Last week, I started writing an article about Tucker Carlson’s interview with Viktor Bout, a name you may recognize if you’re a general in an African tribal war or the procurement specialist for a drug cartel. Bout was the convicted arms trafficker freed by President Biden in exchange for Brittney Griner, the women’s basketball star arrested in Russia for bringing weed into the country back in 2022.
Back then, Tucker didn’t mince words about the “Merchant of Death.” Speaking on Fox News in 2022, Tucker said:
In exchange for [Brittney] Griner, the administration handed over an arms dealer called Viktor Bout. Now Bout is an indisputably serious criminal. He sold weapons to terror groups that killed Americans. We’re not overstating that, here’s a summary.
Carlson then played an interview with the former chief of operations for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Mike Braun.
Braun: Viktor Bout, in my eyes, is one of the most dangerous men on the face of the Earth.
Interviewer: On the face of the Earth?
Braun: Without a doubt.
Braun goes on to describe how Bout elevated African conflicts from machetes and hunting rifles to AK-47s: “He transformed these young adolescent warriors into insidious, mindless, maniacally driven killing machines that operated with assembly line efficiencies.”
Interviewer: What makes him a threat to the United States?
Braun: He’s a shadow facilitator. He’s arming not only designated terrorist groups, insurgent groups, but he’s also arming very powerful drug trafficking cartels.
The screen flashes back to Tucker, who concludes: “So that’s the guy that Joe Biden just sprung from prison – the international arms dealer who’s arming terror groups and drug cartels.”
Well, now he’s a guest on Tucker’s show.
For an hour, Tucker let Bout paint his portrait of what’s happening in Ukraine. To Bout, of course, this is a war of “liberation,” where Russian troops are liberating more people each day. Despite substantial evidence suggesting mounting discontent within Russia and that Russia’s offensive has stalled, Bout insists that Ukraine is “losing ground,” with “several villages, small towns being liberated by the Russian army” each week.
Not content to just amplify this narrative, Tucker asks Bout to name the “European countries manufacturing these drones, these armaments being used against civilians in Russia.” He sits passively while Bout claims that Russia is the world’s only country that follows the laws of war.
And Tucker doesn’t just let Bout talk – he endorses him: At 15:38, Tucker states, “I think everything you’re saying is real.”
When I first started writing this, I ended the article there, with a simple question to Tucker fans: Why do you trust Tucker and Bout?
But then, I found out the answer.
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Very interesting. To me I wonder if people disregard the evidence against people because there is some doubt that the counts against them are factual. It’s so hard to discern truth when it’s one person’s word against another.
Yesterday I read about a boy who was accused of something that he did not do and was ostracized at school because of it, but it took years for the school to acknowledge that he didn’t do it and by then the damage was done.
We have all become skeptics, unfortunately, of new information that goes against what we believe to be true.
Great piece