In case you missed it: I am hosting a summer series of shows on Reality Check Radio starting Wednesday 14th February—the day after my 29th birthday. Thanks to Paul Brennan and Cam Slater who have done some promos for me on their shows this week.
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Friday 9th February may well be a day that goes down in geopolitical history. The President of Russia was interviewed for over two hours by Tucker Carlson and simultaneously the President of America was ruled mentally unfit to stand trial by his own special counsel.
Vladimir Putin was given the opportunity to say whatever he wanted to a Western audience, whose wealth he is draining as we fight in a proxy war in the killing fields of Ukraine. After saying he was going to spend "30 to 60 seconds" providing us with background information, he spent over thirty minutes giving an autistic monologue of Russian history from AD 800, flawlessly naming futures, dates, and places from memory. As Tucker became confused, Putin would bring his tale back to a specific point in history and effortlessly carry on. Rather than provide some justification of "NATO aggression" or threat of nuclear war, he made a 1,200 year old claim to Ukrainian territory on the basis that Lenin and the Bolsheviks "for some unknown reason" split off historical Russian territory to manufacture Ukraine in the 20th century.
He even put together a large bundle of archive documents which he had an aide bring and present to Tucker during the interview. For the intellectual inclined it was extraordinarily enjoyable to watch. For the average person the entire show will sound like a bizarre and boring ramble. On a purely intellectual level, the Vladimir Putin of Tucker's interview stands head and shoulders above any leader from the world of liberal democracy. There are those who will criticise him as an evil and bloody man, but I can struggle to say he's any worse than the people running the show at our end. He's perhaps a bit more open and direct about the killing.
Meanwhile, in the free world defined by the rule of law and fair elections, Joe Biden was ruled mentally unfit to stand trial for mishandling classified documents. This mishap was similar to the one that they are going after Donald Trump for in a partisan manner. The decision states that Biden cannot remember when he was Vice President or when his own term began. He cannot remember when his son died, the circumstances of the Afghan war, or has the ability to distinguish between political allies and adversaries. In public appearances over the past few days he has mistaken world leaders for predecessors who have been dead for decades.
President Biden took to his podium to refute his own special counsel in the hours after the Tucker-Putin interview, but during this address he referred to the rules of Egypt as the President of Mexico and shouted at reporters who questioned his mental agility.
He's still the likely Democratic nominee, because none of this matters. The people who run the United States government are doing just fine and appear to have given up on the illusion that they let the President make any real decisions. Several top commanders during the Trump administration even came out and said that they openly ignored the President's wishes or withheld information from him. They suffered no consequences then and appear to have simply done away with the formalities.
No one is in doubt that Vladimir Putin is the one calling the shots in Russia.
What happens next? I do not know. American and European leaders know the Ukraine war is lost, but continue to funnel money and arms to Ukrainians willing to spill their blood for every inch of soil. I do not blame them for fighting against all odds, and I mourn their deaths. It is clear to me that Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk arranged this interview with Vladimir Putin as an olive branch of sorts—an attempt to take the information war to a whole new level and force a peace deal onto the table. Two men who want the killing to stop. Republican congressmen are currently holding up the next round of funding for both the war in Ukraine and the one in Gaza, but no one trusts them to hold the line for long.
The war ends when we stop paying for it.
On Friday 9th February 2023, Russia showed the world a strong man and America showed the world a senile man.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out how this ends.