Tucker and Duranty’s Ghost
The New York Times had a bureau chief in Moscow for most of the 1920s and into the 1930s named Walter Duranty. He won a Pulitzer prize in 1932 for a series of articles he did on the Soviet Union. It would later be revealed that Duranty was little more than an honest-to-God Soviet propagandist, defending Stalin’s show trials [which were used as mere pretext to execute those Stalin perceived as threats to his political power] and — most notably — outrightly denied the existence of the Ukrainian famine in the early 1930s, despite having witnessed it directly. He even used the quote often attributed to Stalin in one of his dispatches from Moscow, noting the ongoing “mess” of forced collectivization, saying “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Duranty may have died in 1957, but it seems he was reborn in 1969, now bearing the name of “Tucker Carlson.”
I don’t literally believe in reincarnation, but I sort of wish I did in this case because it seems preferrable that Tucker is merely the rebodied soul of a disgraced Soviet propagandist than — what appears to be the truth — that he arrived at that conclusion all on his own.
A week and a half ago, Tucker announced that he was in Moscow, presumably to interview Russian despot Vladimir Putin. The interview was released a few days later, and it turned out to be what most of us expected: a two-hour platform for Putin to broadcast his propaganda and Soviet nostalgia. But the interview, as debasing and shameful as it was for Carlson, is not his biggest embarrassment of late. That [dis]honor has to go to Carlson’s newfound enthusiasm for the entire Putinist system.
After leaving Moscow, Tucker dropped by the World Governments Summit in Dubai, where he had this to say about Putin:
“The most radicalizing thing, I would just say, for me, in the eight days I spent in Moscow, was not simply the leader of the country — who of course is impressive, it’s the largest landmass in the world. And it’s wildly diverse, linguistically, culturally, religiously. And it’s hard to run a country like that for 24 years, whether you like it or not. So, an incapable person couldn’t do that. And he is very capable. And many of you know him and you know that.
Which is a hell of a thing to say about a murderous dictator who is — right now, today — engaged in a war of aggression against a neighboring country in which he has committed a litany of war crimes. He would go on to say about Moscow specifically:
“What was radicalizing, very shocking, and very disturbing for me was the city of Moscow, where I’d never been. The biggest city in Europe, 13 million people, and it is so much nicer than any city in my country. I had no idea. My father spent a lot of time there in the 80s when he worked for the U.S. government and it barely had electricity. And now it is so much cleaner, and safer, and prettier, aesthetically; its architecture, its food, its service, than any city in the United States. And this is not ideological — how did that happen? How did that happen?
Tucker is like that guy who spends one semester abroad in England and comes back with a British accent, except in Tucker’s case he spent eight days in Moscow and came back with an enthusiasm for despotism that even Walter Duranty would find excessive.
He also released a series of videos of his time in Moscow, including a visit to a Moscow grocery store, where he said:
“Coming to a Russian grocery store — the “heart of evil” [he says, sarcastically] — and seeing what things cost and how people live, it will radicalize you against our leaders. That’s how I feel, anyway — radicalized. We’re not making any of this up, by the way. At all.”
Well that last bit is reassuring. For a second there I thought he might’ve been making it up.
It’s not even so much that Tucker Carlson is obviously wrong, just as an economic matter. Though he is just flatly wrong: As many people have been pointing out all week in response to Carlson’s propaganda, Russia has a GDP per capita of just over $15,000, which puts it below even economic powerhouses like Romania, Venezuela, and Latvia. It’s about two-thirds poorer than our poorest state, which is Mississippi. A full 20 percent of Russian households don’t have indoor plumbing. The video inside the supposedly mind-blowing Muscovite grocery looks noticeably lower quality than the average American grocery store, to say nothing of the Harris Teeters and Whole Foods. There’s a reason food costs less in Moscow — the people there are much poorer than in America.
The term “Potemkin Village” comes from the 18th century Russian statesman Grigory Potemkin, who planned and failed to develop the Crimean peninsula but nevertheless wanted to impress the Russian empress Catherine the Great. So Potemkin devised a scheme to build a fake village and import peasants and farm animals from other parts of Russia so as to make it seem as if the area had been developed when Catherine toured the region. The Moscow subway station is the modern day Potemkin village — it’s the one nice thing in the city that gullible foreigners are shown to fool them into thinking that Russia isn’t the underdeveloped shit hole that it actually is. So I suppose it’s fitting that Tucker Carlson utterly fell for the presentation.
“We’re standing in front of the Kievskaya Metro station, in this train station next to it. Now, the metro station was built by Joseph Stalin 70 years ago. And the question is, how is it doing now after 70 years? So we went into it to take a look, and what we found shocked us. Now, that’s not an endorsement of Stalin, who was bad, obviously, nor is it an endorsement of the current president, Vladimir Putin. You may not like him either, but it doesn’t change the reality of what we saw or precisely didn’t see. There’s no graffiti, there’s no filth, no foul smells. There are no bums or drug addicts or rapists or people waiting to push you onto the train tracks and kill you. No, it’s perfectly clean and orderly. And how do you explain that? We’re not even going to guess. That’s not our job. We’re only going to ask the question.
Ah yes, Tucker famously “just asking questions.” But I’ll take a stab at answering it: As National Review’s Andrew Stuttaford points out, “part of the reason for the improvement [in crime] may be the installation of an extensive facial-recognition system.” It’s amazing how little crime there can be so long as the government is a paranoid police state, y’know? [This comes as reports broke this morning that noted Russian dissident Alexei Navalny euphemistically “died in prison.”] So even if Carlson was correct in his admiration for Putin’s Russia, the cost of doing so is ignoring the means by which it is achieved. Nevertheless, I feel like there’s a word for an American who would go to Russia for eight days and then come back espousing the superiority of the Russian system to the American one, and saying that he had been “radicalized” against our leaders. Maybe it’ll come to me.
What’s most troubling to me about Carlson’s schtick is that I don’t understand it. He’s presumably not doing it for the money. He doesn’t need money. He’s not doing it because he’s stupid enough to believe the propaganda — everyone who’s ever worked with him says he’s an intelligent guy. The best I can come up with is that he’s just so driven by the disdain he has of his fellow citizens that he would rather live under literal fascism than under liberalism. There’s that old quip that Mussolini, for all his faults, “at least made the trains run on time.” Tucker Carlson seems willing to forgive quite a lot — even wars of aggression, war crimes, political oppression, and the like — so long as he can ride the subway [because he would totally ride the subway, you guys] without seeing undesirables.
He claims in one of the videos above that he’s “the most pro-American,” but I’m just not sure by what metric that could possibly be true. You can’t love a country when you despise so many of the people that live in it, while talking about how you’ve been “radicalized” against its leaders after visiting one of its enemies. Again, I feel like there’s a word for that. It’s right on the tip of my tongue.
A Reminder of Actual Patriotism vs. Despotism
I hadn’t planned on writing about Alexei Navalny today, mostly because he was alive when I started writing this. But as I said above, news broke this morning that he “died” in a Russian prison. I use quotes because “dying” implies it was a passive process, and Navalny almost certainly was murdered in one way or another. He was the target of a nearly-successful assassination attempt in 2020, when he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok. He was evacuated from a Russian hospital to Germany, where he spent four weeks in a coma. After awakening from the coma and recovering from the poisoning, he boldly returned to Russia, saying: “It was never a question of whether to return or not. Simply because I never left. I ended up in Germany after arriving in an intensive care box for one reason: they tried to kill me.” He dedicated his life to advocating for the idea that the Russian people deserved better than Putin. When he returned to Russia, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison; the first two of which were served near Moscow before he was transferred to a more remote maximum security prison.
I don’t imagine the timing of Navalny’s murder is accidental. I mean, Tucker Carlson has just spent the last several days publicly praising Putin and the Russian system to Americans. What better time for Putin to prove that he is what he’s always been — a murderous goon with a lust for power. He can murder dissidents in broad daylight, and what’s the West going to do about it?
Of course, various Trumpists took to Twitter to proclaim how what happened to Navalny is just like what’s happening to Donald Trump:
Now, sure, D’Souza descent into madness has been well-documented for years. But Lee Zeldin up until 10 minutes ago was a normal Republican. He was first elected to Congress from New York in 2014, and was the Republican nominee for governor of New York in 2022. It’s just yet more evidence of the complete brain rot currently afflicting most of the Republican party.
There’s that famous Bill Buckley line from the Cold War about how if one man pushes an old lady in front of an oncoming bus, and another man pushes her out of the way of the oncoming bus, it’s not accurate to call them both the sort of men who push old ladies around. Alexei Navalny was inarguably a patriot who loved his country and wanted before for its people, to the extent that he knowingly risked his life to do so and got murdered by his government for his trouble. Donald Trump, well, is a schmuck who commits crimes and is then incensed that he might suffer consequences for it. It takes a profound moral degeneracy to look at the cases of Alexei Navalny and Donald Trump and conclude that they are even in the same moral universe.
That Alexei Navalny suffered the fate that he did is an affront to humanity. That there are people willing to use his murder to further bolster their devotion to Donald Trump is an insult to Navalny and other dissidents like him, and is a moral stain on those making such claims. These people have no concept of actual patriotism, mostly because they spend their time rooting for the guy murdering dissidents.
I’ll probably have more to say on this next week, but anything else I say on the matter would just be me venting half-considered thoughts. [And yes, there’s a difference between that and what I usually do.]
Occasional Trivia
Category: Editors
Clue: In 1892, Francis Bellamy, editor at The Youth’s Companion, penned this, which would become a daily recitation for American children.
The Pledge of Allegiance
Today’s clue:
Category: Bodies of Water
Clue: This river rises in the Black Forest and flows easterly about 1,770 miles, where it empties into the Black Sea.
Dispatches from the Homefront
My older daughter is getting so proficient at writing that she’s taken to making greeting cards. She made a Valentine’s Day card for me, which was cute enough, but she also signed it on behalf of my wife and our other daughter. The problem was, she spelled “Mom” with one too many Os. Upon realizing her mistake, she simply drew an X over one of the Os. So not only is she getting proficient at writing, she’s already editing. I’m incredibly proud.