“Oopsie-Poopsie,” squirms little Tucker
The profiteering populist fraud that is the American “conservative media” is only allowed to survive at this point because its millions of viewers, listeners, and readers, feeling long abandoned by the mainstream, lack the dignity to trust their own ears and eyes, and to remember how thoroughly they have had their hearts and their principles looted by these money-grubbing pretenders who pose as their leaders and representatives. The way to end this fraud, and to win back some semblance of true political discourse, is to call their bluff, and hold them to account for their endless flip-flopping opportunism. Never has this necessity been more obvious, or had more real life-and-death significance, than in the current repugnant case of Vladimir Putin’s chief propagandist on American soil, Tucker Carlson.
Today, as the whole semi-civilized world, and even most of his own alleged “news network,” has acknowledged the truth of what is happening in Ukraine, and the world-historical desirability of Putin’s ultimate defeat, Carlson has dared to look into his propagandist’s camera and say, with his best approximation of a straight face and sincere voice, that:
No sane American approves of what Russia has done in Ukraine. We certainly don’t, and we don’t know anyone who does. On Twitter, you see Democrats pretending that their political opponents are responsible for the invasion and somehow support it. So Joe Biden and his staff so mismanaged the world that Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine after Biden told us for months he could prevent that from happening, and yet all of it is your fault.
I will stop right there, because what Carlson says in those opening sentences is probably the biggest and most obvious bald-faced lie in his entire worthless career as a pro-tyranny entertainment profiteer, so much so that nothing else he could subsequently add to his crap fest could make it any worse.
Notice that he immediately deflects from his own direct and open cheering for Putin, over at least the past two months, by claiming that Democrats are saying that the invasion is “your fault,” meaning his viewers’ fault; that is, he sets himself up as his viewers’ defender against these Democratic slanders — when in fact it was not his viewers, but Carlson himself, who was being particularly singled out (and not only by Democrats on Twitter) as a Putin-loving liar.
It was Carlson, not his viewers, who was being replayed on Russian state television, and his arguments and apologies for Putin touted there as wonderful reasoning. It was Carlson, not his viewers, whom Russia’s actual paid propagandists cited repeatedly and enthusiastically to lend credibility to their case for invading Ukraine due to “Russia’s legitimate security interests.” It was Carlson, not his viewers, who repeatedly fed Americans the official Kremlin talking points about how the U.S. government was only taking Ukraine’s side due to rich Ukrainian lobbyists, how Ukraine was just an unimportant “autocracy,” how Putin’s claims to and threats against Ukrainian territory were merely an understandable historical and geographical cry for justice and security, how Putin is right to view NATO as nothing but a group of bullies trying to deny him his sovereign territory and his naval rights.
These, and many more equally outrageous lies on Putin’s behalf, were spewing from the whiny face of Tucker Carlson and his heavily praised and honored guest analysts, such as US Army Colonel Doug “Kremlin” Macgregor, continuously, repeatedly, and right up to the day before the invasion. Carlson and his guests are on record strongly defending Putin against his critics, not because they had no idea he had designs on Ukraine, but because he had those designs. Carlson openly declared that he was taking Putin’s side in the dispute — taking an aggressive tyrant’s side against a sovereign nation wishing to deny that tyrant its land. He said he was rooting for Putin, that he had no beef with Putin, and that he had no patience for those claiming that Ukraine, which he repeatedly belittled and smeared as a worthless autocracy, had any defensible claims in the matter at all.
That was Tucker Carlson’s clear and unequivocal position on this situation — right up to the moment, a couple of days ago, when it became apparent that absolutely everyone on “the right,” apart from those at the white nationalist convention in Florida, was at least paying lip service to condemning Putin and supporting Ukraine. Then, in true mercenary anything-for-the-money form, Carlson had a sudden change, not of heart of course, but of calculation. As did Mark Levin in 2016, when he realized that he could not defeat the populist authoritarian Trumpsters, so he finally condemned the better faction within his own audience and turned himself into one of Trump’s most embarrassing ring-kissers. As did, for that matter, almost the entire “conservative media,” eventually, including some old friends of mine.
The lesson here, if there were anyone left to read it, would be this: The pied pipers leading you astray are not merely wrong — although they are certainly that — but are not even committed to their wrong ideas, or to any ideas at all. They are all fakes, taking advantage of your desperation, and your dependent weakness and fear that craves someone, anyone with a public voice, to represent you. Due to the combination of your weakness and fear, and these profiteers’ cynical willingness to flow with any winds that might blow money their way, you are being led to hell, to tyranny, to demagoguery and stupidity, so that a few dozen people less intelligent and principled than yourself can get rich and feel “influential.”
I have tried a hundred times over the years to get my old friends and readers to see how they have been had, how their wishes and their souls have been abused and cast to wolves. If they — meaning “you,” who are not reading this — cannot see this ugly truth in the case of Tucker Carlson today, the most self-evident example you could conceive of a “conservative host” peeing on his audience and asking them to call it vintage wine, then you are lost, and there is truly no hope left for you. For two months (or more, I assume), Tucker Carlson was the entire world’s single most effective, popular, and diligent apologist for Vladimir Putin’s murderous aggression, until just a few days ago, when that inhuman and anti-American position became financially untenable. Today, the punk looks you in the eye and says, “No sane American approves of what Russia has done in Ukraine. We certainly don’t, and we don’t know anyone who does.”
I do know someone who does, regardless of how he wishes to cover his cowardly, profiteering butt today, and turn it all into a domestic argument between the Democrats and his audience. This is not about the Democrats or Fox News viewers. This is not even about American politics at all. It is about one famous TV celebrity who used his fame and his platform to defend and support a murderous tyrant, and whose support was directly appreciated and exploited by the tyrant’s own official news media to help justify his invasion of Ukraine. Joe Biden is weak, and there is no doubt that Putin felt emboldened by this fact. But Joe Biden did not cheer for Putin’s aggression, argue for it, make excuses for it, make moral equivalency arguments for it, and slander Putin’s victims to justify it.
That was Tucker Carlson — again and again and again, on the most popular cable news show in the “free world.” On the flagship station of the “conservative media.” Face this fact, understand it well, and remember it.