Tucker Carlson and the U.S. war on China

Why was Tucker Carlson fired from Fox News? Not for any of his known offensives, even though that’s a very long list.

Carlson is the millionaire (net worth $420 million) son of the director of the CIA’s Voice of America and Radio Marti directed at Cuba as well as the U.S. Information Agency, whose racist, misogynist, homophobic, anti-immigrant views take 27,407 words to chronicle on Wikipedia. Obviously not a friend of the working class.

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who started his career as a lawyer for a white supremacist and has been a second banana on Carlson’s Fox News show in recent years, suggests that Carlson was fired because “the removal of Tucker means the elimination of the only real, sustained dissent on U.S. militarism.” Greenwald claims Carlson “opposed the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine.”

If Greenwald was honest, he wouldn’t say that Carlson dissented on U.S. militarism; he dissented only on the U.S. proxy war on Russia.

What Carlson says is: “Russia is not America’s main enemy … Our main enemy is China. The U.S. ought to be in a relationship with Russia, aligned against China”.

In another broadcast, Carlson said: “The biggest threat to this country is not Vladimir Putin; that’s ludicrous. The biggest threat obviously is China.”

When Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old in the Air National Guard’s 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis Airbase, released top-secret Pentagon documents, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene praised him as “white, male, christian, and antiwar … he told the truth about [U.S.] troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more.” 

Really? This guy, who was known for his racist and anti-Semitic postings, was never antiwar, though he may have opposed the U.S. proxy war on Russia. That’s what Tucker Carlson said, that Teixeira’s leaks “prove U.S. troops are fighting in Ukraine.”

Actually, that part is true. The U.S. and NATO started training Ukrainian forces to fight in Donbass in 2015, and while the training is now done in other countries, NATO provides six-month training courses to all of Ukraine’s forces. 

The leaked Pentagon documents revealed that in addition to military trainers and “consultants” in Ukraine, the U.S. has about a hundred special forces personnel operating there, including 14 who are part of a special forces unit made up mostly of “elite” British SAS soldiers.

The leaked Pentagon documents also show a buildup in Pentagon operations targeting China, including assessments that could be used for a U.S. military intervention in Taiwan. 

Divisions in U.S. ruling class

The documents also reveal what the Washington Post calls “the U.S.’s gloominess on the war in Ukraine.” 

“The [Washington Post] admits that Western media audiences have been misled about the course of the war, that essentially what mainstream media has been reporting about Ukraine has been a pack of lies: namely that Ukraine is winning the war and is poised to launch an offensive that will lead to a final victory,” reports Joe Lauria in Consortium News.

“Instead, the second paragraph of the piece makes clear the leaked documents show the long-planned Ukrainian offensive will fail miserably — ‘a marked departure from the Biden administration’s public statements about the vitality of Ukraine’s military,’ Lauria continues.  

“In other words, U.S. officials have been lying about the state of the war to the public and to reporters who have faithfully reported their every word without a hint of skepticism,” he concludes.

The documents show there are sections of the U.S. ruling class who are worried about the disastrous proxy war in Ukraine. The death toll has been rising steadily, and the economic costs of the war are mounting. 

The war is also having a destabilizing effect on the global economy, with the price of oil and gas rising sharply and inflation spiraling in the U.S. and Europe. It could disrupt the U.S. war buildup against China.

That’s the fear being voiced by Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald, Representative Greene, the Pentagon leaker, and their kind.

The U.S. war on China is dominant in Washington now. As Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman noted on April 24: “Visiting Washington last week, it was striking how commonplace talk of war between the U.S. and China has become. That discussion has been fed by loose-lipped statements from American generals musing about potential dates for the opening of hostilities. …

“They are a reflection of the broader discussion on China taking place in Washington — inside and outside government. Many influential people seem to think that a U.S.-China war is not only possible but probable.”