TheRighting Review:
Tucker Carlson Does Putin’s Bidding in Two Short Videos
By Howard Polskin, February 19, 2024
In the last few days, Tucker Carlson posted videos on his website that purport to show the wonders of Moscow through his eyes. He calls these abbreviated videos Tucker Shorts and the best thing I can say about them is thank goodness each one is under four minutes.
If Putin’s propaganda machine had produced the videos, they couldn’t have done a better job. The videos paint a highly sanitized and one-sided picture of an idyllic, orderly society with abundant goods and first class infrastructure.
Carlson’s Moscow Subway Station video takes viewers under the streets of the Russian capital for an inside peek at the city’s famed Kiyevskaya tube stop with its sparkling chandeliers and art work on the walls. Cello music accompanies the pristine images, evoking a Shangri-La-like setting. The fallen Fox News host observes that “there’s no filth,” “no bums” and “no rapists,” but for the life of me I don’t understand what powers he has to determine if someone is a rapist just by looking at them. He goes further, saying “It’s nicer than anything in our country.” It makes me wonder what he would have said if he observed Berlin’s mass transit system in 1939.
Carlson visits an unnamed Moscow supermarket in his second video. He shows wide, spotless corridors and shelves overflowing with a mouth-watering bread selection. Without any sense of irony, he points to the wines from Crimea, which used to be part of Ukraine before it was annexed by Russia in 2014. Carlson became so enamored of the grocery store, he predicted that if his audience visited a similar Russian outlet that they would become radicalized against the leaders of the United States. “That’s what I feel,” he concluded. “Radicalized.”
Nauseated. That’s what I felt after watching these two videos.
If Carlson has any common sense or decency following the suspicious death of Putin’s leading dissident Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison on February 15, he should delete the videos of his Moscow travels. (He did describe Navalny’s death as “barbaric and awful.”)
Should Carlson’s new website fail, I’ve got the perfect job for him: the marketing department of the Moscow Chamber of Commerce. For a more balanced view of Russian life, read Fareed Zakaria’s Washington Post opinion piece.
Howard Polskin is the founder and president of TheRighting.
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One video gives viewers an inside peek at Moscow’s famed Kiyevskaya tube stop (above) with its sparkling chandeliers and art work on the walls. It paint a one-sided picture of an idyllic, orderly society with abundant goods and first class infrastructure. (Image: Flickr)
