Before he was abruptly fired from Fox News TV by Rupert Murdoch in April, the network’s former star commentator Tucker Carlson had completed an alleged documentary in which he called for a military invasion of Canada to “liberate” the neighboring country of the “totalitarian” regime of liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. His sin? Having imposed severe restrictions due to the covid pandemic. The documentary – on the cover, with Soviet airs, in which Trudeau appeared with a vaguely Hitlerian mustache – never saw the light of day, its broadcast was suspended following the dismissal of its sulphurous author. But surely the idea pleased his admirer Donald Trump, who while occupying the White House maintained execrable relations with the Canadian president.
Anti-vaccine subscriber to all conspiracy theories, known for his far-right ideology, racist comments and violent harangues, fervent Trumpist and venomous advocate that the 2020 election was a fraud, the controversial host never cared about the truth a radish Nor on Fox News TV, on the other hand. Nor to his followers. Three years ago, a federal judge – Mary Kay Vyskocil, appointed precisely by Trump – acquitted Carlson and the network in a defamation suit, upholding the defense’s thesis that the general tenor of the show made it clear to any informed television viewer that his comments were “exaggerations” that were not necessarily based on “real facts”.
The extreme political polarization in the United States owes a lot to Fox News TV and other similar media in the Republican orbit – amplified by social networks – in which falsifications and blatant lies are common currency. The writer Honoré de Balzac, who critically judged the sectarian drift of the French press in the 19th century, anticipated this scenario in his novel Illusions perdues (lost illusions) from 1837: “A newspaper is a shop where they sell the public words of the color it wants. If there was a diary of hunchbacks, it would demonstrate night and day the goodness, the need of hunchbacks. A newspaper is no longer made to enlighten, but to flatter opinions”.
If these means succeed, it is due to the indifference of a large part of public opinion, for whom the truth has ceased to be a value and the facts have lost their incontrovertible character. Closed in social bubbles immune to all outside influence, used to reading and listening only to what confirms our opinions and prejudices, the veracity of information has ceased to matter. The most blatant lies are believed with blind eyes by a previously surrendered citizenry. Tell me you love me even if it’s a lie, as Johnny Guitar would say…
That is why Donald Trump, who has already been prosecuted on four occasions, accused of crimes as serious as the attempt to fraudulently reverse the results of the ballot boxes in the 2020 presidential elections, maintains an unshakable popularity in the Republican camp. What’s more, his support grows with each impeachment: 63% of Republican voters today want Trump to run again in 2024, according to an Associated Press-NORC poll this week, up from a 55% The fact that, meanwhile, the former president – ??who insists on his lies and insults judges and prosecutors – could be tried and sentenced to prison does not seem to disturb them. And even less leads them to ask themselves questions.
His admired Vladimir Putin has it much easier still. The Russian president does not have to deal with justice – which he controls – or opposition parties or independent media, persecuted and appeased as in the good old days of the USSR. The official media hammers the public with nationalist and bellicose proclamations, in which the West is presented as the great evil, and the aggression against the neighboring Ukraine, as a special operation of legitimate defense.
Behind the official propaganda, the consequences of the war are beginning to become apparent to the Russians as well. Its soldiers are dying by the thousands (an independent investigation by the media Meduza and Mediazona puts the number of Russians dead between the start of the war and May at 47,000, three times more than the ten years of the 1979 war in Afghanistan -1989) while the economy degrades due to international sanctions and the war effort: defense spending already takes up more than a third of the budget (5.59 billion rubles in the first half of this year, 37.3% of spending, according to an official document obtained by Reuters), which has forced the Government to make cuts in education and health. But none of this seems to have any effect on Putin’s popularity. The latest survey by the Levada Center, from July, places public support for the Russian president at a resounding 82%.
In 2024 the two men, one in the Kremlin, and the other, in the White House again, could meet again and revive the complicity of old times. This would force the cards of the Ukrainian war to be reshuffled. And to face, perhaps, other conflict fronts. Because the invasion of Canada was Tucker Carlson’s nonsense, but there are more and more voices in the Republican Party who, to combat the trafficking of fentanyl to the United States – where it causes 100,000 deaths a year -, propose nothing more and nothing less than to intervene militarily in Mexico… Surely American public opinion buys it.
