How an interview with fawning American conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson could help Vladimir Putin triumph in Ukraine

The Kremlin doesn’t roll out the red carpet for visiting Americans at the best of times. But since populist American broadcaster Tucker Carlson arrived a week ago, he has been treated like a major celebrity.

As he and his team have driven around the city in a blacked-out Mercedes, Russian state media have breathlessly followed his every move: taking him to breakfast at his swanky hotel restaurant, attending the Spartacus ballet at the Bolshoi and even visiting a supermarket.

His VIP treatment is particularly shocking because Carlson was one of the biggest stars on American cable news until a year ago as an anchor on Fox News. And Vladimir Putin tends to negatively judge journalists with their pointless questions about his brutal invasion of Ukraine and countless human rights violations.

To his critics, however, Carlson is not a journalist at all; he is a propagandist whose obsequious support for the Putin regime and contempt for Ukraine could have devastating consequences if Republicans withhold aid to Kiev’s armed forces.

Yesterday, the Russian government confirmed that Putin had generously overcome his misgivings about the Western media and granted Carlson an interview. It was the first given by the Russian president to the US media since he ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

For his part, Carlson emphasized that it is his duty to tell the truth about Ukraine: “Two years after a war that is reshaping the world, most Americans are unaware.”

He then said that the main thing they should know is that the conflict is not good for the US because it has “turned upside down” the global economy and threatened the dominance of the US dollar. Carlson said he was in Russia because “I wanted to talk to people and look around and see how things are going – and they are going very well.”

The interview could air as early as today on Carlson’s show on the social network X (formerly Twitter), where he has 11.6 million followers, and probably also on Russian state media.

Since Carlson, 54, arrived in Russia and dropped heavy hints that he would meet Putin, the howls of anger at home have been deafening. Some, including former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger, have called him a “traitor,” while Bill Kristol, former chief of staff to Dan Quayle when he was George W. Bush’s vice president, stated that he should be banned from entering the U.S. are denied.

An extended stay in frigid Moscow would not appeal to Carlson, the privileged son of a journalist father who became one of Ronald Reagan’s Cold War propaganda chiefs and an heiress stepmother. But if he were to be held up at the border, it would play right into his hands.

For years, Carlson has boosted his media following — most of them Trump diehards — by endlessly spreading conspiracy theories and blatant disinformation, first on Fox News and then on his X show. Covering everything from Covid-19 (he’s an anti-vaxxer) to the 2020 election, the January 6 Capitol riots and the war in Ukraine, they often revolve around the US establishment’s sinister ‘deep state’ machinations .

Next, US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin talk during the 2017 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders’ Summit

American conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson (circled) is spotted in a hotel in Moscow this week

One conspiracy by Carlson is that his beloved Donald Trump will be the target of an assassination attempt. In return, Trump has floated the idea of ​​Carlson being his running mate in this year’s presidential election. Shortly before he was fired from Fox, Carlson called Ukraine a “primitive” country where – he claimed – the US government operated “secret biolabs” and kept sensitive nuclear technology.

No wonder it was reported last year that Russia’s Ministry of Information and Telecommunications is advising state media to use as many excerpts from Carlson’s broadcasts as possible because they are so useful to Putin’s case.

A measure of Carlson’s disregard for accuracy can be gleaned from the fact that he insisted this week that no other Western journalist had “bothered” to interview the Russian leader and get his take on the invasion of Ukraine.

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour dismissed his claim as “absurd” as her colleagues have tried to interview Putin “every day since his massive invasion of Ukraine.”

The BBC’s Russia editor Steve Rosenberg said they had “made several requests to the Kremlin over the past 18 months – always a ‘no’ for us,” while Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, scoffed, “Poor, poor Vladimir Putin. So far, no one in the West has had the chance to hear him explain all the excellent reasons why he should invade Ukraine.”

Even the Kremlin corrected him: “Mr. Carlson is wrong. We get a lot of requests for interviews with the president.” A spokesman said Putin chose Carlson because “his position is different.”

It certainly is. And for the Putin regime, Carlson’s actions in Russia and his popularity among Trump supporters could not have come at a better time as American resistance to providing military aid to Ukraine grows.

Just this week, Trump and his Republican Party supporters were blamed by President Biden for rejecting a bill that should have brought billions of desperately needed dollars to the country.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell is so concerned about Carlson’s influence on his party — both in Congress and among the broader population — that he has declared it “troubling.”

His cozy conversation with Putin is also important for Carlson as he struggles to rebuild his brand as America’s most influential conservative commentator after being kicked out of Fox News last April.

Insiders say the channel’s owners, the Murdoch family, were fed up with his idiosyncratic behavior and increasingly extreme views, which critics say branded him a white supremacist. It is claimed that the final straw came when he sent a text message to a colleague complaining about a video of three Trump supporters attacking a left-wing agitator because three-on-one “wasn’t the way white men fight.”

Carlson and the company were also sued by former Fox producer Abby Grossberg, who alleged that Carlson — who frequently liked to refer to people using the “c” word — presided over misogynistic working conditions on his show. Her lawyer said Grossberg settled the lawsuits for £9.5 million.

Putin’s macho image and the way the president portrays himself as a true guardian of traditional conservative values ​​– for example, he passed a law in December restricting what he calls “LGBT propaganda” – are one of the reasons why Carlson and his Make America Fans of Great Again admire the Russian leader.

Another perhaps Carlson’s wealthy but eccentric upbringing in California by his father, which instilled in him a lack of respect for convention. Dick Carlson divorced his artist mother when Tucker was five and was awarded full custody after citing her “alcohol, marijuana and cocaine abuse” that left her “unable to properly care for the children.” Tucker and his younger brother, whose father married a frozen food heiress who lived next door, never saw their mother again.

Dick’s idea of ​​childcare was also sometimes questionable: he took the two boys with him on his job as a reporter, once even showing them a bloodied corpse at a murder scene and taking them for Sunday lunch to the home of a notorious gangster who was accused of murder.

Carlson Sr later became President Reagan’s director of Voice Of America, a radio station that spread the American line around the world, and became the US ambassador to the Seychelles.

Tucker Carlson was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland, but was expelled. So he went to another in Rhode Island, where he met his future wife Susan, the director’s daughter. It was there that he picked up an oft-derided penchant for wearing bow ties, a habit he didn’t kick until 2006. After college he tried to join the CIA, but chose journalism when his father told him, “They’ll take someone.”

Opponents cite Carlson’s early journalism years working for left-wing publications and broadcasters as evidence that he is merely an opportunistic dilettante whose politics change with the wind.

While people close to him insist he has always been a conservative at heart, they still have to explain the current loyalty of a man Trump once described as “the most disgusting person on the planet.”

But that is all a thing of the past. “Carlson is smart and his agenda is clear,” Russia analyst Janis Kluge told the Washington Post. “He and Putin will work brilliantly together to reinforce the false narrative about Ukraine, weaken Biden and strengthen Trump.

‘This co-production of theirs is perhaps the most effective and poisonous propaganda clip ever made.’