Before being abruptly fired from Fox News TV by Rupert Murdoch last April, the former commentator Tucker Carlson had completed an alleged documentary where he called for a military invasion of Canada to "liberate" the neighboring country from the "totalitarian" regime. Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. His sin of him? Having imposed severe restrictions due to the covid pandemic. The documentary – on whose cover, with Soviet airs, Trudeau appeared with a vaguely Hitlerian mustache – never saw the light of day, its broadcast was suspended following the dismissal of its sulfurous author. But surely the idea delighted his admired Donald Trump, who while in the White House maintained execrable relations with the Canadian president.
Anti-vaccine subscriber to all conspiracy theories, known for his far-right ideology, his racist comments and violent harangues, a fervent Trumpist and a staunch defender that the 2020 elections were a fraud, the controversial presenter never gave a damn about the truth. Neither did Fox News TV, for that matter. Not even his followers. Three years ago, a federal judge – Mary Kay Vyskocil, named precisely by Trump – acquitted Carlson and the network in a defamation lawsuit, endorsing the defense's thesis that the general tenor of the program made it clear to any informed 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 from the Republican orbit – amplified by social networks – where falsifications and outright lies are commonplace. The writer Honnoré 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) of 1837: “A newspaper is a shop where words of color are sold to the public. what he wants If there were a newspaper for the hunchbacks, it would demonstrate night and day the goodness, the need of the hunchbacks. A newspaper is no longer made to illuminate, 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. Locked in social bubbles immune to all outside influence, accustomed to reading and listening only to what confirms our opinions and prejudices, the veracity of the information has ceased to matter. The most coarse lies are believed at face value 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, already prosecuted four times, accused of crimes as serious as the attempt to fraudulently reverse the result of the polls in the 2020 presidential elections, maintains unabated popularity in the Republican field. Furthermore, with each accusation their support grows: 63% of Republican voters today want Trump to run again in 2024, according to an Associated Press-NORC poll this week, when last April they were 55%. . That, meanwhile, the former president – who insists on his lies and insults judges and prosecutors – can be tried and sentenced to prison does not seem to take away their sleep. And even less does it lead them to ask questions.
His admired Vladimir Putin has it much easier still. The Russian president does not have to deal with justice – which he controls – nor with opposition parties or independent media, persecuted and silenced as in the good old days of the USSR. The official media hammer the public with nationalist and warmongering proclamations, in which the West is presented as the great villain and the aggression against neighboring Ukraine as a special legitimate defense operation.
Behind the official propaganda, the consequences of the war are beginning to become evident to the Russians as well. Its soldiers die by the thousands (an independent investigation by the Meduza and Mediazona media estimates the number of Russians killed between the start of the war and last May at 47,000, three times more than in the ten years of the 1979-1989 Afghan war ) while the economy is deteriorating 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 the spending, according to an official document obtained by Reuters), which has forced the government to make cuts in education and healthcare. But nothing seems to dent Putin's popularity. The latest poll by the Levada Center, from last July, places citizen support for the Russian president at a resounding 82%.
In 2024 both men, one in the Kremlin and the other back in the White House, could meet again and revive the complicity of yesteryear. Which would force the cards of the war in Ukraine to be reshuffled. And to face, perhaps, other fronts of conflict. Because the invasion of Canada was Tucker Carlson's madness, but there are more and more voices in the Republican Party that, to combat the trafficking of fentanyl to the United States –where it causes 100,000 deaths a year–, propose nothing less than to intervene militarily in Mexico ... Surely the American public opinion buys it.
