Tucker Carlson wasn’t done dishing out advice and giving his unbridled analysis of the world when his recent speech at the MCC Feszt in Budapest concluded. Instead, the host of "Tucker on X" sat down with Hungarian leader Balázs Orbán and gave even more viral-worthy takes on everything from his life post-Fox News and the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines to the transgender agenda and his guidance for young people today.
Below are six noteworthy moments from the interview.
1. On life after he was unceremoniously canned from Fox News, Carlson explained he was “grateful” to have been let go and also took a minute to compliment his former employer.
“For whatever it's worth...Fox was really nice to me for the 14 years I worked there, and they never said, ‘you can't say that,’...they let me say whatever I wanted.”
Carlson’s departure from Fox News was the third time in his adult life he’s been fired, and he explained why he sees the development in a positive light.
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“It's great to get fired because it keeps you from being a truly horrible person...the problem with men when they're successful is they start to think they're Jesus...you get this hubris like, I can do anything, I'm so important, and getting fired reminds you that no, you're just like everybody else, you're kind of a ridiculous person...Men need to be humiliated fairly regularly to keep their souls pure, otherwise, they become absolutely unbearable, and anyone who's married to one can tell you that that's true. So I'm really glad that I got fired, and I think my wife was really grateful that I got fired also...”
2. Carlson also explained why he believes NATO will not last in the long-term.
“NATO is going to collapse,” he said. “Obviously you can't have the main the driver of NATO, which is the United States, sabotage Germany's main source of cheap energy.”
Carlson said he wants to talk about the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines because it was “the biggest act of industrial sabotage in history...[and] it was the largest man-made CO2 emission in history.”
He pinned the blame squarely on the Biden administration and said the act will have long-term effects on our alliance with Western Europe and on NATO itself.
“Western Europe is America's last main ally and we just attacked our most important ally,” he said. “NATO cannot stand long-term. At some point, the Germans are gonna wake up...I don't think you can continue after that, I really don't, maybe I'm wrong but I don't see how it does.”
3. Referring to his program on Fox News, Carlson said the show was done at a time when there was a "power vacuum" in both political parties and no new ideas, which is how the "trans thing" caught on.
The "Democratic Party...had no new ideas," he said. "And that's what the trans thing is on some level, you know, they just like took the civil rights movement of the '50s and early '60s, removed African Americans, put in trans, and it's the same thing. It's like there's no new idea at all, it's just the same template."
4. While current political topics are certainly important, Orbán said he was very eager to hear Carlson’s best advice for young people, particularly on the topic of education.
“The most important thing I ever did, other than get married, was read books,” he explained. “Not tweets, not electronic, but paper books in traditional form, and read them every day. And that to me is education.”
Carlson recalled a biting insult his father, whom he described as an “entirely self-educated person,” used to say about “people who presumed to be intellectuals.”
“He would always say, ‘he reads magazines,’” noting how doing so gives one a shallow understanding of a topic.
“There’s something about forcing yourself to read a book all the way through, to sustain an argument or a series of connected ideas for 300 pages—that's entirely different from consuming information online or in shorter form,” he said, noting that the purpose of schools changes over time.
“Most modern universities were once effectively seminaries, now they're anti-God, so colleges change, but reading books—books, themselves, do not change. If you read good books consistently through life, you will become educated in a true sense, and wise, which is the point. It's not accumulating information, [that’s] not the point, your iPhone can do that. Becoming wise, able to discern between good and bad, truth and falsehood, that's the goal.”
5. Orbán followed up, asking Carlson how young people can filter through the online noise to become and stay informed.
“Start with the knowledge that you're being lied to at scale, not just one person but a collection of people, a network of people acting in concert, knowingly or not, with one another in order to tell you things that are not true and not just not true, the opposite of the truth, and that there are reasons this is happening but it is happening, that's the best thing to know,” he said.
Carlson then detailed how one goes about discerning the truth.
“I hate to say this because it's very dark and cynical but it's also true—I assess peoples’ honesty by how the...predominant voices regard them,” he said. “So if somebody in power says we are not allowed to think that, my first question is, ‘why?’ Probably because it's true."
He added: “I can't remember the last time I saw a public figure in the United States punished for lying—they're caught all the time. No one is ever punished. Instead, people are punished for telling the truth, maybe not the whole truth, maybe a variation of the truth, maybe just something that points toward the truth, but it's the truth that is illegal, and so I assessed it in reverse..."
6. Finally, Carlson was asked for advice he'd give to his younger self. But he responded with advice he said applies to everyone.
"Don't be so quick to assume you're right. Don't be so quick to assume you know. Don't be so arrogant in the way you approach other people. Don't be so judgmental, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," he began.
"So go into every decision, every situation with the knowledge that you are seeing it incompletely. You are not seeing all the facts, you do not understand everything that has happened when you weren't there, you don't really know. The best you can do is guess with good faith and an open mind and hope you got it right. That's the best you can do. And if you go into life with that attitude, you will arrive at a wiser conclusion than if you approach it like your average Atlantic Council person approaches it or the NATO leadership who's like wrecking the Western world right now or the Biden administration was, or your ridiculous, absurd, grotesque American ambassador to Hungary goes into it...that hubris, that belief you know things you don't, that lie that you can control things you can't, the most basic of all human misperceptions, which is that I am God–no, you're not. That's how we get into trouble, that's how people die every time."
None of our leaders are punished for lying. Instead, regular people are punished for telling the truth. That was part of our conversation with Hungarian leader Balázs Orbán. It happened immediately after our speech in Budapest. Watch. pic.twitter.com/HpWDBJFS6W
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 28, 2023
