Airtime for the Autocrat: Tucker Carlson Sucks Up to Putin
We have reached a very odd place in our national politics: not long ago, Republicans would consistently out-gun Democrats on being “tough on communists,” especially Russia –– who can forget President Reagan saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The GOP has also typically portrayed themselves as defenders of freedom, especially against “big government.”
But now, many on the right-wing of the GOP openly admire Vladimir Putin, head of the very big, intrusive, and often brutal Russian government.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/04/europe/russia-military-culture-brutality-intl/index.html
Russia is now clearly an oligarchy, not a democracy, and one that suppresses all political opposition, imprisons (or poisons) potential political rivals, and invades a sovereign nation, killing thousands of innocent women and children. This invasion, which continues brutally unabated, is in blatant violation of international law and the founding principles of the United Nations. But, to many on the “right,” Putin is seen as a guardian of traditional conservative values. He is “savvy” (Donald Trump’s words) and a “true leader,” –– according to Tucker Carlson, who interviewed Putin on Feb. 6th.
What is this strange attraction between MAGA conservatives and Putin, that Carlson would travel to Moscow to give Putin a platform for his propaganda? That propaganda includes numerous lies about Russian history and Ukraine’s.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/vladimir-putins-revisionist-history-of-russia-and-ukraine
Part of the attraction may be that right-wing voters in the U.S. make common cause with a “manly man” who supports “Christian values” and rejects transgender rights. Putin has made repeated, derisive references about the West’s promotion of transgender rights. If you embrace Putin as a traditionalist with conservative values, however, you must reject some traditional GOP values, like freedom, free speech, and democracy.
Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn) had it right when he wrote,
“Trump’s admiration for Putin has turned into a collective right wing obsession. Turn on Tucker Carlson virtually any night and you’re going to hear him lionizing Putin, and pushing often line for line Russian disinformation. Elon Musk uncritically blasts out Russian propaganda about the war to his 120 million plus followers. Steve Bannon says that Putin is the leader of the anti-woke fight globally. Donald Trump Jr., and I follow him on social media, he’s relentlessly making fun of Zelensky online. QAnon sites say that Russia’s war in Ukraine is righteous because it’s just the next front of the war against these global sex traffickers that apparently are operating out of pizza parlors in Northwest DC and Ukraine.” Murphy here refers to the QAnon story that Hilary Clinton other prominent democrats like John Podesta were trafficking little kids from the basement of the Comet Ping Pong Pizza in D.C.
Ahem. I hardly need to remind regular readers of PLBW that the Q Anon Comet Ping Pong Pizza story is absurd beyond belief, and yet people still believe it, even after an armed “liberator” from North Carolina showed up only to find no basement at the Comet Ping Pong Pizza.
Such is the mind-bending impact of pernicious and deliberate lies repeated over and over and over. Adolph Hitler and his Nazis knew the value of “the big lie.” During the 1920s and 1930s, the Nazis fulminated against the Jewish ‘traitors’ and ‘November Criminals’ who supposedly ‘stabbed Germany in the back,’ and through such falsehoods, generated tremendous popular support. In both cases, propaganda was essential in magnifying dishonest claims.
After losing the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, Donald Trump spent months falsely claiming the election had been stolen from him. And despite all evidence to the contrary, many of his followers believe him (still). The historical parallel to Trump’s conspiracy theories were Nazi efforts to blame Jews for German defeat in WWI.
For those who care to see it, here is a link to Carlson’s interview with Putin:
It’s a free country, so you can suck up to Putin all you want. But you can’t claim the mantle of freedom for your part, or even classic conservatism. How can all this be explained?
Professor Jonathan Zasloff made the following points in The Daily Beast in 2023:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/putin-like-dictators-have-long-felt-the-love-from-the-us-right
“The American conservative movement has always been comfortable with dictatorships. Sure, conservatives hated Communism, but not because of the USSR’s and Maoist China’s brutality; rather, they detested Communism because 1) It was atheist (“Godless” in conservative terminology); and 2) It abolished private property. . . .Putin, however, has brought back the Orthodox Church and capitalism (at least the crony capitalism version), so what’s not to like?”
“Readers need to remember that the American right has welcomed just about every non-Communist dictatorship, both before and after World War II. Conservatives in the media, on Wall Street, and in politics described Benito Mussolini in glowing terms, and did so consistently. J.P. Morgan partner Thomas Lamont, who exerted a substantial influence on U.S. foreign policy in the interwar period, described himself in 1926 as “something like a missionary” for Il Duce. President Harding’s ambassador to Italy, Richard Washburn Child, ghost-wrote Mussolini’s front-page autobiography in The Saturday Evening Post.”
Many conservatives in the U.S. also believed Hitler and the Nazis were the answer to labor unrest, socialism, and communism. In fact, many business interests in 1933 sought to un-democratically unseat FDR through a coup to be led by Marine General Smedley Butler, a fact that most histories of the U.S. overlook.
Volodymyr Zelensky, frustrated with the current GOP, which refuses to provide further aid to the embattled democracy (why? because Trump calls the shots, and encourages Putin to take what he wants) made the following comments earlier this week after the death of Alexei Navalny. “Putin is a threat to all free nations. Putin is the monster who invaded Ukraine and killed thousands and thousands of people and kidnapped and deported at least tens of thousands of Ukrainian children.”
As dysfunctional as our democracy now seems to be, surely Russia (and Putin) are not models worth emulating. Russia today is a gangster-capitalist oligarchy with far greater disparities between rich and poor than most developed countries, and Putin heads a socially conservative government that gains much of its legitimacy from a cynical alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church.
Putin calls our democracy “rotten.” Well, yes, it’s a bit beyond ripe, being over nearly 250 years old, and probably even “ropune”. . . . . but it is not, as yet, rotten. Recently, Trump quoted Putin at a campaign rally, after the Russian leader (earlier this year) said that the former president’s criminal indictments show “the rottenness of the American political system.” Trump added that Joe Biden is a threat to democracy. But the last time I looked, it was not Biden, but Trump trying to undo the results of a democratic election in 2020. But the “big lie” still works for many.
In sucking up to the rank brutality of a person like Putin, swallowing his lies and his aggressions, you pretty much have to abandon any pretense of being a freedom loving conservative. But maybe, like many in the MAGA-verse, you think that violence is a necessary means to some preferred end? Violence and threats of violence have not been the exclusive province of the right or far left, but most of the threats these days are coming from “the right.”
In today’s New York Times (Feb. 19, 2023), David French describes how MAGA violence is disrupting social and political order in the U.S.
“But the tsunami of MAGA threats is different. The intimidation is systemic and ubiquitous, an acknowledged tactic in the playbook of the Trump right that flows all the way down from the violent fantasies of Donald Trump himself. It is rare to encounter a public-facing Trump critic who hasn’t faced threats and intimidation.”
“The threats drive decent men and women from public office. They isolate and frighten dissenters. When my family first began to face threats, the most dispiriting responses came from Christian acquaintances who concluded I was a traitor for turning on a movement whose members had expressed an explicit desire to kill my family.” It is ironic, given the teachings of Jesus, that “Christians” would feel comfortable with violence, yet the White Christian Nationalist “movement” does seem to be.
“Unsurprisingly, Trump supporters, especially white evangelicals, are in the vanguard of this movement. Nearly one-third of white evangelicals, regardless of party affiliation, expressed support for political violence — easily the highest among all Americans. Among Americans with a favorable view of Trump, 41% of people are open to violence from “true American patriots.”
Nothing Tucker Carlson did or said is illegal, but at the very least, it’s wrong-headed, and U.S. politicians that follow Trump’s lead in making excuses for Putin should be deeply ashamed. The courage of Navalny, who died in the hopes that Russia would someday be more democratic, makes many in the GOP who oppose further aid to Ukraine look like helpless, clueless puppets, subservient to Trump instead of the public good, and lacking in any sort of moral courage. Alexei Navalny gave up his life for democracy; many in the GOP just fear giving up their positions in the MAGA-verse. In this Congress, such “profiles in cowardice” are almost too numerous to count.
