Tucker Carlson's Holiday Greetings from Mother Russia
"Happy Holidays! We're about to enter a nuclear World War III with Russia!"
The holiday season between Thanksgiving and New Year's is a cherished time when many Americans travel far to visit the people and places they love.
Likewise for Tucker Carlson. At the beginning of December, Carlson returned to his beloved Russia to seek out the wisdom of its sages, interviewing Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. It was important for the United States to realize how its support for Ukraine has placed both countries into a “hot war,” he insisted.
Standing in Red Square, Carlson intoned in a nearly-three minute X video how it’s all the fault of the United States.
“We’ve watched from the United States as the Biden administration has driven the U.S. ever closer to a nuclear conflict with Russia. . . . Because of that war, because of the fact that the U.S. military is killing Russians in Russia right now, we are closer to nuclear war than in any time in history …”
“We’ve been trying for over a year to get that perspective out.”
Wait, what? The US military is killing Russians in Russia right now? That’s quite the leap Tucker has taken from his usual “just asking questions” to downright accusing the US military of invading a foreign nation and killing civilians.
You know, like Russia is doing to Ukraine right now.
Carlson, of course, has no receipts for that. He’s extrapolating. In his pretzel logic (and that of his supporters), because President Biden gave the Ukrainians ATACMS long-range missiles, trained them in their use, and at long last finally gave Ukraine permission to launch them into Russia, this constitutes the US military “killing Russians in Russia.”
So as a result of America’s intransigence, the Russians have been testing Oreshnik hypersonic missiles as threats not only to Europe, but to the United States as well. And don’t think that Russia will back down from using them, said Lavrov.
The West must cooperate with Russia “for the sake of the universe,” warned Lavrov. But Tucker Carlson didn’t bother to challenge him, as one would expect of a serious journalist, but rather played the sycophant.
Carlson — unwittingly or not — played right into Russian hands. As Kremlin media monitor Julia Davis posted on X:
“Every day, I watch Russian experts on state TV complaining that Americans are not afraid of Moscow's nuclear threats and wondering what they can do to scare us, in order to dissuade Americans from supporting Ukraine. That's why Tucker is in Moscow.”
No, We’re Not Heading into World War III
While Carlson fans and many in the media have been wringing their hands over a potential nuclear war with Russia, serious people are pooh-poohing this nonsense.
Peter Dickinson, editor at the Atlantic Council, points out that Russia has time and time again made nuclear threats, only to back down:
“Nuclear intimidation has been central to Vladimir Putin’s strategy as he has sought to deter the West from coming to the aid of Ukraine following Russia’s February 2022 invasion. In his initial address announcing the decision to invade, Putin warned that any attempts at Western interference would be met with a nuclear response. Three days later, he underlined the message by placing Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert.”
Dickinson continues by noting that in the fall of 2022, Putin vowed that he would defend Russia’s conquests in Ukraine with nuclear weapons. In the spring of 2024 he ordered nuclear drills after French president Emmanuel Macron mulled over sending troops to Ukraine.
Putin’s newest iteration of his nuclear doctrine, published in November, asserted that any attack by a non-nuclear state, if backed by a nuclear state, would be viewed as a joint assault on Russia.
But even when Ukraine crossed the reddest of Russia’s red lines in August, 2024, by crossing the border and invading the Kursk region, Russia did … nothing. Instead, Putin called the action a mere “provocation” and assured Russians that the presence of Ukrainians in the region was a “new normal.”
And It’s Not Like the Cuban Missile Crisis, Either
“We are closer to nuclear war than in any time in history — far closer than we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis,” cautioned Tucker Carlson in his interview announcement at X.
Well, no, says British-Russian historian Sergey Radchenko. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis provokes an emotional response among Americans, which is precisely what Carlson (and Russia) wants.
As Radchenko told Meduza, an independent Russian-English language news site headquartered in Riga, Latvia:
“… we're now in a different territory [than in 1962] altogether because Russia and the United States know so much more about each other's nuclear arsenals than they did during the Cuban Missile Crisis. At that time, the Americans relied on U-2 imagery. They were so late in understanding that the Soviet Union shipped missiles to Cuba because of bad weather over Cuba. They couldn't see through clouds.”
“Today, we have much better signal intelligence, satellite imagery, and so on. Anytime the Russians make any kind of moves in the nuclear sphere, it registers. In the fall of 2022, there was an immediate reaction ….”
“So, when Carlson says this is much more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis, this seems to me like an uninformed take.”
Radchenko concluded:
“Now, I don’t want to downplay what Carlson is saying; it is a dangerous situation. But I would not say the situation is so dangerous that we must make all these concessions to Putin right away. That’s obviously what the Russians are saying: “Surrender quickly! Otherwise, we’ll show you what’s what.”
“But this is not how it works. If you want to get anywhere in the business of dealing with Russians, you have to play this game the same way that they play and not succumb to unjustified fears.”
Russia Has Been Attacking the West All Along
Russia may be bluffing about using nuclear weapons, but they have been engaging in sabotage against the West for years. This should come as no surprise: Vladimir Putin is former KGB, well-trained in subversive activities.
Last month, the British Telegraph sounded a warning about how unusual incidents which have occurred throughout Europe smell like Russian-style sabotage. While disparate events may look like random freak accidents or one-off infrastructure failures, these are not isolated. Rather, they are Putin’s payback for European nations that provide support to Ukraine.
These “accidents” may include the following, as reported in War Notes, from News Nation’s Leland Vittert:
DHL cargo plane crash in Lithuania
Recent bomb scares in London
Drones spotted near U.S. Air Force bases in the United Kingdom
An explosion at a weapons manufacturing facility in Wales
Telecommunications cables severed in the Baltic Sea
Arson attacks, including on a Ukrainian-owned business
Successful attempts to interfere with Czech rail operators
A ransomware attack on an NHS provider
Television satellites were disrupted and damaged, causing programming changes across Europe
A defector gunned down in Spain
An assassination attempt on the chief executive of a German arms manufacturer
Even more alarming is the possibility that Russia may instigate mass casualty attacks throughout Europe. Keir Giles, of the international foreign policy think tank Chatham House, raises a red flag:
“We ought to be concerned that Russia is willing to consider causing mass-casualty events in Europe, as evidenced by the airliner plot. That was the one element missing in the campaigns of murder sabotage in previous decades. And that’s a worry.”
Serious Americans are also becoming alarmed. On Friday evening, former FBI and CIA counterterrorism expert Philip Mudd appeared with Vittert at News Nation, expressing his concerns that such sabotage could reach the United States.
However, it appears that Russia has already attacked Americans in the Western hemisphere. As Irene Kenyon wrote at this site on Saturday, it appears that Havana Syndrome symptoms are more than just “anomalous health accidents,” as they have been termed. A five-year investigation showed that they may have been engineered by Russia’s GRU Unit 29155.
Does Tucker Carlson have any explanation for this suspected sabotage? Other than “the media is lying to you?”
What is Going On in Tucker’s Brain?
Good question. I have previously written that Carlson hates the West, and I continue to believe that it’s true.
The West has lost its moral soul and compass, believes Carlson. It’s Vladimir Putin with his strict Slavic adherence to “traditional values” who is worthy of our admiration. He’s manly, he doesn’t tolerate homosexuals, and is devoutly Russian Orthodox. Since Carlson contends that he’s a Christian, this may partly explain why he’s such a cheerleader for Russia.
Except Putin has arrested and imprisoned Orthodox priests for speaking out against the Ukraine invasion. Russian invaders into Ukraine have killed evangelical faith leaders, tortured and imprisoned other evangelicals, and destroyed over 600 of their churches (Putin sees evangelical Christianity as an American plot).
Here at Christmas time (which the Ukrainian Orthodox celebrate on December 25, as in the West), Ukrainian children ask St. Nicholas for the bombs to stop, and even for power banks to sustain electricity during bombings.
And their parents no doubt pray that their children will not join the 20,000 children whom Russian forces, in collaboration with the Russian Orthodox Church, and other officials have taken across the border into Russia.
Some devout Christian, that Vladimir Putin is. Some religious freedom he promotes.
As for freedom of speech in Putin’s Russia — let’s just say Alexei Navalny is not available for comment. Since Carlson relies upon the protections of the First Amendment of the US Constitution in order to spew his distortions, you’d think he’d be the first to condemn Navalny’s death.
Yet Tucker Carlson says he loves America. I recently watched an interview with him in which he told his host that “But I love this country! I was born here. I love America!” Carlson repeated these protestations over and over.
If you’re explaining, you’re losing. And no one who takes a deep dive into Tucker Carlson’s adulation for Russia believes that he truly loves America most of all.