American television host and commentator Tucker Carlson was the star guest at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) Festival this year. “We must admit that we do not know everything, and we will be wiser than [US President Joe] Biden, his government, or Ambassador Pressman,” Carlson said at a talk with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s political director in Budapest on Tuesday.
Referring to David Pressman, Carlson said the US ambassador to Hungary did not understand Hungary or Hungarians: “You don’t know anything about [Hungary], you don’t speak Hungarian. Leave!” During the talk with Balázs Orbán, who also heads the board of the organizer Mathias Corvinus Collegium, Carlson also insisted that the US had sabotaged Germany’s energy supplies. “The Biden administration blew up NordStream … and the Germans won’t say anything about it.” Carlson said NATO was on the brink of collapse, according to a report on the website mandiner.hu. Meanwhile, Carlson said Hungary was inspiring for the US as it “knows who it is, knows its own culture” and was trying to preserve it. Hungary, he added, was a central topic in US think tanks. While “many are trying to stop Hungary,” Hungarian politics remains moderate, he said. “No one seems on the verge of killing anybody else … [Hungarian politics] doesn’t seem super-heated and crazy, it doesn’t seem revolutionary,” he said. He praised Hungary for remaining Western and a NATO member while communicating: “We’ve got our own thing going on here … maybe just leave us alone”. Hungary is a model of how “you can preserve your dignity and have a pro-human society without killing anybody, without screaming and without blowing up what you already have,” he said. Carlson also urged young people to read “paper books” as opposed to electronic devices. “Schools come and go and their purpose changes over time … modern universities are now anti-God … but books don’t change, and they help people to discern between good and bad,” he said.