Tucker goes Balkan, what?
If political sociology were physics, we would say that there are forces drawing him there, and forces drawing the region to him.
It was bound to happen sooner or later, like peanut butter meeting chocolate, toxic emissions meeting a climate catastrophe, Wile E Coyote meeting a cliff edge, or štruca meeting a krpa, the falangist American ex-TV host Tucker Carlson met SRS alum Aleksandar Vučić. And much hay was made.
That is to say, Carlson posted a short video in which he says he is going to meet Vučić at the Serbian embassy in Budapest, shows a few clips of him and Vučić together, and proceeds on to some footage of himself sitting in a car while he babbles some tendentious and ignorant nonsense (which Sputnik lost no time in attributing to Vučić himself). There is a video, go ahead and search for it if you want, it won't be getting any links from me. Presumably the two of them did an interview, and this interview may well become available somewhere, or it may not, whatever.
Not a big deal, most people will say. A media personality is generally looking for someone to talk with under the condition that having talked with that someone enhances the perception of their importance, and politicians will generally do an interview if somebody asks them to. But this one is a little weird. The interviewer is a fallen angel of the American ultra-right propaganda machine, and the interviewee is a rogue authoritarian who is trying to extract just enough indulgence from the US and Europe to get him to drop his pro-Russia stance on the bombing and invasion of Ukraine. It is more than coincidence that brings this pair together. This faecal ragout has been long in the making. Let’s review the ingredients.
The jingoists in search of a home.
If you are not American, and even if you are, you could be excused for not knowing who Tucker Carlson is. He is a wealthy fellow, heir to a fortune made from the cheap frozen dinners with which some people poison their families. Like a lot of folks untalented at journalism but wanting a role on news-adjacent television, he became a right-wing propagandist and was, until recently, one of the marquee stars of the Fox outrage factory. Unlike others, he went a bit far. Publicly loyal to a Trump he despises personally, but whose audience keeps him afloat, he made his show on Fox a showcase for racism, amplifying false claims about electoral fraud, and echoing Russia Today talking points. In a move that nobody regards as coincidental, he was let go from Fox pretty suddenly, right about at the same time that the voting machine manufacturer Dominion agreed to accept a very very large payment to settle their libel suit against Fox. He was let go at full pay, of course.
The full pay part of the deal is a bit of a problem. The Salisbury steak scion is, like an IQF jacket potato, fully loaded, and not in this for the money. What he is after is the notoriety, and the power that comes from acting as the filter that stands between powerhungry fash boys and media publicity. But Fox is paying him to observe a contractual non-competition clause, forbidding him to take a slot with another broadcaster as long as the cash flows his way. Carlson says his toolshed broadcast on the deceased husk of Twitter is not competition, but Fox is not persuaded of this. Another way out is to try for an international footing, but the plausible sites for this are few in number, basically just Russia or Saudi Arabia. To make his way into either one of these he has to appear to have some international knowledge, hence footage of him cackling beside Vučić and sitting in a car blithering about how NATO attacked Russia.
He is the former holder of a big prize who feels like he has something to rescue. His inroads into media that have audiences is the crowning success of a path that begins strongly with the popularity of Father Couglin, had a dry spell in the period of Francis Parker Yockey and Willis Carto, and that he felt sure he could bring to new heights. Lucky Vučić may turn out to have been an early stepping stone.
The Balkan bullshit magnet.
But why else would Carlson have chosen Vučić, who is as unimpressive as he is charmless? Well, Winston Churchill is supposed to have said that the Balkan peninsula „produces more history than it consumes.“ He didn't say that, though, it was Arlington Stringham, a character in a short story by H.H. Munro known as Saki, and he was talking about Crete. Which says it all, really. That part of the world is endlessly attractive to Western (and probably also Eastern) charlatans, cheats, whack jobs, inadequacies, and folks who are all to happy to take advantage of other people's credulity.
Think of just recent history. Who has come to seek that fortune in that environment rich in intrigue and short of fact checking? The list just goes on and on. Those of us who were around Serbia in the weird war days remember Giovanni di Stefano, who convinced some number of well placed people that he was a prominent international businessman. There's that weird American pseudoscientist who came to Croatia as a guest of „U!U!U! ime naroda“ to argue against sex education and for the existence of a compelling but sadly fictional aperfif called „erotoxin.“ And who can forget the brief celebrity in Macedonia of the „malignant self-love“ dude. Really we could go on for so long, because there are so many. What they all have in common, aside from bad politics, is an understanding of how profitable it is to tell people what they want to hear.
Tucker wasn't doing this just for the tuck of it, and he didn't tuck it up. He was walking onto well prepared ground.
Elective affinities.
Right, so we know why these Balkan destinations attract the charlatans. What makes them so welcome? Let's exclude one hypothesis right at the start: this is not because the politicians or powerful editors of the region do not now who they are dealing with. If that were the case they would not keep making the same mistake. They make the mistake because it is not accidental.
The people who control media in that part of the world know fully well, for example, the difference between the (venerable and well respected) Washington Post and the (ideological and Moonie-owned) Washington Times. And they know it is a lot easier to get an article into the latter than into the former. When their lobbyists get an opinion piece placed into the Times, the media controlled by the regime will not go so far as to falsely claim that the item appeared in the Post, but they will take advantage of the probability that half their audience is not aware of the difference, and the other half can be counted on not to check.
Meanwhile the regional sherriffs and their ambitious deputies are happy to court the Western far right, whatever guise it may take. Viktor Orban got for himself the permanent spot on the winger catwalk that Janez Janša tried so embarrassingly to acquire, while Vučić and crew went wild for Trump's grifter envoy to the Kosovo conflict. Vučić has been smart enough to keep an iron in the alternate fires as well, but his effusive praise for Trump is the product of a recognition of shared values and identities.
The symbiosis binding the white-knuckled holders of political power in the region to the Western opponents of democracy is not a product of ignorance but of interest. They know that if the West ever gets sincere about its declared values there will be no tolerance left for them. Their future depends on the scum rising to the top. And they have reason to be optimistic, it has risen before.