Tucker in Russia
what is going on inside him
Tucker Carlson has now published his second interview with a Russian leader.
On February 6, 2024 he interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On December 3, 2024, he interviewed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
Both interviews featured the Russian leaders reciting at length the Russian narrative about the Ukraine war and Russia’s view of the post-Cold War world. In the Putin inteview the Russian President basically gave a 30 minute history of Russia over the past 1,000 years. In the Lavrov interview the Foreign Minister justified the Russian position as a defense of Russian-speaking peoples in eastern Ukraine.
I thought to myself: what is going on? Is this just Tucker Carlson on his own, or is he the face and the voice of a movement within or adjacent to the rising US ruling class?
I said to myself: I don’t know. So, I thought, the only thing to do is to watch the segment on Tucker’s website where he tells his own story as “Episode 6: The Host” in the documentary series “All the President’s Men.”
In the episode he tells his journey as a son of Dick Carlson, “longest-serving” director of Voice of America (i.e., intelligence community operative). He tells about his adult life from applying to the CIA to journalist to network-TV commentator, cable-tv news castoff and now independent internet content producer.
Like all of us, Carlson once lived and believed the Narrative, that we are the good guys trying to bring democracy to the world. Then he went to Iraq in 2003 and experienced “chaos.” We spent about $1 trillion in Iraq, he says, for what? The CIA is overthrowing governments all over the world:
The whole premise is insane: we are defending democracy by ending it?
On the Republican Party:
(0:21:30) The party has changed, but its leadership has not changed. And there’s still every committee chairman in the House and Senate, all whom I know personally: they’re all just tools of the intel agencies, one hundred percent. They are being blackmailed, in some specific cases, one I know for a fact… But mostly [they] just sort of identify with their intel briefers, who are lying to them.
Why are neocons like Bill Kristol anti-Trump? Because Trump declared the Iraq war a mistake at a debate in 2016. “What they really believe in is endless war.”
Why the regime’s anti-Russia narrative? Partly ideological, partly money, people that were educated and work and live in the Cold War “system.” Everyone is doing it. And yet, Tucker says, Russia is the largest, most diverse country in the world. If it fell apart…
But what do we do?
(1:17:01) It’s very tough to fix a system that is rotten on every level… everything about it is rotten, and we know that. But they are very comfortable with hurting people, not just disagreeing with them, not just shutting them down or taking their power away or taking their jobs away which is itself a form of violence, but actual physical violence against American citizens who disagree with them, they are very comfortable with that…
Why don’t the people vote them out of office?
(1:18:00) The people pushing it, the totalitarian organizations that are embracing totalitarianism, are completely for it, and they have a vested interest in convincing people not to resist by telling them it’s not happening. But I think it’s more fundamental in that I think it’s a feature of human nature that people don’t see what they don’t want to see, and that abrupt change is too hard for people to handle. It’s not just that we are being fooled; we’re fooling ourselves.
So what is Tucker Carlson all about? Revolution? Regime change?
(1:18:35) I’m still for living with people I disagree with. I will always be for that. I will always be for pluralism. I’ll always be happy to have dinner with someone who doesn’t share my views… And that will never change, I will not allow that to change, because I think you become something less than you should be.
It really does seem that Tucker Carlson is not interested in power, is not necessarily working within the bowels of the Trump phenomenon to change the regime.
Maybe all he wants to do it talk and listen. And shine a light upon the political world so that we can see what he sees.
There is always the worry Tucker and Trump are just different forms of the deep state. We’ve been fooled for many years and it is hard to believe there is really sunlight out of the cave we have been in for so long. It’s possible the internet and rise of citizen journalists like you Chris are coming back out of the sunlight to tell us of a beautiful world and just maybe we are listening instead of killing the messenger. My apologies to Plato for butchering his allegory of the cave. It seems mankind has been in the dark for a long time.