The Tucker-Putin Interview Fever Dream: Full Analysis

An insight into the mind of a mad king

Hello friends, ever since the crazy CCP bomb threat stuff upended my life in 2022, I have been trying to make my pro-democracy activism more sustainable. One way I’ve tried to do this is by producing more long-form writing and videos. My hope is that by doing this I can still have a voice when it comes to the great debates of the day without freaking out my loved ones with constant arrests, dangers and threats.

My long term goal here is to build up a following on YouTube and my dream is to one day be able to make a living as a full time writer and presenter. I have been slowly improving my video production and editing and I think this video is by far my best one yet - a full analysis of Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Putin. Please give the video a like to boost it in the YouTube algorithm! If you have any tips to help me grow my YouTube I would be really thankful.

I have included the full essay on which I based my video essay below for those who would prefer reading.

In personal news, I just started law school at UQ. One day I hope I will be able to practice as a human rights lawyer, God willing. I will be busy this semester but I will try my best to release at least one video and blog post a week while studying.

As always you can support my work by subscribing to my Substack or my Patreon: patreon.com/drewpavlou. Thank you so much!

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The Tucker-Putin Fever Dream

The Tucker Carlson-Putin interview is insane. It’s like a fever dream, just hours of paranoid ranting and delusional lies, unhinged conspiracy theories, bitter resentments. Probably the closest analogy we have for this interview is Frank Costanza’s beautiful tradition of Festivus and its airing of grievances. 

It’s obviously despicable and morally debauched considering the way it came just days prior to Putin’s execution of his main political opponent Navalny. Tucker really has disgraced himself for all time by staging this propaganda charade with an internationally wanted war criminal - I think it is roughly morally equivalent to conducting a Women’s Weekly cover spread with Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair in September 1939. 

On balance though I think we are lucky that this interview exists. Tucker’s status as a simpering sycophant and propagandist meant that Putin let his guard down, exposing the full range of his demented obsessions and ideological fixations. So this interview is historically important -  Tucker inadvertently provided us a great window into the madness consuming Putin’s mind. 

What’s hilarious about it all is that Tucker clearly panicked as the interview progressed. He wanted to talk about NATO and drag queens and gay toilets but Putin wanted to lecture him on one thousand years of Russian victimhood instead. Tucker kept desperately trying to steer Putin back to the firm ground of the Fox News boomer culture war slop but instead the mad tsar just wanted to rant about the treachery of the world and his enemies for two hours. Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Genghis Khan, Batu Khan, the Poles, the Americans, the British, the Germans, the Lithuanians, the Jews, the Austro-Hungarian Empire - all form part of one single grand conspiracy over one thousand years to corrupt the mystical Russian soul. Tucker just sits there confused in response to this all and tries to ask Putin whether he believes in UFOs. Just so beautiful. 

Voltaire once said: ‘’I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.’’ And indeed here he has. Let us parse through the wreckage of this interview and analyze what we can learn from it.

The Part Where Putin Teaches Us History

Putin’s historical rants are incredible. I actually went through and counted and the man mentioned Adolf Hitler by name more than 15 times in his interview. He mentions the word ‘’coup d’etat’’ some 17 times. He mentions Poland and the Poles more than 47 times. 

Putin’s forty minute rant about the grand thousand year conspiracy against Holy Mother Rus is reminiscent of a 4chan schizoposter so it is quite disturbing that this is a dictator in charge of a huge nuclear arsenal. I think he’s lost touch with baseline reality and he’s now living in a complete fantasy world. It is probably a product of his extreme isolation which began to take hold during the COVID pandemic. 

He seems to have spent most of the pandemic isolating himself in the Kremlin archives pouring over old maps and letters in an attempt to prove the eternal historic union of Russia and Ukraine. And now these delusional fantasies somehow seem to have become even worse, perhaps under the pressure and stress of war. 

This is why I think Putin’s opening thirty minute monologue about medieval history will go down forever as an unforgettable insight into the mind of a mad king - a mad tsar. 

Tucker began with the most softball of questions about NATO expansion and Putin insisted instead on first outlining his version of the entire history of Eastern Europe, complete with digressions about Genghis Khan and the Mongol Hordes. Tucker’s expression gradually darkened and there are points where he genuinely seems kind of frightened. 

He tried to intervene at multiple points only to be simply ignored by Putin who continues on and on with this endless stream of historical mythology: ‘’Prince Ivan Ivanovitch Ivanovsky dreamt of a virginal dragon which would bring a magic conch to the plains of Khrakovka’’ and crazy things of this nature. These are the kinds of myths and random dynastic trivia that establish Russia’s eternal claim to Ukraine. By way of analogy, consider that Queen Anne of Denmark is Australian. Applying Putin-Tucker logic this should give Australia the right to invade and annex Denmark in about 1000 years time. Danish friends, please expect us in the year 3024 CE - We already beat you at the World Cup!

Anyway, all the sycophants of course immediately rushed out to praise Putin and gush over his incredible grasp of history. Take a random selection of Tweets by prominent pro-Russian accounts:

‘’THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT INTERVIEW OF OUR LIFETIMES. WHATEVER YOUR VIEWS ON PUTIN, HE IS SUPREMELY INTELLIGENT MAN.’’ 

‘’THIS IS SERIOUS COLLEGE LEVEL HISTORY.’’ 

Matt Walsh: ''Putin's intelligent, scholarly grasp of world history is truly fascinating and beautiful.’’ SO INTELLIGENT, SO SCHOLARLY.  

This is all lunacy, of course. Russian YouTubers were laughing at idiot Westerner sycophants falling over themselves to praise this eighth grade historical textbook slop. Putin’s monologue was entirely lifted from the standard Russian history textbook for thirteen year olds. And anybody raised in a Balkan/Slavic household has already heard this exact same speech ten thousand times. This is literally just drunk ultranationalist boomer ranting after 15 shots of vodka/ouzo.

Ultimately, the historical inventions and falsehoods that form part of Putin’s tirade are simply too many to count. That is probably the point. The blizzard of propaganda and lies is supposed to simply browbeat you into submission. Timothy Snyder explains this well: ‘’As soon as (you) … start correcting the factual errors, it’s as though (you are) endorsing the overall logic.’’ But we can go through some of them and expose their utter stupidity. 

It all begins, for Putin, when the people of Novgorod ‘’invite’’ the ‘’Prince Rurik’’ to rule them. In actuality, a Viking slaving company known as ‘’Rus’’ worked its way down Eastern European river routes while raiding Slavic peoples and hauling them away as slaves. Putin claims that this slaver proto-state centralized and united the Russian lands under ‘’one language.’’ In reality, the Russian language would not begin to emerge for centuries. As Timothy Snyder argues, the Medieval Viking state of Kievan Rus had much more in common with Sweden, Denmark or Norway than Russia.

I quote from Snyder now: 

‘’Kyivan Rus was in no way "Russia."  It was named after Vikings who became rulers. That name "Rus" came to be associated with the land and its people and with Christianity. But "Russia" as Putin is using it, when it refers to anything specific, is an empire founded in St. Petersburg (a city that did not exist at the time of Kyivan Rus) in 1721. That Russian Empire was named "Russian" precisely as a claim to lands and to history. But just because Peter the Great made a clever public relations decision half a millennium after the Mongols took Kyiv does not mean that there was a Russia when the Mongols arrived. There was not.’’

As Timothy Snyder points out, if Putin wants to base the contemporary borders of Russia on historical borders in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, we can look forward to Russia withdrawing from the entirety of Siberia and its massive oil and gas fields. If we were to apply consistent logic to his argument that Russian borders should be based on events in the thirteenth century, Mongolia arguably maintains rightful territorial claims to all of Russia. 

The former President of Mongolia actually made a very funny post about this on Twitter where he follows me and I just want to say - I respect you sir, it would be my honor to ride with you on a great and noble steed on the steppe towards Moscow.

Anyway, Putin is incapable of seeing his own hypocrisy. This is because Putin believes that Russia stands outside the normal rules of logic, history, law, politics. We are basically dealing with theological claims here rather than history. 

Putin’s Demented Theology

And this is extremely dangerous because Putin’s demented theology is genocidal. Pontificating on the mysteries of the Russian soul and the unique spiritual basis of Russian civilization, he believes that Russia has a natural, God-given eternal right to rule over other peoples. Countries like Ukraine are mere abstractions before the grandeur of Holy Rus, artificial creations concocted by a grand international conspiracy to destroy and enslave Russia. The Poles, the Austrian General Staff, Lenin, Stalin, the Bolsheviks - all are invariably blamed for the creation of Ukraine.

And because Ukraine is supposedly a fake and artificial nation invented by Russia’s enemies, it follows that any Ukrainian who believes in national independence is confused, brainwashed, prey to false consciousness. How could the Ukrainians fail to realize that they are really Russians? Could it have something to do with centuries of repression? Perhaps something to do with the Holodomor and the genocide of millions of Ukrainians by starvation under Stalin? No, it is the Ukrainians who are wrong. Some - like the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children systematically kidnapped and deported to Russia - might be saved and made into ‘’good Russians’’ through re-education. Others will simply have to be killed. 

Putin’s footsoldier Pavel Gubarev expressed these ideas succinctly at the beginning of the 2022 invasion: ‘’Ukrainians are Russian people, who are possessed. We aren't coming to kill you, but to convince you. But if you don't want us to convince you, we'll kill you. We'll kill as many as necessary: 1 million, 5 million, or exterminate all of you.’’

This is the logical conclusion of Putin’s ideas about Ukraine: mass-murder and genocide. Gubarev is just more honest about it than Putin. Timothy Snyder again explains this process very well. History has already proven Putin’s mythological history of Eastern Europe wrong because Ukrainians continue to stubbornly exist Putin’s attempts to exterminate them. 

I write this on February 20th, 2024 - the tenth anniversary of Russia’s first military action in Ukraine. The Russians marked this grim anniversary by taking the desiccated ruins of Avdiivka. Russian Telegram channels hailed this as a great victory but the reality on the ground is that Russia lost 100,000 killed and wounded to take the blasted rubble of a town within walking distance of Donetsk city center - the first areas Russia occupied a decade ago. The lines of control have barely moved in the Donbas for ten years. This stubborn resistance on the part of the Ukrainians seems to suggest that Ukrainians actually exist as a people and a culture and a nation-state! 

But Putin is not ready to admit this fact. He’s not ready to admit that the theological, mystical version of history that he’s constructed in his own head bears no relation to the actual reality of Ukraine on the ground. This is a delusion common to all Russian ultranationalists. Snyder points out that even two years into the war, Russian soldiers ‘’persist in calling the Ukrainian they hear on radio intercepts "Polish" because they are unable to grasp the obvious: that there is a Ukrainian language, and they do not understand it.’’ So Putin and the Russian fascists must resort to mass murder, slaughter, rape and pillage to avoid confronting their own ignorance. Ukrainians must die so that Russian fascists can act out their mentally ill delusions on the world. It really is a form of mass psychosis. As Snyder writes: ‘’It is because Putin is wrong about everything that he must kill.’’  

Putin’s fascist theology climaxes with his promise that Russians and Ukrainians will be tied together by the will of God forever: ‘’No one will be able to separate the soul.’’ If you are born Ukrainian you are born to be a Russian slave and nothing you do or say will ever change that. The rape victim bonded to the rapist forever. He falsely claims that most Ukrainians to this day consider themselves Russian and invents a delusional story about besieged Ukrainian soldiers chanting their undying loyalty to Russia right before being killed in battle. The 1991 referendum on Ukrainian statehood was carried by 92 per cent of the Ukrainian people with a majority among ethnic Russians and a popular majority in every single part of the country. A poll conducted prior to the 2022 invasion found that just 3 percent of Ukrainians favor merging with Russia. But in Putin’s lonely fever dreams he imagines every killed Ukrainian soldier proclaiming personal loyalty oaths to him on their deathbeds as the truth of his schizo race cult flashes before their eyes. 

Putin’s Poland Obsession

At this point of the interview, Putin’s fascist sympathies bring him to the point of openly defending Hitler and the Nazi invasion of Poland. Putin’s demented hyper-fixation on Polish treachery is ever present in his two hour monologue - I counted more than 47 times where he mentioned Poland or ‘Poles.’ But his demented hatred of the Poles actually takes him to the point of open Hitlerism. 

He first accuses Poland of siding with Hitler, denouncing them as Nazi puppets and collaborators for signing a non-aggression pact in 1934. Somehow in the very next breath he argues that Hitler and Nazi Germany had NO CHOICE but to invade Poland in 1939 because Poland did not collaborate enough with them. He blames the Poles for the outbreak of World War II because they were apparently too uncompromising in refusing to simply hand over their territory to Nazi Germany - they ‘’forced’’ Hitler to invade them.

The irony here of course is that the Soviet Union began World War II as a German ally, jointly invading and dismembering Poland together with Nazi Germany. Putin’s only comment on the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact here is that the Soviet Union behaved ‘’very honorably’’ in agreeing to start World War II on the side of Hitler because the terms of the treaty meant the ‘’return’’ of Russia’s ‘’historical lands.’’ 

This insane line of argument perfectly mirrors Nazi propaganda against Poland in World War II and parallels Putin’s own propaganda against Ukraine today, casting both Poland and Ukraine in the role of warmongers for not agreeing to simply roll over and be exterminated. 

Snyder writes here: ‘’Putin blames the war on Poland because his own approach to borders and history in 2024 is like Hitler's in 1939.  Putin's "historical" argument about Ukraine is consistent with Nazi propaganda about Poland, right down to the business about "artificial" states and peoples with no historical right to exist.’’ 

This really perfectly expresses the Nazi origins of Putin’s worldview. It should be abundantly clear to all of us at this point that he only hates the Nazis for invading Russia - had they kept to the terms of the Molotov Ribbentrop pact, Putin clearly believes that they would have been a perfect ally for Stalin and the Soviet Union in World War II.

Incredibly, Tucker bursts out with ‘’Of course!’’ when Putin blames the Poles for Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Tucker fails to challenge so many of Putin’s historical lies - they all go through to the keeper.

Putin’s Compulsive Lies

So much stuff is just made up, invented out of thin air: At one point Putin even claims he lectured Zelensky about his ‘Nazi hypocrisy’ considering his father fought for the Red Army. Zelensky’s father was actually born two years after the conclusion of World War Two. Much of his extended family were killed in the Holocaust. Putin doesn’t care - it’s all simply a blur to him.

This is also how Putin discusses the Maidan. A complete blur, the facts unimportant. He claims that Yanukovych refused to use any force against the protesters when every single Ukrainian knows that the pro-Russian Yanukovych sent in snipers and the brutal Berkut riot police, massacring at least 76 people in just three days. 

Putin claims that Ukraine ‘’threatened Crimea’’ and initiated the war in the Donbass. How could Ukraine ‘’threaten’’ its own internationally recognised territory? All these areas voted for Ukrainian independence in the 1991 referendum. Russia acknowledged Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea for decades, signing treaties to this effect in exchange for Ukraine decommissioning its nuclear arsenal.

Putin’s narrative about the 2014 outbreak of war is also so unfair to poor old Igor ‘’Strelkov’’ Girkin. Girkin helped launch the Russian invasion of Ukraine back in 2014. Girkin himself admits to starting the war in the Donbas by seizing the city of Sloviansk with Russian paramilitary forces under his command: ‘’After all, I pressed the launching trigger of war. If our squad did not cross the border, at the end all would have been finished as in Kharkiv or Odesa. Practically, the flywheel of war which lasts until now was launched by our squad. And I bear a personal responsibility for what is happening there.’’ 

He was the one in command of Russian forces in Crimea when the ‘’little green men’’ without Russian military insignia fanned out across the peninsula. And he was the one in command of the Russian forces who shot down Flight MH17, massacring 298 people. Dutch courts convicted him in absentia but Russia protected him right up until last summer when Putin had enough of Girkin’s constant bitching and moaning about the war effort on Telegram and had him detained. Now he even wipes out Girkin’s role in starting the war - it’s unconscionable! 

Tucker’s Ritual Humiliation

Ultimately, power warps the human mind. This is why Putin appears insane to us. Notice how Putin regularly stops and smirks after finishing so many of his monologues, almost instinctively awaiting applause. This is what happens when you spend twenty four years as a dictator surrounded by sycophants and courtiers. 

And make no mistake, Tucker is a sycophant, a court jester. 

What didn’t Tucker ask about? There’s no mention of the Russian ‘’cleansing’’ operation in Bucha which saw death lists drafted up against local Ukrainian activists who were then mercilessly executed. No mention of the mass graves and torture chambers discovered everywhere the Ukrainians have expelled Russian soldiers. No mention of the razing of Mariupol, the mobile crematoria vans, the mass graves, the slaughter of tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians that took place there.

No mention of Putin’s ICC indictment for orchestrating the mass kidnapping and population transfer of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children, whisked away to be raised as Russians far from their families and homes. No mention of the the bombing of the Nova Kakhovka dam and the shelling of rescuers desperately trying to save drowning families and pets.

No mention of the castration, torture and execution of Ukrainian POWs, the ISIS style beheadings of captured Ukrainian troops. No mention of mass repression in Russia, the execution of political opponents like Navalny, the imprisonment of people over social media posts, even pro-Ukraine drawings at school. No mention of any of this.

Tucker tries so hard to praise Putin in the interview and farm TikTok clips about Biden and the Democrats and Chuck Schumer. He tries to prompt Putin into condemning American democracy as a charade, into mocking the American economy. But the funniest thing is that Putin does not care about this culture war shit. I was surprised, I thought he would hit all those talking points, I thought he would rant about transgender bathrooms and all that. 

But no, Putin refuses to help Tucker farm MAGA culture war slop. In fact, he seems to go out of his way to troll Tucker and humiliate him. He looks bored and starts to say he doesn’t know the answers to his questions about American politics. He tells Tucker to simply Google answers to some of his questions. He goes off on long Abe Simpson style tangents about old road trips he took back in the 1980s and comments on the types of hats people wore back then. 

He upbraids Tucker for questioning him about his ‘’good friend Xi Jinping.’’ He lectures him that Americans are being too mean to China. But when he’s finally forced to comment on America, Putin declares that American GDP seems to be growing decently, inflation is quite manageable. 

Tucker tries to get Putin to mock Biden and express support for Trump but Putin dismisses the question. Later, in an interview with Russian state television, Putin claims to respect Biden as an ‘’experienced politician.’’ He dismisses questions about Biden’s age: ‘’He hit his head on a helicopter? Let he who has not ever hit his head on something cast the first stone.’’ It’s amazing, Putin just totally trolling Tucker. He goes on in this interview to express open contempt for Tucker’s light questioning despite hand picking Tucker to interview him. He really, really goes out of his way to humiliate and mock Tucker, it’s incredible. 

It is likely the case that Tucker is the first American to have met Putin face to face since the beginning of the war. So Putin could not resist the temptation to berate the visiting American and to put him in his place. Why else would he randomly bring up the fact that Tucker applied to join the CIA out of college only to be rejected? He produced this fact nonchalantly, to get under Tucker’s skin, to unnerve him and throw him off balance. 

Such behavior is inexplicable given Tucker’s massive support for Russia. For two years now he’s been working to convince Republicans to abandon Ukraine and he’s been very successful at this mission. This is a guy with the power to flip votes in the US Congress and Senate. Indeed, Alabama Republican Senator Tuberville announced via Twitter that he would vote to block aid to Ukraine based on Tucker’s interview with Putin. So why insult Tucker for no reason? 

Really, it’s the behavior of a mad king, a bored emperor who takes pleasure in humiliating his courtiers. We’ve known about this feature of Putin’s personality for a long time. In the lead up to the full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Putin humiliated his spy chief on live television before all of Russia. Now he humiliates his biggest media supporter in the West, simply because he can. It’s a display of petty, raw power: ‘Look what my intelligence services know about you.’ He lets Tucker stew in the uncomfort. 

What does this show? The petty displays of power, the bitterness, the anger, the self-pity, the deluded blood and soil nationalist myths - this is what motivates Putin. This two hour free floating, rambling diatribe is a window into the madness. 

Conclusion

The biggest takeaway from the interview is Putin is simply uninterested in peace. He proclaims his ardent desire to end the war but this interview shows us conclusively that he needs war to survive. He laughs at the idea of speaking to Biden about ending the war and tells Tucker the solution is simple: cut supplies to Ukraine, let us roll over them, then we can speak terms. 

Recall here the famous words of Tacitus: ‘‘They make a desert and call it peace.’’

This is Putin’s idea for peace in Ukraine. Witness the blasted ruins of Adviivka and Mariupol to understand his vision for the Ukrainian people. He wants them permanently reduced to destitution and Russian slavery.

He showed us his true face in this interview, his ardent bloodlust and hatred of free peoples. There is no mystery here. People love to shroud Putin in mystery, to portray him as this shadowy master strategist moving pawns on a global chess board. But there is no mystery behind Putin. He is your average schizo boomer cousin or uncle who yearns for past historical greatness out of a sense of weakness and insecurity in the present. This is who he is at a fundamental level. He’s destroyed Russia and to escape accountability for this fact he must destroy other countries too.

Here I cannot help but think of Hitler in his final days in the bunker. Traudl Junge said that when Hitler ordered her to take down his last will and testament, she excitedly thought that she would hear her Fuhrer finally explain just why he started the war, only for him to start ranting about the Jews again, like he always did. Because that's all it ever was and then he ate a bullet the next day.

And this is what we have here with the Putin-Tucker interview. We all thought we would get to learn the incredible, secret reasons for war - the incredible, secret plans motivating Putin. But instead he just rants like some deranged drunk boomer for hours. And that’s what he is at a fundamental level - a half-crazed boomer obsessed with conspiracy theories and insane historical myths.

And there is really not much that is special about that. There are millions of people like this and I know a lot of people who lost their minds during COVID and invented grand world conspiracies in their minds about lizard people and Jews and freemasons. This is their way of making sense of a strange and confusing world. There are millions of people like this and Putin is just another one of them - an old, lonely, isolated Boomer. The sad thing here is that we have to listen to him because he commands a massive nuclear arsenal while currently waging a war of conquest on a nation of forty million people.

Ultimately, how do you talk down the crazy, unhinged ultranationalist Boomer from the ledge? You can’t really do it. The only thing Putin understands is force. And so every single time the West has rolled over, the West has given in - every single time political leaders in the West claim that they are about to issue dire consequences and sanctions against Putin only to back down from the red lines they themselves have set - Putin is emboldened. He believes he can get away with it and he is determined to press on with his insane plans.

And that’s the lesson here. You can’t debate him, you cannot reason with him. You can’t bring him out of his fantasy world. The only thing that will stop Putin is arming Ukraine to fight back and defend themselves and bloody the nose of the Russian military. When the Russian military bloodies its nose on the brick wall that is the Ukrainian military - this is the only way to bring Putin back from the brink, back from his deranged fantasy world. The only way we are going to be able to convince Putin that this course of action is insane is by bloodying the nose of the Russian military in Ukraine and pushing them back. And the fragile, brittle Putin regime - a regime which looks impregnable to outsiders - will collapse when the Ukrainian army deals the decisive blow on the battlefield.

This is why we have to arm and fund Ukraine. We must help them fight back against the genocide, fight back against this attempt to enslave them. They are fighting so that their people, their language, their culture, their nation can exist. We have to back them in this independence fight. This is the only way to bring the Russians back to sanity - There is no other way.