RIGA, Latvia — The blustering American TV personality Tucker Carlson has lambasted the United States for sending too much aid to Ukraine, called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “sweaty and rat-like,” and given credence to Russia’s baseless justifications for its invasion.
The former Fox News host’s rhetoric on the war — he has called it a U.S.-led “regime-change war” against Russia — and his attacks on Zelensky’s government — “a pure client state of the United States State Department” — aligns so well with the major propaganda points of Russian state television that one channel has decided to broadcast Carlson’s new show on X, formerly Twitter, to millions of Russians, though apparently without Carlson’s permission.
The channel, Rossiya 24, had recently been teasing a new show “Tucker,” and the first episode aired over the weekend. But rather than a voiced-over ensemble of Carlson’s greatest hits against Ukraine — effectively throwing raw meat to the pro-war hawks in its audience — the show turned out to be a puzzling, roughly 20-minute excerpt of his recent interview of embattled Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, an official virtually unknown to Russian viewers.
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Rossiya 24 is Russia’s leading news channel, and the hosts of its political talk shows spend hours drumming into their audiences that Kyiv, not Moscow, is to blame for the brutal war and that U.S. military aid will accomplish nothing other than helping “neo-Nazi Zelensky” fight “until the last Ukrainian.”
In that sense, Carlson would be a natural fit in the lineup. His descriptions of Zelensky, who is Jewish, as a rat, for instance, have been denounced by Jewish groups as resorting to an old antisemitic trope used by the Nazis, among others. He made those comments in the debut of his internet show in June, in which he also declared that aliens were visiting Earth and questioned the official accounts of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
But Russian pundits have long used Carlson’s rants on Fox News to support their viewpoints, seizing on the prominent American TV star to boost the credibility of their claims and showcase how Russian President Vladimir Putin’s conspiracy theories about Washington resonate well beyond Russian borders.
Long before the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russian television executives excitedly replayed Carlson segments to illustrate political turmoil in the United States and to debunk allegations of Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election. (Even though the late Wagner boss Yevgeniy Prigozhin boasted of interfering in the race using his internet troll farms.)
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More recently, this narrative morphed into breathless descriptions of the “unjust” persecution of former president Donald Trump, whom Putin has recently described as a “politically persecuted” person, calling the indictments against him evidence of “the rot in the American political system, which cannot claim to be able to teach others about democracy.”
Russian state outlets also came swiftly to Carlson’s defense after he was dismissed by Fox in April, with headlines such as “Carlson fired over fearless Ukraine reporting.” The Russian outlets also amplified reports of congressional Republicans turning against U.S.-supplied military aid to Ukraine — something that could vastly increase Putin’s chances of scoring a victory in the protracted, grinding war.
The idea of a Tucker Carlson show as part of regularly scheduled programming in Russia seemed to herald the next step in the melding of right-wing MAGA punditry and Kremlin propaganda.
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Rossiya 24 began advertising what appeared to be a Russian version of Carlson’s show about three weeks ago, with a trailer made up of clips in which the host repeatedly pronounces the word “Russia” with different intonations before a slogan appeared: “The loud American presenter goes to another level, here” — adorned with the logos depicting Carlson’s show and Rossiya 24’s emblem.
VGTRK, a holding company that owns Rossiya 24, did not respond to a request for comment. Carlson, in an interview with the Financial Times, said that he was not aware of the broadcast and, using an expletive, referred to it as nonsense.
Carlson was fired from Fox News in April just days after the network agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which accused the network of airing false claims that it had conspired to rig the 2020 presidential election.
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The news of Carlson’s firing was covered prominently in Russia, where Kremlin-friendly outlets said he was fired for “telling the truth” in an America devoid of free speech. One top anchor publicly offered him a job.
Carlson quickly launched a new show on X, formerlyTwitter, where in the very first episode he touched on his usual conspiracy-theory-tinged topics, describing Zelensky as a rat and suggesting without evidence that Ukraine was responsible for the destruction of a major dam that was located in a Russian-occupied area of Ukraine.
There is still no conclusive evidence of who or what destroyed the Kakhovka dam, but Carlson told his viewers that it made no sense for Russia to have done it.
Recently, Carlson asked for an interview with Putin, a request that was publicized and endorsed by the head of the state-funded RT network, Margarita Simonyan, during an on-air appearance with another propagandist, Vladimir Solovyev.
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“Tucker is a great guy, and, by the way, he is really asking for an interview with Vladimir Putin, so if someone heard this and reported it to the president, it would be great,” Simonyan said.
“The most popular host in all of U.S. history, and what happened?” Simonyan said. “He was thrown out of Fox News! And he didn’t even say anything that radical; he just didn’t sing in tune with the rest of the choir.”
Last week, Carlson claimed without evidence that “the U.S. government” has prevented him from interviewing Putin.
“I tried to interview Vladimir Putin, and the U.S. government stopped me,” he said in an interview, published by Swiss magazine Die Weltwoche on Thursday. “By the way, nobody defended me. I don’t think there was anybody in the news media who said, ‘Wait a second. I may not like this guy, but he has a right to interview anyone he wants, and we have a right to hear what Putin says.’”
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“You’re not allowed to hear Putin’s voice. Because why? There was no vote on it. No one asked me. I’m 54 years old. I’ve paid my taxes and followed the law,” Die Weltwoche quoted Carlson as saying.
On Monday, the Kremlin spokesman said there was no point in granting interviews to Western journalists at the moment.
“We receive dozens of requests every day from international media, including American media, asking Putin for an interview,” Dmitry Peskov said on his daily call with journalists. “We believe that time will come when such an interview will be necessary. But at the moment, when the public is drugged by Russia-hating propaganda, hardly anyone is able to soberly perceive Putin’s analysis of the situation.”
“But we are convinced that sooner or later such a moment will come,” Peskov continued. “You know that the president, when speaking to foreign media, is always extremely frank, gives detailed answers and always explains our country’s position. Whether Carlson will be among those who will be considered for an interview, well, let’s wait and see.”
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