Great men are sometimes known by their first and last names plus their initials or middle names. This distinguishes them from other great men. We need to distinguish John Quincy Adams from John Adams, Martin Luther King from Martin Luther. However, truly greats are sometimes just known by their first names — Alexander, Leonardo, Napoleon — even though there are others with the same first name. They alone lay claim to the moniker. Everyone knows who you are referring to.

Tucker is a truly great journalist.

Tucker has been fired from virtually every major news network where he had his own show, MSNBC, PBS, CNN, and most recently Fox News. This occurred because he went against the political slant of his home network. Efforts to disparage his name as “someone fired from Fox News” are hypocritical. Ignoring the fact that these pundits also hate Fox News, the real motivation for their hate is that he hosted what was by far the most popular news show in the world.

Everyone knows Tucker was fired for going against the grain of neoconservative politics. He took several stances that went against Fox News’ owners, the Murdock family’s political positions. He was given free reign to do so at first because he gained a reputation as someone who was not afraid to tell the truth as he saw it, no matter how uncomfortable it made his viewers. This frankness caused people to listen and his refreshing honesty shaped public opinion.

Tucker sought to interview Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2021, but he claims his personal email was hacked by the US government and they worked to prevent him.

When the US Congress refused to audit or account for any of the military aid flowing into Ukraine, Tucker was hellbent on exposing the corruption and collusion between American corporations and Ukrainian oligarchs and politicians. Tucker was fired during the same week that Blackrock signed a deal in Kyiv buying the rights to rebuild Ukraine on the backs of the US taxpayers after the war. Not coincidentally, Blackrock also owns more than 15 percent of Fox News. (See: Blackrock is taking over Ukraine.)

The design was to silence Tucker by cancelling his show and keeping him on payroll until after the 2024 elections. The Murdochs thought he would fade into obscurity by that time, much like Fox’s former king of neoconservative primetime advocacy journalism, Bill O’Reilly. Once that predictable plan became obvious, the muzzling fell by the wayside.

Now that Tucker is breaking the monopoly of the one-sided legacy news media, they are absolutely apoplectic. There are even Liberals in the European Union who are seeking to enact government sanctions on him. This is nothing new. Aleksandr Dugin, Russia’s most prominent living philosopher, was sanctioned by the US government. In a nation that supposedly has a free press, you cannot find Dugin’s books on any major bookseller’s website, not Amazon, not Barnes & Noble, not even Books-a-Million. Tucker did a segment on Dugin for Fox News and was told by an Amazon representative that the US government had sent them a list of sanctioned authors.

I did not like Tucker at all a few years ago. He seemed to change from a neoliberal to a neoconservative depending on which network he was on. I noticed something more fundamental changed in 2022 when he began to speak on the Ukraine conflict. As a frequent traveler to both Russia and Ukraine since 1991, I have long been exasperated by the media spin on the former Soviet Republics. Virtually nothing that is reported is correct by means of omission. We get a partial story or a caricature of reality. Granted, international affairs are complex and need to be dumbed down just enough for the average American with an eighth grade reading level will understand in soundbites. Of course, it isn’t only geopolitics that is treated this way.

I applaud Tucker for exposing stories to a mass audience that most will hear nowhere else — even when I don’t agree with everything he says.

The unpardonable sin was committed when Tucker interviewed Colonel Douglas MacGregor several times. MacGregor was previously one of the few voices who testified to the US Congress that the claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction were unfounded. Trump had even brought MacGregor into the White House as an advisor in the administration’s final months to devise a plan to get the US out of Afghanistan in orderly manner. Unfortunately, it was determined that the plan could not be implemented safely in the time Trump had left. History shows us that the fiasco of yet another failed war came a few months later when the Biden administration showed their incompetence. Not only does this country not know how to win a major war, we don’t know an honorable way to lose one either.

That is truly frightening.

MacGregor shockingly contradicted the universally agreed to narrative that the war was going well for Ukraine and therefore US citizens ought to support Zelenskyy with over a hundred billion dollars in military aid. He exposed the truth that Zelenskyy is a mere puppet controlled by the military-industrial-congressional complex and his own country’s oligarchs. Such statements were a bombshell to Fox’s neoconservative audience and owners. Tucker went on to expose the collusion of the major news outlets with the Pentagon and US State Department.

What I find so hypocritical about the legacy media was exemplified by their reaction. When Tucker said that he is the only journalist who has bothered to try to interview Putin, numerous pundits threw a tantrum and claimed it’s all a big lie because they get turned down all the time by the Kremlin for interview requests. Then they went on a tirade claiming that Tucker is doing the bidding of the Kremlin, he’s a Putin stooge, a lover of dictators, and so on.

The point Tucker was making is that none of the journalists who interviewed Volodymyr Zelenskyy ever asked any hard questions, but rather promoted him so he could get hundreds of billions of your money (that is, your children’s future money) for a war that is impossible for Ukraine to win. This is a war that is killing hundreds of thousands of people. No one asks Zelensky about that.

As Hamlet asks Ophelia, who is unwittingly part of his murderous uncle, King Claudius’ plot to remove Hamlet from the line of succession, “if you be honest and fair, your honesty should / admit no discourse to your beauty” (Hamlet 3.1.108-109) If the legacy outlets were “honest and fair,” they would have less regard for maintaining their pretense of political correctness, than for the importance of telling the truth. Their truth would come from their honesty and beauty. But being neither honest nor beautiful, they are strangers to the truth.

Tucker is the only Western journalist in over two years allowed to interview Putin precisely because he is honest and fair. He will ask tough questions. He won’t lie, take things out of context, omit context, or propagandize. It is not in his nature to do that.

The response?

The Ukrainian government’s secret service — the SBU — put him on their kill list — Myrotvorets.

This is a site where Ukraine lists its enemies and crosses out their names once they have been assassinated by the SBU.

Aleksandr Dugin’s daughter, Daria Dugina, was assassinated by the SBU.

Gonzalo Lira, an American journalist, film maker and writer living in Ukraine, was arrested and killed in jail while awaiting trial for bogus charges of supporting Russia.

Both appeared on the Myrotvorets list before they were killed.

Tucker let the US government and their media lapdogs make his point for him. The US government can require Ukraine to take down the website. Our government will censor a Russian philosopher and sanction their sports stars, journalists and artists, but we won’t push the Zelenskyy regime to see that the FSB does not murder civilians and encourage the killing of hundreds of others.

That is truly frightening.

Hopefully, Tucker will raise topics most Western media won’t touch. I will write a follow-up analysis after I see the interview.