Tucker Carlson Deployed His Oldest and Dumbest Tricks to Defend His Putin Interview

Tucker Carlson is in Russia to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin, claiming that he’s doing it out of some sort of high-minded commitment to “journalism” and “to inform” Americans who “have no idea why Putin invaded Ukraine, or what his goals are now.” He’s being widely criticized from both sides of the aisle, and it’s not just a transparently dumb game but not even an original card for him to play.

It’s a stunningly mendacious truckload of poppycock from Carlson, whose previous employer, Fox News, paid $787.5 million for airing nonsensically untrue claims about the 2020 election, but still found Carlson’s schtick to be unbearable and fired him despite his high ratings.

In a video posted on The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, Carlson repeatedly states unfounded claims that, when held up to his own history, are so absurd they would be laughable if they didn’t concern a horrific war.

The same guy who ranted about the sexiness of M&Ms and peddled testicle tanning insisted that he was interviewing Putin because he was a seriously a serious journalist, seriously.

“[I]t’s our job. We’re in journalism. Our duty is to inform people,” said Carlson, claiming that “most Americans are not informed” and “have no real idea what’s happening in this region, here in Russia or 600 miles away in Ukraine.”

Carlson bashed politicians and media outlets for “promoting” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “like he’s a new consumer brand,” while “not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview the president of the other country involved in this conflict, Vladimir Putin.”

As veteran journalist Christiane Amanpour pointed out, she had made many requests to interview Putin since he invaded Ukraine, denouncing Carlson’s claim as “absurd.” Countless others pointed out that two American journalists, Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, are imprisoned within Russia without trial and on trumped up charges, literally arrested while they were reporting from within Russia.

Humorously, Carlson’s claim about being the only reporter who wanted to talk to Putin was exposed by a Kremlin spokesman, who said they received “numerous requests for interviews with the president.”

In Carlson’s defense of the interview, he further claimed that citizens in English-speaking countries “seem mostly unaware…because no one has told them the truth,” and it was happening because our media outlets are “corrupt” and “lie” to us “mostly by omission.”

To hear those words spoken by the same person who presented carefully selected, out-of-context clips from the more than 40,000 hours of Jan. 6, 2021 video footage to claim the rioters “were not insurrectionists, they were sightseers,” with the “overwhelming majority” being “peaceful” and “ordinary and meek,” has us singing along with Alanis Morissette as we ride along in a 1978 Lincoln Continental.

Carlson — who has called Zelensky a “liar,” a “Ukrainian strip club manager,” and “sweaty and rat-like, a persecutor of Christians,” and has said U.S. aid to the country is a “scam” — complained that Zelensky had not accepted his request for an interview and then bashed the interviews the Ukrainian president had done with other media outlets as “fawning pep sessions.”

Yes, this is literally the same Tucker Carlson whose own fawning comments about Putin have made him a regular feature on Russia’s state-owned TV programs. But here he is, accusing other media outlets of engaging in “government propaganda, propaganda of the worst kind, the kind that kills people.”

After accusing the Biden White House of interfering with his efforts to interview Putin, Carlson declared his show had “come to Moscow anyway,” and bragged about how they had “paid for this trip ourselves,” not getting paid by “any government or group,” and wouldn’t charge anyone to watch the interview.

Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, a chicken nugget heir made wildly rich by his years under an absurdly lucrative Fox contract, doesn’t need the cash, from the Kremlin or any MAGA world subscriber. After his defenestration from Fox, he could have easily chilled out in one of his multiple homes in Maine or Florida or wherever else he’d like to expand his real estate portfolio. But, oh, that wouldn’t satisfy his thirst for relevance and influence. This interview was never about money (he doesn’t need it) but it has his name in headlines (irrelevant if many are critical; all press is in fact clout-building press in this Trumpian era) and he can enjoy cosplaying as an influential force in the foreign policy arena.

He then claimed his website would post “the entire thing shot live to tape and unedited.”

Besides the skepticism any reasonable person would have after Carlson was busted for editing out of his interview with Kanye West multiple anti-Semitic rants and unhinged disturbing moments, any potential editing of Putin’s words isn’t the real danger here.

The Russian president is not as emotionally volatile as the rapper who once declared he was going “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE;” he isn’t likely to pound the table and declare he wants to personally rip every Ukrainian civilian apart limb from limb, but that doesn’t mean the interview will be anything other than carefully calculated propagandistic lies. Putin is, of course, the same person who insisted the invasion of Ukraine was a “special military operation” to “de-Nazify” a country led by a Jewish president, while his army bombed residential areas and committed horrific war crimes.

Even a Putin bootlicker like Carlson has to be aware of how quickly and cruelly a dictator’s favor can turn, and it’s extremely doubtful he made this trip to Moscow without not only first clearing his travel plans with the Kremlin, but also having some sort of discussions over what topics the interview would cover.

Does anyone with a plural number of brain cells actually believe Carlson will aggressively press Putin over the extensive evidence of targeting of Ukrainian civilians, torture, rape, and other war crimes? Is he going to urge Putin to free Gershkovich, or Paul Whelan, or any other Westerner wrongfully held in his brutal prisons?

And here’s the cherry on top of the Pravda sundae: Carlson concludes his video by facetiously claiming that he is “not encouraging you to agree with what Putin may say in this interview,” merely to “watch it,” and “then, like a free citizen and not a slave, you can decide for yourself.”

It’s the same charade he deployed many times on his Fox News show. Bring on a guest to spew Russian agitprop, antivaxx conspiracies, or election lies, claim he’s just asking a “few questions” or telling you what some nefarious unnamed government or big media forces don’t want you to know, and then if he gets any sort of fact-checking or pushback, cry that he’s a victim of oppressors seeking to silence his truth telling.

I should acknowledge that Carlson’s four-and-a-half minute video wasn’t totally untrue. He is correct that the war in Ukraine has been a “human disaster” with “hundreds of thousands of people dead” and a mass exodus of Ukrainian refugees. He just isn’t willing to articulate the fact that the person at fault for that tragic death and loss is that guy in the Kremlin — and, if Putin had his way, that death toll would soon be in the millions.

Watch the video above, via The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.