Now we just call them idiots but it turns out they’ve been quite useful as well. Margaret Sullivan writes about Putin’s massive success in recruiting right wing celebrity hosts to his cause:
The former presidential adviser and Russia expert Fiona Hill made headlines last week when she stated bluntly in a Politico interview that Vladimir Putin would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons.
But it was another part of that long interview that I found almost as arresting. Hill described how Putin, as he reaches for domination, relies heavily on his skills at the influence-and-information game.
“What happens in a Russian ‘all-of-society’ war, you soften up the enemy,” she told her interviewer, Maura Reynolds. Hill named some names: “You get the Tucker Carlsons and Donald Trumps doing your job for you.”
And now, after a few years of their apologetic rhetoric on behalf of Russia, Putin “has got swaths of the Republican Party” and “masses of the U.S. public saying ‘Good on you, Vladimir Putin,’ or blaming NATO, or blaming the U.S.” for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she added.
It was quite an indictment from a well-respected intelligence officer, who worked inboth Republican and Democratic administrations. She became known to the American public for her unsparing analysis when she testified during Trump’s first impeachment hearings.
But while it’s startling to hear it said so directly — a Fiona Hill specialty — the proof is there for anyone to see.
In addition to the many times that Trump has praised Putin as strong and admirable, while failing to criticize his human rights offenses, our previous president helped the Russian cause in more specific ways. He reportedly argued to fellow world leaders in 2018 that Crimea — the Ukrainian peninsula that Russia invaded and annexed in 2014 — was Russian because, after all, people who live there speak Russian.
Carlson, meanwhile, recently wondered on air why Putin is hated by “permanent Washington,” describing Ukraine as “not a democracy” but a “pure client state of the United States State Department.”
In more recent days, Carlson has changed his tune to oppose Putin — while managing to fault Democrats as not sending a clear message about the impending crisis.But, to a large extent, the propaganda mission had already been accomplished. In 2019, Carlson had even asked on the air, “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia, which by the way I am?” (He tried to walk that comment back after it went viral, saying he was only kidding.)
Do these pro-Putin messages sink in? No doubt they do, here in the United States and in Russia itself.
Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) said that in the run-up to the invasion, his office heard complaints from constituents who watch Carlson and “are upset that we’re not siding with Russia in its threats to invade Ukraine, and who want me to support Russia’s ‘reasonable’ positions.”
That Russian state TV has repeatedly played clips of Carlson’s rants, complete with Russian subtitles, is a tribute to just how well-received his rhetoric has been by Putin and his allies.
Laura Ingraham’s show was a big help late last month as she trashed a speech by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “really pathetic” and brought Trump on as a guest. The former president’s analysis: His strongman idol would merely have taken over two regions in eastern Ukraine but went further because “he sees the weakness and the incompetence and the stupidity” of the Biden administration.
The circularity and symbiosis of right-wing media and Russia’s own talking points can be quite remarkable.
On Tuesday, former Trump-eraassistant treasury secretary Monica Crowley told Fox News’s Jesse Watters that economic sanctions were so severe that “Russia is now being canceled.” Within days, we heard about Russian Foreign Intelligence Director Sergei Naryshkin using the same cancel-culture rhetoric. “The West isn’t simply trying to close off Russia behind a new iron curtain. This is about an attempt to ruin our government — to ‘cancel’ it, as they now say in ‘tolerant’ liberal-fascist circles,” Naryshkin said.
As one Twitter wag responded, “sounds like a press release from the Republican National Committee.”
They helped, there’s no doubt about it. I don’t know what changed their minds to tell you the truth. They’ve been pro-Putin for years. I suppose the footage of people running for their lives may have awakened their consciences but I doubt it. They don’t really have those. It was probably polling that showed most of their audience was not amused.
Whatever it was, their abrupt pivot to criticism rings hollow now. The internet never forgets.