Tucker Carlson Blames US for Russian Invasion of Ukraine; Continues to Echo Russian Talking Points

Fox News star Tuck­er Carl­son is con­tin­u­ing his efforts to blame the US and the Biden admin­is­tra­tion for the Russ­ian inva­sion of Ukraine while echo­ing Russ­ian talk­ing points on the caus­es of the con­flict. In a recent broad­cast, Carl­son opens by cit­ing remarks by US Vice-Pres­i­dent Kamala Har­ris in which she said:

 Let me start by say­ing I appre­ci­ate and admire Pres­i­dent Zelenskyy’s desire to join NATO.

Carl­son said the “mes­sage” from Har­ris was:

Up yours Vladimir Putin, go ahead and invade Ukraine.

How­ev­er, Carl­son omit­ted the con­text of Har­ris’ remarks, which clear­ly were not a green light for an invasion:

And I’ll put that in con­text, because the obvi­ous is also the point, which is that: and there­fore no oth­er coun­try can tell any­one whether they should or should not join NATO.  That should be their inde­pen­dent choice.  That is the point of sov­er­eign­ty.  So I respect Pres­i­dent Zelenskyy’s desire to be a mem­ber of NATO.

Carl­son went on in the broad­cast to accuse the US of inten­tion­al­ly seek­ing war with Rus­sia and to assert that Trump was impeached to facil­i­tate such a war:

Why would the Unit­ed States inten­tion­al­ly seek war with Rus­sia? How could we pos­si­bly ben­e­fit from that war? You still don’t know the answer to that ques­tion. It is obvi­ous that per­ma­nent Wash­ing­ton has been fix­at­ed on war with Rus­sia for a very long time. Cou­ple of years ago, we’ve for­got­ten, they impeach a sit­ting pres­i­dent why? Threat­en­ing to with­hold mil­i­tary aid from pres­i­dent Zelen­sky of Ukraine. Fail­ing to back a proxy war in Ukraine was one thing Pres­i­dent Trump was not allowed to do as Pres­i­dent. They impeached him for it. And no one said much about it even in his own par­ty because of course they sup­port a war with Rus­sia too, even more than the Democrats.

Medi­aite, a US media news web­site, cit­ed Carl­son’s claim on anoth­er broad­cast that media cov­er­age on the Russ­ian attack on the Zapor­izhzhia nuclear plant were “dis­in­for­ma­tion” and “designed to get you to sup­port a war against Russia.”

Medi­aite also report­ed Carl­son’s com­par­i­son of the media cov­er­age on the Ukraine con­flict to what he called “moral pan­ics” such as the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment and the Covid epidemic:

We live in a coun­try of moral pan­ic. The first one began in May of 2020 with the death of George Floyd in Min­neapo­lis. That changed Amer­i­ca com­plete­ly. The sec­ond moral pan­ic was Covid. We have lived through that. So for near­ly two years, the shout­ing has not end­ed. Hys­te­ria is now the offi­cial lan­guage of pub­lic dis­course in the Unit­ed States. That’s not good for any­one except those ben­e­fit­ing from it. Who is ben­e­fit­ing? Any­one who lies for a living.

Accord­ing to Medi­aite, Carl­son used the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment and the Covid epi­dem­ic to sug­gest that much of the media cov­er­age on the Ukraine con­flict was “pro­pogan­da:”

Carl­son told his audi­ence to ask them­selves, “How much of what you first heard about [Black Lives Mat­ter] and about the coro­n­avirus turned out in the end to be true?” He added, “The pat­tern nev­er changes. Hey, maybe with war on Rus­sia is not a good idea for the Unit­ed States. Say that out loud some time. It’s not an extreme posi­tion. ”“The peo­ple in charge and decid­ed the pri­ma­ry job is to decide who you should hate,” Carl­son stat­ed. “In an envi­ron­ment like this, every­thing feels like pro­pa­gan­da, and that’s because much of it is..”

The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ed last month on Tuck­er Carl­son’s role in Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da efforts dur­ing the inva­sion of Ukraine, includ­ing one Carl­son broad­cast where his com­ments were sub­ti­tled and re-broad­cast by RT, the Russ­ian state-backed media outlet.

In August 2021, the Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ed that Carl­son had spent a week host­ing his show from Budapest, where he gave what was described as a “fawn­ing inter­view” with Vik­tor Orbán, the increas­ing­ly author­i­tar­i­an prime min­is­ter of Hun­gary. Dur­ing the inter­view, Carl­son pro­mot­ed Hun­gary under Orban as a mod­el for the future of the US.

A recent­ly pub­lished Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report doc­u­ments Tuck­er Carl­son’s role in a new and devel­op­ing alliance between US con­ser­v­a­tives and Euro­pean nation­al­ists, seen as a poten­tial vehi­cle for Russ­ian influ­ence operations.