The Left is reacting with intense disdain over the Tucker Carlson interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This was the first interview with Putin by an American journalist since Russiaundefineds attack on Ukraine. While Hillary Clinton is calling Carlson a undefineduseful idiot,undefined there are viral social media posts about how he is on a undefinedkill listundefined through the Ukrainian website, Myrotvorets. Keep in mind, this is a country we are supporting with billions of dollars - a country that allegedly supports freedom of speech and an honest, peaceful democracy. Why are so many journalists now being threatened with death or harm? Could this be a reflection of our current political and social state? Tonight on Ground Zero, Clyde Lewis talks to author and political analyst, Michael Rectenwald about AMERICAN PRAVDA - MOTHER TUCKER GOES TO MISTER RUSSIA.
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In 1984, The Reverend Jesse Jackson met with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro while he was running for President. He met Castro many times before that.
Dan Rather interviewed Saddam Hussien on February 24, 2003, very shortly before the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. The interview was aired both in the United States and on all three Iraqi television networks.
Mike Wallace interviewed with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at his presidential compound in Tehran. Among the issues they addressed were the role of Iran in the Near and Middle East, U.S. involvement in Iraq, the role of Islam in the region, and nuclear development programs in Iran.
Christiane Amanpour interviewed Moammar Gadhafi, It was his last interview.
Now, the left is reacting to Tucker Carlsonundefineds interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This is the first interview of Putin by an American journalist since the attacks on Ukraine.
Hillary Clinton was one of the first to comment on MSNBC about Tucker calling him undefinedA Useful Idiotundefined and that Russians have been calling him a puppy dog.
Hillary Clinton was interviewed by Alex Wagner who also scored low points for her mocking tone undefined not hiding her feelings about Tucker Carlson and his brazen interview undefined undefinedhow dare he?undefined
Clinton said “Well, it shows me what I think we’ve all known: he’s what’s called a ‘useful idiot,undefined “I mean if you read translations of what’s being said on Russian media, they make fun of him. I mean, he’s like a puppy dog.”
Clinton then said Carlson’s future could lie with state media in Putin’s country.
“After having been fired from so many outlets in the United States,” Clinton said, referring to Carlson’s on-camera careers at CNN, then MSNBC, and finally Fox, “I would not be surprised if he emerges with a contract with a Russian outlet.”
She continued:
“He says things that are not true, he parrots Vladimir Putin’s pack of lies about Ukraine.”
It is interesting to note that the exchange with Clinton took place before the interview with Putin aired on the Internet.
Hillary Clinton came off as being catty -and speaking like a movie critic who has not seen the movie undefined but has to make something up to meet a deadline.
However, this type of treatment and criticism is harmless compared to what has been said by others, including unknown assassins in Ukraine.
There have been viral social media posts that have spread rumors about how Tucker Carlson now is on a Ukrainian kill list.
Carlson was added to a “Ukraine kill list” called Myrotvorets.
Myrotvorets is a running list made in 2014 by an independent organization called the Myrotvorets (or Peacemaker) Center, which keeps track of people it believes have committed crimes against the “national security of Ukraine, human life and health, peace, human security, and the international legal order,” including Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters and NBC journalist Keir Simmons.
People on the list who have died from various causes are marked as liquidated, including former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who died in 2022 from disease, daughter of Russian nationalist Daria Dugina, who died in a car bomb attack the U.S. believes elements of the Ukrainian government was behind, and Italian journalist Andrea Rocchelli, who died after being hit by mortar fire in Ukraine while covering the conflict.
The site claims that Carlson was first added to the list on June 08, 2023, after posting a 10-minute long video to X where he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “rat-like,” and suggested the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine was Ukrainian terrorist act.
The site does list Carlson’s interview with Putin as another offense against Ukraine, along with a 2022 statement he made on Fox News, saying Ukraine’s army was too small to win a victory against Russia.
Now keep in mind this is from a country that we are defending. A country that we are told believes in Freedom of Speech and is a well-run and peaceful democracy.
Democracies do not ban opposition parties. The fact that so many such parties ever existed says something about the level of opposition faced by the Ukrainian nationalist government that came to power after the 2014 revolution.
Then in May of 2022, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law formally banning all these parties. President Volodymyr Zelensky signed the law. The list included the Opposition Platform for Life, which had held fully 10 percent of the seats in parliament. Among the 11 banned parties are the Socialist Party of Ukraine, the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, the Union of Left Forces, and the Communist Party of Ukraine.
Democracies do not ban elections, but Ukraine has put the democratic process itself on hold since declaring martial law in 2022. This hiatus was supposed to be temporary, but it has been repeatedly extended.
Democracies do not censor the media. In February 2022, the Ukrainian government ordered the nine largest television networks in Ukraine to combine their news operations into a single, state-controlled news program called undefinedTelemarathon.undefined In April 2022 the National Security Council ordered three independent television channels associated with Zelenskyundefineds predecessor taken off the air. In December 2022, Zelensky signed a law that gave the National Broadcasting Council statutory authority to regulate all print, broadcast, and digital media.
In 1931, Dorothy Thompson a Journalist with Cosmopolitan Magazine interviewed Adolf Hitler.
On the morning of August 25, 1934, Dorothy Thompson was having breakfast in her room at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin when she received a letter from the Gestapo. “Given your numerous anti-German publications in the American press,” Thompson was informed, “the German authorities, for reasons of national self-respect, are unable to extend to you a further right of hospitality.”
For years, she had been critical of fascist movements throughout Europe. After being granted an interview with Hitler in 1931, Thompson wrote an especially unflattering portrayal of the soon-to-be German chancellor.
That long essay, which first ran in Cosmopolitan Magazine, was subsequently turned into a book called I Saw Hitler. “He is formless, almost faceless,” Thompson had written, “a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones.
He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, and insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man.” In addition to that injurious portrait, Thompson had produced a series of articles for the Jewish Daily Bulletin deploring Hitler’s anti-semitic policies.
The Führer was reportedly threatened enough by her work to demand the creation of a “Dorothy Thompson Emergency Squad” to rush translations of her articles. Now, at the personal directive of Hitler himself, she was being expelled from the country, an unprecedented act against an American correspondent.
Now we have not learned anything from this page of history.
Now we have the ugliness of an American Independent journalist in the crosshairs of some paramilitary organization in Ukraine.
An enemy undefinedKill Listundefined sounds like something that would come out of the Middle East. The Salmon Rushdie fatwah comes to mind.
Nearly 40 years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of the novelist Salman Rushdie, whose book “The Satanic Verses” Khomeini declared blasphemous.
Rushdie lived in hiding in London for a decade before moving to New York, where he began to let his guard down.
In August of 2022, a man named Hadi Matar attacked Rushdie onstage before a public event, stabbing him about a dozen times even once in the eye.
Rushdie barely survived.
Now Tucker Carlson is on a Ukrainian hit list?
When Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox News back in April last year (for doing his job, mind you), it seemed as if the last vestiges of press freedom in the United States were destroyed. And that’s certainly true when it comes to corporate media. However, despite how bad it looked at the time, it turned out to be one of the best things that happened in Carlson’s professional career.
Namely, the fact that he worked for one of the largest news networks in America meant that their editorial policies constrained him and would’ve never reached his full potential as a world-class journalist.
As a result of his truthful and objective reporting, Carlson became the target of Washington DC’s top vassal, the infamous Kiev regime, which effectively ended his long-running career at Fox News. Many in America were quite happy to see him go, but none more so than the Neo-Nazi junta frontman Volodymyr Zelensky, whose endless corruption and dictatorial behavior were regularly exposed precisely by Carlson.
But it does not stop there.
A legal expert reports that some left-wing activists in Washington believe that Carlson could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for interviewing Putin.
Lawyer Ian Corzine said in a video posted to X on Wednesday, with his analysis drawing some pushback. He said that while interviewing Putin may be legal, there may be undefinedsome big problems aheadundefined for Carlson, pointing to the undefinedsuper broadundefined language of the Espionage Act, which prohibits Americans from spying on behalf of foreign countries.
Corzine warned that the language of the law undefinedcould be construed to prohibit any sharing of information with another country with intent to harm the U.S.undefined
Carlson sharing questions with Putinundefineds team before the interview, or Putinundefineds team providing the Americans with evidence supporting the war with Ukraine, could be covered by the Espionage Act, Corzine said.
The case of course would be weak-as the interview droned on for two hours with Putin giving a history lesson to Carlson -which seemed to go on and on undefined set of a long way to explain why Russia is at war with Ukraine.
In order to make a case for the Espionage Act undefined you have to prove that Carlson intended to harm the U.S. with his interview.
It gets even more weak when you consider that the U.S. government is duty-bound to follow the dictates of the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution guarantees freedom of the press, and the U.S. Supreme Court has done everything it can to protect this provision and journalists.
Yes that is all well and good if only the left would follow the Constitution instead of cherry-picking it and weaponizing it against people they do not like.
It appears that anyone can be a target for telling stories or doing interviews with controversial personalities.
Carlson of course exemplifies the idea that if journalists want journalism to mean something, they are the ones who will have to do more – and they can’t rely on other people’s corporate management to do it for them.
But of course we live in times where official” narratives are considered true by default, and anything that calls them into question is, by default, a “conspiracy theory.” The term signifies to other intellectuals—who don’t question the pronouncements of the state—that evidence that potentially undermines official narratives is, by definition, false. This conclusion is, of course, a load of crap.
We can look back in our not-too-distant history as to how we treat Truth tellers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.
Assange, came to international prominence in 2010 when he published a series of leaks from US Army intelligence operative Chelsea Manning in what was referred to as the largest disclosure of classified documents in history. He faces up to 175 years in prison if convicted of a string of espionage charges.
Assange is also at “risk of being placed in prolonged solitary confinement” and could receive a “potentially disproportionate sentence” in a US courtroom if the decide to extradite him to the United States.
The United Nations special reporter on torture has called upon authorities in the UK to block Julian Assange’s possible extradition to the United States to face espionage charges. Britain could be violating human rights laws by turning the WikiLeaks founder over to the US, due to his fragile mental state.
A final decision on Assange’s possible extradition is expected to be made in London’s High Court on February 20 and 21. He faces a total of 18 criminal counts in the United States over his supposed role in leaking classified documents via the WikiLeaks platform, including some that exposed alleged war crimes.
On March 16, 2016 WikiLeaks launched a searchable archive for over 30 thousand emails & email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clintonundefineds private email .
Some say that Assange helped Donald Trump win the election.
Now Assange is being abandoned and could face torture and solitary confinement for his actions.
in a dirty war , it is the journalists that are attacked first. Oppressive laws , keep people from telling stories that expose the tyranny that exists today.
Real journalism is wiped out and replaced with sanitized propaganda.
If Tucker Carlson interviews Putin- what is the threat?
Are the powerful worried that perhaps Putin comes off as a better speaker, or even come off as more coherent than our current leader here in the United States?
It is time to insist that all sides of any story be discussed and that all the facts are established and reported to the public.
Doesnundefinedt the public have a right to know? Well, not if the gatekeepers of the legacy press are in charge.
During a discussion titled ‘Defending Truth,’ The editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal admitted to Davos elites that the legacy media no longer ‘own the facts’ and people are much more likely to question what they report as truth.
Emma Tucker told a crowd at the World Economic Forum, “I think there’s a very specific challenge for the legacy brands, like the New York Times and like the Wall Street Journal.”
She continued, “If you go back really not that long ago, as I say, we owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well.”
“If it said it in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, then that was a fact,” Tucker further stated, adding “Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news and they’re much more questioning about what we’re saying.”
During the same discussion, Věra Jourová, Vice-President of the European Commission, complained about the rise of ‘disinformation’ being a “security threat,” noting “It was part of the Russian military doctrine that they will start information war, and we are in it now.”
The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen addressed elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos Tuesday, calling for overarching globalist control over the flow of all information in the digital age.
“The top concern for the next two years is not conflict or climate, it is disinformation and misinformation,” von der Leyen proclaimed, adding “The boundary between online and offline is getting thinner and thinner, and this is even more important in the era of generative AI.”
Globalists fear that free speech and independent journalism as a threat to their existence.
This fear extends to the entire political West, as the European Union is now threatening to sanction Tucker Carlson for his interview with President Putin.
Of course, he’s completely unmoved by the threats of the anemic EU and its laughable bureaucrats. Why would he be, because he’s being targeted by US intelligence, the same one that essentially destroyed the life of Carlson’s colleague
Julian Assange and tried to do the same to their former employee Edward Snowden, who was saved only thanks to being in Russia.
Now it appears that Carlson is well on his way to being in the midst of a Witch hunt that may put him in the same boat as Assange and Snowden.
Guy Verhofstadt, former Belgian prime minister and current member of the European Parliament wants a travel ban on Carlson, who he also described as “a mouthpiece” of Putin and former US President Donald Trump.
He also accused Carlson of “aiding Putin’s war crimes”. This is precisely why no sane person is interested in the opinions of EU bureaucrats.
They’re simply incapable of using reason, which is what Carlson has been warning about for years, pointing out the importance of dialogue instead of going on mindless rants such as the one Verhofstadt just did. Carlson articulately explained his motivation for interviewing President Putin, making Verhofstadt’s comments all the more ludicrous and, quite frankly, deranged. According to Newsweek, even EU officials are having difficulty finding legal grounds for sanctioning Carlson.
One, who wished to remain anonymous, told Newsweek that any sanctions would require evidence that Carlson is “linked to Moscow’s aggression”, something that “is absent or hard to prove”. What this means is that the sanctions would be illegal.
All sorts of hysterical reactions have arisen among American neoconservatives and liberals. Tucker has been called a “traitor” by several public figures. More than that, in a controversial statement, neoconservative writer Bill Kristol went to the extreme of calling for Tucker’s banishment from American soil, aimed at preventing him from returning to the US from Russia.
Carlson has been notorious for exposing the lies that we have been subjected to, since January 6th, and the continued support for Ukraine and their corrupt oligarchs.
Carlson is currently the most popular American journalist on social media. With more than 11 million followers on his X account and running a show whose audience is continually growing, Carlson represents a “threat” to Western Big Media. For example, Carlson’s recent interview with former American President Donald Trump reached an impressive 267 million views on X alone – having also been broadcast on other digital platforms. Carlson’s popularity is the reason why American elites are so afraid of his interview with Putin.
The trouble is the interview gave us nothing juicy except for a few jabs at the Clinton administration and Biden Administration undefined otherwise it was a history lesson where Carlson had to force his eyes open as it was a sleepy conversation.
Russian media has prevented Western citizens from hearing the Russian side in the ongoing conflict. Putin’s words, when they reach an English-speaking audience, come in a distorted and biased way, with ordinary people in Western countries not having the opportunity to understand Russia’s concerns and reasons.
More than that, Russian denunciations of war crimes, human rights abuses, promotion of neo-Nazism and the production of ethnic biological weapons rarely reach Western public opinion.
But what the interview also does is show that the propaganda about Putin being sickly and weak certainly does not appear in the interview undefined in fact, comments about how sharp Putin is undefined casts a shadow on the competence of our President Joe Biden.
Special Counsel Robert Hur recently released a 388-page report on why he wasn’t pursuing charges against Biden over classified documents found in his Penn Biden Center office and his Wilmington home.
He said Joe Biden didn’t remember what year his beloved son Beau died. He wasn’t sure which years he served as Vice President. He had “limitations in his recall” during interviews with investigators.
Painting him as a feeble old man.
This of course did not sit well with the President.
Again the truth hurts as White House officials immediately thought Hur, crossed a line and implied some of those observations might not be true.
Hours later, Biden himself took things further, holding a rare evening press conference at the White House to furiously dispute Hur’s characterizations of his mental acuity. Biden took particular umbrage with the report’s allegation that he had forgotten when Beau had died. “How in the hell dare he raise that,” Biden said.
“Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, wasn’t any of their damn business,” the President continued, adding that he carries with him every day a rosary that belonged to Beau and his family holds a service for Beau every Memorial Day. “I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away,” Biden said. “For any extraneous commentary, they don’t know what they’re talking about. It has no place in this report.”
Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked Biden to respond to the report’s description of him as “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
“I’m well-meaning and I’m an elderly man and I know what I’m doing. I’ve been President, I put this country back on its feet,” Biden said. He then joked to Doocy: “My memory is so bad, I let you speak.”
“My memory is fine,” Biden went on. “Take a look at what I’ve done since I’ve become President. None of you thought I could pass any of the things I got passed. How’d that happen? I guess I just forgot what was going on.”
But a few minutes later, Biden undercut those assurances. At the same time, he answered a question about a ceasefire in Gaza, saying “Mexico” instead of “Egypt” when talking about Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.
During a speech last Monday Biden said that shortly after he took office, he had a conversation with a French leader. The problem is that the leader died more than two decades ago.
Biden was discussing some overseas leaders’ reaction to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
“Right after I was elected, I went to what they call a G7 meeting, all the NATO leaders,” Biden told the crowd. “I sat down and I said, ‘America’s back!’ And Mitterrand from Germany, I mean, from France, looked at me and said …’ How long you back for?’”
Biden was referring to François Mitterrand, who served as president of France from 1981 to 1995. Yet he died in 1996.
It wasn’t the first time Biden tried to reach out to the dead.
As the Tampa Free Press reported in September 2022, Biden hosted a summit meeting on hunger, and in his opening remarks, he asked, “Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?” about Republican Rep. Jackie Walorski of Indiana, who had been co-chairwoman of the House Hunger Caucus.
Walorski died tragically in a car crash while in her home state more than a month earlier. On Monday, in response to an X post about Biden’s comment by Raheem Kassam of The National Pulse, one X user noted, “There’s copious evidence that, mentally, Biden passed away around 1996 as well. So this fits.”
That may be a joke. But there is growing concern about Biden’s continued mental fitness.
I guess journalists should proceed with caution when they decide to tear down a fallen leader undefined or when they decide to get another side of the story that is not laundered and whitewashed into a homogenized worthless piece of high praise for a leader that had become a liability to this country.
The time for these undefinedget off my lawnundefined political speeches and witch hunts is an embarrassment to this country and its so-called democracy that this administration loves to wheel out when it is convenient.
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SHOW GUEST:
Dr. Michael Rectenwald is the author of twelve books and was a Professor of Liberal Studies and Global Liberal Studies at NYU from 2008 to 2019. Michael’s writing for general audiences has appeared in numerous publications and he’s been a guest on major network political talk shows, syndicated radio shows, and podcasts. Professor Michael Rectenwald has spoken to audiences large and small in many venues.
A former Marxist, Rectenwald is a champion of liberty and opposes all forms of totalitarianism and political authoritarianism, including socialism-communism, “social justice,” fascism, political correctness, and “woke” ideology.
His website is http://www.michaelrectenwald.com/
