Tucker Carlson’s rage at Zelensky caps a year of getting things wrong
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
www.washingtonpost.com /opinions/2022/12/23/tucker-carlson-zelensky-speech-congress-2022-elections/
Tucker Carlson’s rage at Zelensky caps a year of getting things wrong
Greg Sargent 6-8 minutes 12/23/2022
After Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a rousing speech to U.S. lawmakers this week, Tucker Carlson unleashed a diatribe that put schoolyard sadists everywhere to shame. “No one’s ever addressed the United States Congress in a sweatshirt before,” he seethed, slamming Zelensky as a “strip club” manager whose presence was “humiliating” to “the greatest country on Earth.”
Carlson’s attack on the Ukrainian president, whose olive green garb was meant to dramatize his country’s wartime plight, has sparked outrage because of its demeaning quality at a time of extraordinary duress for the Ukrainian people. But this episode deserves a deeper look than Carlson’s adolescent belittling usually merits.
Carlson’s rant carried a more hateful edge than usual, a kind of shrill fury. Perhaps that’s because Zelensky’s presence before Congress was far more humiliating to Carlson and his ideological comrades than to anyone else: It demonstrated how badly they misjudged Ukraine’s will to resist Russian conquest and the durability of the U.S. commitment to our beleaguered ally.
This represents the failure of a worldview, a strain of far-right authoritarian populism, that goes well beyond Ukraine. A whole lot of things have happened that — in Carlson’s mental universe — were not supposed to happen.
In his diatribe, Carlson depicted Zelensky as little more than a sleazy street thug who had come to “demand money” from Congress, telling his audience that the lawmakers “love him much more than they love you.” He exaggerated Ukraine’s conditions for ending the war, depicting Ukraine as the unreasonable party.
Carlson has long insisted that Ukrainians are “pawns” in the United States’ quest for “regime change” in Russia, predicting our warmongering would trigger nuclear catastrophe. He has trivialized the invasion as a faraway “ border dispute ,” and has scoffed that Democrats are hypnotizing Americans into feeling “hate” for Russia.
Carlson’s obvious bet has been that voters wouldn’t care about the conflict and would see little virtue in U.S. military aid to Ukraine. Lawmakers would ultimately abandon the cause.
But Zelensky’s appearance itself forcefully repudiated all of this. It demonstrated that Ukrainian resistance is driven by its people’s own extraordinarily courageous commitment to self rule. It showed that U.S. support for Ukraine is unwavering. It displayed the success of President Biden’s careful balance, which has enabled Ukraine to regain substantial ground while avoiding direct U.S. escalation , refuting Carlson’s predictions otherwise.
There is an ideology behind all that wrongness, and Carlson has clearly laid it out . It tells Americans that Democratic elites prioritize Ukraine’s border over our own — they love Zelensky more than they love you . This conflation of the two borders, a widespread right-wing populist trope , encourages Americans to turn inward in multiple ways, washing our hands of responsibility for international allies and desperate migrants alike.
This worldview also rails against elite wokeness. Carlson frequently tells viewers that the same elites who want people to hate Russia and are obliterating the southern border are also brainwashing kids with anti-White racism.
As Cathy Young writes at the Bulwark , right-wing populist distaste for Zelensky is driven partly by Ukraine’s desire for integration with the liberal, secular, internationalism-minded West. That through-line links attacks on elite wokeness, pro-Ukraine sentiment and receptiveness to migration.
As a political argument, all this has proved pretty impotent.
Just before the midterm elections, Carlson wrongly predicted a “humiliating repudiation” for Democrats. Importantly, Carlson based this in part on Democrats’ wokeness and border policies, hubristically certain that voters would reject both.
Carlson’s show also promoted 18 GOP candidates who went on to lose, as tallied by Matthew Gertz of Media Matters . And while Carlson backed Ohio Sen.-elect J.D. Vance, he also hawked Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters as “the future of the GOP.” That’s almost certainly because Masters’s demonization of migrants ( including ads featuring machine-gun fire at the border) was peerless . But Masters lost by 5 points — in a border state.
Outside our borders, Carlson also lionized Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro as one of the great illiberal populist hopes of the Western Hemisphere. This year, Bolsonaro was ousted after one term. (To be fair, Carlson was able to celebrate a hard right victory — in Italy .)
And Carlson has been ham-handed in his efforts to counter the House committee investigating Donald Trump’s insurrection with his own propaganda, even smearing the committee as “Stalinist.” He used similar language about the FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
All this also reflects Carlson’s broader dogma: The elites who obsess about Ukraine’s border and are brainwashing kids are also wielding the “deep state” against Trump and his supporters (which is supposed to discredit elites’ devotion to the Western liberal democratic project).
But the revelations in the committee’s final report are utterly damning, and they’re heavily based on Republican witnesses. The Mar-a-Lago search produced devastating evidence and courts have validated it . All this is advancing the rule of law, no matter how hard Carlson tries to lie that away.
None of this should prompt liberal overconfidence. Future electoral losses are inevitable. Cultural liberals need a proactive case against charges of wokeness. The war will grind on . Trump may still evade accountability. Carlson-style politics is being wielded effectively by a certain presidential aspirant in Florida who is crouched in the wings.
But a year ago one couldn’t have predicted that Carlson’s brand of politics would be repudiated in so many ways. If that prompts a bit of, dare we say, Carlson-grade smugness from his critics, well, it’s well deserved.
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This passage hits the nail on the head. The far right's love of Putin and Russia IS connected to their anti-woke insanity and to their ubiquitous white grievance.
Still drinking the Hillary Kool-Aid?
What does any of this have to do with Hillary?
I seem to recall you stating that Vlad the Impudent held all the cards. Kool-Aid comes in a variety of flavors including sour grape.
Better than the Trump/Putin Kool-Aid.
Well, nobody's perfect John./s
www.thebulwark.com /putins-useful-idiots-right-wingers-lose-it-over-zelensky-visit/
Putin’s Useful Idiots: Right Wingers Lose It Over Zelensky Visit
Cathy Young 7-9 minutes 12/22/2022
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s surprise arrival in Washington on Wednesday for a meeting with President Joe Biden and a speech before Congress has unhinged the always-seething anti-Ukraine Trumpian right, triggering a deluge of snark and grievance. For instance, after the Washington Examiner ’s Byron York tut-tutted that Zelensky was about to tell Congress that U.S. aid to Ukraine so far was not enough, the former First Son weighed in with this:
“National conservative” pundit and Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer, who played the “ obviously Putin is a thug and Ukraine is the victim here, but . . . ” game in the early days of the war, went full Putin this time around.
To top it off, Hammer, who shares Zelensky’s Jewish heritage, also accused the Ukrainian president of being a bad Jew—unseemly under any circumstances, but all the more so considering that only a few days earlier, Hammer had been spotted at a New York Young Republicans’ Club Gala in the company of various alt-right types with, shall we say, a complicated relationship to anti-Semitism. (Among them: Rep. Marjorie “Jewish Space Lasers” Taylor Greene, the founders of the white-nationalist website VDARE, and erstwhile Jew-baiting troll Jack Posobiec.)
Hammer’s deputy op-ed editor, progressive-turned-populist Batya Ungar-Sargon (for whom, I must mention, I used to write during her stint as an editor at the Forward ), at least made an effort to stay classy while making a de facto pitch for throwing Ukraine under the bus:
That’s more than can be said for the vast majority of the “no money for Ukraine” crowd, from the Daily Wire ’s Matt Walsh (“Get this grifting leech out of our country please”) to Tucker Carlson, who referred to Zelensky as a “Ukrainian strip club manager”—apparently because he was dressed in a olive-drab sweatshirt—and asserted that “it may be impossible to imagine a more humiliating scenario for the greatest country on Earth.” He also insisted that Zelensky is seeking not just to “push the Russian army back to pre-invasion borders,” which even Carlson conceded “sounds reasonable,” but to topple Vladimir Putin and bring about “regime change” in Russia. After Zelensky’s speech to Congress, Carlson brought on former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, the “maverick” Democrat from Hawaii, to sing along with his assertions that Zelensky was actually an autocrat muzzling critical media outlets, jailing opposition politicians, and now trying to shut down an entire church because he finds it insufficiently loyal.
(In reality, the situation involving the Moscow-affiliated branch of the Orthodox Church—one of the two Orthodox denominations in Ukraine—is massively complicated ; in wartime, there are legitimate security concerns about its clergy’s reported activities in support of the invaders. However, a quote Carlson attributes to Zelensky, threatening “economic and restrictive sanctions [on] any Christian caught worshiping in unapproved ways,” does not seem to have any source other than Carlson himself.)
Then there was this from Red State commentator Brandon Morse, asserting that Zelensky has done much more damage to the United States than the January 6th rioters:
A few other right-wing pundits, including career plagiarist -turned-conspiracy-theory-peddler Benny Johnson and Turning Point USA grifting leech Charlie Kirk, homed in on the really important stuff: Zelensky’s outfit.
Of course Zelensky’s clothes were meant to visually convey the fact that he’s in the middle of a brutal war. When you’re just back from a visit to the front lines in an area that looks like a ghost warscape from World War I come back to life, you’ve earned the right to make that particular fashion statement—even on a visit to Washington, D.C.
But wait, is it a military outfit or a mafia one? The American Spectator ’s Melissa Mackenzie has got the goods:
I could go on and on. But perhaps this parade of indecency should come back full circle to a literal obscenity from Don Jr.: a photoshopped image that put a naked Hunter Biden next to Zelensky on the podium addressing Congress. (Warning: this tweet may be hazardous to your eyes.) It’s vile, of course. It’s also the sort of thing you post when you have no substantive way to attack someone.
T he extent and purpose of U.S. military aid to Ukraine is certainly a legitimate subject for debate. Right now, there is a powerful consensus in the United States and Europe that Ukraine, for all the flaws and imperfections of its still-young democracy, is fighting for freedom against an authoritarian Goliath and that its fight is also a fight for the free world and its values.
The question of why the Trumpian populist right is so consumed with hatred for Ukraine—a hatred that clearly goes beyond concerns about U.S. spending, a very small portion of our military budget, or about the nonexistent involvement of American troops—doesn’t have a simple answer. Partly, it’s simply partisanship: If the libs are for it, we’re against it, and the more offensively the better. (And if the pre-Trump Republican establishment is also for it, then we’re even more against it.) Partly, it’s the belief that Ukrainian democracy is a Biden/Obama/Hillary Clinton/”Deep State” project, all the more suspect because it’s related to Trump’s first impeachment. Partly, it’s the “national conservative” distaste for liberalism—not only in its American progressive iteration, but in the more fundamental sense that includes conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: the outlook based on individual freedom and personal autonomy, equality before the law, limited government, and an international order rooted in those values. Many NatCons are far more sympathetic to Russia’s crusade against secular liberalism than to Ukraine’s desire for integration into liberal, secular Europe.
Whatever the reason, the anti-Ukraine animus on the right is quite real and widespread. (When journalist Bari Weiss, who has a largely “anti-woke” following, retweeted a Hanukkah greeting from Zelensky, the responses from her followers in the thread were mostly hostile.) But right now, it also smells of desperation. Ukraine’s cause is still massively popular in the United States, with two-thirds of Americans supportive of sending money and arms. Disingenuous laments about the poor Ukrainians exploited by American and European globalists ring hollow and false when the vast majority of Ukrainians are so clearly determined to resist the invasion. And Zelensky, as the smarter among the aid opponents, like Ungar-Sargon, can see, is a genuine hero: patriotic, incredibly courageous and charismatic, and a speaker so compelling that even congressional right-wingers who initially refused to join in the standing ovations (including Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Andrew Clyde) finally rose up during the last portions of his speech.
There’s a nineteenth-century Russian fable called “The Elephant and the Pug” in which a pug yaps furiously at an elephant to get attention and show off how tough it is, while the elephant simply ignores it. Zelensky would obviously be the elephant in this scenario; but that would make the Zelensky haters the pugs—and that’s frankly a hideous insult to pugs.
We have seen a mini version of this garbage right here on our own Newstalkers over the past few days.
This picture brings Tucker Carlson's rant to mind.
Carlson accuses Zelensky of degrading the dignity of the US Congress by wearing a khaki colored pullover shirt to an address before the House and Senate members, but Carlson said nothing about the sight of a loon wearing a horned headpiece while naked above the waist sitting in the vice presidents seat on the Senate floor.
Only a madman would find equality between what is depicted in these two photos.
Who found equality?
Ah, fox news. Where all one has to do is be a total dick to make lots of money.
Seriously, all one has to do is yell and scream, make things up and blame everything on the evil leftists to win praise and adoration of the right wing.
A little off topic but I saw where Hannity testified in court that he knew the stolen election theory was a lie the whole time.
It doesn't matter to some on the right. They will continue to believe these blowhards.
Carlson is a media whore who will say anything to appeal to his audience.
Just like those collection of clowns over at MSNBC
Hey, Carlson's a close match to Joy Reid! Her and Rachel "Mad Dog" Maddow.
No. Carlson is a Quisling.
A majority of Americans, of all political stripes, support the Ukrainian people's struggle for peace and independence. Putin's totally unprovoked attack has to be beaten back and must end in his removal. It is the US who is at war with Russian, and Ukraine is our proxy and doing the heavy lifting, suffering, and dying. We will need to support them for as long as it takes, whatever the cost.
NATO and the Europeans should be contributing much more than they are, but it is what it . And the Biden administration should be doing something significant to stem the flow of illegals across the Rio Grande, but here again, it is what it is. Blowhard asswipes like Tucker Carlson don't represent the views of the majority of Republicans in the US. Trying to make the problem a racial issue is stupid and inflammatory.
They never do...
As of now, the U.S. has contributed $40 billion and the Europeans have contributed $30 billion. That's not as huge a disparity as some would like to pretend.
I always forget that some European countries are smaller than Texas.
Every European countries is smaller geographically than Texas. Russia, which is huge, is in both Europe and Asia, so it doesn't count.
The economy of the European Union is the third largest in the world, after the U.S. and China.
The US is by far the largest country with the biggest economy (compared to European countries) if you take the contributions of countries by the % of their GDP the largest contributors are the three Baltic countries and Poland.
Well said.
Tucker either has an echo chamber or is an echo chamber:
"Russian state TV sought to downplay the military and political support Zelinsky received in Washington, stressing in a news segment that not all members of Congress showed up to listen to Zelinsky's speech, commentators also criticized the Ukrainian leader's "casual attire" during his White House visit with President Joe Biden."
Carlson wears his stripe boldly. Or wears it because the 'kompromat' Putin has on people is real and can be devastating.