'Economically illiterate' Tucker Carlson mocked over claim Russian grocery store 'radicalized' him

15 February 2024

Former Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson — who has since migrated to X/Twitter after his firing in 2023 — recently posted a video praising the cheap cost of groceries in Russia while visiting the country to interview Vladimir Putin.

In the video, which was posted by the X account @CatchUpFeed, Carlson filled his cart with various food items and mentioned that both he and his crew estimated that a full cart would cost approximately $400 in an American grocery store. However, when the cashier finished swiping all of the groceries in his cart, the total came out to approximately 9,682 Russian roubles, which is equal to approximately $104 in US dollars.

Carlson said that after his trip to the supermarket, he was "radicalized" by the low cost of groceries in Russia. But the video was widely ridiculed by users on the platform who pointed out that Carlson seemed ignorant that the Russian rouble is worth a lot less than the US dollar, and that groceries will tend to be much cheaper in poorer countries.

"99% of the time I think Tucker is playing dumb for his audience, but I do think he might have sous vided his brain enough in his own bs that he really might not understand why the US dollar is so strong and valuable in poor countries," wrote X user Matt Duffy.

One X user showed a screenshot from the nonprofit site Our World in Data, which shows that Russians spend approximately a third of their income on groceries, whereas Americans spend just 8% on average. The X account for the Libertarian Party of San Bernardino County made that same observation, tweeting that Carlson was "economically illiterate." and that his video was "on the same level of dumb" as previous economic arguments he's made. Daniel Chang Contreras, who is a grad student at American University, explained the basic economics of currency value in a tweet of his own.

"Maybe Tucker doesn’t know, but the wages of most people outside the US are not in US Dollars (shocking, I know)," Contreras posted. "So yes, for him buying groceries in Russia is cheap as he earns US dollars. For people who earn in weak currencies, not so much."

Even conservatives took their turn mocking the former Fox News host. X user Carlos Ron tweeted that Carlson seemed like a person who "would go to Venezuela or even North Korea and do the same thing that he did in this video. [By the way], the average salary for Russians last year was a little over 14k dollars a year… do you still think that they can live with that salary?"

Watch Carlson's video below or by clicking this link.

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