Ezra Levant critiques Western media’s exclusion of Vladimir Putin’s rare English-language interview with Tucker Carlson, which drew 136 million views, framing it as censorship of an authoritarian leader. Putin claimed NATO sabotaged Istanbul peace talks in 2022 by pressuring Ukraine to reject a deal that could have ended the war within six months, alleging Western support prolonged conflict. He dismissed Biden’s cognitive concerns while contrasting Russia’s economic resilience under sanctions with Germany’s green energy struggles, warning U.S. reliance on force risks global escalation—including nuclear threats. Putin also used Justin Trudeau’s Nazi SS invitee as propaganda, hinting at Ukraine’s ties to extremism, though Levant questions his troop withdrawal claims. The interview exposes stark geopolitical narratives, challenging Western assumptions about Russia’s motives and the war’s origins. [Automatically generated summary]
We used to do him every day, but then we had an epiphany, which is the place for our journalists is out in the world, out on the streets, where the stories are.
I do some journalism in the streets too, but I do a daily podcast, as you may know.
We call it the Ezra Levant Show.
That's my name.
And you can get it for free in audio format.
To get the video format, go to RebelNewsPlus.com.
It's $8 a month.
I think it's good value.
But frankly, the real reason we do that, because that's how we pay the bills around here.
We don't get any government money.
We're being demonetized by YouTube.
So please consider going to Rebel News Plus.
Anyways, I think the whole world was watching Tucker Carlson's interview with Vladimir Putin last night.
Go to the Twitter account and how many views has that video had on Twitter alone?
And remember, Tucker Carlson pointed people towards his own website, tuckercarlson.com, where he had the interview up for, I think, 45 minutes first before putting it on Twitter X.
A ton of people saw it.
I was, in fact, thinking that perhaps Tucker Carlson's website would crash with all the traffic.
But what's the latest count there?
My little window is blocking it, so I can't see it.
130 million views.
Now, I don't know how accurate that Twitter view count is.
Does that mean someone was just scrolling by it and watched it for a fraction of a second?
Probably has some of that.
But how many people watched a significant portion of it?
And I think these days, even five minutes is significant.
The reason I say that is, when was the last time you actually heard Vladimir Putin speak in his own voice, as opposed to what we call B-roll in the TV business?
B-roll is what we're showing right now.
Two people, but you don't hear their voice.
It's just background footage while I talk.
That's actually how you normally see Vladimir Putin.
Joe Biden, you probably get a lot of him in five to 20 second soundbites.
And frankly, that's about all Joe Biden can handle these days.
But my point is, listening to Vladimir Putin through a translator, he was speaking Russian and was translated through a translator.
Hearing him for five minutes is probably more than anyone, than 99% of people have heard from him ever.
Partly because he speaks Russian, partly because he's a foreigner who's not the center of Canadian or American news, but I think in large part because there has been a political decision by the media political industrial complex not to platform Putin.
And I don't think that that's conjecture on my part.
I know it's a fact.
In fact, Russia Today, which is a state-owned broadcaster, has been booted off of YouTube, booted out of, I think it's banned from Canadian TV.
I'd have to double check that.
So they're overt about it.
You're not allowed to hear from Vladimir Putin because he's evil.
And I think, of course, to a degree, that's true that he's evil.
He's an authoritarian ruler.
I think it's fair to call him a dictator, even though that there are some trappings of democracy in Russia.
I don't think they have fully free and fair elections.
I think that the majority of their journalists are government-controlled or government-funded, and critical journalists often wind up dead.
However, we would never arrest journalists who contradicted the government, maybe with the exception of Julian Assange.
And we would never have government-controlled journalists in the West, except for, of course, the CBC, the BBC, PBS, and in Canada, 99% of the media are subsidized.
I'm only half kidding.
In the United States, the courts are trying to bump Donald Trump off the ballot.
That's a Putin move.
I'm not equating the level of freedom in Canada and the United States with the level of freedom in Russia.
I don't think I'll ever go to Russia because I'm afraid for my liberty, because some years ago I wrote a book that mocked Vladimir Putin and disparaged their natural gas monopoly called Gazprom.
Frankly, I don't think I should go to Russia for my safety.
That said, I don't think I should go to Ukraine either for the same reason.
Although this is a long-winded throat clearing exercise, to say last night's interview was remarkable because not just for 30 seconds or five minutes, but for rather two full hours, Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin spoke.
And I think Tucker Carlson himself was caught by surprise by that.
He had a little preamble to his video, and let's show the preamble in a second, where he sort of shows the whole thing uncut.
But for the first 10 seconds, he sort of pre-apologizes for something he realized he did, which is he asked Putin a question about Ukraine.
You ask any Western leader a question, they're going to give you an answer between 30 seconds and two minutes, max.
Well, Vladimir Putin had a half hour answer to that question.
And I don't think Tucker Carlson, I'm not going to say he didn't like it.
He was afraid that it was Putin's way of just not really having the interview, of just using Tucker's audience as a propaganda platform for himself.
But I think, and you'll hear from Tucker, we'll play the clip in about 30 seconds.
I think Tucker Carlson was just surprised that an answer to a question got a half hour response.
And Tucker Carlson was worried that that was his whole interview time.
In fact, it was two hours, and Tucker Carlson himself wrapped it up.
So I just want to play for you, because that says something too.
Vladimir Putin doesn't do a scrum every day.
And when he does press conferences, they're very deferential.
He doesn't have reporters ambushing him.
Certainly, they'd be shot.
He doesn't have tough attack accountability questions.
They're generally soft.
So I think that Vladimir Putin just simply does not think and speak in the manner of Western politicians.
And I think Tucker Carlson was thinking like a Western journalist.
Anyhow, here, let's play this little preamble by Tucker Carlson.
I just want to show you that because I think it's a premonition of the whole two hours.
Take a look.
The following is an interview with the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, shot February 6, 2024, at about 7 p.m. in the building behind us, which is, of course, the Kremlin.
The interview, as you will see if you watch it, is primarily about the war in progress, the war in Ukraine, how it started, what's happening, and most pressingly, how it might end.
One note before you watch.
At the beginning of the interview, we asked the most obvious question, which is, why did you do this?
Did you feel a threat, an imminent physical threat?
And that's your justification.
And the answer we got shocked us.
Putin went on for a very long time, probably half an hour, about the history of Russia going back to the 8th century.
And honestly, we thought this was a filibustering technique and found it annoying and interrupted him several times.
And he responded he was annoyed by the interruption.
But we concluded in the end for what it's worth that it was not a filibustering technique.
There was no time limit on the interview.
We ended it after more than two hours.
Instead, what you're about to see seemed to us sincere, whether you agree with it or not.
Vladimir Putin believes that Russia has a historic claim to parts of Western Ukraine.
So our opinion would be to view it in that light as a sincere expression of what he thinks.
And with that, here it is.
Mr. President.
So that's interesting because that I, and I, I'll be honest with you, I didn't watch the entire half-hour history lesson.
It just got way too obscure for me.
Maybe I should watch the whole thing, but I actually don't have a half hour's worth of interest in the deep, detailed history of Russian borders.
But the reason that's important nonetheless, and the reason it was important enough for Putin to talk about for half an hour, and the reason I think that Putin wants to say it is because I think he actually is motivated by history and a sense of destiny.
And if you do listen to the history of Russia, you'll understand that it's a history of war and a history of invasion, whether it's the Nazis or whether it's Napoleon.
And I think that in our 202nd soundbite culture of 2024, I don't think people know their history.
I mean, is there any Canadian politician who could talk to you for half an hour about a detailed history of this country?
I think Stephen Harper actually could do it.
Do you think Justin Trudeau could talk for half an hour about the history of Canada without it devolving into some woke, fake, artificial history of diversity or whatever?
I don't think he knows it.
He doesn't know the dates of battles.
He doesn't know this king and that colonist.
He doesn't know that.
He doesn't know about Upper Canada and Lower Canada and the 1867 Confederation.
He doesn't know that stuff.
And that's not what motivates him.
He is a man of the instant.
He's like a fruit fly.
His attention span is the same.
Whereas Putin talks for half an hour about history because he feels like he's a link in the chain of that history and he's the keeper of that history and the destiny and the legacy.
That's part of it, I think, is to show his mindset what motivates him.
And then the second is more weaponized, I suppose, is when he talks about the history, the borders of Ukraine and Poland, he makes the audacious suggestion that Ukraine is not a history.
It does not have the same history and sovereign authenticity that Russia does.
And by the way, borders there change all the time.
Let me tell you about the city of Lviv.
Well, that's what it's called under Ukraine.
But when it was under Russian control, it was called Lvov.
And when it was under Polish control, it was called Lemberg.
It's the same city, but it's been in three different countries.
Vladimir Putin's case is, well, that's actually Russia, Greater Russia, you could say.
And he talks about new Russia Novorossiysk.
And I'm probably boring you just saying these words.
But if you don't, I think the Russian mind is different than ours, especially the Russian political mind, certainly the Russian literary and poetic mind.
I think it's darker because they have a darker history.
And they straddle such a vast continent.
I think that there's a history of brutality there that is that although the Europeans matched it during the Holocaust, I think the eternal brutality and the cheapness of life and the constancy of war and suffering, I actually do think that that manifests itself in Putin's outlook on the world.
Wartime Lies Manifest00:06:07
And you may say that's evil, and you could be right.
But I think one of the great political and geo and diplomatic values in the interview that Tucker Carlson did last night was that let us look at Vladimir Putin.
And he's a former KGB agent.
He's a trickster.
He's a propagandist.
He's a deceiver.
Of course, I think those are traits shared by many world leaders, including in democracies.
Do you think Bill Clinton was anything other than a master deceiver?
But at least it lets you see who he is.
And when was the last time you saw who he is?
Would you be interested in a two-hour interview with Xi Jinping, the Chinese dictator?
Now, he's evil.
He's a killer.
He's a brutal man.
He's a racist.
He's a warmonger.
Okay.
But are you not interested in hearing him for two hours?
When was the last time you heard more than 30 seconds from Xi Jinping?
And would any journalist who would go and conduct such an interview be considered a traitor?
That's what Hillary Clinton said about Tucker Carlson.
If we have that clip, grab it.
In fact, I think one of the most interesting things about this interview was what happened before it even was recorded.
It was almost unanimous in the media party that Tucker Carlson should not do this.
Comma, can I do this?
I think it was Christiana Manpoor, who has done work for CNN and others.
And she's done some great interviews in her day, by the way, who said, well, Tucker Carlson is not a real journalist.
I've been trying to get this interview.
That sort of says it all.
Here's Hillary Clinton telling a reporter that Tucker Carlson should face possible prosecution for even daring to talk to the guy.
Take a look.
Go ahead.
I mean, he's like a puppy dog.
You know, he somehow is, after having been fired from so many outlets in the United States, I would not be surprised if he emerges with a contract with outlet because he is a useful idiot.
He says things that are not true.
He parrots Vladimir Putin's pack of lies about Ukraine.
So I don't see why Putin wouldn't give him an interview because through him, he can continue to lie about what his objectives are in Ukraine and what he expects to see happen.
It's really quite sad that not just somebody like Tucker Carlson, who has, as I said, been fired so many times because he seems unable to correlate his reporting with the truth, but also because it's a sign that there are people in this country right now who are like a fifth column for Vladimir Putin.
And why?
I don't know.
I mean, why are certain Republicans throwing their lot in?
Why are other Americans basically believing Putin?
Why did Trump believe Putin more than our 11 intelligence agents?
I don't know.
Do you have a working theory?
You're a working theory.
There's a lot in there, actually.
Let me just take a second there.
And I'm just going to take her at face value for a minute.
I mean, put aside the fact that she's basically against the interview.
Actually, that's sort of the essence of what she said.
She said one of the main reasons was that Putin lies.
So you shouldn't interview a man who lies.
I'm sorry, but I think every politician lies.
And occasionally, I think almost every person lies.
Now, hopefully, most of us don't lie as a matter of course, and most of us don't deal with momentous things that require massive, dark lies.
But I recall Winston Churchill himself said the truth needs a bodyguard of lies.
The truth is so precious, it needs a bodyguard of lies.
He was talking about what life is like in wartime.
You might recall that Churchill had body doubles because deceiving the enemy about where he was was important because, of course, there were German spies trying to kill him.
So in wartime, do you doubt that both sides engaged in lies?
And I'm not here to beat up NATO, but there were so many pro-Ukraine lies.
The ghost of Kiev, some mysterious fighter pilot who was shooting down all the Russian planes, or Snake Island, where a handful of Ukrainian soldiers held off the entire Russian army.
There were all these little propaganda lies.
Welcome to wartime.
You know, war is fought by many means.
A lot of it is kinetic, but a lot of it is propaganda.
During the Second World War, there was Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose, who were English language radio hosts in Germany and Japan, saying demoralizing things to the Western troops.
And, of course, the Allies would drop leaflets on the bad guys trying to convince them to surrender.
Welcome to wartime.
But if we don't interview politicians because we think they're going to lie, so he hadn't even lied yet.
And I'm not sure what there was one thing Putin said last night that might be a lie, and I'm going to talk about it in a minute.
But even if he is a liar, shouldn't we hear the lies?
And maybe we'll expose the lies.
Or maybe they're not actually lies.
Maybe they're just falsehoods that Putin believes.
Or maybe, just maybe there are certain things he says that we don't like, but may be true.
And for example, his history about Ukraine and its historical authenticity and its historical place, maybe it's wrong.
Tucker Returns Four Times00:08:58
But I don't think Putin's lying.
He may just have an antagonistic belief.
But if we were to take Hillary Clinton's advice, we could not interview people who engaged in lies.
I don't think you would have a lot of interviews with world leaders.
But look at the second thing.
The left really does this.
They project their own thinking onto their opponents.
Hillary Clinton talked about Tucker Carlson leaving Moscow with a fat contract.
Did you catch that part?
As in, she thought he would be paid by Putin.
Get some contact with Russia today or something.
I don't think Tucker Carlson's short of money.
I think he's doing, he did quite well when he was with official broadcasters.
And now that he's an independent broadcaster, I think he's doing great, actually.
But I think that shows you more about how Hillary Clinton thinks than about how Tucker Carlson thinks.
And not just how she thinks.
Do you remember the Clinton Foundation?
I'll give you a quick refresher on it.
When Bill Clinton was done being president, but his wife Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, the family set up the Clinton Foundation.
And it got massive donations from all sorts of countries around the world, including from Canada, where countries would give, I'm serious, $5 million, $10 million, $25 million a pop to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State.
So Hillary Clinton would be making some decision as Secretary of State about some part of the world.
And then surprise, $10, $20, $30 million from that country would go into the Clinton Foundation.
It was just Bill.
I'm just a retired president.
Like, Hillary Clinton wrung money out of every single transaction she had, including from Russia and from Ukraine.
And evidence suggests that Joe Biden did too.
I don't think for some, I've been watching Tucker Carlson for years.
I'm a fan.
Obviously, I've appeared on his show probably three or four times.
I don't think he would ever take money from a foreign entity because that would destroy his whole reputation.
And for what?
Does he need an extra $5 million or $10 million?
I think he's extremely rich.
He had the top running show on cable news for years.
I understand his speaking fee is a quarter million bucks.
I really don't think he would sell his soul for $5 million.
I think he's probably worth 50 to 100 million bucks.
But Hillary Clinton, I think she showed us into her own mind.
Anyhow, I wanted to show you that because there was this wall of outrage that this interview was happening, but I don't think it was because they thought Tucker would be obsequious.
I think it's because they just didn't want Putin to be heard in the West.
I want to show you one more clip, and I shouldn't show you this, but it's just too funny.
Tucker Carlson last night asked, I think most of his questions were, I would just call them good questions.
Some of them were sort of hobby questions that Carlson himself has been asking for years, and I wouldn't call them hobby questions.
They'd clearly be on his mind, and you knew he was going to ask them.
But there was one question, his very last question, and it was a series of questions, went on for almost 10 minutes.
Can we do that?
This is where he was, at the end of his interview.
So you put the toughest question right at the end in case the person you're interviewing storms out.
Now, I don't think Vladimir Putin storms out of a meeting.
I think he makes the other guy storm out.
But I want to show you the interaction between Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin about an American reporter who is in jail in Russia, accused of espionage.
So, I mean, there was this basketball player, I think, who was arrested on drug charges.
And, you know, there's people arrested occasionally from this side or from that side.
You can find it in the main, yeah, in the main one, and just go, it's the very last series of questions.
So he leaves his toughest question for the end, and he's pretty blunt, and he tries to put Putin on the spot.
And Putin dodges a few times, but I think Tucker comes back at him four times.
I think it was actually Tucker's most repeated line of questioning.
I would just go to the main video, Open it up and then go to the end and just sort of manually find it.
Yeah, so I would start it around there and just open it up here.
Let's see if we can find it together.
Go ahead and make that full screen.
Put the audio up.
If you're having trouble on Twitter, you could even do it on his webpage, tuckercarlson.com.
Okay, go ahead and pump up the volume.
It's nature, the more difficult it becomes to resolve them.
Everything has to be done in a calm manner.
I wonder if that's true with the war, though, also.
I mean, I just want to, I guess I want to ask one more question, which is, and maybe you don't want to say so for strategic reasons, but are you worried that what's happening in Ukraine could lead to something much larger.
Let me give you a minute to find it and come back when you found it.
He presses Putin on the release of an American journalist, 32-year-old man from the Wall Street Journal, charged with espionage.
And Putin comes back and says, well, he was charged with espionage.
And Tucker says, look, he's a 32-year-old kid.
Now, let's be honest, 32-years-old is not a kid.
And you can certainly be a spy if you're 32 years old.
But he goes back again and again and again.
And he says, I want to leave here with this journalist.
Will you let him leave with me?
And Putin says we've done so many decent things already, so many gestures of goodwill were empty.
But Tucker doesn't leave it alone.
He comes back again and again.
And actually, one of the last words Putin has on the matter, and seriously, they go back and forth about four times, is, well, I'm sure he belongs back in his homeland.
And I got to tell you, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if this 32-year-old prisoner is released in the days ahead.
I think Putin just didn't want to do this on live or not in a live interview.
I don't think he makes decisions that way.
I don't think he respects journalists or fears journalists enough to be commanded by them to do anything like that.
But I think he actually will release this journalist for his own credit, but also to help Tucker Carlson, who's given Putin an enormously large audience because it's the largest audience that Tucker's ever had, but it's the largest audience that Putin's ever had.
Looks like you found it.
Go ahead, play the clip.
I'm just going to ask you one last question, and that's about someone who's very famous in the United States, probably not here, Evan Gershkovitz, who's the Wall Street Journal reporter.
He's 32 and he's been in prison for almost a year.
This is a huge story in the United States.
And I just want to ask you directly, without getting into the details of it or your version of what happened, if as a sign of your decency, you would be willing to release him to us and we'll bring him back to the United States.
We have done so many gestures of good will out of decency that I think we have run out of them.
Special Services Agreement00:08:42
We have never seen anyone reciprocate to us in a similar manner.
However, in theory, we can say that we do not rule out that we can do that.
Partners take reciprocal steps.
When I talk about the partners, I first of all refer to special services.
Special services are in contact with one another.
They are talking about the matter in question.
There is no taboo to settle this issue.
We are willing to solve it.
But there are certain terms being discussed via special services channels.
I believe an agreement can be reached.
So, typically, I mean, this stuff has happened for obviously centuries.
One country catches another spy within its borders, it trades it for one of its own intel guys in another country.
I think what makes it not my business, but what makes this difference is the guy's obviously not a spy, he's a kid, and maybe he was breaking your law in some way, but he's not a super spy, and everybody knows that, and he's being held hostage in exchange, which is true.
With respect, it's true, and everyone knows it's true.
So, maybe he's in a different category.
Maybe it's not fair to ask for somebody else in exchange for letting him out.
Maybe it degrades Russia to do that.
You know, you can give different interpretations to what constitutes a spy, but there are certain things provided by law.
If a person gets secret information and does that in a conspiratorial manner, then this is qualified as espionage.
And that is exactly what he was doing.
He was receiving classified confidential information, and he did it covertly.
Maybe he did that out of carelessness or his own initiative.
Considering the sheer fact, this is qualified as espionage.
The fact has been proven as he was caught red-handed when he was receiving this information.
If it had been some far-fetched excuse, some fabrication, something not proven, it would have been a different story then.
But he was caught red-handed when he was secretly getting confidential information.
What is it then?
But are you suggesting that he was working for the U.S. government or NATO, or he was just a reporter who was given material he wasn't supposed to have?
seem like very different things.
I don't know who he was working for, but I would like to reiterate that getting classified information in secret is called espionage.
And he was working for the U.S. Special Services, some other agencies.
I don't think he was working for Monaco, as Monaco is hardly interested in getting that information.
It is up to special services to come to an agreement.
Some groundwork has been laid.
There are people who, in our view, are not connected with special services.
Let me tell you a story about a person serving a set.
Anyways, it goes on.
Do you see how long he's going on about this?
I think it was the longest, but that's not even the full clip.
That was just a little clip we found online.
Tucker Carlson's like a dog with a bone.
And I actually think that Putin's going to give that 32-year-old.
And by the way, 32-year-old is not a kid.
And journalists often are spies because they have access and because asking questions is their job and getting tips is their job.
I don't know if this guy's a spy.
How would I know?
But it's notable that Tucker Carlson was so energetic about it.
And I'm sure that that man's family is grateful to him.
And if he's released, he'll be grateful to him.
And I put it to you that probably most corporate media reporters wouldn't ask that question of Putin.
And if they did, they certainly wouldn't come back at it again and again and again.
The way, in fact, that could have gone on for five more minutes, but that was just a short extract.
So we'll wrap that up there.
But again, Putin answers in different ways, doesn't he?
I don't think that Putin would ever answer a question based on feeling pressure from a reporter.
Because I just don't think in Putin's world, reporters are centers of power.
He's not worried about what the front page of Izvestia is going to say tomorrow in the same way that Trudeau might be worried about what the front page of the Global Mail is going to say tomorrow.
So I just don't think that Putin responds in the same way.
And I don't know.
I thought he probably thought that was boring and playful, if anything.
But there were some very interesting things.
So we've been talking around the interview a little bit, but I want to go to what I think were some of the most interesting moments.
The single most startling fact, and I don't think it's a Hillary Clinton said it's a lie.
I don't think it's a lie.
If it was a lie, I think it would have been disproven immediately.
Vladimir Putin says he has not talked to Joe Biden in two years.
Really?
Like, not even a private conversation, not even just a, hey, let's keep the lines of communication open.
Hey, let's make sure we don't escalate.
Or, hey, should we have a back?
Like, just no conversation in two years.
Here's the clip.
Let's take a look.
But you haven't spoken to him since before February of 2022?
No, we haven't spoken.
Certain contacts are being maintained, though.
Speaking of which.
Do you remember what I told you about my proposal to work together on a missile defense system?
Yes.
You can ask all of them.
All of them are safe and sound, thank God.
The former president, Condoleezza, is safe and sound.
And I think Mr. Gates and the current director of the intelligence agency, Mr. Burns, the then ambassador to Russia, in my opinion, I'm not sure.
They have a clip that came after.
But I think you saw the revelation there.
Biden hasn't talked to Putin and vice versa.
And in a way, I think that's really good because Joe Biden is absolutely failing in front of our very eyes.
He's sort of falling apart.
Tucker didn't follow up by saying, why are you talking to the vice president?
Because I think we know, obviously, that didn't happen.
And again, I think that's very good.
Could you imagine if Kamala Harris was in charge of handling Russia?
Oh, my God, we'd have World War III by now already for sure.
How about, you know, I think there's probably contact between the FSB, which is the successor to KGB, and the CIA.
I think they probably talk all the time.
I think probably the head of the Red Army, if it's still called that, probably does talk to some counterpart at NATO, probably in some formal communication.
I mean, remember, they had the red hot telephone in the White House in the Kremlin that was designed to have lines of communication.
So I think probably someone is keeping in touch.
But the fact that it's not Biden is astonishing to me.
There's one more thing that Putin said that I just don't know if it's true, and it may be a lie because it's just so unlikely, but maybe it's unlikely because we've just never heard it before.
It's when Putin claimed that there was a, I mean, everyone knows there was a negotiation, a peace negotiation very early in the war, year and a half ago.
Putin's Unlikely Peace Offer00:06:28
I think it was happening in Istanbul, Turkey, and they had a tentative agreement that Vladimir Zelensky himself had tentatively agreed to.
And there's sort of two parts to the story that are incredible.
The first part is actually sort of already known.
It's that Russia and Zelensky had more or less agreed they were going to have peace after six months, not after two years.
A peace that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
But Boris Johnson, the former prime minister of the UK, who wasn't even in PM at that time, was dispatched on behalf of NATO and America to scupper the deal, to tell Zelensky, don't you dare sign it.
Do you have that part of the clip?
Okay, let's take a look.
Yeah, I think so.
Let's take a look.
It was they who started the war in 2014.
Our goal is to stop this war.
And we did not start this war in 2022.
This is an attempt to stop it.
Do you think you've stopped it now?
I mean, have you achieved your aims?
No, we haven't achieved our aims yet, because one of them is the Nazification.
This means the prohibition of all kinds of neo-Nazi movements.
This is one of the problems that we discussed during the negotiation process, which ended in Istanbul early this year.
And it was not our initiative, because we were told by the Europeans in particular that it was necessary to create conditions for the final signing of the documents.
My counterparts in France and Germany said, How can you imagine them signing a treaty with a gun to their heads?
The troops should be pulled back from Kiev.
I said, all right.
We withdrew the troops from Kiev.
As soon as we pulled back our troops from Kiev, our Ukrainian negotiators immediately threw all our agreements reached in Istanbul into the bin and got prepared for a long-standing armed confrontation with the help of the United States and its satellites in Europe.
That is how the situation has developed.
And that is how it looks now.
All right, that was the second part.
Olivia, I just sent you the clip of the first part.
That, I think, is an astonishing thing that I've never heard before.
Did you hear what he said?
That they were negotiating a peace deal at Istanbul, and Western leaders, I think he said France and Germany, said, how can you have Zelensky negotiate with a gun at his head, pull back from the capital, Kiev?
And Putin claims he pulled back to allow Zelensky to sign the deal.
And that's when the West said, haha, we're going to continue to fight.
I've never heard that before.
I've only heard the Western point of view, which is that, no, the Ukrainian armed forces with funding and materials from NATO drove the Russians back.
Not that they deliberately withdrew.
I find it implausible, but maybe it is the truth.
Or maybe it's a lie, a lie that Putin says to keep domestic Russian support.
Because if Russia was losing a war, that would look terrible.
A dictator's power or authoritarian's power is self-reinforcing, self-fulfilling.
As long as the dictator looks and sounds powerful, he will be powerful.
But the moment he looks vulnerable and weak, it'll all come imploding.
So maybe that's a lie.
But I have to say, even if it's only 1% chance it's true, that's a heck of a counter narrative, isn't it?
But I just sent Olivia another clip that I haven't listened to because I'm on the show, but I saw the description.
That Istanbul meeting that they're talking about, that Putin allegedly pulled his tanks back to give Zelensky breathing room to sign it.
We've heard from other people.
We've heard from the Israeli government who was there saying, yeah, we basically had a deal.
We heard from other leaders who were in the room.
And here's Putin describing how they essentially had a peace deal a year and a half ago, but the West scuffered it.
Take a look.
We support this.
So I just want to make sure I'm not misunderstanding what you're saying.
I don't think that I am.
I think you're saying you want a negotiated settlement to what's happening in Ukraine.
Right.
And we made it.
We prepared the huge document in Istanbul that was initialed by the head of the Ukrainian delegation.
He affixed his signature to some of the provisions.
Not so all of it.
He put his signature and then he himself said, we were ready to sign it and the war would have been over long ago 18 months ago.
However, Prime Minister Johnson came, talked us out of it, and we missed that chance.
We support this.
So I just want to make sure I'm not.
You know, I think that's incredible.
We're learning about the war.
We're learning about Putin's openness to a diplomatic resolution.
And now Hillary Clinton says it's a pack of lies.
And I suppose if someone knows lies, she's a connoisseur of lies.
She's an impresario of lies.
She's the master and mistress of lies.
She would know.
Or maybe she just doesn't want to hear Vladimir Putin's point of view.
I don't know.
But I do know that for a course of two hours, Vladimir Putin talked on a range of subjects with a depth and detail that I think few foreign leaders could match.
And that doesn't mean he's a good person.
But what it means is that Russia is led by a powerful leader who understands his country and is focused on this country's national goals.
Vladimir Putin's Depth00:15:43
Can you say the same about the leaders in the West?
Can you say the same about Rishi Sunak in the UK?
Can you say the same about Justin Trudeau here?
One of the things that the anti-Putin propaganda has led us to believe over the last two years, for example, just one detail, is that Putin was physically very frail and dying.
We saw different theories of he had this disease or that disease.
Could be.
I mean, not all diseases are visible to the eye.
But he certainly looked attentive.
He looked engrossed.
He looked physically comfortable.
He didn't look like he was in pain or something.
He didn't look like he was on meds, as Biden sometimes does.
And according to Tucker, I mean, we saw the video.
It was Tucker who wrapped up the interview after two hours.
It seems like Putin could have gone on.
I just don't know if there's a leader in the West who could hold his own in an unscripted, wide-ranging, content-rich, challenging conversation in the same way.
They talked about AI.
They talked about genetics.
They talked about Elon Musk.
They talked about the BRICS group.
That's the China-led alternative economic arrangement.
They talked about sanctions.
They talked about, well, for example, they talked about Russia becoming the largest economy in Russia last year, in Europe last year.
And people who watched my show know that's, we did a whole story on it.
Do you have that clip?
You go ahead and take a look at this.
Russia was the first economy in Europe last year, despite all the sanctions and restrictions.
Is it normal from your point of view?
Sanctions, restrictions, impossibility of payments in dollars being cut off from SWIFT services, sanctions against our ships carrying oil, sanctions against airplanes, sanctions in everything, everywhere.
The largest number of sanctions in the world which are applied are applied against Russia.
And we have become Europe's first economy during this time.
But for Scott, I mean, it's the largest economy.
And I was shocked to hear that news a year ago, and I checked it out.
Indeed, it's true.
On a purchasing power parity basis, and what does that mean?
How much you can buy, like the actual value of the economy.
Russia exceeded Germany.
In my mind, Germany was always this industrial powerhouse.
But it's a combination of Germany sort of undoing itself with its green energy schemes and Russia making other arrangements.
I mean, would you have guessed that Russia would pull ahead of Germany in this sanctions environment?
I certainly wouldn't have.
I want to play a clip.
I just sent you an eight-minute long clip, Olivia.
We're not going to play all eight minutes of it.
But what I found interesting about the conversation of, have you heard of the BRICS?
I think it stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, or something.
It's basically the alternative to the G7.
You know what the G7 are, right?
The G7 is Canada, United States, France, Britain, Germany, Japan.
And I left one out.
I can't remember.
And it used to be the G8 with Russia in it, but then they sort of kicked Russia out.
So the G7 was sort of the leading world's industrial democracies.
I don't know how Canada got in there because I'm not sure if we really are.
But this is a China-led alternative to the G7.
It's challenged.
Yeah, there you go.
That's the G7.
So you can see Japan.
Okay, that's BRICS, actually.
Thanks.
I was confused for a second.
Yeah, there's the Indian flag.
Sorry, I'm looking at the other screen there.
So BRICS is an attempt by other countries to say, you know, we don't have to be in an American-led world.
We don't have to have a U.S. dollar-led world.
And play the clip that I just sent you just for a few minutes, because Putin is dropping statistics and arguments and facts as he goes, no notes.
And it's not about the war in Ukraine.
He's just talking about the changing center of gravity in the world.
Go ahead and play a bit of this.
The question is what comes next?
And maybe you trade one colonial power for another, much less sentimental and forgiving colonial power.
I mean, is the BRICS, for example, in danger of being completely dominated by the Chinese, the Chinese economy, in a way that's not good for their sovereignty?
Do you worry about that?
We have heard those boogeymen stories before.
It is a boogeyman story.
We're neighbors with China.
You cannot choose neighbors just as you cannot choose close relatives.
We share a border of 1,000 kilometers with them.
This is number one.
Second, we have a centuries-long history of coexistence.
We're used to it.
Third, China's foreign policy philosophy is not aggressive.
Its idea is to always look for compromise, and we can see that.
The next point is as follows.
We are always told the same boogeyman story, and here it goes again through an euphemistic form, but it is still the same boogeyman story.
The cooperation with China keeps increasing.
The pace at which China's cooperation with Europe is growing is higher and greater than that of the growth of Chinese-Russian cooperation.
Ask Europeans, aren't they afraid?
They might be, I don't know.
But they are still trying to access China's market at all costs, especially now that they are facing economic problems.
Chinese businesses are also exploring the European market.
Do Chinese businesses have small presence in the United States?
Yes, the political decisions are such that they are trying to limit their cooperation with China.
It is to your own detriment, Mr. Tucker, that you are limiting cooperation with China.
You are hurting yourself.
It is a delicate matter, and there are no silver bullet solutions, just as it is with the dollar.
So before introducing any illegitimate sanctions, illegitimate in terms of the Charter of the United Nations, one should think very carefully.
For decision makers, this appears to be a problem.
So you said a moment ago that the world would be a lot better if it weren't broken into competing alliances, if there was cooperation globally.
One of the reasons you don't have that is because the current American administration is dead set against you.
Do you think if there were a new administration after Joe Biden that you would be able to re-establish communication with the U.S. government?
Or does it not matter who the president is?
I will tell you.
But let me finish the previous thought.
We, together with my colleague and friend, President Ji Jingping, set a goal to reach $200 billion of mutual trade with China this year.
We have exceeded this level.
According to our figures, our bilateral trade with China totals already $230 billion.
And the Chinese statistics say it is $240 billion.
One more important thing.
Our trade is well balanced, mutually complementary in high-tech, energy, scientific research and development.
It is very balanced.
As for BRICS, where Russia took over the presidency this year, the BRICS countries are, by and large, developing very rapidly.
Look, if memory serves me right, back in 1992, the share of the G7 countries in the world economy amounted to 47%, Whereas in 2022, it was down to, I think, a little over 30%.
The BRICS countries accounted for only 16% in 1992.
But now their share is greater than that of the G7.
It has nothing to do with the events in Ukraine.
This is due to the trends of global development and world economy, as I mentioned just now.
And this is inevitable.
This will keep happening.
It is like the rise of the sun.
You cannot prevent the sun from rising.
You have to adapt to it.
How do the United States adapt with the help of force, sanctions, pressure, bombings, and use of armed forces?
This is about self-conceit.
Your political establishment does not understand that the world is changing under objective circumstances.
And in order to preserve your level, even if someone aspires, pardon me, to the level of dominance, you have to make the right decisions in a competent and timely manner.
Such brutal actions, including with regard to Russia and, say, other countries, are counterproductive.
This is an obvious fact.
It has already become evident.
You just asked me if another leader comes and changes something.
It is not about the leader.
It is not about the personality of a particular person.
I had a very good relationship with, say, Bush.
I know that in the United States, he was portrayed as some kind of a country boy who does not understand much.
I assure you that this is not the case.
I think he made a lot of mistakes with regard to Russia, too.
I told you about 2008 and the decision in Bucharest to open the NATO's doors for Ukraine and so on.
That happened during his presidency.
He actually exercised pressure on the Europeans.
But in general, on a personal human level, I had a very good relationship with him.
He was no worse than any other American or Russian or European politician.
I assure you, he understood what he was doing as well as others.
I had such personal relationship with Trump as well.
It is not about the personality of the leader.
It is about the elite's mindset.
If the idea of domination at any cost, based also on forceful actions, dominates the American society, nothing will change.
It will only get worse.
But if, in the end, one comes to the awareness that the world has been changing due to the objective circumstances and that one should be able to adapt to them in time using the advantages that the U.S. still has today, then perhaps something may change.
It's a long clip, but I'm glad to have shown it to you.
There were so many things in there.
Now, I want to start by saying something that I feel just watching this, which is, boy, he talks differently than our politicians do.
And there's a lot of reasons for that.
Obviously, he has his own personality, but he's Russian.
And they don't have a vigorous press scrum style.
In fact, I think his very first answer to Tucker was something like, is this a talk show or something?
As opposed to Putin was obviously ready for a deep discussion.
And he would have kept going.
It was Tucker who said, okay, two hours and seven minutes is enough for me.
So I think the Western ear, the short attention span mindset, the TikTok generation is not interested in eight-minute answers talking about the growth rate of the BRICS economy versus the shrinking of the G7 economy as a proportion of what.
But I think maybe that's a Western conceit because we have short attention spans, we have entertainment-style politics, and we're America-centric.
And I say we, Canada and the United States, we're sort of twins.
But in Europe, and I saw this when I went to Hungary, and I saw the speech that Viktor Orban gave.
And China, they talk about China in Hungary as much as they talk about America.
And they're closer to China and they're closer to Russia.
And that's the rest of the world.
Not all the rest of the world thinks LA, New York, Washington.
Other parts of the world think Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, New Delhi, Bombay, you know.
And the fact, I think, you know, there was, I don't think we played the exact part of the clip, but when Tucker Carlson said, when was the last time you talked to Biden?
His first answer was, I don't know exactly.
And Tucker Carlson laughed out loud.
If you can find that exact moment, please do, Olivia.
Tucker Carlson laughed out loud.
And Putin sort of said, you know, I've got a lot of things, a lot of domestic things I worry about.
And I don't, I think Putin was just sort of, it was his reaction to Tucker Carlson being absolutely stunned that Vladimir Putin couldn't remember the exact moment he last talked to to Biden.
And Putin was, his response, I think it was a genuine response because it was so reflexive.
It was, yeah, I got a lot of busy things I'm worried about.
You know, I happen to run one of the largest countries, the largest country in the world geographically, a country that has lots of different languages, ethnicities, religions, lots of different borders, military issues.
Yeah, you know, waiting for Joe Biden to call is not exactly, you know, I'm not thinking about him when I go to bed and thinking about him when I wake up in the morning.
You know, if you just go into Twitter and type in Putin-Biden phone call and then click on top, I bet it would come up quick.
I just want to show that one moment.
But there was a good question and answer exchange there, wasn't it?
And it had nothing to do with Ukraine.
So, I mean, when Hillary Clinton and other Westerners said, don't listen to the war propagandist, don't listen to the killer, don't listen to the illegal invader.
I understand what they're saying.
They're saying he's the enemy.
Don't give him a platform.
But does that mean we can't hear what he has to say about the rising place of China and the BRICS countries and how that's inevitable?
Does that mean that his comments about that are a lie?
Do you think he was lying about China-Russia trade?
I thought it was a very interesting answer that he said, don't tell me about China trade.
Europe is more hungry for the Chinese market than even we are.
I don't know if you caught that part.
Concerns About Mental Acuity00:10:53
I thought it was interesting to hear his reflections on talking about talking to different politicians.
He was friendly with George W. Bush.
I believe he would.
He didn't mention Hillary Clinton, which is interesting to me because Hillary Clinton is so hostile to Putin, but he didn't even mention her.
He said he got along well enough with Trump, which I think he did, even though Trump was a large force for increasing NATO spending.
But I think he was on to something where he said, you can change the leader at the top, but what about the elite's mindset?
And it's true that the, I'd even say Russophobia.
And I'm not a Russophile.
I'll never set foot in Russia.
I'm afraid that I would be politically targeted for my criticisms of Vladimir Putin and Gazprom.
I don't like the authoritarian regime there.
I think it's obviously less totalitarian than it was under Soviet times.
But you've got a former KGB agent as president now.
It's not a gentle place if you have political views.
That said, I think hearing from him and understanding him is useful.
And of course, he's skilled in propaganda.
Of course, he is.
On the other hand, he's not as comfortable and routinely chatting with journalists.
It's not as large a part.
I mean, think about how much time our politicians spend in a day dealing with the media.
They have press releases every day.
They have press conferences for those press releases.
The one hour of question period doesn't actually get any answers.
It's just a showtime for the media.
I put it to you that at least 50% of the day for a Canadian politician is how to get media and how to control media coverage of what a politician does.
And then I'd say a quarter of the rest of the time is thinking about the re-election, dealing with constituents, fundraising.
I'd say at most only a quarter of the time of a politician in the West is actually focused on governing, let alone thinking, planning, believing.
And I'm not saying that it's better to have a politician who doesn't have the worries of the media and democracy, because although those exercises are shallow, they actually are accountability exercises.
We need a free press to scrutinize.
We need elections.
We need the checks and balances.
But Putin doesn't have any of those things.
He doesn't stand up in the Duma and answer tough questions.
He doesn't have to go.
I mean, there are elections there, but I think they're pretty much controlled.
It's not a good thing for Russia that they don't have the democratic checks and balances.
But on the other hand, it obviously frees their president to do a lot more thinking and doing and to think more deeply than any politician in the West does.
There aren't too many more clips I propose to show.
I mean, it really was a two-hour marathon.
There were some funny moments.
I don't know if you can find it.
What clip do you have on standby there?
Oh, this is the exact point about when was the last time you talked to Biden?
Let's just play this because I referred to it a few times.
Take a look.
You wouldn't be speaking to the Ukrainian president.
You'd be speaking to the American president.
When was the last time you spoke to Joe Biden?
I cannot remember when I talked to him.
I do not remember.
We can look it up.
You don't remember?
No.
Why?
Do I have to remember everything?
I have my own things to do.
We have domestic political affairs.
Well, he's funding the war that you're fighting, so I would think that would be memorable.
I'm definitely interested.
But from the outside, it seems like this could devolve or evolve into something that brings the entire world into conflict and could initiate a nuclear launch.
And so why don't you just call Biden and say, let's work this out?
What's there to work out?
It's very simple, I repeat.
We have contacts through various agencies.
I will tell you what we are saying on this matter and what we are conveying to the U.S. leadership.
If you really want to stop fighting, you need to stop supplying weapons.
It will be over within a few weeks.
That's it.
And then we can agree on some terms.
Before you do that, stop.
What's easier?
Why would I call him?
What should I talk to him about?
Or beg him for what?
And what message is that?
You're going to deliver such and such weapons to Ukraine.
Oh, I'm afraid.
I'm afraid.
Please don't.
What is there to talk about?
That's a very powerful exchange.
And I think it's honest, by the way.
I don't think that's a lie.
I think the different agencies are talking to each other.
Of course they are.
Even during the depths of the Cold War, that's why they put him the hot phone, the hotline.
But he's exactly right.
Why would he call Joe Biden?
And would Joe Biden even know who he is?
I don't know if you saw.
Do you have any of those Biden clips from yesterday?
Let me just mention this in passing.
I talked about the stamina, the intellectual focus, the physical comfort, the physical appearance of Vladimir Putin.
And that's relevant because, like I say, I've read reports for years that he's on death's door.
He's sick.
He's ailing.
He has a body double.
What I saw on this interview was Tucker Carlson trying to keep up with Putin in terms of energy.
Putin was attentive.
He didn't forget things.
He was quoting statistics.
They talked about 20 subjects.
Could you imagine Vladimir Putin phoning up this guy, Joe Biden?
And let me just give you a little bit of background.
So Joe Biden, there was a special prosecutor, a special investigator, because Biden apparently gave some confidential state secrets to his biographer.
And the special prosecutor met with Biden several times about it to see if a prosecution should be filed.
And the report of the special prosecutor was no, including for reasons that he's an old man who forgets things and he lacks the mental element to commit a crime because he's cognitively in decline.
So the special prosecutor said, I've spent a lot of time with Joe Biden.
We are not likely to convict because a jury will see him as a kindly old, forgetful man.
In fact, here's the exact word, an elderly man with poor memory.
So they trotted out Joe Biden yesterday because he was really mad about this and he wanted to prove how good his cognitive abilities were.
And I want to show you two clips.
And if it's not in this one, get the next one ready, too, where he said Mexico instead of Gaza.
Let's take a look at this one.
I know there's some attention paid to some language in the report about my recollection of events.
There's even reference that I don't remember when my son died.
How in the hell dare he raise that?
Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn't any of their damn business.
Let me tell you something.
Some of you have commented.
I wear since the day he died, every single day, the rosary he got from our lady of every Memorial Day we hold a service remembering him attended by friends and family of the people who loved him.
I don't need anyone.
I don't need anyone to remind me when he passed away.
Passed away.
Simple truth is, I sat for a five-hour interview over two days of events, going back 40 years.
The same time I was managing international crisis, their task was to make a decision about whether to move forward with charges in this case.
That's their decision to make.
That's a counsel's decision to make.
That's his job.
And they decided not to move forward.
For any extraneous commentary, they don't know what they're talking about.
It has no place in this report.
The bottom line is the matter is now closed.
I'm going to continue what I've always focused on, my job of being president of the United States of America.
President Biden, something the special counsel said in his report is that one of the reasons you were not charged is because, in his description, you are a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.
I'm well-meaning, and I'm an elderly man, and I know what the hell I'm doing.
I've been president, and I put this country back on its feet.
I don't need his recommendation.
It's totally-and can you continue as president?
My memory is so bad, I let you speak.
That's what I'm saying.
So, look, my memory is not got my memory is fine.
My memory, take a look at what I've done since I become president.
None of you thought I could pass any of the things I got passed.
How'd that happen?
You know, I guess I just forgot what was going on.
Mr. President, do voters have concerns about your age?
How are you going to dissuade them?
I do hear that this report is only going to fuel further concerns about your age.
Only by some of you.
Mr. President, I don't want to clear out credit all my ability today.
Do you take responsibility for anything careless with classified material?
I take responsibility for not having seen exactly what my staff was doing.
It goes in and points out.
Things that appeared in my garage, things that came out of my home, things that were moved not by me, but my staff.
But my staff asked about your age, you would respond with the words, watch me.
Many American people have been watching and they have expressed concerns about your age.
That is your judgment.
That is your judgment.
That is not the judgment.
They express concerns about your mental acuity.
They say that you are too old.
Mr. President, in December, you told me that you believe there are many other Democrats who could defeat Donald Trump.
So why does it have to be you now?
What is your answer to that question?
Why do you want the qualified person in this country to be president of the United States and finish the job I started?
Backing Into NATO00:14:14
You know, that press conference, there was a number of things yesterday that just made he went out to demonstrate how sharp he was, but oh my God.
You know, he mixed up Mexico and Gaza.
And I want to go to, I just sent you a link to a Twitter account called TechnoFog, Olivia, where he's posting various excerpts from this report by special counsel Robert Hurr.
So it found that Joe Biden retained all these secrets, kept him in his garage and stuff.
Can you scroll down a bit?
You know, he unlawfully retained classified notes, gave classified info to his ghostwriter.
But scroll down to where they describe how forgetful he was.
And it's scroll down a bit a little bit further.
Biden's serious cognitive issues are exposed.
And he's quoting, yeah, it's right here.
He did not remember when he was vice president.
He forgot when his term began.
He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Bo died.
And you saw he was asked about that, and he was really mad.
How dare you?
I remembered Bo out.
So he didn't deny that he couldn't remember when his son Bo died.
He just was very mad that someone would ask him that personal question.
I show you these clips, and I don't need to show you the clip about he called the president of Mexico the president of Egypt or something.
He confused Francois Mitterrand, a French leader who's dead for years.
Do you really think that Vladimir Putin would call up Joe Biden?
For what reason?
So Joe Biden could ask him who he was again.
I just want to show you one last clip, and it's the CIA one.
I sent it to you, Livy.
Do you have it there?
So Tucker Carlson's an interesting guy.
I'm a big fan, by the way.
I like his style.
I like how he's gone independent.
I love the fact that he doesn't care who dislikes him.
In fact, he sort of loves it.
I like the fact that he cares about Canada.
I really get a chuckle out of the fact that he deliberately mispronounces Ottawa just to get Canadian liberals furious.
There's a lot of things I like about Tucker Carlson.
I don't know everything about him.
I've never met him in person.
I've just dealt with him through a TV camera those times I was on his show.
I didn't know he applied to join the CIA when he was a young man.
And, of course, Putin is a former KGB man.
Let me play this very short clip.
It's just 20 seconds, of Putin sort of bringing up the CIA thing in a little jab.
It's sort of funny.
Take a look.
With the backing of whom?
With the backing of CIA, of course.
The organization you wanted to join back in the day, as I understand.
We should thank God they didn't let you in.
Although, it is a serious organization.
understand with the backing of I think that was in response to the question who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline well listen we've sort of hopped around the video a lot And Olivia, thank you very much for finding those things on the go.
I know I throw things at you, and it's a two-hour video.
So finding the exact moment to the second is not easy to do in a two-hour video.
I recommend it.
I have not yet watched the whole thing from end to end.
I've just really zeroed in on different parts.
And it's sort of tough to get right into because of that 30-minute history lecture on Russia.
But frankly, let's check the view count on it because an hour and a half ago when we checked, did you remember what it was, the view count?
130 million or so.
Let's take a look what it is now, just in the last hour and 15 minutes.
136.
136 million.
So are you saying that it's grown by 6 million?
Was it like exactly 130 million?
Do you remember?
So even as we've been sitting here, 6.5 million people have watched this version.
But there are many, every single clip we've shown you has been cut and reposted by someone else.
A lot of people saw it on Tucker Carlson's own website.
And if it's had 136 million views on that alone, I don't think it's crazy to think that this video and all its clippings have been seen a billion times.
I mean, I think far more people have seen the little clips than watched the whole thing.
Now, I acknowledge that 136 million views, maybe that's only for a few seconds, but even if only 10% of those people watch a significant amount, that is an enormous audience.
And I think people, you don't think Hillary Clinton was watching it?
You don't think Vladimir Zelensky is watching it?
They talked about Zelensky.
Let's just dig up one more thing.
I would go to Twitter and I would search Putin, Zelensky, father.
Because I thought this was an interesting exchange.
Putin and Zelensky have spoken before.
In fact, Zelensky, when he ran for office, ran as the peace candidate.
And one of the conversations in the video was about, yeah, that's the exact clip there, was about the denazification.
One of the things that Tucker Carlson asked was, what are your goals?
What do you want to happen in Ukraine and how will it happen if you don't conquer the whole place?
And one of the things Putin said is denazification.
I think that first clip there is the one.
It's just a very brief one where he talks about his last conversation with Zelensky about how can you not fight against fascists.
Your father did.
And remember, Zelensky's a Jew.
Take a look.
Said.
Bologna.
What are you doing?
Why are you supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine today while your father fought against fascism?
He was a frontline soldier.
I will not tell you what he answered.
This is a separate topic.
And I think it's incorrect for me to do so.
Isn't that interesting?
So that's just a very tight clip there, but the intro to that would be he called Zelensky, or they talked on the phone.
I don't know who called whom.
And he tried to appeal to Zelensky's family tradition because his father fought against the Nazis, apparently.
That's an interesting thing.
And an also interesting thing is Putin did not say what Zelensky told him out of, I don't know, some sort of code of honor or something, or I don't know, but I think he did that a couple of times in the interview where I think a Western politician would have said, aha, I have a juicy tidbit about my enemy.
I'm going to release it now.
Putin didn't give in to that impulse if he had it at all.
I saw Tucker Carlson recorded a sort of a nine-minute after-the-fact, you know, decompressing comment when he was still, his head was surely swirling.
And he said it's going to take him a year to fully understand what he heard.
And I think he's probably right.
I think a lot of CIA and MI5 or 6 or whichever one it is, a lot of people are going to be analyzing that, the Ukrainian intelligence, NATO intelligence.
A lot of Russians are going to be watching it.
Because remember, Putin was talking to the West, but he was also talking in Russian to his own country.
He was talking to Ukraine.
He was talking to NATO.
He was talking to China.
He was talking to the world.
It was the biggest moment for Tucker Carlson.
It was probably one of the biggest moments for Putin, too.
There will be a lot to be studied there.
And of course, Hillary Clinton's right to say politicians lie, and authoritarian dictators probably lie more than most.
But when he describes his views on BRICS and China and the de-dollarization and sanctions and purchasing power and economic reality, how are those lies?
How are those not obvious observations of someone who has a different worldview?
Russia's always straddled West and East.
I mean, Vladivostok is so far, it's over Japan.
That's how far East Russia goes.
So far East, it almost comes west again and touches Alaska.
And yet it's in the heart of Europe as well.
It's always had sort of a split personality.
And is it Eastern or is it Western?
And one of the things that Tucker acknowledged in his sort of after right after the moment videos is he said he felt Putin had some anger about the way things have gone, but also that Putin felt that Russia was rejected by the West, that Russia was not warmly welcomed into the West.
You know, I don't know if you can find it, and I keep adding things on here, but there was a clip.
Search Putin join NATO.
Putin-Clinton-NATO because Putin said, if I'm remembering correctly, is that the one there?
Yeah, go ahead and play it.
Created by the Russian leadership.
I do not understand what the Russian leadership was guided by at the time.
But I suspect there were several reasons to think everything would be fine.
First, I think that then Russian leadership believed that the fundamentals of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine were, in fact, a common language, more than 90% of the population there spoke.
You know, let me stop you there, because I think that clip's not the right time code, but I just sent you a clip in Slack.
Putin asked...
Can we join NATO?
What?
NATO was built to deter the Soviet Union.
And here's the leader of Russia saying, can we join?
Take a look.
I think this is the right clip.
Take a look.
Meeting here in the Kremlin with the outgoing president Bill Clinton, right here in the next room.
I said to him, I asked him, Bill, do you think if Russia asked to join NATO, do you think it would happen?
Suddenly he said, you know, it's interesting.
I think so.
But in the evening, when we met for dinner, he said, you know, I've talked to my team.
No, no, it's not possible now.
You can ask him.
I think he will watch our interview.
He'll confirm it.
I wouldn't have said anything like that if it hadn't happened.
Okay.
Were you sincere?
Would you have joined NATO?
Look, I asked the question: is it possible or not?
And the answer I got was no.
If I was insincere in my desire to find out what the leadership position was, but if he had said yes, would you have joined NATO?
If he had said yes, the process of reproachment would have commenced.
And eventually it might have happened if we had seen some sincere wish on the other side of our part.
Isn't that a crazy idea?
I forget who came up with the phrase to explain NATO.
It was to keep the Germans down, the Soviets out, and the Americans in.
It was some British politician, I think, who said, the purpose of NATO, keep the Germans down, the Russians out, the Americans in.
How does NATO work if the Russians are in it?
Isn't the whole purpose of NATO to protect against Russia and the Red Army?
Did I blow your mind by, you know, did Putin blow your mind by saying, can we join NATO?
Imagine if they, I mean, I don't even know how that works because that would be like I don't even know what that would be like.
It's just so it's like water and fire.
The whole purpose of water is to put out the fire.
But what if the fire says I'd like to be part of the fire department?
Well, maybe it's not fire anymore, or maybe it's a trick.
I don't know.
Maybe it's an arsonist.
Maybe it's sneaking.
Maybe it's a Trojan horse.
But what an incredible thing.
And he says Clinton would recall it.
Of course, I mean, that would be, of course, that's he's not going to lie about that.
What's Bill Clinton's answer to that?
Maybe it's an absurd point, an absurd question that should not have been entertained, but I think the world would have been quite different.
Isn't that interesting?
There's a lot of things in there.
Like that alone will stimulate a thousand reverberations.
Maybe that was well known already, but it was certainly news to me.
I don't know.
Very interesting.
Listen, I could throw the clips all day and I wouldn't be done.
But let me close by showing you the reaction by some of the world's journalists.
Andrew Neal's Interview Reaction00:04:56
One of my favorite journalists in the world is Andrew Neal.
And he is, I think, the best interviewer in the English language.
And I've seen him just absolutely fillet politicians.
He's in the UK.
I've seen him destroy Jeremy Corbyn.
I've seen him destroy Tories and people of every stripe.
I remember when Ben Shapiro went on Andrew Neal's show was not prepared.
Holy moly.
I mean, I like Ben Shapiro's style.
I generally agree with him, but he did not realize what he was getting into.
Andrew Neal, who I actually think is the best interviewer in the world, and he's one of the longest-serving journalists.
He was the chief editor of so many different magazines and newspapers.
Here's what he said.
He said, Tucker Carlson's Vladimir Putin stunt was like interviewing Hitler without asking about the concentration camps.
It confirmed the Russian president is mad, bad, and dangerous.
And his interlocutor is a fool.
And it goes on that way.
And I read most of it, but I got halfway through it, and he didn't say a word about the interview.
It's all here.
Let's just read a little bit together, just a little bit together.
In the end, it was no contest.
Tucker Carlson, blow-vieting broadcaster for the pro-Trump MAGA movement, was blown out of the water by President Putin, dictator of all the Russias.
Carlson thought he was doing the Russian leader a favor by going to Moscow to give him a platform to explain why he invaded Ukraine and the multiple conspiracy theories associated with it, which Carlson and the MAGA cult uncritically lap up, but Putin did Carlson no favors.
Right from the get-go, Putin hijacked the interview with an interminable discourse on Russian history, which started in the 9th century and took over half an hour to get to the 20th century, much less Putin's invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, which took almost another half hour.
If this is how Putin treats his friends, you can understand why his enemies fear him.
He even teased Carlton about once, Carlson about once trying to join the CIA.
Carlson, bar a couple of feeble interjections, just sat there with an increasingly pained expression as he realized what was meant to be his guest.
Great broadcasting coup, Putin's first interview with the Western media since the invasion, was disappearing down the Swannee.
Far from being a great meeting of the minds between Kremlin leader and Kremlin lover, it looked as if Carlson, whose pain was turning to panic as he realized he couldn't stop Putin pontificating, had been held, taken hostage by a lugubrious and deranged Russian uncle, forced to listen forever to his ramblings.
It must have been torture, something which the Putin regime is particularly adept.
Those of us diligently watching the two-hour snooze fest, so you don't have to.
We're rapidly losing the will to live.
It goes on and on and on and on.
And so far, he hasn't really mentioned any of the news that was broken or any of the interesting things there.
I have never interviewed a president.
I've certainly never interviewed anyone of the stature of Vladimir Putin.
Really, there would only be a handful of people in the world at that level.
I would think the Prime Minister of Britain, the President of France, Chancellor of Germany, President of the United States, and President of Russia, and Xi Jinping, and the President of Japan, I think, I mean, and President of India.
I mean, other than Prime Minister of India, other than like there's probably 10 people in the world in politics at that level.
Obviously, I've never come close to any of them.
But I have interviewed, for example, I'm going to give you an example.
I interviewed Kurt Bilders, the winner of the Dutch parliamentary elections a couple months ago in the Netherlands.
And I remember what I was thinking.
I'll just tell you, because I think maybe Tucker had the same thoughts.
He thought, I only have a limited amount of time with this guy.
I'll be able to give my opinions and my interpretations and my thoughts after, on my own time, unlimited.
But if I only have 15, 20, 30 minutes with the newsmaker, I want to keep my questions succinct.
I want to give him maximum talk time.
So the video is not me giving speeches.
It's me listening to an actual newsmaker.
So my first point to Andrew Neal is: when Tucker Carlson sat there listening, I don't think it was out of obsequiousness or obedience or submission.
I think it's I've got this man and he's talking and I want to hear every word because there is literally nothing I have to say that is more important for me to say than to listen to what he has to say.
On a few occasions, Tucker Carlson did in fact ask for clarification or as you saw with the journalist freeing the Wall Street Journal prisoner.
Listening to Andrew Neal00:02:50
He challenged Putin repeatedly.
Actually, we didn't even show the whole clip of that.
But Andrew Neal, always obsequious in the MAGA cult and MAGA, MAGA, failed journalist fired like Hillary Clinton did.
Can I tell you what is so obvious, it's as plain as the nose on your face.
Andrew Neal wishes it was him doing that interview.
And you know what?
Boy, I'd love to see that because it's true.
And I don't know if you can find it.
Can you type in Andrew Neal, Jeremy Corbyn?
And that's just, I mean, that's just one of many interviews I've seen Andrew Neal do.
And it was just brutal.
I want to show you what Andrew Neal is like in interviews.
Yeah, just go ahead and throw some of this on the screen.
Andrew Neal is the one on the left.
Jeremy Corbyn is the one on the right.
play a random 60 seconds and i'll make my point afterwards what's your response Yeah, go ahead.
You, he says.
He questions your fit for office.
What's your response?
I'm looking forward to having a discussion with him because I want to hear why he would say such a thing.
So far as I'm concerned, anti-Semitism is not acceptable in any form anywhere in our society and obviously certainly not in my party, the Labour Party.
When I became leader in 2015, I looked at the processes that were available for dealing with egregious behavior and they weren't as good as they should have been.
We've developed a much stronger process.
We have sanctioned people that have behaved in an anti-Semitic way, removed some from party membership, and indeed even removed people as candidates.
And as far as I'm concerned, it's just not acceptable in any form in society.
When the far right are rising across Europe, using anti-Semitic tropes in order to intimidate people, then I think we've all got to stand up together on this.
It's not the far right he's worried about.
I'm sure he is worried about the fire right, but that's not the result of this unprecedented intervention.
It's about you and how anti-Semitism rose as a problem, the Labour Party, after you became leader.
Why?
It didn't rise after I became leader.
Anti-Semitism, enormous.
Anti-Semitism is there in society.
There are a very, very small number of people in the Labour Party that have been sanctioned as a result of complaints about their anti-Semitic behavior.
As far as I'm concerned, one is one too many, and I've ensured action is taken on that.
But we've also, on a positive side, recognized we just chose a random moment, but you can see he's brutal.
He's got facts.
Andrew Neal's Prosecutor Moment00:10:46
I mean, that's not an iconic Andrew Neal moment, but he comes with, like, he's like a prosecutor.
He's extremely well briefed on his files.
Actually, you know what?
Can you?
I want to show another clip.
Can you type in Andrew Neal Boris Johnson?
Of course, Boris Johnson, former mayor of London, former prime minister.
Boris Johnson went on and he used some jargon that he didn't know what he was talking about.
And Andrew Neal could detect it.
And I don't know if you're going to be able to find that clip, but it was unbelievable.
He caught him not knowing what.
This is probably it.
Nope.
Let me seek him.
Andrew Neal Boris Johnson.
And I know we're an hour and a half into this, but this is just so good.
I've just got to show it to you.
And I appreciate everybody waiting.
Well, I can't actually find it now.
Anyways, let me come back.
My point is, Andrew Neal is more like a prosecutor than an interviewer.
And he doesn't do softball interviews.
He doesn't lob questions.
And he's thought through his questions.
He thinks, well, what's the answer going to be?
And then how can I attack that?
Like, he really could be a prosecutor.
And so it is true that an Andrew Neal interview of Vladimir Putin would be unbelievable.
But that's not going to happen.
It couldn't happen.
Putin wouldn't allow it.
I doubt Andrew Neal even tried.
Who knows?
Maybe Putin would be up for it.
I mean, Putin looks like he's up for anything in terms of questions.
I mean, there was a wide range of questions.
There were questions about religion and the place of God that Tucker asked him.
I think that when you're interviewing an authoritarian leader, part of the issue is: what can I say that won't get me thrown in jail?
Now, they're not going to jail Andrew Neal or Tucker Carlson.
What can I say and not have the interview cut short?
What can I say and have the interview happen at all?
And by the way, that last question applies here in Canada, too.
Do you think Justin Trudeau would ever grant me a question?
I know I would ask better questions than the CBC does, but that's why I'm not going to be allowed to ask him questions.
So Andrew Neal, who I will acknowledge is the world's best interviewer, but he's not going to get an interview with Vladimir Putin.
I think Tucker Carlson is, well, I mean, let me put it this way.
He is the first Western journalist to interview Vladimir Putin since the war.
And of all the journalists to do it, is he sympathetic to Putin?
I would say it in the reverse.
I'd say he's not hostile to Putin.
And I think he rejects and identifies the inherent hostility towards Putin in the Western political media establishment.
I think he might like Putin, but I don't think he's a Putin shill.
And I think he was aware of that the whole time.
Well, there we go.
I've talked for 90 minutes straight about the interview.
During that time, you could have watched three quarters of it yourself.
But I hope you thought it was somewhat useful to go through this with you.
I want to take a quick read of the super chats, and then I'm going to say goodbye because we're so over time.
By the way, I recommend you watch the whole thing.
I haven't watched the whole thing because I skipped over the half-hour history lesson, but maybe I should go back and do that, frankly.
I just didn't have the time.
Alberta Don chipped in five bucks.
NDP was on Calgary Radio saying Alberta needs Ontario-style peak hour electricity rates to prevent power shortages during cold snaps.
Before the green wave, we didn't need coal power from Montana.
I think anyone who's against cheap, reliable energy is an enemy to mankind.
And it's often the same people who are against cheap, nutritious food, the same people who are against carbon dioxide in oil and gas, are against nitrogen in farming.
And they just use carbon and nitrogen as these attempts to scientify their basic ideological war on prosperity.
I just think that's pretty obvious.
I actually don't know if there's any other super chats or rumble rants, so I'll wrap it up there.
Well, listen, thanks very much for listening.
Let me sum up.
If you need my views on Vladimir Putin, I'm not sure if you do need my views.
But my view is that he is an authoritarian ruler who violates civil liberties, who invades other countries, who abuses his own citizens, but also abuses the West.
And he often does so through the oil and gas weapons.
Russia is one of the world's largest producers of both.
And in fact, to this day, a great number of European countries are totally reliant on Russian natural gas, which is what Ronald Reagan warned about.
Reagan in the 80s said, do not build a pipeline to Europe.
You will be reliant on your enemy's energy.
And that is the tool that Putin has used, not only to enrich himself, but to hold Europe hostage.
And Canada could be an antidote to that.
Canada could sell liquid natural gas LNG.
In fact, Putin, I don't know if we have time for it.
Do you have time to play the clip of Putin referring to the Canadian parliament?
And this is right when he was talking about denazifying Ukraine.
Is Justin Trudeau gave Vladimir Putin one of his most powerful propaganda talking points?
And to Canada's embarrassment, Putin brought it up last night.
Justin Trudeau invited a bona fide Nazi SS officer to parliament.
Now, Putin adds a detail I was not sure of.
He claims that Yaroslav Hanka actually murdered Jews and others.
I was unaware of that, although I understand in the Nazi SS that was sort of a rite of passage.
Here, let's play that clip.
You say Hitler has been dead for so many years.
80 years.
But his example lives on.
People who exterminated Jews, Russians, and Poles are alive.
President, the current president of today's Ukraine applauds him in the Canadian parliament, gives a standing ovation.
Can we say that we have completely uprooted this ideology if what we see is happening today?
That is what denazification is in our understanding.
We have to get rid of those people who maintain this concept and support this practice and try to preserve it.
That is what denazification is.
That is what we mean.
Yeah, thanks, Justin Trudeau, for giving Vladimir Putin a talking point.
Here's what I learned yesterday in closing.
I learned that Vladimir Putin is physically and mentally stronger than Joe Biden.
You could probably guess that.
I learned that Vladimir Putin thinks about his country in the sweep of history and destiny and national interests, and he thinks about his country's long-term future in ways that our Western leaders do not.
I learned that Vladimir Putin is not used to the back and forth banter as democratic politicians are because there is no vibrant, antagonistic, pluralistic press corps in Russia.
So he's used to giving long professorial answers to people who just sit there and take notes.
I think that half-hour historical answer is sort of how he probably normally talks.
And woe unto the flunky who expresses impatience.
I think that what Putin said about his interests in becoming more allied with the West are most likely true.
If he did, in fact, ask Clinton, could Russia possibly join?
I think that perhaps there was an enormous opportunity that was missed.
And the military-industrial complex of the West said, no, we can never stop fighting Russia.
We always need an enemy.
Of course, now we've got radical Islam and China added as enemies, too.
I think as to the conflict in Ukraine, Putin said something that I think is credible, which is that he's open to a diplomatic solution.
The reason I say that's credible and not a lie is that Putin seemed dedicated to various treaties signed in Minsk and to a treaty that was being hammered out in Istanbul.
And it's been reported from various quarters, including from Israel, that it was Boris Johnson that discovered it, not Putin.
I don't believe Putin when he says he withdrew his military from Kiev as a sign of good faith.
I find that too far-fetched.
It could be true.
It's the first I've heard of it.
And I think that for millions of people around the world, this is the first time they will have heard Vladimir Putin's side of the story, whether they believe it or not is up to them.
And I think Tucker Carlson has shown that he can rise to the occasion.
I think 90% of the criticism of Tucker Carlson is either by people who are putting their partisan or national loyalty ahead of their journalistic sense and saying, don't talk to bad people.
Hillary Clinton, don't talk to liars.
Well, then there wouldn't be any politicians on TV.
Or in the case of people like Andrew Neal, simply professional jealousy.
Raid Documentary Premiere00:01:12
And I can understand that.
That's our show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters to you at home, good night.
Keep fighting for freedom.
And hey, if you're going to be in Alberta next week, can I take you to a movie?
See you later.
Oh, hi, Ezra Levant here from Rebel News.
Do you want to see a movie with me?
I'm going to be in Edmonton on Monday, February 12th, and Calgary on Tuesday, February 13th, for the release of our new documentary called Raid.
It's about a raid that the police tried to do on rebel news.
We do documentaries from time to time.
This is the world premiere of this movie, and we're going to be at Church in the Vine in Edmonton on Monday.
Doors open at 6, show starts at 6:30.
And in Calgary on Tuesday, we're going to be at the Canyon Meadow Cinema.
Same time, doors open at 6, movie starts at 6:30.
And I'm going to be there, and a lot of rebels are going to be there.
I want to show you what happens when you stand up to tyranny.
The police come for you.
Details are at our special website, raid.movie, r-a-i-d.movie.