Jun 2, 2026 · 1 hr 3 min · 10 segments
You can feel when a society loses its ability to talk and starts reaching for labels instead. Unfettered Speech brings on Tucker Carlson for a frank conversation about how he went from the top of…
Leonard GoodmanHostPatrick SullivanHostAnd I'm like, I can't even, that's not a defense of Russia or Iran, or it's not a defense of anybody.
We were talking about this just earlier today, Pat and I, but I remember right after 9-11, there was like a week or two of a window where people were discussing.
I was teaching a college class back then, and I remember the students were asking the question, why do these people hate us so much that they would sacrifice their lives to fly planes into buildings just to hurt us? And I think it was an important discussion to have.
And, you know, it began, I remember, the exact same environment that you recall.
And it was a week or 10 days before, you know, people had settled on the storyline, the narrative.
And a guy called Fareed Zakaria who I think is a poisonous little man who now works at CNN, I think.
But he was at an editor at Newsweek then and he wrote a piece that circulated to every, I mean, everybody I knew read the piece and it was, why did they do this? Because people were genuinely baffled.
And the answer was because their societies are rotten and there are all these tensions within Arab societies.
But basically the answer was they did this because they suck and it had no relationship at all.
There was no cause and effect between anything we had done Which is not to justify 9-11.
But the point is, there was a relationship between American foreign policy and the blowback we received then and at the USS Cole, Cobar Towers, Marine Barracks in Beirut, All of these things were, to some extent, predictable because we were doing things in the Middle East that were bad for the populations of the Middle East.
And I'm like, I can't even, that's not a defense of Russia or Iran, or it's not a defense of anybody.
We were talking about this just earlier today, Pat and I, but I remember right after 9-11, there was like a week or two of a window where people were discussing.
I was teaching a college class back then, and I remember the students were asking the question, why do these people hate us so much that they would sacrifice their lives to fly planes into buildings just to hurt us? And I think it was an important discussion to have.
And, you know, it began, I remember, the exact same environment that you recall.
And it was a week or 10 days before, you know, people had settled on the storyline, the narrative.
And a guy called Fareed Zakaria who I think is a poisonous little man who now works at CNN, I think.
But he was at an editor at Newsweek then and he wrote a piece that circulated to every, I mean, everybody I knew read the piece and it was, why did they do this? Because people were genuinely baffled.
And the answer was because their societies are rotten and there are all these tensions within Arab societies.
But basically the answer was they did this because they suck and it had no relationship at all.
There was no cause and effect between anything we had done Which is not to justify 9-11.
But the point is, there was a relationship between American foreign policy and the blowback we received then and at the USS Cole, Cobar Towers, Marine Barracks in Beirut, All of these things were, to some extent, predictable because we were doing things in the Middle East that were bad for the populations of the Middle East.
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