By Brigitte L. Nacos
After years of falsifying the truth and promoting non-factual tales and ridiculous conspiracy theories that contributed mightily to dividing Americans into hostile political camps, the fired Fox News star and darling of the hard-line MAGA movement Tucker Carlson sells himself as victimized truth-teller. And he promises to return to counter the “liars.”
“Both political parties, and their donors, have reached consensus on what benefits them, and they actively collude to shut down any conversation about it. Suddenly, the United States looks very much like a one-party state…,” he said in the first response after his fall. And then, in a first-rate propaganda trick he compares the honest people against the liars—the “us” versus “them” thing—and sends a message of hope to his fans:
"When honest people say what’s true, calmly and without embarrassment, they become powerful. At the same time, the liars, who have been trying to silence them, shrink and they become weaker. That’s the iron law of the universe. True things prevail. Where can you still find Americans saying true things? There aren’t many places left, but there are some. And that’s enough. As long as you can hear the words, there is hope. See you soon."
In other words, Carlson tells his fellow “honest people” that he will not be silenced for long. The American cable channels with more extreme Far-Right ideologies than Fox News offer him options. And then there is the Russian government’s propaganda arm RT that invited Carlson with the tweet, "Hey @TuckerCarlson, you can always question more with @RT_com.”
More telling is that the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov commented unprompted during a news conference on Carlson’s firing implying that it was a move by the US government. “Perhaps it would be useful to consider how things are with freedom of speech in the United States,” he said with a straight face.
To be sure, Moscow is not happy that their favorite American TV host lost his Fox News perch from which he dispatched anti-American messages that found their way into Russia’s government-controlled media.
If one had not witnessed the perennial truth-twisting by Carlson (and his like-minded colleagues), one would be shocked by the fired TV-host’s complaint that the U.S. looks now like a one-party state. Isn’t that what Carlson and his fellow autocrats in the Far-Right GOP movement see as model? He and they have not hidden their great admiration for strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Hungary’s Victor Orban.
But, then, it is hard to understand the logic of these people. Instead, we need to remind us that there are two “realities” in American body politics with drastically different perceptions of what is fact and fiction.
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