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Ahead of Trump interview, Tucker Carlson refers to 'NATO war against Russia' on visit to Hungary [1]
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Date: 2023-08-23
So what has Putin propagandist Tucker Carlson been up to besides ipre-recording an interview with Donald Trump to run on Xitter as counter-programming to the Fox News Republican presidential debate. Carlson seems obsessed with spreading his anti-Ukraine, pro-Putin agenda into the 2024 presidential campaign.
The former Fox News host spent the weekend in Hungary interviewing Hungarian President Viktor Orban and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic for his Xitter show. Carlson seems to be enamored with authoritarian strongmen, particularly Orban who was also interviewed by Carlson when he broadcast his Fox News show from Hungary in 2021.
Vucic and Orban, both right-wing nationalists, have refused to impose sanctions against Moscow and remain friendly with Russian President Vladimir Putin despite Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Trump, of course, has also been full of praise for Putin.
So here are Tucker’s coming attractions on Xitter:
x Coming Soon
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary
We sat down with him in Budapest pic.twitter.com/hLIy7gMTyZ — Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 22, 2023
And this:
x We just met with the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, at the Serbian Embassy in Budapest. Here’s what happened. pic.twitter.com/R4fcTMBTlV — Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 20, 2023
Carlson’s remarks in his Xitter post about his meeting with Vucic at the Serbian Embassy in Budapest are particularly disconcerting:
“Serbia has the distinction of being one of the countries in the region that’s been bombed by NATO in 1999,” Carlson said. “So I think he’s got an interesting perspective on what’s happening in Ukraine, the NATO war against Russia that is worth hearing.”
In 1999, NATO launched airstrikes against Serbian military positions in the breakaway province of Kosovo, whose population is predominantly ethnic Albanian. NATO’s air campaign was aimed at halting a humanitarian catastrophe resulting from the ethnic cleansing and massacre of Kosovar Albanians.
After the interview, Carlson said that one of the points made by Vucic is “that the war in Ukraine, the war against Russia led by NATO, has crushed the European economy.”
Carlson’s repeated references to the “NATO war against Russia” has been a major part of the disinformation campaign pushed by Putin’s propagandists to justify the war in Ukraine.
Carlson then goes on to mention the September 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, which members of Ukraine’s special operations forces are suspected of carrying out. But Carlson again echoes Russian propaganda by blaming the pipeline attack on “the Biden administration, either directly or through proxies,” claiming that it’s destruction is “killing the German economy … the largest economy in Europe by far.” And he said it amounted to “one NATO country effectively attacking another NATO country.”
Germany’s economy has been stuck somewhere between stagnation and recession this year, but a recent Guardian story made no mention of any link to the loss of the Nord Stream pipeline natural gas supplies. German Finance Minister Christian Lindner told the BBC earlier this year that Germany had completely diversified its energy structure since Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine and is no longer reliant on Russian energy.
But Carlson then outdid himself with this remark:
“This war is hurting everybody, possibly with the exception in the long-term of Russia, and empowering everybody outside of Europe — the Gulf states, China, Turkey. So you are really seeing the world reset in response to this war. It’s a little more complicated than Hitler versus Churchill, Good versus Bad, Democracy. It’s really about a massive shift of power away from the United States and the West to the East.”
Carlson’s remarks were music to the ears of Putin’s propagandists. The official Russian news outlet RT ran a story that quoted extensively from Carlson’s preview of his interview with Vucic.
x Serbia's Vucic believes Russia-Ukraine conflict has crushed EU economy – Tucker Carlson
The former Fox News host discussed a 'world reset' with President Aleksandar Vucic
https://t.co/Lg8BW8rOkD pic.twitter.com/dKTefzKJ6X — RT (@RT_com) August 21, 2023
But former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger, now a commentator for CNN, did not mince words in describing Carlson: “Tucker is a traitor to the US.”
x Tucker is a traitor to the US
https://t.co/UPu77TDaBY — Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@AdamKinzinger) August 21, 2023
What’s concerning is Carlson’s efforts to push his pro-Putin memes into the Republican presidential primary campaign.
Last month, I wrote a diary titled: Tucker Carlson hijacked first GOP candidates’ forum to push his anti-Ukraine, pro-Putin agenda.
At the annual Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines, Carlson got a chance to demonstrate just why he’s the Kremlin’s favorite U.S. pundit. Trump did not attend the event.
The influential Iowa evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats chose Carlson to interview the six GOP presidential candidates who showed up for the event.
The New York Times wrote that Vander Plaats found out “what happens when you turn over your Republican presidential showcase to Tucker Carlson”:
Jesus is out. Vladimir V. Putin is in. Mr. Carlson was given the task of interviewing six Republican presidential hopefuls at the Family Leadership conference in Des Moines on Friday. Consequently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine became the dominant issue of debate, on a day when Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa used the event to sign a near-total abortion ban into law. In the hands of Mr. Carlson, the former Fox News host who was recently fired, Ukraine became the bad actor in the conflict, not Russia.
The most contentious exchange over Ukraine came during Carlson’s interview with Mike Pence. The former vice president criticized the Biden administration for being too slow to provide advanced weaponry such as Abrams tanks and F-16 warplanes to Ukraine.
Carlson said:
“You are distressed that the Ukrainians don’t have enough American tanks? Every city in the United States has become much worse over the past three years. ...” “Drive around — there’s not one city that’s gotten better in the United States and it’s visible. ...Our economy has degraded, the suicide rate has jumped, public filth and disorder and crime have exponentially increased and yet your concern is that the Ukrainians — a country most people can’t find on the map, who’ve received tens of billions of U.S. tax dollars — don’t have enough tanks? I think it’s a fair question to ask, where’s the concern for the United States in that?”
The New York Times story added: “Mr. Carlson called Ukraine an American ‘client state,’ accused Ukraine’s Jewish leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, of persecuting Christians and strongly indicated Mr. Pence had been conned, despite evidence to the contrary.”
[END]
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/23/2189140/-Ahead-of-Trump-interview-Tucker-Carlson-refers-to-NATO-war-against-Ukraine-on-visit-to-Hungary
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