National Review Writer Torches Tucker Carlson for Gushing About His ‘Full Girlfriend Experience’ in Russia

Charles C.W. Cooke, a senior writer at the conservative National Review, put Tucker Carlson on blast over his assertion that Moscow “is so much nicer than any city in my country.”

“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 to — and this is not ideological — how did that happen?” asked Carlson rhetorically at an event in Dubai.

“The simplest answer to this inquiry is that it didn’t,” answered Cooke in his column before suggesting that Carlson might have enjoyed his time in Moscow “as a rich foreign tourist who was being carefully minded by the Russian government.”

Cooke continued:

I have been to Moscow. I have also been to most of the major cities in America. There is no sense in which Moscow could be placed at the top of the list. There is a small part of the place that is rather pretty, and, thanks largely to the mafia, a few good restaurants have popped up, but the rest of it remains as bleak and moribund and soulless as it was during the Soviet era. It is a museum, and an ugly one at that.

“Carlson says that Moscow is ‘clean’ and ‘safe.’ When I was there, it was neither. Moscow has a chronic homeless problem — at night, you see people warming themselves by lighting fires inside discarded oil drums — and it is teeming with petty crime,” recalled Cooke. “I saw an old lady pushed down a flight of stone steps by a beggar, I saw a black teenager punched for no obvious reason (although we know why), and my father and I were mugged on that ornate subway that naive visitors always gush about. It is true that none of this would have happened to us if we’d been there to interview Vladmir Putin, but that’s rather the point, isn’t it? When you’re a guest of the government — especially of a totalitarian government — you’re treated to the full girlfriend experience.”

“Moscow is a drab mausoleum in an economic backwater that is ruled by a dictator,” he concluded, slamming Carlson for his “brand of trollish Russophilia.”