In light of Tucker Carlson’s recently released interview with Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, Glenn dives deep into Dugin’s true beliefs about America and his terrifying “solutions” to society’s problems. Dugin may sound like an ally to American conservatives, but his comments on war, apocalypse, and fascism reveal his true intents. Rockford University Philosophy Professor Stephen Hicks joins Glenn to lay out the “massive trap” that Dugin has set for the West and the future of “fascism without compromise” that he wants for the world.
TranscriptBelow is a rush transcript that may contain errors
GLENN: Welcome to the program. Yesterday, a -- an interview that Tucker Carlson did while he was in Russia, was released. It was about 20 minutes. And I applaud everyone for having a conversation. Tucker has said many times. It's important to see and understand how our adversaries view us.
Well, that -- that wasn't clear in this. He just diagnosed a problem as Aleksandr Dugin always does.
And enough to open a door to people. Have people say, oh. Well, I think I might agree with that.
It is really important, what Tucker has begun. We have to now continue that conversation. So people on our side, will not fall victim to this guy.
They talk about how people want his books to be banned. I don't. I want you to read this in his own words. There will be stuff at the beginning of the book, you will go, yeah. Yeah. He knows me.
By the time you're at the end of the book. This is a horror show.
Literally a horror show. But you should read him.
Jefferson, when we went into our first foreign war, which was against the Muslim pirates, insisted that everybody read the Koran. If you really want to understand the absurdity of it all, he said, you need to read this in their own words. Now, let's get down to it.
GLENN: So let me play just a little bit of what he said, to Tucker yesterday. We'll start there. Here's a clip from the Tucker Carlson interview with Aleksandr Dugin.
VOICE: There was all liberals.
And, for instance (inaudible), correctly, that there are no more ideologies, except for liberalism. And liberalism, that was liberation, of this individual from any kind of collective identity.
There are only two collective identities, to liberate from. Gender identity, because it's disconnected by identity.
You are man and woman, collectively.
So you could be -- so liberation of gender. And that has led to transgenders. To LGBT. And new form of sexual individuals. So sex is all -- something optional.
And that was not just the deviation of liberalism. That was necessary elements of implementation and victor of this liberal ideology.
And the last step that is not yet totally -- totally, made his liberation from human identity. Humanity optional. And when -- now we are choosing for you, in the West, you are choosing the sex you want, as you want. And the last step in this process of liberalism. Implementation of liberalism. Will mean precisely, the human optional. So you can choose your individual identity to be human. Not to be human.
And that -- transhumanism. Post humanism. Singularity. Artificial intelligence. Klaus Schwab. They openly declare that it is the inevitable future of humanity. So we have arrived to the historical terminal station. That we finally -- five centuries. A goal, we have embarked on this train. And we are now arriving at the last station.
GLENN: So what he's saying here is, that liberalism, meaning the classic liberalism where you're an individual. It's not collective. Et cetera, et cetera. He says, the inevitable end is progressivism. And then some dystopian future. But I don't think that's right.
I would love to hear from you.
Liberalism doesn't lead to progressivism. Marxism leads to progressivism.
STEPHEN: Yeah. The first half of the Dugin clip is correct. The second half is a massive equivocation. I think he should know better. I think he's doing some tactical rhetoric against the West, talking about the transgenderism. So let's take those two in part.
So the first part is all of the Soviet Union. I think Dugin is exactly right. What plays out in the 20th century, left only some sort of liberalism standing in the field.
Twenty-first century was a huge ideological battle. I think Dugin's analysis is correct. It's kind of the analysis I've argued and many other people have argued as well.
The 20th Century was about some sort of liberalism, versus some sort of fascism or national socialism, versus some sort of Marxist communism.
We fought world wars. We fought cold wars. Fought many French warfare, ideological wars as well.
What happened was fascism was defeated.
National socialism was defeated. And by 1991, Marxist communism was defeated. So what seemed to be, almost inevitable. I don't want to use the inevitably language. But was that some sort of liberal democracy, capitalism, individualism. Barbarity, was triumphant.
So I think that part is exactly right. Now where I think Dugin goes wrong, is in what happens next.
My view was what happened, liberalism took a breathing. We've been fighting wars. Ideological. And actual wars for over a century.
We let our guard down. We have relaxed. We have kind of thought everybody is going to get on board.
Some sort of liberal, democratic, capitalist. Modern future is slowly going to prevail over the next generation.
What actually happened though, was that the fascists. The national socialists.
The authoritarians. The communists. The Marxists.
The various sorts, did not simply go away, and give up the fight.
Instead, they started to repackage themselves. Inside, the now triumph unto west, there are countermovements that tried to reassert themselves. We started to say, by the time we got to 2010, 2015. Or so.
That those countermovement inside the West are reasserting themselves. And everybody is starting to become aware of them. And the particularly nasty forms of transgenderism.
Now, I think is a legitimate version of transgenderism. That reasonable, sensitive people will take wear of. Weaponized transgenderism. Of a particularly vibrant form, that we're sometimes dealing with.
That is a different phenomena. So the second part then, is what Dugin wants to do is to say.
And this is the part that you were picking up on. That are -- the relativism. The angry activism. The willingness to let everything burn inside the West. That we're now confronting with.
The virulent forms of Islamism. That we are now confronting. And some of the total package of anti-western. Antiliberalism.
Where did those come from?
Now, I agree. Those are pathological.
They are very destructive. What Dugin is offering. Is a thesis that says. That those antiliberalisms. Are themselves an youth growth of liberalism.
And that I think is simply false.
GLENN: So he -- when he says, you know, an end to modernity. And liberalism.
He's actually -- I mean, one of the first things I've found about Dugin. That opened my eyes.
Was his statement that -- that fascism, with Mussolini. Mussolini was a very brave person. As was Hitler.
But it didn't work. But they understood that international communism was not good. So they went for national communism, or socialism. Which became fascist. And he said, where the two of them went wrong. Was they offered too many compromises.
He said, the future -- yeah. The future is fascism without compromise.
STEPHEN: Exactly.
GLENN: This is terrifying.
STEPHEN: This is 1990's Dugin in the first decade after the fail of the Soviet Union. And he's a strange character at this point. He's already adopted various forms of Naziism. In the 1980s. At this point, he's not a young man. He's in his late '20s. Early '30s.
So he's a mature thinker. He hates liberalism already. He hates modernity. He hates the West in its entirety. At the same time, he's dissatisfied with a lot of what's going on in the Soviet Union.
Its version of Communism and Marxism. When the Soviet Union falls, so he's cofounder of a national Bolshevik Party. And the Bolsheviks, of course, was Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and so on. So it's a reworking of a kind of Communist Marxism.
But the nationalism is important there for him. And he then -- and, a few years, settles on saying, what we need to do is just rework fascism.
So he's widely and explicitly admiring of Mussolini, and some of the German fascists of the 1920s and early 1930s. And he publishes an article in 1997, called fascism. Borderless and red. The red part means blood. And it means a little bit of incorporation of Marxism.
That will mean bloody, violent revolution that we need, and the border part is also there. That we need to expand Russia's border.
We need to be expansionists.
What we need is a kind of national socialism. And he takes the socialism seriously.
Economic control.
But it's not going to be a socialism, that we take on, so to speak. It's a Russian people, who moved into some abstract, socialist template. We need to take the Russian people. Its particular ethnic identity, including its religion. Its cultures. It's traditions. See it as having a world historical destiny.
It's going to lead the world to a new, bright future that is not going to be kind of trapped in the old Marxist way. And as you were suggesting, it will learn from the failures of the earlier versions of fascism and national socialism.
And what that is going to involve with. A willingness to be muscular. A willingness to be violent. A willingness to take ethnicity and nationalism seriously. And not to compromise one job with capitalism, with any form of Western liberalism.
Yes. That's Dugin. By the time we get to the late 1990s.