There is so much wrong with Tucker Carlson’s recent episode on Armenia — featuring Narek Kareptyan, the nephew of jailed Russian-Armenian tycoon Samvel Karapetyan and his amoral, opportunistic lawyer Robert Amsterdam — that it is hard to know where to begin.
I think part of the reason I’m writing this newsletter is to put my thoughts on paper about the literal torrent of misinformation and false narratives contained in the episode (and to spare my coworkers, who are probably tired of hearing me rant about it).
Unfortunately, Carlson is hugely influential in the US, particularly within the Republican Party, although he is mired in an ongoing dispute with the party over his criticism of Israel — which he does not fail to mention in this latest episode on Armenia.
So far, the episode has racked up some 400,000 views (interestingly, one of his lesser viewed episodes — another released on Tuesday about how ‘chemtrails are real’ has almost twice as many views already).
From Narek Karapetyan’s side, the goals of the episode were patently obvious — demonise Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, portray his uncle as an innocent victim, and most importantly, reframe the ongoing dispute between Pashinyan and the Armenian Apostolic Church for American conservatives.
The narrative is simple — the Armenia that Karapetyan represents is a traditional country, fighting against both the woke West and the predatory Islamic world exemplified by Turkey and Azerbaijan. The decades-long conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, which no serious scholar believes was about religion, is reduced into a war between Christian Armenia and Muslim Azerbaijan (nevermind that Armenia has close ties with Iran, with whom Azerbaijan has a difficult relationship) — there is no mention of the toxic role Russia plays in all of this. Carlson also inserts his typical US culture war topics, baselessly accusing Pashinyan of ‘focusing on transgenderism as a good thing [and the] LGBTQ agenda, whatever that is’.
In line with his ongoing criticism of Israel — which I do believe to be correct in a type of ‘broken clock is right twice a day’ way — Carlson equates Israel’s sale of military hardware to Azerbaijan and unverified claims that Israeli drone operators took part in combat as evidence that ‘Israelis were killing Christians in this war with US tax dollars’.
‘I just suppose from an American perspective it’s like, why are my tax dollars being used to murder Christians around the world’, Carlson said.
This painfully dumbed down simplification has unfortunately been spread widely on social media.
In turn, both Amsterdam and Carlson were doing their schticks — the former providing a valuable reputation-laundering for his client and the latter spreading conspiracy theories, attacking ‘woke culture’, and criticising Israel and Islam simultaneously, peppering it all with little ads and paid promotions for various Christian products.
The unifying theme here is money. Karapetyan paid Amsterdam to represent him, who then booked the show with Carlson. Karapetyan’s team has denied Carlson was paid $400,000 for the interview, but I’m not sure I believe it.
We already know that Carlson and Amsterdam are registered foreign agents in the US, with Carlson taking money from Qatar to portray the country favourably and Amsterdam taking money from all sorts of unsavoury governments and organisations, including Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, the Turkish government, and more recently, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), which Kyiv believes to be linked to the Kremlin. The latter is key here, as Amsterdam attempted to link Pashinyan’s clash with the church to Ukraine’s own fight with the UOC-MP.
I would concede that Ukraine has taken a heavy-handed approach to the UOC-MP, but that is because it is truly a source of Russian influence, which has included overt espionage. As Russia is waging an all-out war against Ukraine, Kyiv has every right to combat sources of malign Russian influence in the country.
But more importantly, for all of Carlson and Amsterdam’s concern for the plight of Christians, where is their outrage at Russia and the condemnation of its full-scale war on Ukraine, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Christians? Carlson has embarked on a blatant campaign to whitewash both Russia’s war and President Vladimir Putin, whose government has viciously persecuted all sorts of Christians who do not conform to Russian Orthodoxy, particularly in parts of Ukraine currently occupied by Russia.
For his part, Amsterdam claims to be supportive of Ukraine, but calls President Volodymyr Zelenskyi a ‘dictator’ and allows himself to be used by those — such as Carlson — who openly want to undermine the country and end US military support.
Given their track record, why should we trust anything that these two have to say about Armenia?
I often criticise the ridiculously inflammatory Azerbaijani media outlet Caliber, but I found myself agreeing with its coverage of the interview, which deemed it an example of ‘hybrid warfare’ aimed at derailing the peace process between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
I don’t know if the allegations regarding Karapetyan and the church are true or not.
But please, please, do not believe a word that a lying charlatan like Tucker Carlson says.
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