Tucker Carlson’s Many Truths
“The people we love are always truthful and people we hate always lie.”
We should never expect there to be a popular faction that shares all of our interests as in the case for those more on the right with political commentators like Tucker Carlson. He brings up many important things that the Democrats and many old guard Republicans have ignored while at the same time these self evident truths are wrapped around other kinds of truths.
One of these is Tucker’s view on Russia’s war against Ukraine. But the problem is that many political pundits and their followers who hate his guts look the other way when it comes to crime, tend not to care that much about the loss of U.S. production to China, and have no problem with race and gender becoming an ideology taught within schools in this form.
Yet they’re the ones that have been on board with supporting Ukraine as part of what right leaning dissidents refer to as “the current thing”.. A smörgåsbord of woke politics into which this very important war has been embarrassingly crammed.
There’s very much doubt that Ukranians risking their lives against invasion are dreaming of one day having access to “gender affirming surgery” for their kids, yet I don’t blame Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenski for courting the media establishment which promotes such ideas. The promotion itself helps to maintain a broad coalition for Democrats and to push pro-Chomsky pro-Russian progressives into supporting Ukraine.
His position is one of not having much of a choice as any U.S. “woke media” appearance means more of a chance to procure weaponry, or getting development support from the DEI enforcing Blackrock.
Where else is Zelensky going to go when most of the media savvy anti-woke coalition hates him?
Editing Nikki Haley into a Straw Woman.
Beyond the leftists or faux left-panderers on the Democratic Party, there are the non-MAGA Republicans like Bill Kristol and Nikki Haley who very much support Ukraine but they don’t seem to be helping to grow the party..
In Kristol’s case, his support for the Iraq War only increases the paranoia of “forever war” on the back of the American taxpayer. Haley’s problem is that by casting herself against Trump while getting support from the aforementioned Mr. Kristol and Senator Lindsey Graham, she’s seen by the populist opposition as, to quote Donald Trump: “Another Career Politician".
In the first episode of Tucker on Twitter this “Career Politician” angle was in full effect during what looks like a selectively edited clip of Haley advocating for U.S. interests in helping Ukraine during a CNN Town Hall:
“A win for Ukraine is a win for all of us -- and for them to sit there and say this is a territorial dispute… that’s just not the case, to say that we should stay neutral. It is in the best interest of America, it's in the best interest of our national security for Ukraine to win. We have to see this through, we have to finish it.”
The full quote goes as follows:
What we have to understand is that a win for Ukraine is a win for all of us, because tyrants tell us exactly what they’re going to do. What we heard, China said they were going to take Hong Kong, and they did.
Russia said they were going to invade Ukraine, we watched that happen. China says Taiwan’s next, we better believe them. Russia said Poland and the Baltics are next, if that happens, we are looking at a world war. This is about preventing war.
And so the way you prevent war is not that we give cash to Ukraine, not that we put troops on the ground, but that we get with our allies and we make sure that we give them the equipment and the ammunition to win, because when Ukraine wins, that sends a message to China with Taiwan, it sends a message to Iran that wants to build a bomb, sends a message to North Korea testing ballistic missiles, and it sends a message to Russia that it’s over.
And keep in mind, everybody wants to know, well how does this war end? It would end in a day if Russia pulls out. If Ukraine pulls out, then we’re all looking at a world war.”
Would Tucker’s mission have been to seek a different kind of truth than the one he chose to present, he would have included parts that actually spell out Haley’s reasoning, and from there would have been free to argue as to why it’s flawed.
But bringing up context beyond what seems to be an edited circular logic strawman means you introduce an element of doubt to your audience. It is similar to the way that many anti Trump pundits spun any good policy decision from his administration as the unmentionable droppings of a one dimensional orangutan man.
Destroying Kakhovka Dam
As for Tucker’s doubt about Russia blowing up their (currently) own Kakhovka dam in Southern Ukraine, he accuses the pro-Ukraine side of seeing the Russian government just as one dimensionally as he suspects they see Trump and himself.
Tucker dismisses Russia’s motive as “doing evil for the sake of evil” that would “hurt Russia more” by cutting off the water supply to Russian occupied Crimea and their Black Sea fleet, but there have been many examples of the Russian government doing stupid and evil things of this same type.
One example was the 2014 shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 by a Buk surface-to-air missile launched from Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine. To any competent crew commander, it would be obvious that the height of an airliner and a spy plane would be vastly different yet this needless blunder cost 298 civilian lives.
Another example, but one of more nefariousness than idiocy, can be seen in the 1999 series of building explosions which resulted in the deaths of more than 300 people and injuring about 1,500 more.
The final would-be explosion in a Ryazan apartment building was declared to have been a prevented Chechen terrorist plot, only for officials to change the story two days later to this being an FSB training exercise using bags of sugar as explosive placeholders to 'test the vigilance' of the local residents.
However, it was later reported by eyewitness apartment residents that these bags contained a flakey substance matching the description of TNT... a substance that government officials declared to have been used in the previous bombing along with the significantly smaller and colorless granular hexogen.
Based on the reporting done despite government interference, there is strong indication of this being an FSB false flag blamed on independence seeking Chechnya in order to give Russia enough justification to invade it. It also just so happened to elect Putin as President despite only having 2 percent of the population’s support before these atrocities galvanized the masses against the “Chechen terrorists” that Putin swore to wipe out.
And it was during this period that Putin went from head of the FSB to Prime Minister appointed by Boris Yeltsin, in turn shielding the former Russian president from charges of corruption when being given the presidential power to do so.
The fact that Yeltsin attempted to convince then-U.S. President Bill Clinton of Putin becoming Russia's next president the day before the last effective "terrorist" bombing is quite telling. This is especially notable considering that Putin's poll numbers were still low at that time.
As for the most recent atrocity on June 6 of this year, the Kakhovka dam located on the Russian controlled side of the Dnieper river was warned by Volodymyr Zelensky back in October 21, 2022 of being wired to explode by the Russians in case of emergency (such as a Ukrainian counter-offensive for instance).
The resulting flood has left an untold number of people and pets drowned to death as well as the drowning of 300 zoo animals.
Before even looking at motives and outcomes, Tucker's finger pointing at Ukraine can be dismissed for several reasons.
First off, there were seismic readings from this location indicative of explosions on the day of the disaster, and there was no evidence of any artillery activity on the scene.
If we assume this to be the more likely explosion from within, Russian garrison forces occupying this dam would have been privy to any internal mine wiring operations that would generate a force of this magnitude considering they’ve been occupying the thing since February of last year.
Not to mention Zelensky warning of such a move by Russia last year could have tipped them off to be on guard against this sabotage so they wouldn’t get framed. Maybe they were all too drunk on vodka to care while their garrison was being wired with hundreds of kilograms of explosives.
But even if we go with the (less likely) scenario of an artillery strike from the outside which was somehow missed by everyone, “they would have needed to fire 20-30 HIMARs to cause the damage we see here” according to British munitions expert Col. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon.
Ihor Syrota, director general of the Ukrainian hydroelectric power company Ukrhydroenergo, said that “The plant was designed to withstand a nuclear strike,” and “To destroy the plant from the outside, at least three aircraft bombs, each of 500kg, would have had to be dropped on the same spot. The station was blown up from the inside.”
While there was a Ukrainian HIMARS test strike on one of the dam's floodgates as Tucker points out, the goal stated by Maj. Gen. Andriy Kovalchuk (initial commander of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the Kherson region) in the referenced Washington Post article from December of last year was very different from the conclusion this Twitter episode drew:
“Kovalchuk considered flooding the river. The Ukrainians, he said, even conducted a test strike with a HIMARS launcher on one of the floodgates at the Nova Kakhovka dam, making three holes in the metal to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages.
The test was a success, Kovalchuk said, but the step remained a last resort. He held off."
Never mind that Zelensky visited Kherson after the flooding destruction while neither Putin nor a representative on his behalf visited the other side of the Dnieper. Or that Russian artillery has been shelling the area while rescue teams strive to save any remaining individuals in their reach. Or that Russian media is keeping silent about the flood damage and death, which you’d think they’d play up in order to be martyrs of this “Ukrainian attack”.
For Tucker and his truth, however, there is less of a distinction between the morality of the two opposing sides and their culture.
The “evil” that Tucker dismisses within Putin is not so much of intentionally causing pain as it is a general “devil may care” attitude about the well being of your own people that goes all the way from Putin down to the local officer. As a result, only meeting whatever objective Putin wants is important and the human costs on both sides including civilians matter not in the least.
In terms of motive, there has been growing concern within Russia’s government of Ukraine not just taking back the dam, but eventually Crimea and its surrounding territories with their counter-offensive. In terms of timing, it has certainly slowed this down, but at the same time, we never want to exclude the Russians’ emotion driven irrationality and aforementioned stupidity.
This is why one possible explanation of the sheer level destruction on both sides is that it was the work of a sabotage group that “didn't go according to plan” as discussed in an alleged conversation intercepted by The Security Service of Ukraine.
This would then fall more into the stupid than evil category, but the kind of person or system which allows for such deadly stupidity is definitely evil.
Christian Persecution?
As for the categorization of Volodymyr Zelensky, Tucker describes him as a “sweaty and rat-like” “persecutor of Christians”, despite only going after the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate whose leadership is affiliated with Russia.
What many people may not be aware of is that during the USSR, the entire structure of the Russian Orthodox Church answered to and were themselves members of the KGB. When you consider how relatively recently the Soviet Union fell, many of these same people are still around in Russia, albeit with longer and greyer beards.
Not only are they around but so is the KGB, which survived the Soviet Union’s fall to become the FSB and gained even more control over Russia when Putin became President. Now there wasn’t even a Communist Party to check this organization’s power like in the good old days.
This was not the case with Ukraine which went its own way after the Soviet collapse, and so did the former ruling bishop of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Filaret. When breaking away from this church, there was a familiarity on his part with this clergy KGB relationship as he was under that same relationship himself.
And there is very little doubt that these same relationships between the KGB/FSB and former clerical stooges are as strong as they were in the old days, with Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and others falling in line with the government’s position on the war. In this situation, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is a canonical branch of the Moscow Church still run by an organization that actually did persecute Christians.
This has not been the case in Ukraine with churches independent from this influence that individual parishes have been free to defect into while the Christian people themselves can go wherever they want and worship as they please.
Ultimately this situation has to do with the operators of a specific church and not with Christianity at all.
So just like in the case of Nikki Haley and the Kakhovka dam, Tucker’s program seems to have omitted important pieces of information to present its own truth instead.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, who am I to deny Tucker Carlson his living truth? But his loyal viewers rightfully have no love towards the legacy media because of how they leave certain details out in order to portray the truth THEY want us to believe.
Tucker’s second episode makes an important point about how “societies are defined by what they will not permit” and one reason why I believe we’ve gotten too lenient in permitting all kinds of bad things has to do with fleeing into our social media safe havens, many times to complain about the state of the exterior world while doing nothing to fix it.
The reluctance to face a reality you see as brainwashed means you only converse with those that you agree with on the bedrock problems in your society.
Everything is fine until you’re in the realm of things you don’t know much about and expect whoever leads your group to know best, but then it becomes a matter of trust rather than understanding. The thought of being deceived by those who you place so much trust in is not worth the strain.
The solution is to not make an idol out of anybody other than idolizing the values you hold to be important, and freeing yourself to seek alternative sources who may not always align with your values, but can give a broader view of less familiar things.
This is what I’m growing with Break The Rules by bringing together the isolated safe havens, and in doing so we can all hold ourselves to a higher standard of information accountability regardless of how many things we agree with said by those who fall below this standard themselves.
Not a big fan of Tuck the Cuck nor the way the war is being framed. I’m not informed enough on the inner workings of the conflict though I am aware of the historical animosities, but feel it’s not my place to criticize any motives by Zelenski. That being said America is deeply divided and will only get worse, as resentment grows amongst younger Americans who see no future and all the attention turned to a conflict they have NO historical understanding of and obvious propaganda by “both sides.” I can wrap my brain around the rationale of any leader of the weaker force in a conflict, but I’m afraid the red/blue paradigm is still strong in America. The GOP is hated by most sensible rightists, which further complicates the situation. Owen Benjamin did a pretty hard critique of Tucker recently and I know many share his skepticism on the right. Either way, thanks for bringing together thoughtful discussions, cheers mate.
Easiest restack ever:
"There’s very much doubt that Ukranians risking their lives against invasion are dreaming of one day having access to “gender affirming surgery” for their kids, yet I don’t blame Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenski for courting the media establishment which promotes such ideas."
The 4chan brainfog victims think everything is about troons, HRT and SRS, when people die by the thousands. For Russia too.
Who else will give weapons to Ukraine so it can defend itself, but the US?
No other choices if survival is the goal.