Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson has repeatedly condemned the invasion of Ukraine. In fact, his opposition to the war has been unequivocal.
However, Carlson told his viewers on Monday night, that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is turning his country into an authoritarian state. He also criticised American politicians and the media for lying about what is really happening in Ukraine on Zelensky’s watch.
Here’s some of what Carlson had to say in his opening commentary last night:
“In a democracy, citizens can have any opinion they want to have. They can express any opinion they want in public whenever they care to express it, including through mass media.
If citizens are dissatisfied with their political leadership, they can challenge their leaders for office. Now, all of these things are true in every free country, in any period, always.
These are not just features of democracy. These are prerequisites for democracy. So, with that in mind, you should know about a political party in Ukraine called Opposition Platform for Life.
With 43 seats in parliament, it is the largest opposition party in that country. Over the weekend, the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, banned that party. Opposition Platform for Life is now prohibited from “all activity within Ukraine.”
So, with a single command, Zelenskyy made it impossible for anybody to run against him for president. He did this not just to Opposition Platform for Life, but to ten other political parties that he believed were insufficiently loyal to him.
They’re all illegal now. Obviously, there’s a war underway in Ukraine, and on that basis, Zelenskyy has declared martial law, but we must tell you, there is no evidence that the opposition parties he banned were aiding Russia in its war against Ukraine.
Opposition Platform for Life, for example, denounced the Russian invasion the moment it happened, just like everybody else. But Zelenskyy took the opportunity to turn Ukraine into effectively a one-party state, which it now is.
So having banned all opposition, he then seized control of the country’s media outlets. Zelenskyy signed a decree that combines all national television channels into a single platform that he controls.
He described this as a “unified information policy,” and it certainly is unified.
So, if all of these details seem shocking to you, if this is not the Zelenskyy you’ve heard about on the Today Show, then you may not have been paying attention to Ukraine.
Zelenskyy has been solidifying complete control over Ukraine for a long time, since long before the Russian invasion and the war. Last year, he had his main political opponent arrested and his assets seized by the state.
At the same time, Zelenskyy shut down three of Ukraine’s most popular television networks—channels that, not coincidentally, had criticized him. So, how should we as Americans assess this?
Well, first and most obviously, by admitting this is authoritarianism, it’s not democracy.
So, it’s entirely natural to root for the Ukrainians to expel the invaders, and obviously we are rooting for them to expel the invaders, Russia.
But just because what Russia has done in Ukraine was wrong doesn’t mean you have to lie about the Ukrainian government.
In fact, if you really cared about the Ukrainian people and all the people you saw on TV,—”we care so much”—you wouldn’t want them to live under a dictator, so you’d be highly upset about what Zelenskyy just did, but our leaders are not upset in the slightest.
They’re cheering it on even when they know better. So, some of it is (they’re) too dumb to know, but some of them do know.”
