Russia Calling! Tucker Carlson's Fantastic Journey from Media Mediocrity to Putin Propaganda Shill
Echoes of Axis Sally, Tokyo Rose & Lord Haw-Haw: a rich American tradition of broadcast treason.
“He’s not a hero – he’s an anti-hero, he’s a destroyer,” Tucker Carlson said of Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky on February 24.
Carlson has also denounced Ukraine as not “a democracy” but rather a “client state” of the U.S. government.
What gives with Tucker Carlson? Two-thirds of Americans support Ukraine recovering its territory seized by Russia, even if it takes a prolonged conflict to do so, according to a recent Gallup poll.
The thing that stands out about Carlson, however, is that he goes several magnitudes beyond the traditional American isolationist rhetoric about the need to stay out of foreign conflicts. He parrots our enemy’s line, as if Moscow sends him daily talking points topped off by a smiley emoji. Вот очередная порция тем для разговора, товарищ!😁
Take, for example, his brazen repeating of Moscow’s lie that the U.S. is setting up WMD labs in Ukraine:
Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov: “Those laboratories are created by the United States all over the world. Ukraine is probably the biggest project for the Pentagon.”
Without missing a beat, Tucker Carlson then echoes the lie: “Secret biolabs? Like the secret biolabs Ukraine definitely doesn’t have? Ukraine has those? Yes, it does.”
Picking up another relentless Kremlin trope, Carlson said it was “obvious” that “getting Ukraine to join NATO was the key to inciting war with Russia.”
And the info feed travels both ways.
A darling of Putin’s propaganda machine, Carlson appears virtually daily on Russian television and is quoted liberally.
Russia media monitor Julia Davis describes Carlson as “practically the co-host” of state TV propagandists who “is often quoted to support official Kremlin narratives.”
Mother Jones last year obtained a Kremlin directive to Putin-friendly news channels stating, “It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States and NATO.” No other Western journalist is referenced in the document.
America has a tradition of broadcast treason going back to World War II when U.S. citizens offered themselves up as radio propaganda shills for the Axis powers. Irish-American William “Lord Haw Haw” Joyce broadcast Nazi propaganda from Berlin throughout the war. He began his broadcasts with “Germany Calling! Germany Calling!” He was convicted of treason by a British court and hanged in 1946. Iva “Tokyo Rose” Toguri D'Aquino broadcast for Imperial Japan. Having served six years of a ten-year sentence, she was given a full pardon in 1977 by the president after a thorough review of her case revealed she wasn’t a traitor and her trial was flawed. Around a dozen other Americans who broadcast propaganda for the Third Reich were arrested after the war. Their fates ranged from case dismissal to life imprisonment (none of whom served that long).
The most infamous American Nazi shill was Mildred “Axis Sally” Gillars, who began her broadcasts with “This is Berlin Calling. When Berlin calls, it pays to listen.” A sample of her messaging over the Reichs-Rundfunk: “A defeat for Germany would mean a defeat for America. I say damn Roosevelt and Churchill, and all of their Jews who have made this war possible. I, as an American girl, will stay over here on this side of the fence because it’s the right side.” Convicted on a single count of treason, Gillars did twelve years in a federal prison.
A 1941 Princeton University survey of German propaganda found that the Nazis exploited race, class and cultural divisions in American society. “Berlin programs for this country are employing corrosive anti-Semitic propaganda, together with conflicting appeals to workers, businessmen, isolationists, interventionists, racial and national groups.” Sound familiar?
I have a fascination with smart people who sell their souls to evildoers. I examined them in a two-part “Do Not Feed the Whores” essay during the Trump presidency: “Why Do So Many Really Smart People Work for a Dumbass Like Trump?” and “Why Have So Many Really Smart Journalists Sold Their Souls to Trump?” The upshot: “As P. J. O'Rourke noted, ‘Every government is a parliament of whores.’ Include those who attach themselves as paid shills to a rotten regime.”
I can accept as genuine true believers in “Trumpism” folks like Pillow Guy Lindell, Marjorie Traitor Greene, Matt Pedo Gaetz — those whose flamboyant mendacity is exceeded only by their bottomless stupidity. It’s the Ivy Leaguers and equivalents like Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, Laura Ingraham — those who suddenly switched from being serious journalists to raving Goebbels mouthpieces, utterly unashamed to spout any manner of outrageous lie and hate-filled doggerel for fame and riches that get my goat. The timing of their transformation coincides neatly with when the Devil cashed in the pawn ticket for their soul.
Tucker Carlson’s facile moral transmogrification is on full display.
He previously wrote for Esquire, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, and The Daily Beast, and worked for five years with CNN and three with MSNBC as a broadcast journalist. Carlson did serious reporting with a conservative slant. He was a dim-starred, plodding reporter — one can say a steady mediocrity with low name recognition.
Then, hired by Fox at about the same time as Dobbs, Carlson began to feel at home unconstrained in his natural paleoconservative habitat and since 2016 is, as POLITICO described him, “perhaps the highest-profile proponent of Trumpism.” Furthermore, he became a Trump confidant and behind-the-scenes advisor. Carlson unsurprisingly trumpets the whole panoply of proto-fascist Republican tropes about the “deep state,” “stolen election,” etc. He once instigated a serious corporate advertising boycott of his show after he denounced immigrants for making America “poorer, dirtier and more divided.” Carlson wittingly plunked himself into the same Faustian basket of Trump propagandists as Sean Hannity, Dobbs, Bartiromo and the “Fox and Friends” puppetry.
Carlson’s primetime show regularly brings in upwards of 3 million viewers, and has reached 4.5 million, the largest for any program in the history of cable news. This speaks as much to the mental debilities and gullibility of a large chunk of the American populace as it does to Carlson’s talents as a highly paid shill. Fox pays him $35 million annually, making him the highest-paid and wealthiest television host in the world. Who wouldn’t sell their soul for such a sum?
The centrality of lucrative lies to Fox’s success was recently revealed in the Dominion vs Fox News lawsuit depositions when Rupert Murdoch confessed, “It is not red or blue, it is green. . . The man is on every night. Pays us a lot of money.” The Faustian bargain further revealed.
The lawsuit exposes more of Carlson’s rank hypocrisy, his utter disregard for truth in pursuit of power and riches.
When a junior Fox reporter fact-checked Trump’s lies about a stolen election, Carlson texted Sean Hannity: “Please get her fired. Seriously. . . What the fuck? I’m actually shock. . . It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
More examples contrasting his private statements with his on-the-air lying:
Private: “The software shit is absurd.” And “There wasn’t enough fraud to change the outcome.” And “It was shockingly reckless to claim that Dominion rigged the election if there’s no one inside the company willing to talk, or internal Dominion documents or copies of the software showing that they did it and as you know there isn’t.” And “Sidney Powell is lying.”
Public: “We don’t know, we have to find out.” and “You [Sydney Powel] keep telling our viewers that millions of votes were changed by the software. I hope you will prove that very soon.”
As a propagator of lies and useful idiot to a foreign dictator, Tucker Carlson leaves Axis Sally, Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose in the dust. He’s much smarter and galactically more meretricious than any of them. And unlike them, he likely will suffer no legal consequences as he exercises his “first amendment rights” domestically on behalf of a hostile nation with which we are technically not at war. But time inevitably catches up with such people. Their comeuppance arrives eventually in the form of ignominy and lonely obscurity — as came to famed poet turned Mussolini propagandist and vicious anti-Semite Ezra Pound, who spent his final years in a ward for the criminally insane, and Mildred Gillars, who crouched in a convent and died broke and alone. The judgment of history for such people acts as a vandalized grave marker on their reputation.
As Mephistopheles told Dr. Faustus: “Fools that will laugh on earth, most weep in hell.”