 The whole point of an interview is to be tough from the beginning, and he didn't do that. And there's a million things about his own country that he could have asked about him. You're talking to the president of Russia, and I use that word in air quotes. He's not the president of Russia. He is the dictator. He is an actual dictator. People who soft pedal this are wrong. There's no independent judiciary. You cannot say what you want. The number of people, the number of artists who have spoken up against the war in Ukraine, who have had to exile themselves or have been exiled to the Gulag are too many to count. I mean, an American was arrested yesterday in Moscow, a ballerina who is of Russian background and is based in LA because she gave, and this is according to the Russians. This is not our interpretation of this, $51 to a charity in New York that supports Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees, I believe is actually their remit, but $51. And she is facing life in prison in Moscow. This is not a country that is, you know, Victor Orban's country. There's opposition. I mean, not a government that I like, but there's a lot of people, and they've done a lot to squelch the free press, but you can still say Victor Orban is an asshole and not go to prison in Hungary. That is not the case in Russia. So Tucker Carlson has the opportunity that most of us don't have. And I think he squandered that opportunity, but I will agree with his act that the question was good. If he started with that, I'd say, oh, God, this is actually going to be a good interview, but he ended with that after allowing Putin to filibuster in a absurd version of Russian history for about 30 minutes. Yeah. You know, there was another clip that I want to play that's of Tucker Carlson. You know, he's he's pressed about these very questions that you raised, Michael, about why didn't you bring up any of the human rights abuses, any of the repression? It was at the World Government Summit where Tucker was kind of reflecting on the Putin interview, and he gives a defense of his interview style. And I'm curious what you think of this defense. So Ian, could you roll that clip? You should challenge some ideas. For instance, you didn't talk about freedom of speech in Russia. You did not talk about Navalny, about assassinations, about about the restrictions on opposition in the coming elections. I didn't talk about the things that every other American media outlet talks about. Why? Yes, this is my question. Because those are covered and because I have spent my life talking to people who run countries in various countries and have concluded the following, that every leader kills people, including my leader, every leader kills people. Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people. Sorry. That's why I would want to be a leader. That press restriction is universal in the United States. I know because I've lived it. I've asked my former, I've had a lot of jobs and I've done this for 34 years and I know how it works. And there's more censorship in Russia than there is in the United States, but there's a great deal in the United States. And so at a certain point, it's like people can decide whether they think, what countries they think are better, what systems they think are better. I just want to know what he thinks. That was the whole point. Yes. What's your reaction to that? I mean, where does one begin? I mean, every syllable varies, stupid and offensive in almost every way. I mean, first of all, the false equivalence is insane. But I mean, you start with this idea where when he was, you know, got this interview, he did a little piece to camera on the top of the hotel in Moscow. I think that's the Trump hotel, too, by the way, where the accusations in the steel dossier supposedly took place. But he's up there and he said, you know, no one is doing the job. No one is actually interviewing him. And of course, all the people who have wanted to interview him have said, you know, we put in requests and we're getting nowhere. So for him to say that everyone asked that question, but start the entire process of the interview teasing the interview by saying nobody talks to him except for me. I mean, you can't have both of those thoughts in your head at the same time. Because you're the one who gets that opportunity. Nobody has, particularly since the invasion of Ukraine, and you don't ask anything. But the equivalency, I mean, all leaders kill people. Okay, well, we can say that that is broadly true, right? But that's saying that, you know, that there's no difference between, you know, homicide and manslaughter. And if you're, you could say Joe Biden kills people because America, you know, eliminated some Houthis last week. But that's not the same thing as poisoning somebody who is a meek little journalist or a rather strong and robust opposition leader. That's not the same thing. To say that all leaders kill people, the presumption is that all types of death that you could ultimately be blamed for are the same. They are not. The idea also that there is censorship in the United States is utter fucking bullshit. Excuse my language, but it's unbelievable that I did a thing when Navalny was murdered. I went to every major Russian newspaper, major, you know, mainstream Russian newspaper, all of which are controlled by the Kremlin. There wasn't a mention in any of them for two days. Look at Steve Rosenberg, one of the bravest journalists out there who's the BBC's correspondent in Moscow, speaks perfect Russian, has interviewed Putin, has interviewed, I mean, you wanna see a real interview? Go watch Steve Rosenberg interview Lukashenko in Minsk, in Belarus, and it's amazing that he was not assassinated right after the interview, but Steve Rosenberg just doesn't care. He knows what his job is, and he's been allowed to stay as the kind of token opposition in Russia, but he actually went over the newspapers too and said, you know, there was maybe one or two paragraphs, but of course, people don't get their news from just state newspaper, older people do obviously in Russia, but there was no mention anywhere, none. I mean, that's forbidden by the government. Tell me an example of that in the United States, and I will tell you why you're wrong. The thing that has been really bothering me about this is there's an entire contingent of sort of anti-war libertarians who are taking this Tucker soundbite and really running with it. And to me, it strikes me as so either stupid or dishonest, I'm frankly not sure which it is, because it's this complete erasure of degrees, right? Like the scale at which this is happening also matters a lot to me, right? Like for example, a case that, you know, tons of people have been in my mentions all day today and then a whole bunch last week about how, oh, you know, Tucker's so wrong about press freedom in the US and all these things. Well, what about the Assange case? And it's like, first of all, Zach and I talked with Stella Assange, you know, Julian's wife, you know, merely months ago on this podcast, right? So like this is something that's like, we're reporting on, we're interviewing the relevant people. We would love to secure an interview with Julian Assange himself. He's in prison in Belmarsh and so currently Stella is who is available to us. I am sympathetic to his cause. I do not think he should be in prison for publishing this material. Absolutely, but to some degree, like the thing that was bothering me so much about this, other than the fact that we literally have engaged with Julian's case and, you know, been reporting on it is the fact that the scale at which this type of thing happens in, you know, each country when we're making comparisons also matters a ton, right? The Assange case is completely, you know, unacceptable that, you know, by the way, the Trump Department of Justice was the one that's trying to extradite him, right? But, you know, it's completely unacceptable that that type of, you know, persecution and encroachment on press freedom is happening in the U.S. Also that case sticks out to some degree because it's a rarity compared to what happens under Putin's regime. And to me, these degrees matter even if I oppose it always and everywhere. Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth looking at just the data on this, like to figure out how bad is Russia? Is it just kind of, you know, is America like Russia light? I don't think so because like every single pick your freedom index and it's gonna rank Russia at the bottom. This is the 2023 index of economic freedom which is done by the Wall Street Journal and Heritage Foundation. Gives Russia an overall score of 53.8, 53.8 and ranks it at 125. Nigeria is right above it. I love that. Nigeria is right above it. Niger's right below it. You know, very low property rights, judicial effectiveness, business freedom. The only thing that seems to be good at all is, well, it looks like trade freedom went up a little bit. I don't know if that's because of, you know, opening up more trade with China or something like that. Labor freedom also went up because they're no longer like relying on Soviet slave labor. So props to Russia. They're doing great these days. They're very proud. Here's reporters without borders. The 2023 index puts them at 164 out of 180. Here's just a couple of highlights. All privately owned independent TV channels are banned from broadcasting except for cable entertainment channels. That means no BBC, no Euro news, no France 24. There's many laws relating to freedom of expression that have been adopted in recent years including defamation and fake news laws were amended in order to incorporate them into the penal code at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Distributing false information about the Russian armed forces or any other Russian state body is now punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Look, we've had some problems with, you know, we've had our lodged our complaints with the way social media moderates speech and so forth. But we're not in a situation where you're getting 15 years for criticizing the federal government. So it's, you know, it's worth just dwelling on the data. And there's one more here. This is the democracy index, which is put together by the Economist Intelligence Association or Institute Unit, thank you. And it's just showing kind of the, all the following indices of democracy. We linked to all our sources. So if you wanna dig into how they arrive at all these, you definitely should. But my point in that is like you can, you don't have to cherry pick anything to, you know, find pretty broad consensus across the globe that in terms of freedom, Russia is not, you know, the US is not biting at Russia's heels or anything. Yeah, the Soviet Union used to do something funny in occupied countries to the same. So for instance, East Germany, they had a Christian Democratic Party. They had an SPD, the Social Democratic Party. I mean, they weren't real parties, but they had a fake opposition. So in the parliament, you'd give one seat in the Fox comma to like the SPD or the CDU or something. And it was just a complete joke. The same thing was true in Russia until recently with medium. So you had three places, Rain TV, which is an interesting documentary, but it's not a great documentary but gives you a lot of background on how that came into being Echo Moscow, the radio station, which is off the air now too. And the guy who started and ran it is like controlled opposition at this point, a very old white-haired journalist who's just, you know, says what the Kremlin wants him to say at this point. And Nivella Gazeta, the newspaper, which is where Anna Politzkaiva was a reporter and she was shot in the head for reporting on war crimes in Chechnya and keeping in mind, I always find it incredible that the so-called anti-war people who don't appear to be opposed to war always, particularly when it comes to Ukraine, the invasion of Ukraine, you know, that Putin solidified his power in 2000 with the Second Chechen War. And what created the Second Chechen War was a series of apartment bombings in Moscow and the outskirts of Moscow killed 250 odd people. There was one that was about to blow up and it didn't happen, but it was a training exercise. That's what the people were seeing. If you go, if you look at that case, there's a number of people, the economist who's reported on this, it's a conspiracy theory that seems to be true. And a number of very, very serious people have reported this, Alexander Litvinenko reported on this, that it was blown up, those apartment buildings were blown up by the FSB with the purpose of launching the Second Chechen War and then solidifying Putin's power. Litvinenko reported that and then he was poisoned in England, in a foreign country by members of the FSB who are now actually in the Duma. Alexander Lugavoy, who is the man who actually poisoned him is in parliament, in Russian parliament in the Duma as a member of the United Russia Party, as a member of Putin's party. That was his reward for killing somebody on foreign soil who dared to write about the apartment bombings. I mean, there are a lot of people that love conspiracy theories, Tucker loves conspiracy theories. He's on, I mean, he's not even gone 9-11 now, JFK, RFK, aliens, vaccines. He's full. The guy who allegedly blew Obama back in 2009 or he's playing. I mean, it was the only episode of this show that I watched and I was like, oh, this is pretty fun. I didn't believe it, but it was pretty fun. But he doesn't believe this. I mean, why not this conspiracy, which is one that is more consequential than any other that I can think of, I'm particularly for the peace in the Middle East and in the region of Russia, all of this that solidified Putin's power and allowed him to obtain more and more power. If you've seen the early 2000s, there was a sense when George Bush said, I looked into his soul. And then of course, John McCain very famously said, I looked into his soul and I saw KGB, which was more accurate than what George W. Bush said. But there was a point at which, okay, this is the way Russians rule. This is way Russia always has been. It's never been a democratic country. It had a very, very brief experiment with democracy in the 90s and it was sort of disastrous and as it went through the 90s, Boris Yeltsin became more authoritarian and then handed the keys to Vladimir Putin, who by the way, the interesting thing gives him the keys to the two and he's old and drunk and infirm at this point and calls him on the night of his election victory. He's the self-appointed, he's going to take over for Yeltsin. And he never called him back. This is an incredible thing, this video of this. They were filming a documentary in the rage that existed in Boris Yeltsin at the time. He was like, he didn't call me back. I mean, are you kidding me? He's like, I'm waiting for his call. I was like, no, no, this was, once he took the reins of power, there was no giving up on the reins of power. He was not loosening that grip at all. And in doing that, of course, you have to shut down all independent media. You have to arrest and kill everybody inside. I mean, the number of people that have been poisoned, I mean, Navalny was poisoned. Viktor Yushenko was poisoned because he was someone that was drifting towards the West and Ukraine. Vladimir Karamurza, who I've actually spent some time with, Peter Varyslav, who was the kind of manager of Pussy Riot, who I've also spent time with and is a very fun guy, was also poisoned. The Screepalls in London were, or in Salisbury were poisoned, defectors from the KGB. So it was funny when you saw people like, who's this guy, David Sacks, I guess, online said, you know, why would he bother killing Navalny? How did he want it? You ask any... Is David Sacks peddling this stuff too now? Of course, yeah. He's a big, you know, Ukraine deserved it kind of guy. But this attitude is somebody who comes from people who have not read a thing or know nothing about modern Russia. And there are people that are close to Putin, that are not his enemies, who have confirmed this, that the thing is when you betray the motherland, they will go to no length, to no end, like if you do everything they possibly can to punish you for it. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our new show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here. New episodes drop every week, so subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel to get notified when that happens or to the Just Asking Questions podcast on Apple, Spotify, or any other podcatcher. See you next week.