Tucker Spreading Fake Doctored Russian Propaganda About Ukraine Losing? Would Fox News Even ALLOW That?
Man, his journalistic integrity is gonna take a hit now!
Yes, we know, Tucker Carlson has been playing his interview with Elon Musk the past two nights, and it has been overstuffed with loser divorced dad incel moments to make fun of, like when Elon got that look on his face that says "Is my hand in my pants right now?" while he talked about how abortion and birth control interfere with his weird breeding desires. Or when Elon said , "I'm very familiar with space and stuff." We will make fun of those things very soon.
First we want to talk about another story related to Tucker and the Discord leaker and Russia's war in Ukraine, where Tucker openly takes the side of the vile, genocidal, amoral aggressors. (Russia.)
Tucker has been lying and misleading his viewers about the latest accused leaker of classified information pretty much since the get-go, trying to turn the loser into some hero for the (Russian) cause of revealing the TRUTH about what's going on in in Ukraine. (Not the truth.) He's also been using facts and figures from the documents to convince his very idiot viewers that the presence of 14 US special forces attached to the embassy in Kyiv means Joe Biden has been lying and America is in a HOT WAR with Ukraine.
Tucker So Mad Nobody Talking About How Leaker Exposed Secret HOT WAR Between Russia And 14 US Troops
But, you see, certain things in those documents had themselves been altered while they were making the rounds on the dork nerd Discord/4Chan/Reddit internet. Certain things had been altered in a specifically Russian propaganda direction, to make it look like, for example, seven Ukrainians were dying for every Russian killed.
The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend on an American spreader of Russian propaganda named Sarah Bils, who ran and/or participated in a network of spreaders of Russian propaganda who posed as a Russian blogger named "Donbass Devushka." (Translation: "Donbas Girl." You'll note that "Donbas" is the name of one of the regions in eastern Ukraine the Russians want to claim as their own and where at the beginning of the war they wanted the world to believe the people would greet them with flowers and blowjobs. It's where Putin declared "independence" for the two republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, so that he might liberate them from their Ukrainian Nazi occupiers. "Donbass" is the Russian spelling.)
Bils is a former NCO from the US Navy, and the WSJ reports she was stationed at Whidbey Island in Washington state up until last year. Meanwhile, she's doing this pro-Russian shit online. She says 15 people people all over the world control the "Donbass Devushka" account.
Indeed, it sounds like this account's dissemination of some of the materials allegedly leaked by Jack Teixeira — shit that had been on the nerd internet for a while and hardly noticed — was what got the attention of Russian social media, which in turn got the attention of the Defense Department. Nobody cared about these documents until April 5, when this network of Russian propagandists that was actively supporting "our men on the front" — Russians — started putting them up on Telegram. Bils says she was not the member who posted this stuff, but rather that she took it down some days later.
But somewhere between Teixeira trying to impress his nerd friends on Discord by posting these documents and these Kremlin mouthpieces posting them on Telegram, some of the information on the documents got tweaked:
Some of the slides reposted on the Telegram account overseen by Ms. Bils had been altered from the otherwise identical photographs allegedly posted by Airman Teixeira on Discord—changed to inflate Ukrainian losses and play down Russian casualties. A subsequent post on the Donbass Devushka Telegram channel, on April 12, denied that the image had been doctored by the administrators.
“We would never edit content for our viewers,” the post said.
Take that as you will.
So that's where the claim came from that SEVEN UKRAINIANS were dying for every Russian casualty. Have a heart, people! How could you want the Ukrainians to keep fighting if Russia is just massacring them? It's not a fair fight! We should probably all get behind some kind of "peace plan" for Ukraine that involves giving Vladimir Putin as much of sovereign Ukraine as he wants while we all tongue all over Putin's taint.
It's the only humane solution, right?
Tucker Carlson sure thought so, when he started spreading the doctored Russian propaganda on Thursday night. Mediaite summarizes:
Malcontent News first reported on Sunday that Tucker Carlson used the “edited version” of the documents posted by Donbass Devushka’s Telegram channel to “claim Ukraine was suffering a 7-1 troop loss ratio and was ‘losing the war.'”
Indeed, last Thursday in an angry rant in which Carlson accused both PresidentJoe Bidenand Defense SecretaryLloyd Austinof committing “crimes” related to supporting Ukraine fend off the Russian invasion, Carlson cited that statistic.
“The second thing we learned from these slides is that despite direct U.S. involvement, Ukraine is in fact losing the war. Seven Ukrainians are being killed for every Russian. Ukrainian air defenses have been utterly degraded. Ukraine is losing. The Biden administration is perfectly aware of this,” Carlson declared. Carlson has long claimed Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine is going far better than the media has reported, all while remaining a fierce critic of Ukraine’s leadership.
Here is a tweet from an investigative journo about it:
“Tucker Carlson pushed a fake version of a U.S. intelligence document about Ukrainian war casualties. It was doctored by a fraud podcaster who claimed to be a Russian woman from Luhansk. In reality, Sarah Bils is a former U.S. Navy clerk from New Jersey—and she pocketed all the…”
— Michael Weiss (@Michael Weiss) 1681692290
And here is Rachel Maddow talking about Tucker:
“Maddow: In order to get that, you can only learn that from the slides that were crudely doctored by the pro-russia pro-putin social media network..”
— Acyn (@Acyn) 1681782538
Oh yes, weep for the poor Ukrainians, who are totally losing the war, for whom all hope is lost! Why would you force them to keep fighting like this if seven of them are dying for every Russian? Are you some kind of MONSTER?
Only Tucker Carlson and his ideological pals truly care about the plight of the desperate Ukrainians. And he read some stuff a fake Russian propaganda blogger posted that's just really concerning him right now .
As far as what's really going on in Ukraine, Cathy Young writes at The Bulwark that most of the people pushing the narrative that we really should be reeling over the information in these leaks are indeed propagandists for Russia, the Putin apologists who have a fundamental and sick need to believe Ukraine is losing.
But Young says even some more mainstream media is taking the bait, and should cut that shit out. She argues that from the perspectives of the Ukrainians and their supporters, the leaks "[contain] essentially nothing new, at least as far as the war in Ukraine is concerned." She goes through all the things that are supposed to be sorts of shattering revelations and shows the receipts on how people have been talking about them for months.
And, she notes, the leaks contain a hell of a lot that's embarrassing for Russia, stuff that's clearly driving some of their propaganda-spreaders quite batshit. (She's got the receipts on that too.)
So, you know, chill the fuck out.
Read the whole thing, as they say in internet circles.
And don't listen to Tucker Carlson.
Y'all hear his employer is paying out $787.5 million to a voting machine company as a penalty for brazenly and knowing lying to its gullible idiot viewers about that company after the 2020 election? And that a lot of those lies came from his show?
And here we all thought they were so credible and above reproach.
[ Mediaite ]
Follow Evan Hurst on Twitter right here
And once that doesn't exist, I'm also giving things a go at the Mastodon (@evanhurst@newsie.social) and at Post!
Have you heard that Wonkette DOES NOT EXIST without your donations? Please hear it now, and if you have ever enjoyed a Wonkette article, throw us some bucks, or better yet, SUBSCRIBE!
Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons .
Until they find out that takes a whole lot of hard work (and luck). Then a majority of them slide into mediocracy.
Germany JUST delivered another system yesterday. CNN reported that the US is speeding up the delivery of yet another system.