During his recent trip to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin, U.S. journalist Tucker Carlson toured the city of Moscow and shopped at local Moscow stores. Carlson commented that Moscow was “so much nicer than any city in my country,” and spoke about how beautiful, affordable and immaculate Russian grocery stores are in comparison to their U.S. counterparts.

Carlson, whose audience occupies the far-right end of U.S. politics, was condemned by some Senate Republicans, with Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., commenting: “The Soviets had a term for people like Tucker: useful idiots.”

Straight Arrow News contributor David Pakman agrees with the conservative senator and explains how Carlson fell for some of the oldest propaganda tricks in the authoritarian playbook: staging grocery stores like movie sets and offering strict “guided tours” to visiting American journalists in order to significantly distort their perception of everyday life in the host country.

And so we have to understand the cynical goal of this from the get-go, and we can evaluate that for what it is. But we don’t even need to do that, because the entire exercise is flawed. I’ll give you the examples from other countries, and then we’ll go to the Russian one.

We have seen these trips, chaperoned trips, in North Korea, where you go, you’re allowed to go and be a tourist, and you have chaperones, and they take you, especially if you’re a member of the media — there’s Vice documentaries like this and many others, — they take you to the local grocery store. And even though you’ve heard there is famine in North Korea, and there’s no electricity in North Korea, you’re taken to the grocery store in Pyongyang, which has electricity. And there are workers, and there’s beautiful olive oil from different countries, and all these products that kind of look like the products we have in the West.

But when you look more closely, it’s all essentially a set. It’s like a stage, it’s a theater. There are 40 employees, but barely any customers for whatever reason. The customers just circle around and don’t actually seem to buy anything.