Tucker Carlson Slammed Over Interview With Putin Ally With Neo-Fascist Ties

Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson has again courted controversy with his choice of Russian interviewees after publishing his sit-down with ultranationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin on April 29.

In the interview—released online by the Tucker Carlson Network and posted on X, formerly Twitter—Dugin, long close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and considered by some his ideological "brain," railed against what he called "Anglo-Saxon" individualism and said Western liberal values would destroy "human identity."

In February, Carlson interviewed Putin in Moscow, marking the Russian leader's first sit-down with a Western journalist since Russia began its military invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The former Fox News host faced widespread backlash over the interview—which was dominated by the Russian leader's historical revisionism—and is likewise being criticized over his meeting with Dugin.

On X, Anton Gerashchenko, a former deputy minister at Ukraine's Internal Affairs Ministry, wrote, "Tucker Carlson continues popularizing Russian ideology," adding that the host was "acting not as a journalist but as a propagandist."

Newsweek has contacted the Tucker Carlson Network for comment by email.

Dugin said in the interview that Western liberalism undermined "any kind of collective identity," adding that the progress of LGBTQ+ communities and rights was "a necessary element of implementation and the victory of this liberal ideology." He continued, "That has a name: transhumanism, post-humanism, singularity, artificial intelligence."

Dugin and Calrson largely skirted issues related to Russian politics and the war in Ukraine, of which Dugin has been a full-throated advocate. The philosopher has long been dismissive of Ukrainian identity, writing in 2023 that Russia is "fighting so it doesn't exist anymore."

Dugin has been sanctioned by the U.S. and the European Union and has been charged by the Security Service of Ukraine in connection with his support of the Kremlin's war.

Following the interview, Timothy Snyder—an American historian who specializes in Central and Eastern European, particularly Ukrainian, history—described Dugin on X as "a fascist ideologue."

In his interview with Carlson, Dugin described Putin—over whom the extent of his influence is hotly debated—as a "traditional leader" who "contradicts the global progressivist agenda" in defense of traditional values.

"Observers from the progressive camp in the West, I think they have understood that from the beginning of his rule correctly. So this hatred [toward Putin] is not just something casual," he added.

"Someone with nuclear weapons to stand strong defending traditional values you're going to abolish. I think they have some basis for this Russophobia and the hatred for Putin," he continued.

Dugin has long been at the forefront of Russia's conspiracy theory–laden ultranationalist community. The Putinist power bloc's gradual shift into anti-Western revanchism and chauvinism has seen Dugin's ideology increasingly align with the Kremlin's.

The 62-year-old was once an anti-communist dissident, and in the early 1990s, he was a co-founder of the neo-fascist National Bolshevik Party, which combined communist and fascist imagery and ideology and leaned heavily on nostalgia for the Soviet Union. Dugin left the party in 1998. In 2007, it was outlawed by Russian courts and branded an extremist organization.

His school of thought has been described as "Eurasianism," the foundations of which were set out in his 1997 book The Foundations of Geopolitics. He asserted that Russia should become a world empire dominating both Europe and Asia, standing against the "American empire."

Dugin is believed to have links to members of the American far right, among them former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and white nationalist figurehead Richard Spencer. Spencer's wife acted as a translator for Dugin's daughter, Darya Dugina, who was killed by a car bomb outside Moscow in 2022.