Tucker Carlson is back on the air—and he’s not changing much about his approach.
About a month after announcing that he would launch a show on Twitter in the wake of his firing from Fox News, Carlson on Tuesday posted the first episode of Tucker on Twitter—a roughly 10-minute rant in which he claimed that Ukraine “probably” destroyed a dam within its borders and an adjoining power plant, which currently divides Ukrainian and Russian troops.
Both Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of being responsible for the attack on the Russian-occupied Kakhovka dam, which has caused widespread flooding in the area.
The White House says it is still collecting information about the incident before declaring who is behind the devastating attack.
“We’ve seen the reports that Russia was responsible for the explosion at the dam,” White House National Security Council Coordinator John Kirby said Tuesday. “We’re doing the best we can to assess those reports, and we are working with the Ukrainians to gather more information, but we cannot say conclusively what happened.”
Carlson, who used his perch at Fox News to criticize the United States’ funding of the war, often ignored his own network’s fact-checking and even at one point compared Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky to a “strip club” manager.
So, it wasn’t necessarily a surprise Tuesday when he went ahead and put the blame on Ukraine for the dam explosion.
“Blowing up the dam may be bad for Ukraine, but it hurts Russia more, and for precisely that reason the Ukrainian government has considered destroying it,” Carlson said.
“In December, The Washington Post quoted a Ukrainian general saying his men had fired American made rockets at the dam’s floodgate as a test strike. So really once the facts start coming in, it becomes much less of a mystery what might have happened to the dam,” Carlson continued. “Any fair person would conclude that the Ukrainians probably blew it up, just as you would assume they blew up Nord Stream, the Russian natural gas pipeline, last fall.”
The Washington Post also reported Tuesday that the CIA was aware last June of a Ukrainian special operations forces plan to attack the pipeline, which was later largely disabled by a bombing.
Carlson went on to criticize Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and presidential candidate Nikki Haley for publicly supporting the Ukrainian war effort.
“Shut up and support Ukraine, or else you’re in trouble,” he mocked.
Towards the end of the video, captioned “Ep. 1,” Carlson said of his migration to Twitter that he hopes the platform “will be the shortwave radio under the blankets.”
“We’re told there are no gatekeepers here,” he said. “If that turns out to be false, we’ll leave. But in the meantime, we are grateful to be here. We will be back with much more very soon.”
