Tucker Carlson and the Turncoat Republicans

Carlson's propaganda tour in Moscow highlights a new GOP electoral strategy

When Tucker Carlson interviewed Vladimir Putin last week, critics mocked him as the useful idiot of a fascist murderer. Carlson began the two-hour interview by asking why Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and the Russian president blathered on for over half an hour, starting not with the invasion nor with the Maidan Uprising of November 2013, but 1,151 years before with the mythic origins of Russia itself and then painfully working his way forward, blending history with fabrication as he spoke.

Most folks mocked Carlson for not pushing back on Putin’s lies, such as the claim that Poland provoked Nazi Germany to invade it. Even Putin later said he was surprised by Carlson’s softball questions. Others said it’s not the duty of a journalist to push back or fact-check guests in real time, but merely to present their views.

Still others suggested Carlson’s greatest sin was simply that the interview was unbearably boring. But Carlson wasn’t done, not by a country mile. He next went from arguably violating journalistic ethics to spewing fascist propaganda. In the process, he helped highlight the greatest shift in Republican politics since the Southern strategy.

Tucker Goes to the Train Station

Carlson began his propaganda tour by visiting the Kiyevskaya metro station in western Moscow. Here’s what he had to say:

One of the ways you understand a society is through its infrastructure … and what we found shocked us … There’s no graffiti, there’s no filth, no foul smells. There are no bums or drug addicts or rapists or people waiting to push you onto the train tracks and kill you. No, it’s perfectly clean and orderly. And how do you explain that? We’re not even going to guess. That’s not our job. We’re only going to ask the question … How does Russia … have a subway station that normal people use to get to work and home every single day that’s nicer than anything in our country?

Never mind his “just asking questions” tactic, which he has used for decades. Never mind his insinuation that Russian infrastructure is impressive compared to the West. The countries with the best quality of infrastructure are places like Singapore, Switzerland, and the U.S.—wealthy nations with highly skilled workforces, especially in construction and engineering, and capitalist economies with low corruption.

Never mind also that Russia is better than the U.S. in none of these categories and embarrassingly bad in more than one. It ranks 141st out of 180 countries in corruption while the U.S. ranks 24th. As a result, Russian infrastructure ranks alongside that of Serbia and Mexico. Its railroad infrastructure quality is a bit better, ranking higher than Indonesia, but far below nations such as the United States.

Rather, consider how Carlson tried to depict his homeland as a hellhole compared to the supposed paradise of modern-day Moscow. Before we get to why he is doing this, let’s dismantle his claims, one at a time.

First, there’s the graffiti. Russia may not be as wallpapered with graffiti as Athens (no place is), but it’s not spotless. Still, Moscow does have less graffiti than your typical U.S. city. But this is for the same reason that there’s no graffiti in North Korea. In the UK, Banksy pieces sell for up to $1.1 million whereas the “Russian Banksy,” Pavel Pukhov, died in 2013 under “mysterious circumstances.” The following year, the “Banksy of Donetsk” was tortured for six weeks.

Suffice it to say, there’s more graffiti in the West because fascist dictators will go to greater extremes to stamp it out, while in the U.S. we have these pesky things called human rights. So unless you’re putting up pro-Putin graffiti like Russian police, your wildstyle could be seen as dissident art and earn you weeks of torture, if not death.

But what about the lack of homeless people Carlson mentions? This point surely resonates with many of his viewers who will be well aware of the homelessness problem in the U.S. But let’s compare. Boston has 1,545 homeless individuals while San Francisco, one of the worst cities in the nation for homelessness, has 7,754. This feels out of control to most Americans, but by Russian standards, that’s nothing. Saint Petersburg has up to 60,000 homeless people while Moscow has up to 100,000.

Why then didn’t Carlson see homeless people everywhere he went? The answer is that Russia is so brutally cold that the homeless of St. Petersburg and Moscow take shelter below, huddling in sewer pipes, which raises another issue. Russia would have even more homeless people if the weather wasn’t constantly killing them, filling the sewers with their frozen corpses. Homeless deaths reached 815 in New York City in 2022, and that was a record high, meanwhile 1,000 homeless people die on the streets of St. Petersburg and 3,000 die on the streets of Moscow every year.

But at least there are no “drug addicts or rapists or people waiting to push you onto the train tracks and kill you,” right Carlson? Bad news there too, I’m afraid. Moscow is the least safe European capital for women when it comes to public transportation. And in Russia, even the police will rape you. In 2004, a 19-year-old was shot in the head after he unearthed a police rape ring on the Moscow Metro. In 2016, police tortured and threatened to rape a peaceful protester. Last year, Moscow police tortured and raped a guy for protesting the draft. The list of examples goes on and on.

You’re also more likely to be murdered in Russia, where the intentional homicide rate is 6.8 in per 100,000 people compared to 6.4 in the U.S. As for Carlson’s specific claim about being pushed onto the tracks, someone pushed a 15-year-old onto the tracks and killed him mere months before Carlson visited—at the very same station.

How can Carlson be this stupid? As he would say, I’m not even going to guess. I’m only going to ask the question. Literally none of his comments about Kiyevskaya are true, save one. It really is beautiful. In fact, the station is stunningly gorgeous with its ornately decorated baroque flourishes and white Ural marble.

But this is a sleight-of-hand. Moscow is a den of lavish wealth and repulsive destitution. Yet Carlson decided not to show us the latter and instead took viewers to the wealthiest parts of the city. Kiyevskaya station is less than a 40-minute walk over the Moskva River from the “Golden Mile,” the city’s most exclusive neighborhood, home to celebrities and state officials, where the wealth of the entire nation’s most successful people is concentrated within a few city blocks. Outside this, the city looks much different, and outside Moscow, things often look more like an Indian slum.

But Carlson shows us none of that.

Nor does he show us random scenes from the wealthiest part of the wealthiest city in this mafia state. He could have featured a museum, for example. Or a local hospital. He could have stood in awe of the Noble Row, a six-unit townhouse development where units start at $22 million, also walking distance from the station.

Or, of course, he could have shown us any other metro station than the one in the middle of the city’s fanciest neighborhood. But he didn’t do that. And because this is propaganda, he didn’t say he was showing us only the fancy parts either. Instead, he suggested these scenes are representative of the city, or even the whole country.

But if you were to walk through Kiyevskaya, you’d immediately come to understand why Carlson chose this particular place. Namely, its symbolism. Carlson has supported Russia since Day One of its invasion of Ukraine, and Kiyevskaya is not just a symbol of Russian wealth but of Z ideology, with its ceiling frescoes of Ukrainian life and giant mosaic commemorating the reunification of Russia and Ukraine.

That’s not a coincidence, folks. That’s Propaganda 101.

But then Carlson visited a grocery store, and that’s when I realized we were seeing something far more sinister than a doofus reporter fawning at the feet of our enemy and trying to convince us that a subway station in a fascist hellhole is “nicer than anything in our country.”

That’s when I realized that what I was looking at could very well spell the end of our nation as we know it. Let me explain.