Why is the western media calling Tucker Carlson a traitor for interviewing the Russian President?

American journalist Tucker Carlson is in Moscow where he will be interviewing Russian President Vladimir Putin. The reactions from western liberals have been completely hysterical. Carlson has been labelled a traitor by western journalists.

Even The Guardian has piled on.  Just because Carlson opposes the US supplying weapons and sending hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine doesn’t mean he supports ‘the other side.’ It means he doesn’t agree with his country being involved in a war that he doesn’t believe is in America’s interests.

Carlson is a journalist. Before Trump, US journalists always wanted to interview world leaders because it was thought important for Americans to hear from these powerful people. American journalists have interviewed Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and Vladimir Putin himself. This ‘treachery’ used to be called journalism. But now that the US is awash in neocon warmongering ideology, journalists are not supposed to question the government’s endless wars but dumbly sit and applaud the idiocy and waste.  

What happened to free speech? Tucker Carlson is an American citizen. He should be able to interview anyone he wants. This is McCarthyism all over, labelling those with views different from the US government as Russian operatives. We know the National Security Agency (NSA) abused its spying mechanisms to snoop on American citizens. The whole Russiagate episode was exposed as a web of lies spun by the Clinton campaign together with the US intelligence community to portray Donald Trump as a Russian asset to prevent him from winning the 2016 election. The mainstream ‘journalists’ have become no more than stenographers for whatever the US government wants the American people to believe.   

The ‘endless wars’ that the neocons running American foreign policy have been pushing for decades only benefit the weapons manufacturers – they don’t help the American people.

Tucker Carlson is being called a traitor because he has the temerity to suggest that this money should be spent at home, on Americans. Americans don’t have health care - medical expenses are the number one cause of personal bankruptcy. 80,000 Americans die each year from opioid overdoses, nearly 50,000 from gun violence. Homelessness is increasing 6% a year, child poverty has more than doubled since 2021, and inequality is the highest of all the G7 nations. Nearly half the water supply is contaminated with forever chemicals.  11 out of 17 infrastructure categories received a grade of D. Life expectancy has fallen to 76.4 years, the shortest it has been in more than 2 decades, more than 3 years below that of the UK and the lowest among peer countries. 60-90% of the standard American diet contains highly processed food. 1.8 million Americans are incarcerated in the prison industrial complex, the largest number of prisoners worldwide. 66% of all adults are on prescription drugs and nearly half the population suffers from at least one chronic disease and the number is growing. Meanwhile, the US spends $877 billion a year on its military, the most of any nation on earth; and that doesn’t include the billions more for ongoing wars like the current ones in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Tucker Carlson said he is interviewing Putin because it is his job to inform the American people and he believes they are not being informed. You can watch his 4 minute video of why he’s doing the interview here.

Journalism is no longer about informing us about our wonderfully diverse world in order to aid our understanding of it and our ability to live together on this planet. Instead, it has become about selling us government agendas and propaganda to further those agendas. And that’s something we must all resist.