Tucker Carlson says he went “from amused to legitimately angry” at U.S. political leaders during a recent trip to a Moscow grocery store, where the independent conservative journalist and his crew guessed that a cart full of food would cost about the equivalent of $400 in American dollars – and it came in around a hundred bucks.
“Coming to a Russian grocery store, the ‘heart of evil,’ and seeing what things cost and how they live, it will radicalize you against our leaders,” Carlson said in the video shot on-site as he shopped for eggs, bread, wine and other staples. “That’s how I feel, anyway, radicalized. We’re not making any of this up, by the way. At all.”
Carlson has been spending time in Russia recently around last week’s landmark interview with president Vladimir Putin, the first time an American journalist sat with an adversarial head-of-state in wartime. His visit has included time spent filming in an orderly and opulent Moscow subway station and the grocery-shopping trip, which was featured exclusively on the former Fox News host’s subscription platform (but excerpted by various users on X):
“So we were guessing what this would cost,” Carlson said as he puts his items on the belt. “Everybody [in the crew] is from the United States … and we didn’t pay any attention to cost, we just put in the cart what we would actually eat over a week. We all [guessed] around $400 bucks. It was $104 U.S. here. And that’s when you start to realize that ideology doesn’t matter as much as you thought.”
Carlson launched his independent media network on X after he was fired by Fox News last year. Untethered from corporate media handlers, an emboldened Carlson has taken on several controversial topics – but nothing, not even an interview with Infowars host Alex Jones, has been as polarizing, or perhaps as personally impactful, as his trip to Russia.
“If you take people’s standard of living and you tank it through filth and crime and inflation, and they literally can’t buy the groceries they want, at that point maybe maybe it matters less what you say or whether you’re a ‘good person’ or a ‘bad person,’ you’re wrecking people’s lives and their country,” said Carlson, who has questioned U.S. support of Ukraine’s defense since his days on Fox News. “And that’s what our leaders have done to us.”
Watch the partial video in the clip embedded above.
