Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
The View from Moscow: Key Russian Analyst Aleksandr Dugin on Trump, Ukraine, Russia, and Globalism
System Update #414
March 03, 2025
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The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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As I mentioned before, I am traveling to pursue certain interviews, conduct other interviews and speak to people in places such as Russia. Here I am currently in Budapest. I spent the last several days in Moscow. I'll be in other countries over the next week or so. A lot is going on in terms of the reaction to President Trump, to the Trump administration, to the massive changes he is speaking about and in some cases bringing to alliances such as NATO that have repercussions and ripple effects throughout the world, but especially in Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Western Europe. 

In Moscow, I conducted several interviews, one of which I am very excited to show you tonight. It is with Professor Aleksandr Dugin, whose role in Moscow is undoubtedly significant and influential, but, oftentimes, misapprehended or misdescribed in the West. 

Dugin has often been called Putin's brain in Western media, which is designed to imply that he's the person who sits next to Putin, whispering in his ear, shaping the dogma, the ideology and the geostrategy that Putin follows. 

He is more a philosopher, a scholar, a theorist, but he has become a household name in Russia. He is undoubtedly influential, although he is very influential in particular factions and particular circles, one that tends to look at President Putin almost as too moderate of a figure, too cautious of a figure, too restrained a figure. And I think therein lies one of the fascinating parts of this interview, which I have to say, and I said this last night, I consider to be one of the most interesting interviews I've ever conducted. It illustrates the fact that here in the West, we love to, or at least we're often subjected to these very cartoon versions of what Russia is, its totalitarian regime: Adolf Hitler is in charge of Moscow in the form of Vladimir Putin. He's this totalitarian figure. He speaks and everybody obeys instantly and there's no dissent. There's no questioning. The minute you question, you're killed or murdered or sent to a gulag. Of course, the complexities of modern-day life in Russia and Moscow, in particular, are far more nuanced, far more complex than that. There are constantly competing factions and ideological disagreements. 

I might analogize the role that Dugin plays maybe to a Steve Bannon figure where he is unquestionably pro-Putin in the way that Steve Bannon is unquestionably pro-Trump and there have been definitely instances and time periods and issues in which Bannon has played a vital role, arguably the central role, in shaping the mentality, ideology and worldview of Donald Trump, much like Professor Dugin has done with the Putin circle. 

There are other times that Bannon has been kind of cast out of favor, sort of speaks and incites a significant part of the pro-Trump base, but from the outside and that I think is also Professor Dugin, who represents and symbolizes a very significant part of the pro-Putin faction in Moscow, but not one that always gets its way by any means. 

In fact, over the last 15-20 years, there have been times when Professor Dugin has been ostracized, there are other times that he has been kept far more in favor. He probably is at a higher point of influence now because he was somebody who was urging Putin in Moscow to annex Crimea in the wake of the coup attempt, the successful coup that the West helped engineer with Victoria Nuland, John McCain and Chris Murphy and the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID and Ukraine right on the other side of the Russian border. 

He has also been a stalwart defender of the Russian war in Ukraine, which he sees as necessary to combat the influence of the West and NATO and the United States and globalism generally in Ukraine. But he has also at times been critical of the Kremlin in subtle ways for not going far enough in his view for being too eager to recreate engagement with the West, positive relations with the West, even if in his eyes it means sacrificing legitimate Russian interests. 

And so, a lot is going on in Moscow given what Trump is trying to do in terms of facilitating a Russian-Ukrainian peace deal that will end the Russian war in Ukraine. He and others in Moscow are very concerned about what that might look like, what Russia might give away, what Russia might concede. 

There's a lot of robust debate taking place in Budapest as well and throughout Eastern Europe, throughout Western Europe, all as a response to Trump taking the global order and kind of shaking it up like one of those little glass paper weights you put on your desk when you have the water and you pick it up and you shake it and everything kind of moves. That's always the potential that I’ve seen in Donald Trump that it kind of takes 80-year-old post-World War II institutions that have done so much harm, just shakes them up and forces them to rearrange themselves. That's the reason there's so much hysteria in establishment circles when it comes to what Trump is doing. 

So, I had a few general ideas of what I wanted to talk to Professor Dugin, but I didn't have any written questions. As you'll see, I just have a little notebook in front of me, occasionally jotting down some ideas. I wanted it to be a very organic and natural discussion as opposed to a rigid interview. I wanted to hear what he said and react to that and kind of go where that took us as opposed to just having an agenda beforehand. Like I said, I found it to be an extremely thought-provoking interview. There's a reason why we're told not to listen to Russian voices, why the EU forbade any platforming of Russian state TV so that all Western populations would hear the propaganda of Western countries about Ukraine, about Russia, because when you can hear directly from the other side, from somebody you're told not to listen to, the impression that is left with you is radically different, of course, than if those ideas are mediated to you, or served to you, or distorted for you by somebody who wants you to have a particular impression of that other side but not actually ever listen to them. 

So, the conversation ended up being an hour and a half, an hour and 40 minutes. For me, the time flew. In addition to having written questions, I also didn't have a clock or a phone in front of me. I just kind of got a feel for how long the conversation went. The time really flew. His English is excellent, but he's also a very, very clear thinker. He was trained originally as a philosopher, or self-taught as a philosopher, speaks multiple languages, having learned them himself and he thinks and reasons primarily as a philosopher, as a political analyst, secondarily. So, he really speaks from first principles, those first principles that serve as the foundation for at least a significant faction of Russian thought that wields a lot of influence in Moscow. It's really worth hearing what he thinks about Donald Trump and Washington, about the international aspect of this populist nationalist movement, as well as the multipolar world that is clearly emerging and what that might look like and his vision for Russia and what he calls Russian civilization or Russian culture and the role that it plays in the world in relationship to other forms of culture. It's a kind of voice that you very rarely hear, at least in depth, in Western discourse. 

So, I found this discussion extremely illuminating, very thought-provoking, very engaging. I really think you will too. I hope you will and we are proud to show it to you. 

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The Interview: Prof. Dugin

G. Greenwald: Professor, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. It's great to see you. I want to start with the change in what seems like the climate and certainly in Washington, in the United States, where there's a great deal of expectation that with a new president, one who specifically is vowing that he wants to see an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine and there's a lot of expectation that that is going to happen. I think the same is true in Western European capitals, for better or for worse. Some people are happy, some people are not. What is the expectation here in Moscow in terms of that likelihood? 

Aleksandr Dugin: First of all, we observe carefully how deep the changes that Mr. Trump has brought with his new team, new administration are. That is something incredible. He has changed direction 180%. So that is totally reversal of the previous administration. 

G. Greenwald: In what way do you mean that? 

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RE: Charlie Kirk ... I appreciated Glenn's comments tonight. It reminded me of the Clint Eastwood quote from Unforgiven: "Its a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away everything he's got and everything he's ever gonna have."
That thing "he's gonna have" might be a change of mind about something you disagreed with him about. I just thought it was important that Glenn emphasized the point that we are all much more than our opinion about any one particular issue and even our opinion on that issue will often change over time.

I share your views on the sanctity of human life. I go a step further And believe In the sanctity of all life. The problem that America has is one of constructed distraction. The whole left/right conflict is the Distraction. The powerful are very good at keeping the public sight off of them. When the sites do get turned on them as it did when Luigi Mangione shot a CEO whose company caused endless suffering, (allegedly) they absolutely lose their minds. Keep the sights on them. We are fighting ourselves otherwise, distracted, as these powerful sociopaths pillage the last scraps of wealth from America before it completely collapses and then retreat to their luxury bunkers in Hawaii or Brazil (😬) or their summer Estate in New Zealand.

Also, I think the term “sanctity of life“ is too closely linked to the church. This term needs a rebranding in my opinion.

I also believe that Charlie Kirk was wearing body armour and the bullet hit centre mass and deflected into his neck. I think the ...

September 10, 2025

Enjoyed your show on Charlie Kirk, whose death has affected me more than I had anticipated. Probably because he was younger than my own son, and he has two young children (and I was already sad about the Ukrainian lady being stabbed). Anyway, here's an interesting post from a teacher on Substack about Kirk:
https://substack.com/profile/8962438-internalmedicinedoc/note/c-154594339

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Trump and Rubio Apply Panama Regime Change Playbook to Venezuela; Michael Tracey is Kicked-Out of Epstein Press Conference
System Update #508

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

 

 The Trump administration proudly announced yesterday that it blew up a small speedboat out of the water near Venezuela. It claimed that – without presenting even a shred of evidence – that the boat carried 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang, and that the boat was filled with drugs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio – whose lifelong dream has been engineering coups and regime changes in Latin American countries like Venezuela and Cuba – claimed at first that the boat was headed toward the nearby island nation of Trinidad. But after President Trump claimed that the boat was actually headed to the United States, where it intended to drop all sorts of drugs into the country, Secretary of State Rubio changed his story to align with Trump's and claimed that the boat was, in fact, headed to the United States. 

There are numerous vital issues and questions here. First, have Trump supporters not learned the lesson yet that when the U.S. Government makes assertions and claims to justify its violence, that evidence ought to be required before simply assuming that political leaders are telling the truth. Second, what is the basis, the legal or Constitutional basis, that permits Donald Trump to simply order boats in international waters to be bombed with U.S. helicopters or drones instead of, for example, interdicting the boat, if you believe there are drugs on it, to actually prove that the people are guilty before just evaporating them off the planet? And then third, and perhaps most important: is all of this – as it seems – merely a prelude to yet another U.S. regime change war, this time, one aimed at the government of oil-rich Venezuela? We'll examine all of these events and implications, including the very glaring parallels between what is being done now to what the Bush 41 administration did in 1989 when invading Panama in order to oppose its one-time ally, President Manuel Noriega, based on exactly the same claims the Trump administration is now making about Venezuela. For a political movement that claims to hate Bush/neocon foreign policy, many Trump supporters and Trump officials sure do find ways to support the wars that constitute the essence of this ideology they claim to hate. 

Then, the independent journalist and friend of the show, Michael Tracey, was physically removed from a press conference in Washington D.C. yesterday, one to which he was invited, that was convened by the so-called survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and their lawyer. Michael's apparent crime was that he did what a journalist should be doing. He asked a question that undercut the narrative of the press event and documented the lies of one of the key Epstein accusers, lies that the Epstein accuser herself admits to having told. All of this is part of Michael's now months-long journalistic crusade to debunk large parts of the Epstein melodrama – efforts that include claims he's made, with which I have sometimes disagreed, but it's undeniable that the work he's doing is journalistically valuable in every instance: we always need questioning and critical scrutiny of mob justice or emoting-driven consensus to ask whether there's really evidence to support all of the claims. And that's what Michael has been doing, and he's basically been standing alone while doing it, and he'll be here to discuss yesterday’s expulsion from this press conference as well as the broader implications of the work he's been trying to do. 

 

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Minnesota Shooting Exploited to Impose AI Mass Surveillance; Taylor Lorenz on Dark Money Group Paying Dem Influencers, and the Online Safety Act
System Update #507

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

 

The ramifications of yesterday's Minneapolis school shooting – and the exploitations of it – continue to grow. On last night's program, we reviewed the transparently opportunistic efforts by people across the political spectrum to immediately proclaim that they knew exactly what caused this murderer to shoot people. As it turned out, the murderer was motivated by whatever party or ideology, religion, or social belief that they hate most. Always a huge coincidence and a great gift for those who claim that. 

There's an even more common and actually far more sinister manner of exploiting such shootings: namely, by immediately playing on people's anger and fear to tell them that they must submit to greater and greater forms of mass surveillance and other authoritarian powers to avoid such events in the future. As they did after the 9/11 attack, which ushered in the full-scale online surveillance system under which we all live, Fox News is back to push a comprehensive Israel-developed AI mass surveillance program in the name of stopping violent events in the future. We'll tell you all about it. 

 Then, we have a very special surprise guest for tonight. She is Taylor Lorenz, who reported for years for The New York Times and The Washington Post on internet culture, trends in online discourse, and social media platforms. She's here in part to talk about her new story that appeared in WIRED Magazine today that details a dark money program that secretly shovels money to pro-Democratic Party podcasters and content creators, including ones with large audiences, and yet they are prohibited from disclosing even to their viewership that they're being paid in this way. We'll talk about this program and its implications. And while she's here, we'll also discuss her reporting on, and warnings about new online censorship schemes that masquerade as child protection laws, namely, by requiring users to submit proof of their identity to access various sites, all in the name of protecting children, but in the process destroying the key value of online anonymity. We'll talk to her about several other related issues as well. 


 

There've been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years, since the 9/11 attack, of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people I think correctly view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights, protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be an American. And a lot of that happened. In fact, much of it, one could say most of it, happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9/11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later, six weeks later. We've done an entire show on it because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9/11, even though it's extremely mysterious – the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved. But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased and into that breach, into that highly emotional state, stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting, MTG & Thomas Massie VS AIPAC, and More
System Update #506

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

 

We are going to devote the show tonight to more questions that have come from our Locals members over the week. It continues to be some really interesting ones, raising all sorts of topics. 

We do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today when a former student who attended that school went to the church, opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom, young students between eight and ten, were killed. The other 17 were wounded, and amazingly, it’s expected that all of them are to survive. The carnage could have been much worse; the tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding the mass shooting attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda. So, let's get to the first question.

 It is from @ZellFive, who's a member of our Locals community. He offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people. They write:

 

So, I'm really glad that this is one of the questions that we got today because this is a point I've been arguing for so long. So, let me just try to give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law rather than just circulating on the internet. 

So, the suspected killer is somebody named Robin Westman, who is 23 years old. After they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon. The person's birth name is Robert Westman, and around 16 or 17 years old, he decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin, and began identifying as a trans woman, so that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary, and there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that. We will definitely get to that. 

 

The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons. I believe various automatic rifles as well. I don't think they used any of those weapons at school. I believe they just used a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken. But we'll see about that. 

It was essentially a manifesto both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons. And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground. And I mean that literally. The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try to depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates. And it happens in every single case. 

Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda in and out of it instantly. Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter, instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try to increase support for gun control. Whereas people on the right often do the opposite. 

On the right, they typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security. We need more police. So, there's that kind of an almost automatic and reflexive exploitation again, almost before anything is known, but there is an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter. They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize whatever group a person hates most. 

This is unbelievably ignorant, deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons. The first of which is that every single political action, every single ideological movement, produces evil mass shooters. For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooters that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes. And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, I mean, you can develop a clear, reliable, concise and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago, but you're so insightful, your investigative skills are so profound, that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children. 

The idea that anyone can do that is preposterous on its face. I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court, “We don't know yet what the motive is; we're collecting clues.” But almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat is willing to say that. Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or in this religion that is the one I like the most to demonize. It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here. And yet it's so prevalent. 

I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political pundits, influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice. Not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly, we know that the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs. And I'm not talking about random X users, I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well-known. 

I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was and by huge coincidence they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree, or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate. That's always what is done. And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes, we have had Anders Breivik in Norway, who made it very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shot up a summer camp in Norway. We had the Christchurch, New Zealand killer who attacked two mosques and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because it was viewed that Islam is a danger. We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket, who made manifest their white supremacist views. We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity, as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there, I mean, I could go on and on. 

As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their beliefs. But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the times – I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the times because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause. That often is the pretext for what they're doing; that may be how they convince themselves that what they are doing is justified. But far more often than not, the principle overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or their suffering from delusions. 

And this isn't something I invented today. This is something I've long been saying. And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear and say, “I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African-American because I hate Black people and I don't think they belong in the United States,” or “I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers” that I mentioned, even then, it may not be the case that the person's representation of what they're is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness, or all kinds of other issues to be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal-clear manifesto that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible. It's just so intellectually bankrupt. 

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