The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s 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.
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Glenn Greenwald: I have a bunch of questions from last week, some of which – many of which – are very good. So, I'm going to answer those but I also wanted to cover what was, truly, an extraordinary event, I mean, a historically extraordinary event that took place just a little while ago, earlier this afternoon, in the Oval Office, where Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy came to Washington, primarily, because he was summoned by President Trump and the Trump White House to do so.
The Trump administration is very eager to reach an agreement, is one generous way to put it – pressure the Ukrainians to agree or submit to an agreement is probably the more accurate way to put it – in which the United States will obtain very substantial rights to the crucial minerals in Ukraine, many of which are in the Donbas region that the Russians currently occupy, but many of which are simply spread throughout Western Ukraine that are crucial for industrial growth, there's some lithium there, there's all kinds of rare earth minerals that are necessary for future weapons as well, and for a lot of other drivers of economic growth into the future that President Trump very much has his eye on.
Trump brought this suggestion, this proposal, and was a little bit ambiguous about it. Some people understood that he was offering it as a condition for continuing to fund the war in Ukraine, essentially saying to Ukraine, “If you want us to continue to finance and arm your war against Russia, the condition is that you have to give us the rights to these minerals in your ground or 50% of it or, we become partners in it.”
That led a lot of people, including a very good friend of our show, one of our best friends of the show, Michael Tracey, to conclude that this was Trump essentially saying that he's going to continue to pursue Biden's policy of financing the war in Ukraine, and he just wants some mineral rights as a condition for doing so.
There was another interpretation though that I think was very viable, which is that President Trump has been very fixated on the fact that we gave $350 billion, in his words, to Ukraine. That figure has been disputed, but clearly, it's more than $100 billion, maybe $200 billion. And this isn't new, during the campaign over the last couple of years, he's been objecting to this, questioning and saying “Why is it an American interest? Why does the American worker have to finance the war in Ukraine?”
The other alternative is that he is determined to get that money back through middle rights and he continues to emphasize that he intends to end the war in Ukraine that he intends to negotiate a deal between Ukraine and Russia for the war to end, so it's not as if he is saying, "Oh yeah, I want to continue the war, but I just want to get mineral rights for it.” He keeps claiming that Europe's aid was in the form of loans and grants that they'll get back, some of which it was actually, but not all, whereas the United States just kind of gave this money with no expectation in return. So, it seems more plausible to me that what Trump is saying is, “We want our money back that we've given you, and you'll get the benefit that if we have a vested interest in your country in extracting these rare earth minerals out of your country that that will provide a sense of security because we'll have to have a physical presence there.”
Obviously, the Ukrainians don't want to sign away the very lucrative and valuable rights to these minerals, but at the same time, they have been relying upon and will and hope to continue to rely upon U.S. largesse and Trump's view is why should we just give you this money. So, this visit by President Zelenskyy to the White House today obviously took place in a context in which Trump has been saying very insulting things about Zelenskyy, calling him a mid-rate comedian, accusing him of being a dictator because he won't have elections and being extremely unpopular in his country, a kind of war of words that took place.
Trump seemed to retreat a little bit on it when U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer was in the White House yesterday, on Thursday, and a reporter asked about him having called President Zelenskyy a dictator and he said something like, “Oh, did I say that?” But soon as Zelenskyy got there today, Trump came to greet him outside of the White House dressed in the normal Trump presidential costume of an expensive suit and a silk tie and Zelenskyy showed up in his sweatshirt and jeans and President Trump immediately said, "Oh look, he came well dressed,” already kind of mocking and insulting Zelenskyy.
I guess at the beginning, when Russia invaded, in 2022, it made sense for Zelenskyy to prance around in camouflage or whatever, because the idea was he had to go underground. He was hiding, he was commanding from a bunker. Now, he's on the cover of Vogue, he travels around the world, he's constantly in Kiev, this costume has no more validity, but he continues to wear it. I guess president Trump didn't appreciate the fact that he showed up at the Oval Office for a meeting with president Trump and with Vice President JD Vance dressed the way you might dress if you were going to the mall or if you were hiking up a mountain and expecting the weather to be a little bit nippy. So, that was the way that the meeting began.
They sat down in the traditional place in the Oval Office where world leaders when they visit the White House end up sitting next to the President. They were both surrounded by officials, the traveling party that Zelenskyy brought with him and on President Trump's left was Vice President JD Vance and then next to him was Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Treasury Secretary right next to him. Obviously world leaders argue all the time, they fight all the time, they have disagreements all the time, especially, in a case like this where there's been a war of words over the past couple of weeks, but even longer going back. There was a fear in Kiev that if Trump won, Ukraine could be endangered, but a true, war broke out, a major confrontation, that first involved President Trump and President Zelenskyy, Vice President Vance got involved, and it just continued to escalate because Zelenskyy, instead of doing what might have been wise, given his dependency and his country's dependency on the United States, kept interrupting, talking over them, fighting with them and therefore fueling this disagreement, making Trump as angry as I've seen him in public.
I've never seen Trump raise his voice this way. I don't know if I would say he lost control of his composure, but he certainly lost his cool. He clearly does not like Zelenskyy, he dislikes Zelenskyy's posture and he basically kept telling him, “Look, you're in no position to do anything but come here with your hat in your hand and you should be expressing gratitude to us and instead, you're very ungrateful, you're very demanding, and you're going to risk World War III. You're playing games with the lives of millions of people, including in your country.” It was a remarkably contentious, public argument that I think isn't just about personality clashes, but it's about some very deep-seated disagreements that clearly the Trump administration and President Trump in particular have with Zelenskyy, with Ukraine.
There's been reporting that Biden used to get very angry with Zelenskyy as well, to the extent that Biden knew what was going on. He felt like Zelenskyy was constantly asking for more money and there have been reports that Biden got very angry on various calls, but none of that happened in public.
Video. Donald Trump, JD Vance, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. February 28, 2025.
It is true, people often point out, and I think rightly so, that a lot of what Donald Trump says, a lot of what he does, a lot of what he threatens he will do, a lot of what he predicts will happen is his way of trying to gain an upper hand in negotiations. If anything, if he prides himself on anything, it's priding himself on being a good dealmaker. That's been his brand and his identity going all the way back those decades when he was a real estate developer in New York, and then a casino developer. The name of his book, as you likely know, is “The Art of the Deal.” This is how he thinks of himself above all else as somebody who's not just a deal maker but drives a very hard deal. So, when he's yelling at Zelenskyy, when he's insulting him, when he's telling him he has no leverage, it very well might be on some level an attempt to force Zelenskyy into doing a deal that President Trump perceives as favorable to the country, even if it's not favorable to Ukraine: "Look, you have no leverage, you need us, you have no cards to play, you're going to basically sign whatever we tell you to sign because if you don't, we'll cut off aid to you and you'll have no chance to fight the Russians, your country is going to be gone.”
So, it might have been some of that, but clearly, as I said, the way in which Trump's comportment was so different than it normally is, I mean, even when he's very angry at the press, he'll be snide, maybe he'll be insulting, it's always with a kind of light demeanor. He doesn't like to show that someone's gotten to him, that someone's made him angry. I don't think it was just Zelenskyy today, I think the whole situation of Zelenskyy demanding more money constantly, of always complaining that it's not enough, is something that clearly Trump is angry about. Angry toward Zelenskyy, angry toward Ukraine, angry toward the Biden administration, resentful toward Europe. And that is likely to have an effect on how President Trump treats Ukraine going forward.
But I think the most important thing continues to be that Trump vowed when he ran, that he would open relations and communication with the Russians in order to end the war in Ukraine promptly, he continues to say that's his goal. So, this idea that some people have, including, as I mentioned, Michael Tracey, that he's really just trying to continue the war indefinitely and wanting to get as much as possible for it seems inconsistent to me with the rhetorical goal he continues to set for himself, the metric of success that he continues to define, which is that he intends to end this war and end it quickly. He constantly says he wants to be known not just as a deal maker, but as a peacemaker. And so, if this war continues indefinitely, I think Trump will consider himself to have failed in that goal that he constantly sets for himself and the metric he invites you to use to judge him by will be a failure.
So, I don't think this was just a negotiating play, I don't think Trump is envisioning this war going on for long, he realizes it depends not just on himself, but on Putin and on the Russians. And part of what I think was so interesting about that interview we did with Professor Dugin was, despite this cartoonish image that the Western media and the Western governments like to depict of Russia being this totalitarian regime and everybody is just subordinate to Putin, Putin speaks and everybody obeys, there's a lot of political pressure on Putin. And it's coming not from the faction that wants to end the war in Ukraine, but the faction that's very concerned that Putin cares too much about integration into the West, that he's too willing to make concessions and give too much away in order to get an agreement with Trump and with NATO in order to end the war.
And so, it's not only up to Trump or even up to Putin, but about how much political space there is for Putin due to the kind of concessions, of the kind of negotiating that would be necessary to end this war – but that is clearly Trump's goal. He thinks this war is a waste, he thinks it is dangerous, he thinks it is creating a lot of unnecessary, massive loss of life, all of which is true, but he also has to drive a hard bargain, not just with Ukraine, but also with Russia, otherwise, there won't be a deal done and I think that continues to be, and I hope it is, what his actual goal is.
But you saw the spillover of what had been the longstanding tensions, probably on Zelenskyy's part, because he was the one who was encouraged and was told that, “Oh, don't worry, you don't have to do a peace deal with Russia,” in the beginning. That's what Victoria Nuland and Boris Johnson told him. “We, the West, are going to continue to support you, no matter what you do, for however long it takes, so just go to war with the Russians. We'll give you everything you need; we'll be behind you.”
As often happens with the United States, either the policy changes, the promises weren't enduring, the climate of Washington changes and Zelenskyy is finding that from his perspective, he prolonged this war, he avoided a diplomatic solution because he was promised aid and now he's being told, “Look, either you sign your mineral rights away or we're going to cut off your aid.” I'm sure he's resentful as well.
He perceives himself as being the tip of the West, of democracy, fighting against Russia. He clearly believes all of that. But as Trump told him, “Look, you’re not winning. You have no chance to win. Your only goal should be to end this war, otherwise you’re not going to have a country left.” And it’s, I think, rather cathartic, actually, to hear a president say that, but also to hear a president say, as he said, yesterday, when asked about the conditions for ending the war, he said, “NATO is out, Ukraine is never going to be part of NATO.” He said that’s probably the reason the war began in the first place.
And so, rather than the caricature “Oh, Putin started the war because he’s a psychotic monster” – even though we’ve heard for 25 years from five different presidents that he’s rational and trustworthy and shrewd and cunning but got turned into like some Hitlerian psychopath overnight who just wants to conquer the world regardless of the cost – Trump said the reality is that it was the U.S. movement toward putting Ukraine in NATO that likely provoked Putin into the war, that that was a factor in the war. It’s also very refreshing to hear through realistic, rather than a propagandistic or fairy-tale view coming from the White House about what has been this horrific and at the end of the day, completely unnecessary war that is now at its fourth full year.
I’m sure there’ll be further fallout probably even over the next day or so, because Zelenskyy is still in the White House. I believe they’re meeting in private right now, as they suggested they would after that incredible outburst in public and we will continue to follow the story.
It has always been our view and continues to be our view that it’s in everybody’s interest, including the United States, for that war to end as soon as possible and that NATO and the United States ensure their own humiliation by defining victory in that war to be something that was never going to happen, which was the expulsion of every Russian troop, not just from Eastern Ukraine and the provinces and the Donbas, but even from Crimea, something that the Russians would never ever do. They’d rather use nuclear weapons than give that up. Now everybody admits that NATO’s definition of victory has no chance of happening. They’ve now changed it to, “Oh no, all we wanted to do is prevent Russia from eating up all of Ukraine.” Russia has more than 20% of Ukraine. There are hundreds of thousands of people dead on both sides and large parts of Ukraine are destroyed. It’s been an absolutely horrific war that could have been avoided at the beginning and had Kamala Harris won, had Joe Biden won, there’s no question in my mind NATO would continue to fund this war and would make no efforts to facilitate a peace deal and probably would block any attempts to do so. And it really is, at the end of the day, only Trump who has that chance to do so.
All right. We had a lot of questions from our Locals members throughout the week, including about the interview that I did and other matters as well. So, I want to just go through as many of them as I can. There are a lot of really interesting ones about some interesting topics and give you my thoughts, both on the interview, the trip to Russia that I did, the trip to Budapest that I did, what I've been hearing and seeing over the last week, but also whatever else everybody is asking.
So, here's the first question, and it is from @THEMILLMAN:
Professor Dugin had some intriguing thoughts on whether Russia is authoritarian and whether their elections are fair. He claimed (paraphrasing) that Russian elections are fair, even if no viable alternative to the current president is offered, and that the people vote in referendums to show whether they are pleased with their leadership or not. And he even argued that it could be okay, if the people show they are very pleased with their leader, for a president to appoint his successor. This reminded me of how great college football coaches often appoint their successors while crappy coaches don't get that privilege. Fans are usually pleased with this dynamic.
Which system would you prefer in the long run?
1) US’s “democratic” system, which has lately resulted in a back-and-forth philosophical pendulum between liberal/globalist vs. realist/nationalist agendas every four years (plus lawfare assassination attempts); or 2) Russia's “democratic authoritarian” (college football coach) system, which has lately resulted in a stable leader that is considered strong/able/nationalist by many in his country. On the downside, their working class is currently fighting in a war, they also censor, etc. (@THEMILLMAN, Locals.)
You know, it's a really good and interesting question. I found this to be one of the most interesting parts of that interview, because obviously, to somebody who was raised in the United States, went to school in the United States, was educated in the United States all throughout my life, starting with Elementary School, Junior High, High School, College, law school, and just being obviously defined by American culture and American outlook, my instinct is to say – and you saw this I think in that discussion that I had with Professor Dugin, “Look you have to have elections. I mean you can say that the citizen is satisfied with the leader but if you're not giving them a real opportunity to express that view one way or the other, to ratify it, to reject it, then you don't really know.” And he was essentially insisting in fact that this attempt to place Russia or the United States on the spectrum of, “Oh, this country is democratic, and this country is authoritarian” is quite reductive, there are a lot more options than that.
We, of course, do consider the United States to be democratic in the sense that every four years we have a national election, every two years we have an election for a third of the Senate and for the entire House of Representatives. But there's a lot of severe flaws in our democracy that make that democracy oftentimes more symbolic and illusory than authentic. Not just censorship, but the fact that the government hides the vast majority of what it actually does of consequence, so much of what the parties claim they stand for are not, in fact, what they do when they get elected. So, they make promises to people or make representations about what they stand for, what they believe, what their values are, what their intentions are, and in reality, they're dancing to a much different tune, typically that of their donor base or the lobbyists who run both parties in all of Washington. So, you can question to what extent, is there democracy?
And then of course you add onto that as the moment suggested, things like trying to put the leading candidate in prison, which is what the Democratic Party did, as well as assassination attempts, which we still know a little about, those two that almost killed Donald Trump. And you add on to that things like interference by the U.S. Security State in our elections, like they did in 2016 with Russiagate, like they did in 2020 with the lie about Hunter Biden’s laptop and you are talking about a democracy that – is the democracy a name for sure? It maybe has democratic values to it in the sense that people do get to express their views more or less but if you have an election where everything is secret, where the government is hiding behind this very opaque wall, where the whole point of an election is theater and deceit to pretend to support an agenda and reality, trying to get elected to keep an agenda preserved, there is an authoritarian aspect to that, and you can have democracy as the face, but it's not necessarily democratic for real.
And I think what Dugin was saying is that, you know, you can have a kind of real totalitarian system, like they have in North Korea, like they have in Saudi Arabia, like they have in Egypt, where there's absolutely zero plurality of thought permitted. It's punished with the hardest core violence. Russia does have some of that. Russia does, in fact, jail dissidents, jail journalists who cross the line of what's acceptable in terms of dissent, but that interview, I think Dugin's critiques of Putin, despite that he clearly supports him, were quite clear. He was advocating a much different course that Putin has taken, expressing concerns about what he thought Putin might do that was the wrong thing to do. And what he's essentially saying is that “Look, I know you in the West grow up being indoctrinated with the view that liberal democracy is clearly superior. We don't think it is.” And it is true that you look at cultures and societies and what he calls “civilizations” all over the world, there's no liberal democracy to that. In fact, we are taught that the American experiment in the founding of the republic was the first of its kind of experiment in democracy, millennia of people being governed, of people being ruled, of people organizing societies without liberal democracy. His argument was, if the West loves liberal democracy, you should have liberal democracy but don't try and believe that your way of thinking and your way of organizing is so objectively superior that not only can you go around lecturing the world, but that you have the right to go around wiping out other civilizations and erasing other cultures and political traditions in order to homogenize the world in your image.
His view is that there are diverse civilizations that we ought to preserve. There's Russian civilization, there's Chinese civilization, there's Islamic civilization, there's Western civilization, and his view is very much that the world is better off when there's a diversity of civilizations rather than this homogenized globalized way of thinking. And I'm never probably going to get to the point where I think, yeah, I'd rather live in a system that doesn't offer people the ability to choose their leaders, but I definitely understand and can even understand not just that it exists but understand why it exists. There are people in the world who don't think that's the best form of choice. And let's remember, the founders actually didn't believe in liberal democracy as we understand it. They wanted white men, property owners, etc., to exclusively have the power. They were petrified by “the rule by the mob.” The whole point of the Bill of Rights is to protect minorities from majoritarian rule. And so, there is this spectrum and there are other ways of organizing besides letting every citizen go and pick their leaders in a framework of propaganda and secrecy and everything else that we in the United States believe is not just the best system for us but the best system objectively and for everybody.
And I do think it's always worth interrogating whether you believe the set of values that you were taught from birth to believe are superior, whether you believe they're superior in adulthood because you never actually critically evaluated them because they irrevocably indoctrinated you and shaped your brain, which I think we're all vulnerable to, or whether those really are the rational conclusions of your own independent critical thought. I don't think we can ever fully extricate ourselves from the things that we've been bombarded with for a long time, fully in order to really step outside of what we've been trained to believe.
All right. Next question is from @INDIEBEE who says:
Why do you keep saying Obama was reluctant to arm Ukraine? That's not true. We started arming the Nazis in Ukraine in 2014 not 2017 when Trump came in. All he did was keep what the Congress was doing going on. He didn't stop them but he didn't start that either. That was started by Biden/Nuland/Obama.
Obama is quoted sometimes as expressing an “Obama doctrine” acknowledging that Russia had an existential interest in Ukraine whereas we do not and that we wouldn't fight a war there. That didn't mean he didn't arm them. He was the president in February 2014 when we had Nuland/Biden overthrow the government of Ukraine using our NGOs and pretending we had nothing to do with it. (@INDIEBEE, Locals.)
All right. It's interesting. Obviously, I'm the one who, maybe there are other people too, but I am somebody who frequently cites that interview that Obama gave with Jeffery Goldberg in the Atlantic on the way out, in 2016, where Jeffrey Goldberg confronted him about why he didn't do more to stand up for the Russians, both in Syria and Ukraine. It was then that Obama said Ukraine was a vital interest and always has been and always will be to Russia. It's right on the other side of their border and never has been and never will be a vital interest to the United States. And the idea that we're going to confront Russia over who rules Crimea or various provinces in the Donbas is incredibly foolish. This is obviously before Russiagate, when Democrats could get away with saying things like that.
I can just cite to you news articles at the time. In June 2015, there was a New York Times article, a headline “Defying Obama, many in Congress press to arm Ukraine.” It's about how members of all parties in Congress were furious that Obama wouldn't send lethal arms to Ukraine. And then there was an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, in March 2022, the headline was “Why Obama didn't arm Ukraine. He misunderstood Putin and the reality of military force in foreign affairs. (The Wall Street Journal. March 7, 2022.)
You're absolutely right. The coup in 2014 that Hillary Clinton, Victoria Nuland, John McCain and Chris Murphy carried out through the State Department was obviously undertaken during the Obama administration. But President Trump today, when meeting with President Zelenskyy, and he said this before, reminded Zelenskyy, “Look, Obama wouldn't even give you Javelins, anti-tank weapons. I'm the one who gave you that.” And it's something I often pointed out because in 2017 and 2018, when the media narrative was, “Donald Trump is a Russian agent, he's controlled through blackmail by Putin,” that insanity, the reality was it was the Trump administration that authorized the provision of lethal aid and certain kinds of weapons, including the Javelins to Ukraine, that Obama refused to provide. That is just true. That's what Trump himself said today. That's what those newspaper articles that are contemporaneous, and after the fact that we just cited, say as well. I remember it very well, I remember talking about it very well.
It was Democrats and Republicans constantly attacking Obama, even accusing him of being too soft on Russia, scared of Putin, whatever, because he wouldn't send those arms to Ukraine. It doesn't exonerate Obama. He allowed a lot of interference by the United States, by Hillary Clinton, by Victoria Nuland, in Ukraine, much of which provoked or led to the provocation of Russia feeling besieged and threatened. And you could also say that Trump only gave lethal weapons because he was under so much pressure to prove that he wasn't a Russian agent or that there were people on his side of the administration, as we know is true, that were neocons and hawks who kind of did it despite him.
But it was always the main point to me was that while the media was claiming that Putin controlled Trump and they were all running around, “What does Putin have on Trump sexually, financially, politically?” constantly implying that he was captive to Putin's demands. Trump, number one, provided lethal arms to Ukraine on the other side of the Russian border, and number two, kept agitating to force the Europeans and especially the Germans to cease buying natural gas from Russia through Nord Stream 2. In other words, Trump was attacking the two most important vital interests of Russia, Nord Stream 2 selling natural gas to Europe and sending lethal arms to Ukraine while the media was moronically and idiotically suggesting that he was somehow controlled and blackmailed by Putin.
So, it is true that Obama was resistant to sending those types of arms into Ukraine. It was done under the Trump administration, and it was escalated significantly under Biden. They sent Kamala Harris to basically threaten that Ukraine was going into NATO and shortly thereafter Russian troops rolled in mass into Ukraine in February 2022.
All right. The next question is from @PETERLALLY:
What was it like to talk to a real intellectual? As a layman, Dugin strikes me as the real thing - chalk and cheese compared to all these overblown Western academics who merely put on appearances.
(@PETERLALLY, Locals.)
All right, couldn't agree more, so let me just say a couple things about this.
You hear a lot of times, "Oh, so-and-so is so brilliant.” “Oh, this person's really brilliant. You know, you should go talk to them." And then you get there and you talk to them and you can see that they really believe in their own brilliance. And they've heard for so long that they're brilliant, maybe they once were, but they're so enamored of themselves and hearing themselves speak that they just kind of ramble incoherently.
They just love the sound of their own voice, they just kind of say things they've been saying for decades and you sit there and you listen to it and you're like, this is really worthless. Zizek is a perfect example of this. So is Bernard-Henry Levy. There are others like that. These Western intellectuals who barely have anything interesting or independent-minded to say.
One reason I've appreciated Chomsky for so long, despite having disagreements with him, is that I do think he's a real intellectual. I think he reasons from first principles. I think he has a coherent worldview that has very much been the byproduct of his own critical thought and reading. And I always understand what he's saying. You can say that his reaction to COVID was one exception. I absolutely give an exception to that. He was 92 years old. People that old were justifiably frightened of COVID. I know it altered his life. He didn't leave his house in Arizona for two years because of it. And so, I give him some license there to have been irrational. But in general, go just listen to a random Chomsky speech on foreign policy, on international relations, on the distribution of power, on his original field, as a linguist, and you'll be amazed by the breadth of his knowledge and his ability to coherently organize it into a coherent worldview.
And that's what I got from Professor Dugin. You know, I don't know how many of you know this, but I studied philosophy in college, it was my major. I strongly considered going to graduate school to get a PhD in philosophy and teaching philosophy, writing philosophy. It's really what I wanted to do. I was intensely engaged with it. It probably shaped my thinking in my 20s more than anything else. I actually came to Europe. I went to Germany because I was so interested in German philosophy. I studied German, I learned German for that reason. It was really a major focal point of my worldview as I began in early adulthood.
One of the reasons I liked it so much is that I don't have a very artistic brain, I have a more rigorous, analytical, logical brain. That's the kind of rigor that I'm attracted to and one of the things that I find so important and I think my free speech advocacy is about this, my belief in due process, whatever principles that I try to defend, I try and defend them first in the abstract as first principles. So, you adopt these principles and then you go about applying them to every situation universally, regardless of whether they're good or bad for your particular interests at the moment.
I think what frustrates me so much is people who can't reason from first principles, who think they believe in a principle but are incapable of applying it consistently or only apply it when it suits them or when it's someone they like.
What I found with Professor Dugin is – and, you know, there are a lot of people who think he has a very dangerous sort of worldview. It's a little bit fascistic. I get that perspective. Just leave that aside for the moment. I don't really want to opine morally on what he thinks. I was more interested in journalistically interviewing him, so that people could understand the Russian perspective or at least that strain of it. I wasn't there to condemn him; I wasn’t there to push back because I wanted to hear what he said and there was never a moment of a false note.
He has a very strong worldview that is not based on nationalism. He hates the idea of nation-states. It's based on this idea of “civilizations” being the highest order of the highest achievement of human beings and that we ought to be preserving, our own civilization, so that the world is filled with different civilizations, major ones – the Chinese civilization, the Islamic civilization, the Christian civilization, the Western civilization, the Russian civilization – and small ones. You know, he talked about how infuriated he is when the West finds small tribes that are unconnected from the world and immediately want to change them, or African tribes.
He believes in this diversity of civilizations as the highest order, and everything flows from that, which is why he hates globalism, because he sees it as this leveling force, this homogenizing force of erasing tradition and history in civilizations [ ]. Imagine, and I think this is one of the things that I really got from being there. I've been to Russia four times before. I think this is my fifth. But you know, you go there and you're immediately struck by the richness of its history, its culture and its traditions. I mean, this is a country that goes back thousands of years, and it's produced some of the highest levels of art, poetry, literature and science, or architecture. I understand why someone who's Russian would be proud of Russian civilization and want to preserve it, similar to why I understand why people who are German or French would, or American, or Islamic or Chinese. But Americans have a much shorter history: you're talking about 250 years, not thousands of years. And so, I can understand why people in other parts of the world look at their civilization, their history, their traditions, as something of much higher value than Americans typically look at theirs and why they want to preserve it.
So, I agree it was one of the things I liked most about him. Every time I dug deeper to try to get to the root of what his thinking was, to test the rationale for it, he had an answer that was not just a sensible answer, but which was based on inordinate amounts of reading, studying and scholarship in multiple fields of disciplines. And I did find that impressive. I wish that people would reason that way. I'm not saying everybody's going to be as studied or learned or brilliant as he is, but just the ability to think rigorously and through principles. I think it's an absolute prerequisite to having a worthwhile perspective, and he absolutely did, in a way that was pretty rare.
All right, that's it for now. I'm on the road, so I'm going to go ahead and leave it there. As I said, next week, we will be here Monday through Friday, live at 7 p.m. Eastern, but it will be guest-hosted by a truly excellent journalist and I'm really excited to have him on our show as a guest host for the entire week. It's Lee Fang. Have a great evening and a great weekend everybody. See you soon.
