DW. Phillips

“Lights, Cameras, Freedom”

With camera in hand, DW shares frontline stories of perseverance and humanity in the great battles of the 21st Century. He brings the perspective of a filmmaker, journalist and constitutional attorney to his commentaries

April 18, 2025

Is Tucker Carlson the Most Significant Enabler of Russian Warcrimes in the World?

With a collective audience over the last three years in the billions, no individual media broadcaster has focused more specific attention on the war in Ukraine, nor played a more significant roles influencing public opinion about Russia and Ukraine than Tucker Carlson. 

For three years my organization Ukraine Story has been tracking Tucker Carlson’s efforts to advocate for Russian narratives, cover for Russian warcrimes and destabilize Ukraine by fueling a seething hatred and contempt for the Ukrainian cause with the American public than Tucker Carlson. He has played an enormous role advancing Russian narratives in the Trump Administration, and his son is speech writer for the Vice President. 

As we have tracked Carlson’s war on freedom in Ukraine we have been doing more than just cataloguing the hundreds of misrepresentations, false accusations and overt lies he has employed. We have been breaking down his strategies, apparent and stated motivations and approach to argumentation. 

What we have discovered may surprise you. Not merely because of what it says about Carlson, but what it says about present trends in how information and ideas are processed. 

Carlson’s approach is a form of divine revelation by commentator. He habitually states outrageous claims as certainty and fact, merely because he imagines them in his mind. Like his close colleague Alex Jones, he is so convinced of his broader conspiracy that “everyone is lying to you except for me,” and exists in a world of vast personal wealth and unaccountability, that he has reached a place where he genuinely believes something to be true, merely by thinking it or feeling it. And this approach is revealed on repeat in his broadcasts. It is a successful cocktail for a global audience which feels cheated and lied to. One part vituperative hatred at the objects of his contempt, and a second part personal divine pseudo revelation. 

It is an approach which allows him to stretch facts out of reality, infer conclusions and with little or no corroborating evidence on a nightly basis, make claims with an air of absolute authority and righteousness, when such statements are often, in fact, grotesque lies. 

Interested in learning more? 

It is important because it is worth asking whether any individual in the world, using the name of Christ, has done to more enable the persecution of Christians in Ukraine than Tucker Carlson. Or whether in the name of eliminating corruption, any Western communicator has done more to provide aid and comfort to the Russian state, covering for their war crimes and enabling their commission of mass murders, tortures and rapes of Ukrainians?

Subscribe to my Substack as I break down the specifics.