Here's the truth about Tucker's visit to Russia

My video analysis on his trip

By now most of you have probably read about Tucker Carlson’s trip to Russia. Though he was officially there to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin, it was Tucker’s videos about the Moscow subways and Russian grocery stores that arguably caused the most controversy. Tucker used both of these things to depict life in Russia under Western sanctions. He also used them to compare life in Russia with life in the United States.

I decided to do a short reaction video to Tucker’s visit. Knowing Tucker and his team as I do, I figured I could share some insight. That video is below, along with a rough transcript (which, FYI, doesn’t read as smoothly as written text—so watch the video).

Creating videos like these is something I hope to do more of going forward. Let me know what you think in the comments. And give a like and subscribe both here, and on my YouTube page, if you can.

Rough Transcript

So Tucker Carlson was in Russia. He was there to interview Vladimir Putin.

If you listen to Tucker, or if you follow him, you'll know that this is an interview he's been trying to do for a number of years. I know this myself because I worked for Tucker and his show Tucker Carlson Tonight for about three years and and this was something that was in the works for a long time. In fact, it was about two years ago that he initially began planning this interview with Vladimir Putin.

At the time, the NSA released Tucker's text messages to the media when he was planning this interview. He believed, and I think rightfully so, that that was an attempt to tank the interview before it happened.

TUCKER CLIP: Yesterday we heard from a whistleblower within the US government who reached out to warn us that the NSA, the National Security Agency, is monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take the show off the air.

And of course just a few months later, just a few months after those texts were released, war broke out in Ukraine. So the reaction in this country has been particularly interesting. I mean you have the usual people on the left attacking Tucker, but what was interesting too were the attacks from the right. You heard people saying Tucker's a traitor. He's shilling for Vladimir Putin. He's carrying water for the Kremlin, and spreading propaganda on behalf of I guess what is the most evil country in the world. That's what they sort of want us to believe now right?

The thing is many of Tucker's critics, particularly those on the right, the Cato libertarian free market types, the neocons, they missed the point of his visit entirely. So they fell for, or maybe they even agree with, the mainstream media's narrative about Tucker's uh propaganda visit to Russia. They agree with that. But if you don't, and if you're watching what Tucker did over there and you're trying to make sense of it all—maybe there are people on the right who you listen to and who you follow who you saw criticize Tucker and you may be asking yourself the same sort of questions. Why was Tucker over there? What was the point of his interview with Vladimir Putin? What was the takeaway of his visit to Moscow? Well, I'll tell you what it is. I know because I briefly spoke with Tucker while he was abroad. I know the team he took with him. I used to work with them, and I know the way that they think.

What Tucker’s team was trying to convey is something that the media and political elite, not just in this country but in the entire Western world, is working very hard to suppress. It's something they don't want you to know about Russia. It's the things that they don't want you to know about their lifestyle and their way of life, and I think that was the point of Tucker's video.

If you listen to the mainstream media, Russia's a terrible place. It's depressing to live there. The people are poor. It's a gas station with nukes. They always like to say that.

In some sense, those characterizations are half true. They come from some sort of truth. They're not controversial opinion, but in other ways those statements are completely wrong. At best, they’re an oversimplification of a complex country and culture. I know because I've been to Russia. I went there nearly six years ago in 2018, and many of the things Tucker showed in his visit while he was there I've also seen firsthand.

After interviewing Vladimir Putin, Tucker released a series of videos that gave Americans some insight as to what Russia is really like. In fact, Tucker told me the most shocking thing about the entire trip wasn't anything about what Vladimir Putin said, or any revelation from the interview itself, but in fact it was about how amazing Moscow was. I think that's something he tried to share with his audience. By now you've probably seen some of the videos on X, but one of the ways he tried to do that was by depicting Russia's famous ornate and luxurious subway stations.

TUCKER CLIP: We're standing in front of the Kiyevskaya Metro station and what we found shocked us. Now that's not an endorsement of Stalin, who was bad obviously. Nor is it an endorsement of the current President, Vladimir Putin. You may not like him either, but it doesn't change the reality of what we saw or more precisely didn't see. There's no graffiti. There's no filth. There are no foul smells. There are no bums or drug addicts or rapists or people waiting to push you onto the train tracks and kill you. No. It's perfectly clean and orderly.

So the immediate reaction to that video was not to say, ‘hey maybe Tucker's got a point. Our subways actually are getting a little more unsafe. We actually have seen a lot of people thrown onto the tracks in the last few years. You actually do have a high chance of getting raped. I mean our our subways are pretty nasty here. They're collapsing. They're dirty…’ That wasn't the reaction at all. And in a way that's sort of a tell, right? It's because our political elite in DC and New York don't use public transit. So what would they know and what would they care?

The response that we did see was predictably stupid. You had people on X unironically claiming that none of this matters—safety in public transit, getting on the subway—none of that stuff matters because Russia jails its political opponents. And because Russia doesn't have free speech. Then you had the usual crowd of people citing things like the GDP, and median income in Russia. ‘You know, who cares that the subway is really nice? Their people are more poor than ours.’ I guess their argument is well, ‘yes the New York City subway system is filthy and unsafe, and sure, you do have a chance a pretty high chance of getting pushed onto the tracks, but at least the people here in the United States, at least the people riding the New York City subway have more disposable income and purchasing power and a higher per capita GDP, right?’

I mean that's sort of the argument that they're making.

The next thing Tucker did was take his audience inside a Russian grocery store. This was particularly interesting to me because I had the exact same experience and reaction when I was in Russia six years ago. We were in a city called Yekaterinburg. It's probably a city you've never heard of before. It's very very far east, practically in Siberia. It's Russia's fourth-largest city, and it's probably best known for being the site where the Romanovs, the Czars—the last Czar—was exiled with his family and where they were later murdered.

The city isn't exactly an aesthetically pleasing place. It’s pretty rundown. The buildings look like they're crippling, but it is an economic hub for Russia. To a visitor from the West, it looks like a place that's untouched from the Cold War. Yekaterinburg looks like it's lost in time.

Despite all of that, the city had one of the nicest grocery stores I'd ever been to. I can't explain why. I don't know what the reason is, but it was a huge store. It was a luxury grocery store filled with all of products. Meats—anything you can think of. And honestly, even coming from the United States, they had varieties of any type of product, from things that were prepackaged, to produce, to fresh food that I even hadn't seen to that level in the United States. Look, I'm not saying that those stores don't exist here. It's not to say that that we don't have similar stores with similar luxury goods. But the point is, the store was nicer than your average Publix, let's say.

Tucker seemed to have have a similar experience himself. Here's part of the video that he released.

TUCKER CLIP: It's pretty non-sanctioned to me but what do I know? I went from amused to legitimately angry. So we were guessing what this would cost. Everybody here’s from the United States. We didn't pay any attention to cost, as we were just putting in the cart what we would actually eat over a week and we all came in around 400 bucks, about 400 bucks. It was $104 U.S. here. And that's when you start to realize that ideology maybe doesn't matter as much as you thought. Corruption, if you take people's standard of living and you tank it through filth and crime and inflation, and they literally can't buy the groceries they want…at that point maybe it matters less what you say or whether you're a good person or a bad person. You're wrecking people's lives in their country.

Now, Tucker's pretty clear he's not endorsing Putin or Russia's government. I don't know how you look at someone and say ‘hey, they have a really nice grocery store here’ and think that's an endorsement of the government. He's simply saying, ‘hey, this is a country under economic sanction and yet their grocery stores are full. The prices are cheaper than what we pay.’

Again, it's weird. Russia's in the middle of the of a war. They've been frozen, no thanks to us, out of the international economic system. And it hasn't seemed to hurt them. So if it hasn't hurt them, and they seem to be doing fine, what's the point of it all? Who's really been exposed by all of this? And I think when you look at Tucker's material, that's part of why you had such a visceral hateful reaction to it all.

Is it Russia that's been exposed by Tucker's trip there? Is anyone watching Tucker's videos more or less convinced about what our media have been telling us about Russia since the Ukraine war? On the other hand, is the United States more exposed? Is Joe Biden and his Secretary of State Tony Blinken, are they now more exposed by this type of material?

I mean, again, these are the same people who told us that this war was going to be over by now. These are the same people who've told us that sanctions were going to work, that freezing Russia out was going to work. ‘Russia's going to lose this war, Ukraine's going to beat them.’

So when you look at Tucker's video, when you look at what life is like there, who’s narrative is more hurt by it? Is it Russia's narrative? Or is it the United States’s?

And so the reaction shows that Tucker, and by extension the rest of us, are not allowed to notice these things. You can't say Moscow has a clean and nice subway. Instead we have to believe that the New York City subway is cleaner, and it's safer, and it's better than any other subway system in the world! Stop complaining. Forget all the videos you've seen of people smoking weed or having sex on the subway cars. Or all the videos of the mentally ill the homeless, you know disturbing other passengers. You're not allowed to notice that, and you're especially not allowed to complain about it.

In fact, just a few days ago there was an article about how despite all the sanctions the Kremlin has never been richer. They're selling plenty of oil. Their grocery stores, as you saw in Tucker’s video, are full.

So I guess for the crime of noticing, people attacked Tucker as a traitor. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina called him a useful idiot. The women of The View, if you can even call them that, called him a Kremlin puppet. So original, so unique. You've never heard that before. Then of course, you had people pointing out that in Russia people make less than they do in the United States. ‘They have a lower median income, the lower per capita GDP. That's why the prices are cheaper,’ that's what these people are arguing.

If technically true, that sort of misses the point because again, the real point is: yes, Russia is a poor country. Yes their GDP and their per capita median income might be lower than ours. Yet they still manage to have clean safe streets. Their public transit works, and you can use it without being afraid that you're going to get stabbed or killed or raped or pushed onto the tracks. And so if a poor country can do that, what's our excuse?

If you're actually attacking someone for pointing all this out, for questioning why we can't have clean and safe subways—I mean the bar has really become that low in the United States—then what you're really arguing is that America is just an economic zone. You can't want a better country or a better system. It's nothing more than per capita media income, and American citizens are nothing more than economic tools who have to go to work every day. And as long as they increase GDP, who cares what they pay for gas? Who cares what they pay for groceries? Our GDP is higher than theirs, so stop complaining. I mean that's that's essentially what these people are arguing.

You can learn a lot about the way people react to things, and that's why so many in our political and media elite in Washington and New York were so upset by Tucker's reporting. If you think we should have clean and safe subways like the ones we saw in Moscow, that, to these people, is by definition an attack on the status quo in our country. Because to agree with what Tucker showed, or to agree even with part of what you saw, is an indictment of our country. It's an indictment of the leaders who run our country. And as petty as that personal as that sounds, there's nothing they hate more than being exposed for their own mediocrity and their own lies.