Speaker 1: There is a fascinating and disturbing exclusive story from Mother Jones, and the story
is that Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson's recent pro-Putin propaganda is so pleasing to
Putin, it's so pleasing to Russia that the Kremlin wrote a memo which Mother Jones has obtained,
and the memo is the Kremlin directing Russian media to regularly feature Tucker Carlson's
content. Now in a in a sense, this is perfectly logical. We've been covering for two weeks now.
Tucker Carlson sort of soft pro-Putin apologia and casting doubt on Ukraine and its leader
in in ways that are slightly more subtle than just coming out and saying Putin's great right? I mean,
that's not what Tucker is doing, but it's still propaganda. So useful to the Kremlin
that the Kremlin has noticed and is saying, let's regularly translate and use Tucker Carlson clips
on Russian state media when the enemy sees you as a sort of collaborator, in a sense.
You should really step back and think about what it is that you were putting out there. Let's take
a look at a little bit of this memo. Again, this is a great story. Great investigative work by
David Corn and Mother Jones. Leaked Kremlin memo to Russian media it is quote essential to feature
Tucker Carlson. The Russian government has pressed outlets to highlight the Fox hosts Putin helping
broadcasts. There's even a quote from the from the memo, which says it is essential to use as
much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson,
who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States, and Naito their negative role
in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, and the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership
of the Western countries and Naito towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin.
Personally, this is a 12 page document written in Russian. It sums up Carlson's position.
Russia is only protecting its interests and security. The memo even includes a quote from
Tucker. And how would the U.S. behave if such a situation developed in neighboring
Mexico or Canada? Now what's missing from that analysis, as we've talked about before,
is actually different. It's been wait a second for these people that are doing the soft Putin
apology. How would they suggest or imagine the U.S. would react if Mexico or Canada started doing
what Russia is doing? And I think it's really important not to get sucked into some of what
we sometimes call these philosophical black holes or rhetorical propaganda devices. Imagine because
go back to how Putin justified the start of this invasion. Putin's entire premise was Listen,
I mean, in Crimea back in 2014. More recently, when two weeks ago, at the start of this, Putin
recognized the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Imagine if Mexico said,
I don't know. We're sitting here on the border to the U.S., we're in Mexico and we're looking over
at Arizona and we're looking at California and we're looking at Texas. We see a lot of people who
look like us, you know, Mexican-Americans. We hear a lot of people who speak our language, Spanish
and some of them allegedly want to be part of Mexico. So we recognize the independence
of those areas. I don't know. Border towns pick a border town. We recognize the independence of
Juarez or whatever. And, you know, just because we don't feel that the Mexican-Americans are being
treated that well, we're going to send some tanks over as an example. So the idea here of
if we were Russia and Mexico and Canada did what Ukraine is doing, how would we react? But it
completely ignores the similar thought experiment, which you could say is valid or not because the
circumstances in Russia and you. Or different anyway, but it ignores the analogous situation of,
well, what if the U.S. were Ukraine and Canada and or Mexico started behaving like Putin has been in
Russia? That one they don't want to talk about. So needless to say, Tucker Carlson's show has become
the sort of thing you would kind of expect to see on what I would call soft Russian state media
the stuff that's not like overtly the dictates of the Kremlin, but doing apology for it.
You see a lot of folks associated with the left, although it's not really clear why they're still
associated with the left. Glenn Greenwald as an example, Jimmy Dore and others increasingly
appearing with Tucker Carlson and doing what? What sort of appears to be a bipartisan apology
when really what we're talking about here is these are angry, contrarian grifters.
Tucker Carlson, I don't even know if he believes any of this stuff. Tucker Carlson's expertize is
weaponizing the ignorance of his audience with contrarian reactionary rhetoric made to make
people afraid or feel like they're questioning the official narrative in a way that makes sense. And
of course, questioning the official narrative is a beautiful thing. It's called epistemology
critical thinking media literacy, evaluating why we believe the things we believe.
But these folks have really become the the prototypical example of useful idiots. Now,
when I say useful idiot, I'm not. I don't want to use the term idiot as a pejorative,
useful idiot. As a as a term has a very specific meaning, which is a useful idiot is someone
who ends up propagandizing for a cause. Without fully comprehending the causes goals
or that they are even necessarily doing it, and then they end up being cynically
used by the leaders of the cause, I mean, but by the definition of useful idiot,
it is impossible to argue that Tucker Carlson is not a useful idiot here. In this case, Tucker is
propagandizing for Putin. Whether he realizes it or not, that's that's the beauty of the term. He
doesn't matter. You may not realize it. He may just be saying, what's going to fire up
my audience the same way. At one point it was claiming the FBI did the Jan. six riots did.
Does Tucker really believe that? I don't know. But he's he's targeting his audience for ratings
and to kind of keep this persona of, I'll tell you what's really going on. And that propagandizing
for Russia is being cynically used by the Kremlin, which we now know because of this memo. And I
don't know if the right wingers who watch Tucker find themselves in a pickle. You know, they either
you either stand by Tucker and you end up sort of softly supporting Putin, or you have to reject the
guy that you believed was giving you the truth all along. So quite the cognitive dissonance
that they must be experiencing. And in fact, the next segment is going to be about exactly
the type of pro-Putin conspiratorial Apollonia that we've been seeing from Tucker Carlson.