Tucker Carlson Says He’s Not Pro-Russia, He Just Thinks Ukrainians Would Be Better Off If They’d Just Bend Over And Submit To Putin

Tucker Carlson must have a terrible poker face, because he’s done a pretty awful job at hiding where his loyalties lie while “reporting” on the Russia Ukraine War. While he regularly, and blatantly, pushes batsh*t conspiracy theories and Russian propaganda for all his audience to hear, on Tuesday night Tuck took a different tack: Playing the role of concerned American who, like so many other Americans, is worried for the people of Ukraine. Blatant concern trolling, really.

In what amounted to a hollow attempt to tone down his usual “Yay, Putin!” rhetoric, Carlson used a bit of backwards logic to explain that if his nightly rants sometimes seem to be pro-Russia, that’s only because he has Ukraine’s best interest at heart. While he did allow that “Civilians in Ukraine are being crushed by Vladimir Putin—that’s true,” he went on to suggest that providing Ukraine with more weapons and/or supplies in which to help them continue fighting, “as well-intentioned as it is, and it is,” might be counterproductive:

“Will it, for example, prolong the fighting in Ukraine at the expense of the vulnerable civilian population in Ukraine? If I do this, could I inadvertently be doing to Ukraine what the West inadvertently did to, let’s say Iraq, and Syria, and Libya and Afghanistan? You wouldn’t want that. You would hate to do something like that again. Because that would be cruel. So, you would want to make sure that you weren’t doing that.

But not a single person in Washington, at least in public, appears to be asking that question. No one is allowed to ask that question. ‘What are you, a Putin defender?’”

So there you have it: Tucker Carlson—the man who has become a superstar in Russia, where orders have come directly from the Kremlin to plaster the Fox News host’s smug face and pro-Putin rhetoric over every pixel of their state-run media—isn’t actually rooting for Russia.

You see, he just doesn’t think that Ukraine has a snowball’s chance in hell of defeating Putin — though some experts think otherwise — and believes the more humane thing to do is just give Putin what he wants and stop prolonging the inevitable. Whatta guy!

(Via @Acyn on Twitter)