Tucker Carlson parrots Putin
Do you want to know what is most bothersome about the New York Times huge series on that loathsome prep-twerp who spews hate for an hour every night on Fox? Its placement on the front page of the paper. Yesterday, Sunday, the Times headlined across three columns with a gigantic photograph in a box at the top of Page One, “American Nationalist: How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable News.” Today it was the same, another three column box with another photo of Carlson and the headline, “American Nationalist: Tucker Carlson Reshaped Fox News, and Became Trump’s Heir.”
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying the Times shouldn’t educate its readers about how Carlson has managed to make Fox – and himself – tens of millions of dollars selling a diet of red meat hate to their viewers. It’s always nice to know the details of how demagogues do their tricks.
But look at the rest of both front pages: two columns each on the carnage in Ukraine. Sunday’s paper had this incredibly tragic story in a single column right next to the photo of Carlson seemingly looking startled at his own success: “A Body Bag and a Sister in Denial.” The opening paragraphs were enough to draw tears from the eyes of this reporter, who has seen some tragedy in his life:
“The wind carried the smell of death across the street. The body of the dead man, burned, mutilated and barely recognizable, was taken from the refrigerator and laid on a metal gurney. The coroner smoked a cigarette and unzipped the black bag.
It was a beautiful spring day. There had been no shelling that morning. And Oksana Pokhodenko, 34, gasped, blinking, at the charred corpse. That was not her brother, she told herself, that was not Oleksandr. That was barely a human.”
The story went on: “Ms. Pokhodenko, in black jeans, a black jacket and barely laced sneakers, struggled to keep looking at the body. Her brother had taught her how to ride a bike and had loved to watch cartoons for hours with his son. To his sister, he was a ‘stone wall.’ This was a charred husk. Half of the man’s skull was gone, and his chest cavity was splayed open.
’How is it possible to recognize anything here?’ she cried. ’There is nothing left at all. Oh, my god. It’s horrible. There is nothing left.’
This was Ms. Pokhodenko’s task on Tuesday morning, to identify the unidentifiable, to reconcile the unreconcilable, to put a name on a blackened corpse, to fill out the paperwork and to move on. A war so big that it has shaken the world was suddenly just a body bag holding the remnants of a man.”
Next to the story about Oksana Pokhodenko was the photo and story about Tucker Carlson, the multi-millionaire “star” of the Fox News prime time liar’s club. “Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain.”
The delicate world of Carlson’s and Trump’s MAGA masses wasn’t the only civilization under siege. The Times story about Oksana Pokhodenko told of another siege, of the Ukrainian village called Husarivka, not far from Kharkiv, where her brother and his wife and his three-year-old son had taken shelter with a distant relative. The village of about 1,000 people came under massive shelling during its occupation by Russian forces earlier in the war. One day in mid-March, Oleksandr and a friend left the safety of the relative’s basement to go in search of a few potatoes to feed the eight people who were sheltering there. Russian soldiers had told the men they would be safe so long as they were only in search of food. They never returned.
When Ukrainian forces retook control of Husarivka at the end of March, villagers found the bodies of two men. One’s throat had been slit, and the other had been shot through the chest. They recovered the passport of the larger of the two men. It had a bullet hole in it, and it had been partially burned, but Oksana could still read her brother’s name, Olekandsr Pokhodenko. He and the other man had been killed by Russian soldiers and then doused with gasoline and set on fire.
While Tucker Carlson was creating threats out of whole cloth and demonizing gay people and trans people and Black people and people from Mexico and Central America and Africa, while he was pushing lies about COVID cures and conspiracies about vaccine mandates and Critical Race Theory and accusing “liberals” and “Democrats” as conspirators who were out to “replace” white people with “more obedient voters from the third world,” Vladimir Putin was demonizing an entire people as “Nazis” and sending his army onto their land to bomb and shell cities and line up civilians along the edges of mass graves and shoot them in the backs of their heads, the same Vladimir Putin Carlson had asked his viewers, “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?”
This is what happens when you demonize entire swaths of humanity as less than human. You crack open a door that soon floods whole nations with hate and ultimately you begin the truly evil process of justifying violence against them. Carlson had defended the insurrectionists on January 6 as “peaceful” protestors and portrayed the assault on the Capitol as a “false flag” operation masterminded by the FBI. Putin has accused Ukrainians of killing their own civilian citizens so they could blame the Russians for committing war crimes.
Yes, I am comparing Carlson and Putin. The Fox host is using the same propaganda techniques Russian state-run media uses to justify the war in Ukraine, and in fact, Carlson has repeated Russian media talking points about the war on his own show repeatedly.
It is not a small matter. Carlson is distracting a huge part of the American electorate from the war crimes that are ongoing in Ukraine, and he is damning American citizens he does not like in the process. Trump and Carlson and other purveyors of lies and disinformation have already turned the whole idea of “fake news” upside down and turned it inside out to attack, to give just one example, people like Anthony Fauci for trying to do their jobs to save lives during a pandemic that has taken nearly a million American lives.
How long before Tucker Carlson labels liberals and Democrats as Nazis, parroting the propaganda campaign of Vladimir Putin against Ukrainians? And what happens then?
very beautifully said. I KNEW that there was something bugging me about the weird proximity of those two stories. but you tied it all together like a beautifully-wrapped package.
The only legit and non-violent way to turn this tide is to VOTE. The 2022 election is every bit as critical as the 2020 election. DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN TO SIGN UP DEMOCRATIC VOTERS AND GET THEM TO THE POLLS - AND THEN VOTE YOURSELF.