Fox Board Member Paul Ryan Rips ‘Extremely Dangerous’ Tucker and Trump For Pushing ‘Pro-Putin’ and ‘Pro-Tyranny’ Sentiment
AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File
Former GOP House speaker and current Fox Corp. board member, Paul Ryan, tore into both Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump for pushing “pro-Putin” and “pro-tyranny” sentiment in the United States.
Ryan spoke to the Washington Post’s senior congressional correspondent Paul Kane Wednesday during a live event for the paper’s “Election 2024” series. Kane asked Ryan to weigh in on the news of the day, dysfunction in Congress, and Carlson – who was fired from Fox News last April.
“What is it about Russia in which we continue to come back to this sort of reverb loop that started back in 2016, where they keep trying, apparently, and to some measures, they sort of keep succeeding?” Kane asked Ryan, referring to Tuesday’s news that the GOP’s key informant in their impeachment inquiry had ties to Russian intelligence.
“But Russia has been trying to penetrate our system for a long–before 2016. I mean for quite a long time. They got very active in those days, and obviously, now, as we know, that Russia tried to affect our elections,” Ryan replied, after noting he had nothing specific to add about the latest news.
“On the flip side of this, what makes Republicans angry, deservedly so in this particular case, is that the Obama Justice Department did abuse the FISA court. They did abuse the FISA laws on this matter, and we can go into the Steele dossier and all that stuff,” Ryan added, referring back to the Russia scandals of the Trump years.
Ryan went on to frame Russia’s attempts to sow disinformation in the U.S. in geopolitical terms. “They believe our weakness is our freedom, so that we would polarize ourselves into inaction,” he added. “And Russia is basically with a bayonet trying to poke and find the soft tissue in the American political system, and this is probably just one more chapter in that story.”
Kane followed up by asking, “Do you think that they found that little hole in the system with Tucker Carlson? What did you think if you saw any of the clips of him rolling through Soviet–sorry–Russian grocery stores proclaiming their greatness?”
“That was just astounding to me. That one takes the cake, frankly,” Ryan replied, adding:
Yeah, I mean, what they’re going to try and do is build sympathy. What worries me more–and not just Tucker, but that’s a symptom of all this–is that they’re curating sympathy in America. And they’re helping nurture and develop an isolationist wing in my party and in our country, which I think is very, very dangerous. They’re developing people who want to see NATO reduced or NATO not adhered to. Obviously, former President Trump is pushing this line as well. So what I very much worry about is they’re helping curate a line of thought, a school of thought that is isolationist, that is pro-Putin, pro-Russia, pro-tyranny at the end of the day. And that is extremely dangerous for all democracy but for us as ourselves as a democracy.
And so what I see Tucker as, just one little chapter in that story. I didn’t watch that whole interview. I watched a little bit of it, but it just looked like a kind of an infomercial for Putin to be able to push his propaganda.
“You’re still on the board of Fox, correct?” Kane asked.
Ryan said he was and Kane pressed, “And do you feel as if Fox could do a better job of promoting some of the values that you are talking about?”
“Well, we do quite a bit. I mean, obviously, as you know, Tucker no longer works at Fox, and he was let go. I won’t go into all the details of that, other than what Fox, they had–there’s opinion, and then there’s news, and news reports all of these aspects. And there are people with opinions that give their opinions,” Ryan replied.
Read the full interview here.
