Ukraine, according to many media sites, including the UK Telegraph, is a problem for conservatives because it’s divisive: ‘Trump flirts with Putin on Ukraine – and it’s splitting the Right.’ Far from flirting with Putin, Trump is an equal opportunity abuser of both Zelensky and Putin. He wants both of them at the negotiating table and is prepared to apply a combination of rewards and punishments alternatively on Ukraine and Russia to get a peace deal. The host of the Tucker Carlson Show, contrariwise, plays favourites with the Russians.

Carlson was probably Donald Trump’s most influential advocate in independent media during last year’s presidential campaign. In gratitude, no doubt, the owner of Mar-a-Lago opened his Palm Beach home to the Tucker Carlson Show on election night, providing Carlson with instant access to Maga royalty: from Donald Trump Jnr to Elon Musk. One political heavyweight after another shared their first reactions to victory in real time. Carlson, the seasoned performer and long-time Washington insider, proved the perfectly genial and insightful interviewer. Good for him.

Carlson deserves some breaks since he is demonised by the anti-Trump camp as a pariah, a dog-whistling, white supremacist bigot. I say mostly because the American Prospect, a leftist magazine, famously praised Carlson’s anti-corporate and anti-political elite stance at the time of his sacking from Fox. Jonathan Chait, writing for the New Yorker, helpfully pointed out to his readers that ‘the left-wing case for Tucker Carlson is wrong’. After all, weren’t the Nazis also anti-establishment? Being a high-profile pundit like Tucker has brought him great financial rewards and yet to be hated by so many must make that a bitter-sweet experience.

Just last week, for instance, celebrity Gwen Stefani, a devout Catholic, posted an endorsement of her friend and fellow actor Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus Christ in the series The Chosen: ‘What an enlightening intelligent beautiful interview thank you for being u.’ Roumie’s enlightening, intelligent and beautiful interview – and it was – happened to be with Carlson, the hateful and despicable white nationalist, not to mention Putin apologist. An enraged, grammar-challenged public quickly turned on their pop idol: ‘Gwen as a long time fan you’re making it harder and harder to keep supporting you please don’t platform Tucker Carlson the Russian propagandist good lord.’

Carlson, to be fair, is something of a hit-and-miss merchant. What makes his opinions interesting is also what potentially makes them unreliable. A born-again contrarian who believes America’s ruling class has been lying to ordinary folks for decades about everything, there is almost no traditional American narrative of recent years, especially a neo-conservative one, that he does not view with deep scepticism. The powers-that-be have misled the American people on everything from the JFK assassination to the Iraq War and Covid-19. So far, so true, you might say.

But one of the problems with conspiracists is the temptation to see everything as the product of a small powerful group. What else could the government be hiding from the population? According to Carlson, aliens – not from across the border but the UFO kind – might be ‘spiritual beings’. And, yes, he is ‘open’ to the Moon landings being fake. This kind of (shall we say) unconventional thinking obviously has its problems, and yet there are upsides. In the case of the Russia-Ukraine war, for example, Carlson has long echoed Viktor Orbán’s admonition that Ukraine cannot possibly defeat Russia with its extensive military-industrial complex and some 100 million more people.

Back in September 2023, in an article titled ‘Give War a Chance’, I argued – wrongly as it happened – that the Ukraine army might still prevail despite the failure of the summer offensive that year. Carlson, no less than Orbán, would rightly contend I had been taken in by the predominant narrative of the time, which is that after prevailing in the Battle for Kyiv, the Kharkiv counter-offensive and the Kherson counter-offensive, the Russians were done.

Instead, the Russia-Ukraine war turns out to be analogous to the 1939-40 Russo-Finnish war in which the Red Army sustained mind-boggling losses before attaining a bloody stalemate. The Finns, finally, had to cede territory to Russia in order to make peace and save an entire generation of their men from annihilation. More than 25,000 brave Finns were killed fighting to maintain their national independence. It is unlikely Stalin lost much sleep over the loss (dead or missing) of an estimated 126,000 to 168,000 Russian soldiers.

We might have expected Tucker Carlson to subscribe to the broad outlines of the Russia-Finnish war analogy – that is, brave Ukrainians fighting to keep the Russian behemoth at bay. Instead, Carlson’s preference is to promote every anti-Ukraine story, starting with the 2022 Russian (and Chinese) bio-weapons conspiracy theory. His latest claim concerns Ukraine selling US-supplied arms on the open market, including to Mexican drug cartels: ‘Fact – not guess, fact – is the Ukrainian military is selling a huge percentage, up to half, of the arms we send them.’

Carlson is yet to corroborate any of this apart from insisting that he ‘personally knows’ someone who bought US-provided arms. Would that be a Mexican drug lord? Meanwhile, the Department of Defense and US Government Accountability Office have found no evidence of such transactions. Carlson, of course, can dismiss these denials as a cover-up perpetrated by the small powerful group who control everything we think we know about the Russia-Ukraine war.

On the other hand, Carlson did not push back against any of the absurd revisionist history spouted by Putin in their two-hour-long interview last year, including the lie that Ukraine is an ‘artificial state’ and that Russia has been the victim in this war: ‘It was they who started the war in 2014. Our goal is to stop this war. And we did not start this war in 2022. This is an attempt to stop it.’ Really?

Most of us can agree it’s time for Kyiv to negotiate – like plucky Finland in 1940 – and that it will have to cede precious territory to Moscow. We might also accept that Ukraine will not be offered Nato membership and that raising the possibility of it in the past has not been helpful. All that said, let us not rewrite history and pretend Ukraine is an ‘artificial state’ or that Putin is a man of peace.