Israel, Iran, and Tucker Carlson's plans for domestic regime change
And how the USSR was propping up the USA in ways that Americans don't understand. (WYSK. 6/19/25)
Was watching the Tucker-Ted interview everyone is raving about, and there was one bit that stood out to me. It didn’t have to do with Iran or Israel directly — but really was about Tucker’s bigger politics.
Tucker posed a question that we here on NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS have discussed multiple times: Why was it that America — which emerged victorious from the Cold War — did not see an explosion of domestic flourishing in the decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union, but instead went the opposite direction: collapse in standards of living, suicide rates going up, homelessness skyrocketing, drug addiction, life expectancy going down…
Tucker asked Ted this question — and Ted had a ready answer. It’s the fault of the Democratic Party. Specifically, it was because Clinton and Obama moved the country to the left. What’s needed to reverse this trend is more free enterprise, more lower taxes, more focus on family values…in other words, the usual stock Republican and neoliberal talking points. Tucker, who was very aggressive with Ted for a big chunk of the interview, agreed with him wholeheartedly. The leftists are to blame!
The question was the right one. But Tucker’s entire frame for understanding recent American history is totally flipped on its head. To call Bill Clinton a left-winger is to live in an alternative reality divorced from basic verifiable facts. Like him or hate him, Bill is the poster child of the neoliberal turn. He gutted welfare, deregulated Wall Street, helped ship out American manufacturing overseas even more, and destroyed labor. Bill’s neolib policies were so extreme that some of them got opposition from the business populist right like Ross Perot. Not sure what’s left about Clinton, maybe other than his Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell gays in the military policy — which, you know, is pretty conservative. BE GAY. JUST DON’T TELL US! OR YOU ARE FIRED!
Tucker recently went to Russia but he fails to realize how closely America’s internal degradation is bound up with the fate of that place
See my theory is that the unraveling of the American domestic front after the Cold War had a lot to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Americans think they won the Cold War and that they defeated communism. That’s true. But Americans have come out as on top of that conflict as they were led to believe. See, the truth is that the USA and the USSR were connected — and the USSR and its people propped up America in ways that Americans did not understand. Now that the USSR has been replaced by a Russian society with a pre-revolutionary ideology, both the former USSR and the USA have gone through similar reversions to the 19th century. Their internal politics are now linked, mutually reinforcing. In fighting the USSR, regular Americans were told they were going up against their mortal enemy. But turned out they were warring against the only thing that was keeping their modern quasi-socialist state afloat.
In the 1990s, the neoliberal wing took power in Russia and went on a shock therapy capitalist transformation of their own society — fully backed and propped up by the Clinton Administration. What Americans didn’t understand that was that the very policies that their government was supporting in Russia were about to come home and were going to be applied to the United States itself. The USSR collapsed and the Cold War front came home…