “Other than being very funny, it’s also deeply concerning.”
“See the banner under there,” he directed viewers to read the Fox News Chyron that read “Under Sec of State: Ukraine Has Bio Labs.” The Fox News segment featured on Russian television was focused on a statement from Victoria Nuland, the U. S. Secretary of State, that Velshi described as taken “completely out of context. She’s confirming that the U. S. Does have biological laboratories in Ukraine like we have all over the world.”
“U.S. Conservative media has become, at best, a useful idiot for Russian propaganda,” Velshi alleged, adding, “Tucker Carlson is the most visible piece of that, but he is just the tip of the iceberg. The larger piece of all of this conspiracy theory is coming from the underbelly of the Internet.”
The “U.S. bio lab in Ukraine” story first came from fringe social media platform Gab. The idea that these are not just bio labs, but could also be used bioweapons, was later amplified by Russian propaganda and Tucker Carlson.
Carlson’s apparent willful duplicity on this story has been called out by Mediaite’s Michael Luciano in meticulous detail and dismissed by Fox News’ own Jennifer Grifin.
NBC News “dystopian beat” reporter Ben Collins then explained in revealing detail how pro-Putin propaganda began in the netherregions of the Internet, but eventually made it to the top-rated cable news show, and of course, is now being exploited by the Kremlin to argue why their invasion of Ukraine is a just one.
Yes, that appears to be the case, and yet, no executives at Fox News appear to have a problem with this. Which is crazy unto itself, right?
Watch above via MSNBC.
