Free Republic

Over the past few months, a Russian political scientist named Valery Solovei has stoked a global frenzy with a sensational claim: that Vladmir Putin died last year and today is represented in public by a body double. The Kremlin’s elite, Solovei tells his half-million online followers, controls the double and has stuffed Putin’s body in a freezer. Then on Thursday, journalist Tucker Carlson aired a two-hour interview with Putin. Solovei shrugged it off as a sham. Carlson, he said, interviewed Putin’s doppelgänger, who will now be passed off as real to millions of viewers in the West. “Putin is dead,...

Vladimir Putin joked about Tucker Carlson being rejected by the CIA after he finished college during his interview with the conservative polemist—his first with a western journalist since ordering the full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The interview was released on Carlson's website and X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday and covered Russian history, the war in Ukraine, NATO, imprisoned American journalist Evan Gershkovich and his relationships with Joe Biden and Donald Trump. During the conversation Putin discussed the 2014 Ukrainian Maidan revolution, which led to the ousting of then pro-Moscow Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, which he claimed took place...

Tucker Carlson has announced he'll be interviewing Vladimir Putin soon in a video designed to garner attention for the effort. But like a lot of things Carlson says these days, some of it is pure and obvious bunk. Take for instance his claim about being the first western journalist to bother interviewing Putin.Speaking of western countries take on the war in Ukraine Carlson said, "Their media outlets are corrupt. They lie to their readers and viewers and they do that mostly by omission." (snip) Having established that it's bad for media outlets to lie to their viewers by omission and...