Last week, former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, who has successfully ventured out with his own media company after being summarily dismissed from his top-rated primetime show on the cable news station last year, scored one of his biggest interviews to date. Carlson interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin.

Even before the interview aired, Carlson got pushback from various media pundits allegedly for deigning to platform one of America’s and Europe’s biggest adversaries. However, part of that outrage, whether feigned or genuine, likely stems from jealousy over the fact that Putin has granted no interviews with any media outlets, mainstream or otherwise, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago.

Until Carlson’s interview, NBC News had been the last Western media outlet to get an interview with Putin back in the summer of 2021.

So, at least part of the criticism of Carlson likely stems from the fact that he, while a well-known name in news media, is now an outsider and one of the biggest faces of the growing online alternative media sphere. If anything, Carlson’s interview with Putin is a huge score for alternative media and will give it more credibility — exactly what the mainstream legacy media does not want to see happen.

That said, there is the interview itself, which lasted some two hours and at times served to be little other than an opportunity for the old KGB propagandist to drone on about his twisted views of history and to ply his version of it. Furthermore, much criticism has been laid on Carlson for failing to press Putin on his revisionism, either out of his own ignorance of history or out of deference to Putin due to his isolationist sentiments.

By and large, Putin took the opportunity to effectively lecture Carlson on Russian history, harkening all the way back to the Ryurik dynasty’s founding in 862 AD. While few should fault Carlson for his lack of knowledge of ancient Russian history, when Putin ventured into the 20th century — and more specifically, the supposed cause of World War II — one would have hoped for more pushback against some of the dictator’s more flawed assertions.

Of importance to the current situation is Putin’s use of revisionist history to justify his invasion of Ukraine. While Putin made little reference to the “denazification” of Kyiv, which he had ridiculously asserted in the early days of the invasion, he ironically used Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 to justify his own actions against Ukraine.

Putin blamed Poland for starting World War II over its refusal to bow to Adolf Hitler’s intentionally provocative demands for a Danzig corridor. Putin’s basis for faulting Poland, and in turn Ukraine, is the notion that they have no legitimate right to exist as sovereign nation-states. Just as Hitler sought to rebuild the German empire that was wiped out following World War I, Putin aims to rebuild the Russian empire of which Ukraine was once part.

It may be a myopic fantasy to resurrect Russia’s past glory, but Putin appears to truly believe in this idealized version of history.

Should Carlson have done the interview? Yes. Despite the widely raised objections and Carlson’s own lack of holding Putin to account for untruths, it served to show people, especially in the West, how Putin thinks and how he seeks to manipulate the record.

While some fear that this interview may cause some Americans to side with Putin in his war with Ukraine, they are missing the genuine reason why any would be tempted to see Putin as anything other than the truly ruthless and murderous dictator that he is.

Much of this has to do with the fact that it was Hillary Clinton and the Washington deep state that sought to use a bogus claim of Donald Trump colluding with Russia as the reason he won the 2016 election. The result of much of Washington and the mainstream media propagating that fiction is that half the country no longer trusts either.

Therefore, when the MSM reports that certain foreign political leaders like Putin are bad guys, some will reject those claims outright due to the lack of credibility of the messenger. Many Americans have lost their trust in legacy media because it has lied to them and has sought to manipulate them all for political gain. Unfortunately, this can create a knee-jerk reaction of immediate distrust, in which anything the MSM reports is viewed as suspicious or untrue. The irony is that Putin is former KGB, and thus even more adept at misinformation than American deep staters and media figures.

Hopefully, all Americans will view Putin’s claims with a significant degree of criticism and distrust. It should spur them on to research the claims to find the truth.