Andrew Bolt, a columnist for the Herald Sun, which is owned by News Corp., speculates that the straw that broke the camel’s back in the Tucker Carlson-Rupert Murdoch relationship was Carlson’s contention that Ukraine was
My hunch is that Carlson’s final editorial, on the night he was abruptly sacked, was just one more thing too much.
I’ve raised concerns about Carlson painting Ukraine as hopelessly corrupt and the Biden White House as liars for supporting it – all gold to Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin, and repeated endlessly on his state television.
This nonsense was dangerous. Carlson was in effect insisting the US let Russia destroy Ukraine, giving China reason to think the US would abandon Taiwan, too.
It made World War III more likely.
I was assured Carlson had pulled his head in once Russia invaded Ukraine, but on Friday he went feral: “Why does the US government maintain secret biolabs in a primitive country like Ukraine?” Why did it have “sensitive nuclear technology” there? Carlson was again implying the US was helping corrupt Ukraine with biological weapons, even nuclear weapons – a theory that’s, frankly, crap.
Be clear: I’m just speculating that Carlson’s rant on Ukraine was a last straw.
It’s not been confirmed to me, although I know Lachlan Murdoch has good relations with Ukraine’s president.
You can find Carlson’s editorial here; the relevant section:
It was a year ago that every media outlet in the United States, from USA Today to the New York Times told you it was a dangerous conspiracy theory to believe the U.S. government had ever funded secret biolabs in Ukraine. The idea was ridiculous. In fact, it was Russian disinformation.
And then one day in sworn testimony, Toria Nuland of the State Department accidentally admitted that it was true. Yes, she said there are many secret biolabs in Ukraine and “We are now, in fact, quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of them.”
Wait a second, you may be wondering, why does the U.S. government maintain secret biolabs in a primitive country like Ukraine? Why not Austria? Why Ukraine? And why didn’t we dismantle and remove the secret biolabs when the war with Russia started? Nobody ever explained that this show was attacked for asking the question.
I wrote about this several times back in March 2022. Ukraine’s biological research facilities are not biological weapons research facilities, although it is worth keeping in mind that a lot of research on viruses and bacteria can be dual use – that is, the more you know about how a virus works, the more you know that you could apply to weaponizing it. Several times last year, United Nations officials have stated they have seen no evidence that Ukraine has a biological weapons program.
For as long as Ukraine has had busy ports on the Black Sea, it has endured periodic bouts of communicable viruses and disease-infected rats arriving with those ships. Because of this, long before there was a Soviet Union, Ukraine’s national, state, and local authorities have had programs studying communicable diseases and viruses and figuring out how to stop or slow their spread.
As I wrote last year, the U.S. government eventually realized it was not a good idea to have all kinds of viruses and bacteria sitting on refrigerated shelves of Ukrainian research facilities with minimal security. In 2005, the U.S. and Ukraine agreed to expand the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program to fund security improvements for pathogens stored at biological research and health facilities in Ukraine — specifically mentioning the Scientific Research Institute of Epidemiology and Hygiene in Lviv, the Ukrainian Scientific Research Anti-Plague Institute in Odessa, and the Central Sanitary Epidemiological Station in Kyiv. The U.S. provided $15 million. This is what makes them considered “U.S.-funded labs.”
A June Pentagon statement that “the United States has also worked collaboratively to improve Ukraine’s biological safety, security, and disease surveillance for both human and animal health, providing support to 46 peaceful Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities, and disease diagnostic sites over the last two decades.”
From this, sites ranging from the Gateway Pundit to the socialist People’s World contended that the Pentagon had admitted “there are 46 U.S. military-funded biolabs in Ukraine,” or “after months of denial, U.S. admits to running Ukraine biolabs.” These are stupid arguments from stupid people who bet on their audiences not being able to distinguish a hospital or medical research facility from a bioweapons factory.
Before the war, the Ukrainian State Emergency Service ran 30 laboratories at regional SES centers that perform initial investigations of disease outbreaks.
It is something of a misnomer to declare these laboratories “secret.” The existence of the labs was never denied, although it is safe to say that neither the U.S. government nor the Ukrainian government wanted to advertise just what pathogens were in those labs. Any major university or major hospital/medical center is going to have a lab that, at minimum, will have samples that may include dangerous or contagious pathogens collected from patients, etc., separate from any labs doing medical research on these kinds of viruses and bacteria. When somebody shows up in a hospital coughing and infected with some virus that isn’t immediately recognizable, doctors need to send samples to some place to do the detective work to figure out what the new virus is.
As for Carlson’s question about why the U.S. didn’t dismantle and remove the secret biolabs when the war with Russia started, that would require significant numbers of U.S. personnel on the ground of a country at war with Russia, and the U.S. withdrew troops training in Ukraine on February 12, 2022, and closed the embassy two days later, before reopening it with a skeleton crew in May.
You can either be mad that the U.S. didn’t do more in Ukraine after the war started, or you can be mad that the U.S. has a handful of military personnel remaining in the country. But not both!
For what it is worth, I find it hard to believe that Carlson’s comment about Ukrainian labs would be sufficient to get either James Murdoch or Rupert Murdoch to fire their highest-rated host.