Tucker Carlson has a lot of negative things to say about supporting the Ukrainian war effort.1
Just recently, one of the major news outlets drug a 1960s vintage peacenik out of the closet with an "Ukraine can't win" editorial.
Some oddball Representative from Georgia keeps saying we're giving too much to Ukraine.
Why is this happening?
Lex Anteinternet: Wars and Rumors of War, 2023, Part 2. The Gatherin...:Russo Ukrainian War.
The Institute for the Study of War credits Russia with a real information false flag, in the form of media propoganda designed to suggest back in December that they were ready for peace talks, when they were not. This, the Institute maintains, delayed the supplying of armor to Ukraine.
There's no reason whatsoever to believe at this point that the Russians are aiming for anything else than the complete defeat of Ukraine.
Okay, let's start with this. Americans have a long isolationist streak in which we tend to believe that we can basically close the door on our North American home and remain safe from the world, while it fights out its problems. We've thought this pretty much from day one, even though, at the same time, it's never ever been true and, moreover, we've often messed with other areas of the world. American intervention in far off lands is another topic, which we're not dealing with in this thread, but we will note isolationism, as we've long had an isolationist streak.
Indeed, some of us thought we could avoid World War One even as American commercial ships went down in the cold Atlantic and the servants of the Kaiser, while not plotting how to win the war by sending Lenin to Russia, plotted on ways to get Mexico to attack the US. In the end, we couldn't avoid that one.
And some of us thought we could avoid World War Two until the Japanese decided we would not.
After the Second World War, some of us thought that we could ignore things again until the Soviets exploded an atomic bomb, blockaded Berlin, and invaded North Korea.
It turns out that yelling "say off my lawn" doesn't actually cause people not to stay off your lawn, which doesn't deter people from thinking that it might work this time.
Also, there is a real, and sincere, group of Americans who feel that the war is a tragedy, but it's not our tragedy, and it's too expensive, or perhaps too dangerous, to be involved with in any fashion.
Okay, that's an honest opinion. I don't agree with it, but it's honest.
Added to that, there are those who have looked at the Ukrainian situation and believe it's simply hopeless. To credit them a bit, while I think they're wrong, figuring out a winning strategy for Ukraine is a little difficult, so this line of thought is now without a logical basis. Those folks think investing in a doomed effort is economically risky and merely prolonging a war leading to an ultimate Ukrainian defeat.
There are also some who genuinely admire Putin.
There were Americans who admired Hitler and Mussolini. Truly, there was. They thought, basically, that the world was going down the flusher and fascism offered a strong backed way out of that situation. By the same token, there were plenty on the left who thought Stalin was just nifty for the same reason.
Currently, there are those on the far right, often on the National Conservatism spectrum, who are willing to overlook all his hypocrisy in order to conclude that Putin is an Orthodox Democratic Caudillo whose example is admirable. Sure, his troops rape and murder, but gosh, he stands for . . . well anyway.
Okay, so there's that group.
And then there are those who simply profit off of taking extreme positions. Carlson is almost certainly in that camp. He says something outrageous and people comment on him. Marjorie Taylor Greene's entire fame seems based on this. Greene may believe what she's saying, assuming her stream of thought is pretty shallow, and Tucker may just like the Green and not really even be all that invested in what he's saying, other than being invested in the cash of what he's saying. He has to keep saying stupid crap to draw in an audience that expects it.
And then there's fifth columnist and Russian assets.
It's worth pondering how many op ed voices are people who are in Russia's orbit through pay, or compromise.
I'd wager that some are, and perhaps considerably more than we might suppose.
It's very well established that the Soviet Union maintained an extensive disinformation campaign during its lifespan, and the Russians have kept it up. During the Soviet era, this included employing some journalists. The most effective World War Two era Soviet spy, Richard Sorge, was a German journalist. Whitaker Chambers, the writer, was a Soviet spy until he defected in 1938, prior to his time as a journalist for Time. Journalist I. F. Stone, well known in his time, may have been a Soviet spy. British journalist Cedric Belfrage was a Soviet spy.
And this doesn't touch, of course, other influential people who were Soviet assets. Harry Dexter White, for example, was a very influential figure in the Roosevelt Administration who was also working with the Soviets.
Now, one thing about the Soviet fellow travelers is that most of them, but not all of them, tended to occupy that role due to left wing sympathies. It would, quite frankly, be hard to believe that very many Americans today really have strong Putinist sympathies of that type.
But money is another matter.
And so do long held ties.
We already know from Tucker Carlson's example that figures loudly yapping one thing on television may hold the polar opposite opinion in private. They're willing to say, at least to some extent, what they're saying on TV as it pays.
There's no reason to believe that pay that comes through a Russian contact, as opposed to advertising, isn't as influential to those who might be willing to compromise their beliefs.
And, like prostitution, once a person starts selling their opinion just a little bit, they're pretty much in it no matter what, as they're compromised. A few bucks here to say that Putin isn't such a bad guy a few years ago can easily turn into being compelled to claim that Ukrainians are Nazis now.
Moreover, for old voices, fellow traveler money that was around in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, taints. Nobody wants to be sitting in near genteel retirement in College Town USA to find that they were paid a few rubles in a prior era as they were convenient to that fellow traveler. In that case, writing the Ukrainians Will Lose op ed for the papers, after being suggested that you should, probably can be rationalized to not be all that different from being for radical social justice in the 60 through 80s.
Sound too much like a story line from The Americans? Well, maybe it should.
But some of the media opposition to Ukraine is a little odd. It's worth considering.
Footnotes:
1. No, I am not saying that Carlson is a Russian asset. Why anyone listens to him for any reason whatsoever is another matter.
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