Tucker Carlson seems unaware of how badly he is damaging himself.
The former Fox and CNN host followed up his interview of Vladimir Putin by touring Moscow and comparing it favorably with his own country, raving about its nice subway system and low grocery prices. Charlie and Dominic have ably dismantled this. Even in purely material terms, Russia is a poor country, and many of its people outside the capital live without things we consider the most basic of necessities, such as indoor plumbing.
This may be Tucker’s lowest moment yet. I’m not sure he has ever done anything so indefensibly auto-discrediting. The interview with Putin was at least formally defensible as journalism: It presented the views of a newsworthy world leader. And sure, this is far from the first time that Tucker has told his audience things that were false and/or morally depraved. But Tucker’s whole shtick is to be the guy who is skeptical of official explanations and institutions, in many cases to the point of plunging into the world of conspiracy theory. And here he is, in the capital of an authoritarian state run by a master of real conspiracies, and Tucker just swallows whatever the official, institutional propaganda line is, like he’s a gullible professor of literature with a Che poster on his wall taking a tour of the USSR and parroting whatever he’s told by the graduates of Patrice Lumumba University.
The guy who is usually just asking questions suddenly doesn’t seem to question anything. It’s not just bad as other things he has said and done have been bad; it’s dreadful for his brand.