Tucker Carlson has a sick obsession with Ukraine. He even went after his erstwhile ally Lindsey Graham over it this week in an extremely crude fashion:
On Thursday, Carlson attacked Graham over his support for U.S. aid to Ukraine in its war against Russia, which invaded the country in February. The Fox News host’s remarks came a day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed a joint session of Congress.
Graham had said the war will end when President Vladimir Putin is no longer in power. Carlson said calling for regime change in Russia is wrongheaded.
“So, the other day Lindsey Graham came out–” Carlson began, taking a long pause “–the Republican from South Carolina, and said that he agreed with Joe Biden and Zelensky.”
Some have speculated about the sexuality of Graham, who is a bachelor.
“And you don’t want to play shrink and wonder about, you know, what emptiness at the core of Lindsey Graham’s personal life causes him to identify so strongly with a country he’s not a citizen of,” Carlson declared. “Something’s going on there.”
I mean … that’s Fox News saying that, not some snarky blogger.
Greg Sargent took a deeper dive into Carlson’s Ukraine crusade and it’s disturbing:
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 audiencethat thelawmakers “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. Thisconflation 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.
The piece then lays out the record of Carlson’s electoral losses here and around the world and his assaults on the January 6th Committee and the Mar-a-Lago case. It’s almost as bad as Trump’s.
There have been a number of long form profiles of Carlson over the past year or so since he’s become the most popular cable news host in America. He hob nobs with all kinds of influential wingnuts and openly endorses the Victor Orban white nationalist ideology. And he’s apparently really obsessed with making money. So his motives all seem on the surface to be rational, if evil.
But I have to say that more and more I think there’s actually something wrong with him. Taking that kind of swipe at Graham doesn’t appear to me to be calculated, That’s the kind of thing a 13 year old says when they’re experiencing an emotional tidal wave. It’s possible that he thought it through as a way to tickle the pro-Putin, anti-gay, anti-RINO lizard brain but that’s a stretch. It sounds like he was just having a bit of a tantrum.
Not that it matters. He is a blight on American politics, a Father Coughlin for our times. He’s showing that there are no limits for him. He’s dangerous.
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