Putin Entertains Tucker in Russia

By: Cliff Kincaid

Professor Renato Cristin (University of Trieste, Italy) and I are among the signatories of the Appeal for Nuremberg Trials for Communism. We agree that Vladimir Putin should be put on trial for communist crimes against humanity. We also agree, as he puts it, that “The Carlson-Putin skit is a political and cultural indecency, which should be classified as vaudeville.”

With his softball interview of the Russian dictator, Tucker Carlson has made himself into a laughing stock, a pathetic figure who seems to be angling for status in the Walter Duranty School of Journalism.

It is significant that Tucker also showed up at a Russian grocery store, holding a loaf of bread, since Duranty is the New York Times journalist who claimed that the Stalin-induced Great Famine in Ukraine which killed seven to ten million never occurred.

We can laugh at Tucker’s antics but he continues to be a favorite of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which is meeting at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in Maryland, outside of D.C., from February 21st – February 24^th. I attended and spoke at the CPAC conferences, especially when Ronald Reagan was president and was featured.

These days, I cover the CPAC conferences in order to understand where “conservatism” has gone wrong.

To understand this dangerous trend, I return to Professor Cristin’s critique of Tucker’s Putin interview. The Carlson-Putin show, he argues, was “a perfect psyop, a disinformation and psychological distortion operation, in the style of the old KGB and international communism.”

In 2014, we detected the start of the Russian infiltration of the conservative movement, as various conservative and “pro-family” leaders joined a Russian operative at a National Press Club conference in Washington, D.C. to proclaim Vladimir Putin the Christian savior of the world. Eventually, we published a major report on “Russian Influence in the Conservative Movement.”

Putin so liked the Tucker interview that he posted it in English on his own website, but he later complained about the lack of tough questions, saying Tucker “chose a different tactic.”

That “tactic” was playing the role of a modern-day Walter Duranty, who started his career, according to S.J. Taylor’s book, Stalin’s Apologist, by participating with Satanist Aleister Crowley in drug-taking homosexual Satanic orgies.

As Tucker looks like a complete fool, by playing into Putin’s hands, we must wonder how this one-time “conservative” journalist turned out this way. He is a symbol of a much bigger problem.

Before he was fired by Fox, he had entered the Twilight Zone of New Age theories and beliefs, even doing shows about “cattle mutilations” and cows being sucked into flying saucers.

Whatever the explanation for his bizarre turn, his coverage of Russia has failed to convey to his audience that Putin is a former Soviet KGB colonel and that his regime is based on the remnants of the old Soviet Union, including its military and intelligence establishment.

At one time, I thought Tucker was the new voice of the forgotten American, noting that he was urging Republicans to return to the themes that got Trump elected. His 2018 book, Ship of Fools, was about how the failures of the political establishment led to the election of Trump.

But when he was on Fox, he became a mouthpiece for Glenn Greenwald, a former gay porn lawyer and libertarian who had attended various socialist conferences and then became a mouthpiece for former NSA/CIA operative Edward Snowden.

Snowden defected through Chinese Hong Kong before escaping to Russia, where he became a Russian citizen.

Perhaps Snowden has room at home for Tucker.

It was almost a year ago that I wrote about Tucker’s pro-Russian tendencies, noting he went over the edge with his promotion of a communist rally against Ukraine in Washington, D.C. that featured another person. Tara Reade, who has since fled to Russia. At the time, he had openly complained about alleged NSA surveillance of his personal communications. We now know he was using Russian contacts to arrange his recent Putin interview.

Tucker has become an unofficial foreign agent for Russia and is not ashamed of doing Putin’s bidding, even while the Russian dictator was apparently planning the murder of one of his chief critics, Alexei Navalny.

But Biden’s anti-Putin posturing is just as offensive.

On Friday, Biden exploited the murder of Navalny to attack President Trump and Republicans in Congress for the failure of his own “strategy.” He said Trump had encouraged a Russian invasion of NATO when the Russian invasions of Ukraine occurred first under President Barack Hussein Obama and then under President Biden.

Going further back in time, it was President Bill Clinton who arranged the Budapest Memorandum with Russia, disarming Ukraine of its nuclear weapons and leaving it open to subsequent Russian invasions. Trump bears no blame for any of this.

Putin prefers Biden as president over Trump and it’s easy to see why.