Would you move to Mother Russia?

Last year, Tucker Carlson scandalised America by travelling to Russia and interviewing Vladimir Putin. As US viewers denounced the idea that one ought to speak to an enemy such as Putin, Tucker strolled around Moscow, filming himself taking the subway, buying a burger from the new Russian McDonalds, and going grocery shopping in a Moscow supermarket. Behaving, in fact, like he was in the West.

Back home, Tucker had some good things to say about Putin, as well as some bad things. But it was the streets and shops of Moscow that really “radicalised” him. The West likes to paint Russia as poor, miserable and oppressed, but Tucker described a perfectly ordinary modern society. The discrepancy between what Tucker had been taught to expect and what he actually saw in Russia didn’t just unnerve him — it made him angry.