“You know, it’s such an awful thing to say. We hesitated to play that, even – it’s very common, you hear it every day. The question is: Why are they saying that? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Tucker Carlson, after playing a news clip of U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell saying he and other Republicans were on Putin’s side
This is a contrast to Carlson’s previous statements about Putin. During his February 22 broadcast, he declared: “The point here is to defend democracy. Not that Ukraine is a democracy. It’s not a democracy. Ukraine’s president has arrested his main political opponent, he has shut down newspapers and television stations that have dared to criticize him. So in American terms, you would call Ukraine a tyranny. But Joe Biden likes Ukraine, so Putin bad, war good.”
Since the onset of the Russia-Ukraine crisis, Russian media outlets have been sharing news clips of conservative American political and media figures speaking positively about Putin.
Chief Writing Wolf 