By Lev Tsitrin

To an ex-Soviet like myself, Tucker Carlson’s 3-min rant against “the system” that allows a “dumb,” “stupid,” “uncreative”  people like financier Bill Ackman and journalist Bari Weiss to prosper (apparently at Tucker’s expense) highlighted in a short youtube clip reveals much more about Tucker’s mindset than an hour-long session on a psychoanalyst’s couch would.

This is because his grievance is couched in unmistakably Marxist/Leninist terms with which I — an ex-Soviet — have the misfortune of being well familiar.

What is Bill Ackman’s sin, per Tucker? It is that Bill Ackman is “uncreative,” there being no specific “product” being produced by him. This is a standard (and central) Marxist grievance: exploitation by the monied of the moneyless, the Marxist remedy being that workers of the world unite to build a new type of a society — Communism, in which all means of production are collectively owned by the workers. This will turn all forms of labor into “creative” one, labor metamorphosing from a necessity to earn a living into a welcome activity one does joyously and voluntarily, not for pay but just for the fun of it. This results in overabundance, capitalist economics losing its grip on the society. Money is no longer needed and becomes obsolete, everyone being free to take what they need, while contributing by their liberated, creative labor what they can. Money gone, all occupations associated with it — cashiers, bookkeepers, accountants, salespeople, police officers (to a Marxist/Leninist, all crime is economic by nature and will disappear, too), soldiers (in the Marxist analysis, all wars are fought over money) — and needless to say, Wall Street types like Bill Ackman who generate wealth by moving investments from low-profit to high-profit area seemingly without “creating” any tangible product (since the “product” comes out of the industry that gets the investment, “product” becomes disassociated from the investor, and is invisible to a true Marxist — or to Tucker).

Put simply, Tucker’s attack on Ackman is as Marxist as it gets — Tucker is not at all being “creative” here. We heard this (and the less lucky among us had to live through this) for well over a century — if “the Great October Socialist Revolution” of 1917 that gave birth to the Soviet Union I was taught to revere in the days of my childhood be taken as a happy benchmark. In bashing Ackman, Tucker merely channels his inner Commie. That’s all there is to it — in his subconsciousness, Tucker is simply an envy-filled Marxist for whom capital, capitalism, and capitalists are the root of all world’s evil.

Equally revealing is Tucker’s grievance against Bari Weiss. Since she is a journalist like Tucker, his animus is fueled by her professional success that shines even brighter against his professional failure: the difference in the caliber of the two people could not be starker. While Tucker was kicked out of Fox to sink to the lowest level of profession by using his past, Fox-associated prestige to platform the likes of Nick Fuentes, eking the clicks and his living by catering to consumers of the lowest-level discourse, Bari Weiss left the New York Times voluntarily, with her head high up, having been disgusted by the paper’s echo-chamber of editorial “wokeness,” and founded a highly successful media company she called the Free Press, which she sold to CBS for $400 million, and became CBS’ top news editor. Her success — which contrasts with his failure — apparently rattles Tucker to no end. In the Tucker world (and in Tucker’s words) she should not have risen above a secretary.

Well, that’s the story of Mozart and Salieri all over again — a story of mediocrity resentful against talent. But not to Tucker. How, according to him, did Bari Weiss manage to pull it off, and to succeed where he failed? His answer boils down to a single word: “Israel.” It is because she supports Israel that she — deprived of talent as she is, in Tucker’s mind — was put at the helm of a major media company, while the much more deserving Tucker is reduced to, in essence, kissing the asses of Qataris and Fuenteses. Hence, to Tucker “it is a rigged world!”

This is not an original idea, either — we’ve been there nearly a century ago in Germany, where precisely that kind of resentment — the resentment of supposedly disproportional Jewish influence — lead to Nazism. Tucker’s grievances are exactly identical. To him, the world is turned on its head by financiers and Jews.

While criticizing Ackman and Weiss for the lack of “creativity,” Tucker is himself being uncreative — he merely parrots Marx and Hitler. Like another publicity-seeker — the owl-faced Greta Thunberg who will support any cause as long as cameras are trained on her (destruction of Israel being her latest venture), Tucker spreads his sails to catch any wind now blowing in America, no matter how fowl — Communist or Nazi — in the hope of moving his career forward. His tirade against Bill Ackman and Bary Weiss shows his caliber: Tucker is a very big mouth connected to a very small mind indeed.