Clickbait merchants on X advance a baseless Tucker Carlson assassination attempt narrative

The incentives are broken.

Social media is ablaze with popular pundits and commentators declaring that a Russian man attempted to assassinate the famed journalist Tucker Carlson while he was in Moscow to interview Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The video in question was first posted to a just-launched YouTube channel translated from Russian as “counterterrorism,” which features Russian military forces interrogating claimed Ukrainian security and intelligence officials. Notably, all of the videos on the channel were uploaded within the last day.

In the above video, a Moscow-based man named Vasiliev claims he accepted four thousand dollars from Ukrainian intelligence services to plant a bomb on Tucker Carlson's vehicle while it was parked at The Four Seasons in Moscow. He adds that the plot was foiled because he was “detained in the preparation stage” by Russian police.

This unsourced, unvetted, unconfirmed, unalleged (through official channels) allegation has somehow made its way into the greater media atmosphere.

Check out the traffic the video is receiving on X (impressions are listed in the bottom right hand corner).

Others pointed to a website called The Intel Drop as the source of the material. Upon further review, the claimed Iceland-based website has no sources for its information. The commentary on the website comes from an anti-U.S. and pro-Moscow perspective.

Millions and millions of people have now seen the video and the captions that go above and beyond the evidence available to claim there was a genuine attempt on Tucker Carlson’s life.

But again, all we have to show for the allegation is a guy named Vasiliev in an undisclosed location saying he got 4 grand from the Ukrainians to blow up Tucker Carlson’s vehicle, in a video that was posted to YouTube yesterday.

Should the Russians (whose officials were apparently interrogating the man) publicly back the accusation of a bomb plot, it might be worth scrutinizing.

Sadly, the clickbait merchants of X and other social media sites are incentivized to post the most sensationalist nonsense they can, so that they can pump of their monetization numbers. The incentives are all screwed up, and the truth and/or clarifying perspectives gets lost in the noise of a manufactured clickbait hysteria.

The Dossier has been highly critical on the effort to support the unlimited U.S. taxpayer-funded slush fund that’s been allocated for the Ukrainian-Russian war. But those criticisms are grounded in facts, not random YouTube videos without even a modicum of credibility.

Vladimir Lenin is attributed with inventing the term “useful idiot.” And there are a whole lot of useful western idiots doing the bidding of bolstering a foreign government’s moral and geopolitical claims in exchange for a few Elon bucks.