How Tucker Carlson helps Putin silence critics like Navalny

The version of Russia Tucker Carlson presented to his viewers is a world away from the one Alexei Navalny died in

Tucker Carlson in a supermarket in Moscow (Screenshot via 1776)

In 1989, during the twilight of Soviet communism, Boris Yeltsin famously marveled at the abundance of an American grocery store in suburban Texas. In 2024, Tucker Carlson absurdly did the same in a supermarket in Moscow. Like a painfully oblivious travel vlogger in a third world country, Carlson gushed over the supposedly cheap prices and commonplace goods in a Russian Auchan — a French supermarket chain — while admiring basic amenities like coin-activated grocery store carts. Never mind that the price of goods is so much lower in Russia because Russians make on average almost six times less than Americans, or that the innovations Carlson had admired in almost Borat-like fashion are nearly universal across European countries — at the end of the video, the former Fox News host said the visit had “radicalized him” against America’s leadership.

The day after the video came out, Alexei Navalny, the most famous Russian anti-government dissident, died in a maximum security prison colony north of the Arctic Circle in Siberia. There is no doubt that the Russian state was responsible. While Carlson was attending performances at the Bolshoi Theater, interviewing Vladimir Putin about how NATO had provoked him into invading Ukraine, and praising Moscow’s cleanliness, the Kremlin was likely preparing to poison Navalny as they had so many other undesirables before him. It’s painful to think that Navalny probably watched Carlson’s interview with Putin in his final days.

Carlson’s entire visit to Russia was predicated on finding out “what [Putin] thinks; that was the whole point,” as Carlson later said in an interview, in order to allow everyday Americans to make up their own minds about Russia’s war in Ukraine. This is an idea that has become ubiquitous on the new right — that in a one-sided media environment, presenting “the other side” is the only way to truly educate the audience and to arrive at the truth. Elon Musk has made the same claim to justify his amplification of right-wing voices on X, stating he bought the platform to save civilization from the woke mainstream.

The media ecosystem is biased and deeply broken in a variety of ways, and a diversity of viewpoints is healthy for both democracy and an informed populace. But interviewing someone who says the sky is green “just to see what they think” is absurd unless you make it clear that, despite claims to the contrary, the sky is in fact blue. And when you fail to point out that this person has murdered anyone who argues otherwise, you cross the line from journalistic malpractice into enabling a criminal dictatorial regime. That’s exactly what Tucker Carlson did in Moscow, and Navalny’s killing, together with Putin’s ongoing destruction of Ukraine and its people, demonstrate the brutal costs of allowing a malicious “other side” to propagate its political narrative and to rehabilitate its image unchallenged in front of an audience of millions around the world.

In comments following his interview with Putin, Carlson responded quite bluntly to questions about why he hadn’t pushed Putin on his assassination of political opponents: “Every leader kills people. My leader kills people…Leadership requires killing people. Sorry.” In the wake of Navalny’s death today, Carlson was more conciliatory, calling the murder “barbaric and awful.” But having fawned over Putin, his perspective on Ukraine and the West, and the amazing standard of living in modern Russia (or in truth, Central Moscow), the damage was already done. Carlson has repeatedly claimed that he left things like Putin’s repression of dissent and free press out of the interview because the media reports on all this already. But it’s unlikely that the average Tucker Carlson viewer is aware of the lies and manipulations Putin presented in his deceptive half-hour historical overture on Ukrainian history at the start of the interview, or about all the ways Russia undermined peace efforts during the Donbas Conflict after 2014, which Putin blamed Ukraine for. And being shown a rose-colored-glasses view of life in Russia, devoid of the inequality and political repression ordinary Russians have to live — and die — with, most people likely walked away from Carlson’s coverage of his visit seeing the Russian government as being morally equivalent with the United States. Having been fed tall tales about Russia’s anti-woke, traditional culture for years by Carlson and others on the right, his visit may have even convinced them that life in Russia is in fact better, and freer, than life in America itself.

What makes Carlson’s approach so potent is that, like all propagandists, his claims contain a kernel of truth. Inflation has indeed wreaked havoc on Americans across the board with little help from their leaders, its military adventurism overseas has cost America dearly while exacerbating local conflicts, and the US has persecuted its fair share of political dissidents. But his manipulation emerges in the act of painting the US and Russia with the same brush, as two sides of the same coin, and by suggesting very explicitly that Putin might actually not be such a bad guy after all.

Carlson’s comments in the wake of Navalny’s assassination shows that he is not a complete Putin sycophant just yet, but his brief remarks on the killing will reach only a tiny fraction of those who watched his interview and his reports from Moscow. And having been primed by them, Carlson’s audience will quite possibly view coverage of Navalny’s death through the prism that he gave them, seeing it as yet another, one-sided, biased media narrative about Putin’s Russia. In the end, if “every leader kills people,” the murder of one political upstart is a small price to pay for cheap groceries.