Is Tucker Carlson still in Moscow? I wonder if he was lounging in a café with his FSB handlers, laughing at their jokes while savoring a scrumptious pierogi, when the news broke that Alexei Navalny—Russia’s, perhaps the world’s, most famous political prisoner—had died in a Siberian prison at the age of 47.

Carlson had spent the week following his dreadful interview with Vladimir Putin on a guided tour of Moscow’s most sparkling sights. In videos posted on his website, he marvels at the Kievskaya subway station (“no graffiti, no filth, no rapists or people waiting to push you onto the tracks … nicer than anything in our country”), goes slack-jawed in a grocery store (where food prices are so low that he finds himself “radicalized” against American leaders), and admires the Russian capital’s “clean, safe streets.”

Until Friday, these videos seemed merely risible, the work of an ersatz journalist so naïve that he appears startlingly unaware of the long history of gullible Westerners falling for such cherry-picked displays of Soviet majesty. Yes, the subway stations are magnificent. Does Carlson know they were dug by slave labor and designed by British engineers, some of whom Stalin jailed for espionage; that some of the gorgeous marble was taken from the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which Stalin had blown up in 1931? Yes, the platforms, like the streets, are safe and clean, as are most facilities in authoritarian countries, but does he know about their facial-recognition sensors, which have led to dozens of protesters being arrested on the platforms? The groceries at the store he visited are a quarter........

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