What I learned from my talk with Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson just did something that no other Western journalist in the world has either been willing or able to do in a very long time. He traveled to Moscow to speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin. And right on cue came the collective outrage: “Tucker Carlson is dangerous.” “He’s a Putin lover.” “Will they ban him from coming home?” “Is the European Union sanctioning him?”

The news was kind of hilarious and still is. Take any war in history. Name the country and the leader, and any journalist worth his or her salt would be champing at the bit to interview the combatants on both sides.

Why is journalism now a crime to journalists?

But not this war. The moment Tucker Carlson dared speak with the world leader behind a war that the United States is actively funding on the other side, the knives come out.

Don’t get me wrong. Putin is a bad guy. He’s a cold-blooded killer who throws people off of roofs. He’s a dictator. And I don’t like the other Russian leaders, either. They are corrupt and dirty.

But I also don't think that the Ukrainian leadership is in this war for really anything but money and power. I’m not sure where exactly all those billions of American taxpayer dollars have gone, but when you’re spending more than you did for the Marshall Plan in inflation-adjusted dollars, something isn’t right.

Why are we just pushing this through?

I don't want to support Putin, and I don’t want to support the leadership of Ukraine. But I also don’t trust Joe Biden and his administration. They have been meddling with Russian and Ukrainian affairs forever.

So I can’t say I have a horse in this race, and I don’t want to put my name behind any of the three because I don’t trust any of the three, even though I’m still proudly American. That’s why we need journalists to ask the hard questions, to press our leaders over what is really going on. That’s what journalism is, and Tucker Carlson is one of the very few with the courage to do it.

And yet he is called a traitor. Why?

Why is journalism now a crime to journalists? The media have forgotten something critical about why they exist. Maybe the governments have never known it. But it is that open and free dialogue is the foundation of a free society.

It is also the foundation upon which peace can be built. Talk with everyone. You don’t need to trust them or even like them. But talk to them. Understand where they're coming from. It's all very basic.

And if anyone currently is criticizing Tucker Carlson for interviewing a person who is the leader of the country we’re currently involved in a shadow war with, well, maybe they should just ask Tucker what he’s thinking.

Why did you do it? Why did you go? What did you mean by the showing us the Moscow subway station? What have you learned? And what does it mean all going forward?

That’s what we did. On Tuesday, Tucker Carlson joined me for a special edition of "The Glenn Beck Podcast” for his first interview back from Russia.

This wasn’t a softball interview. We didn’t agree on everything, and I pushed back on points I did disagree with — as he did with me. But that is the point. We had open and free dialogue about the issues facing our world, and that is the foundation for free society. Tucker Carlson is certainly a champion of that.

Tucker Carlson Takes On Critics of His Interview with Putin | The Glenn Beck Podcast | Ep 210www.youtube.com

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