Days after useful idiot Tucker Carlson fanboy’ed all over Russian President Vladimir Putin, proving once again conservatives cater to the propagandistic needs of authoritarian leaders, Putin’s key nemesis was assassinated in a far-off prison colony in Siberia. Though Carlson himself didn’t push the plunger of polonium (or whatever method was used), he gave Putin an indication that Carlson’s American conservative followers would dismiss such an action if Putin wanted to knock off his opponent.
Speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai this week after his interview with Putin, Carlson was downright giddy over the power of autocrats to kill opponents, equating it to orders from Western leaders like President Joe Biden who order individuals who threaten the safety of their country and their people killed.
In a Q&A with Egyptian journalist Emad el-Din Adeeb on Monday, Carlson haughtily asserts that his unspecified, though implied lengthy, list of interviews with “world leaders”–a quick search on Google shows Carlson has interviewed a total of three world leaders: Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Putin, all of whom arguably fall in the “autocrat” category–proved to him that all world leaders kill people and its total acceptable.
“[…] I have spent my life talking to people who run countries in various countries and have concluded the following,” Carlson pontificates as though someone should be chiseling his words into stone tablets. “That every leader kills people, including my leader. Every leader. Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people,” Carlson says before adding a condescendingly, “Sorry.”
This isn’t a new assertion from the Right: Trump made nearly the exact same statement in a 2014 interview with Carlson’s Fox “News” predecessor and fellow sexual assaulter Bill O’Reilly. When O’Reilly comments “Putin’s a killer,” Trump responds, “There’s a lot of killers. Yup. There’s a lot of killers. Whaddaya think our country is so innocent?”
Was Tucker Carlson’s statement the Western approval Putin needed to assassinate Navalny? Not likely: Putin was going to murder Navalny regardless of what the bootlicking propagandist said or did. But it gives Putin a real-time reference to say, “Hey, look, even this well-known Western journalist says American leaders assassinate people. The West shouldn’t have all the fun, da?”
Carlson, of course, is engaging in false equivilance: leaders of Democratic nations don’t assassinate domestic political opponents, despite the Trump cult’s efforts to do so on behalf of their god. Putin assassinate people to stay in power; Western leaders eliminate foreign enemies targeting the lives of their nations’ citizens. Those are not just semantic differences.
No, I am not suggesting that Putin’s plan for murdering Navalny hung on the opportunity provided by a sycophantic Tucker Carlson giving permission, but the timing of the Carlson’s statement–after meeting with Putin and then saying on a world state that political killings are justified–isn’t a pure coincidence either.