Transcript of Thought Crimes, Cults, and Propaganda: The System’s Evolution Into Nazi Totalitarianism

Now, if there's one hallmark of totalitarianism of the 1930s, it's banning books. Book burning. Remember that? We're against it. That couldn't possibly happen now. Oh, it happens a lot more than it happened in the 1930s. In fact, we're going to talk to a man whose book became a bestseller and then was banned by the government. His crime? He accurately described what once-free Western societies have become. Western freedom is only the semblance of the real thing. Sure, you're free to watch Netflix and smoke weed and doom scroll and order DoorDash and live alone, racking up credit card debt in your apartment that you don't own. But if you step out of line and notice what's happening around you, your freedom evaporates instantly and you could find yourself in handcuffs. We watched that happen in 2020. People who challenged the official story, refused to comply, were censored, treated like a despised, hated minority group, ostracized, punished. C.J. Hopkins documented all of that as it happened in a series of essays collected in this book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich. And we are proud to bring this book back because it was banned. It was banned.

It was kicked off Amazon, was banned in multiple countries in Europe. And so we're publishing a new edition of it. I wrote the foreword to it, available now on tuckercarlsonbooks.com. And we operate on the assumption, because it's true, that authorities only censor the truth. And they only censor it when it threatens their power. We specialize in bringing back banned books. We're proud to do that. And C.J. Hopkins' observations really resonate now, 6 years later. He joins us for a conversation about the book and what led him to write it. C.J. Hopkins, thank you very much for doing this.

Thanks so much.

You have an amazing life trajectory, which our viewers can read about, but if I could just summarize it, You begin life in America, in Miami. You wind up in New York as a playwright, very much a figure of the left, I think, culturally and politically. Then you wind up in Berlin almost 25 years ago. You've lived in Europe really since the Iraq War, but on the left. And then COVID happens. And then the next thing you know, we're reading about you getting arrested by the German anti-racist authorities for something, even though you're not a racist. And like, so what hap— what happened? What, how did you, what was the pivot point that got you from your previous life to wherever you are now?

Um, I think it's COVID. Um, yeah, that's, that's the one. Um, uh, yeah, I mean, I was, you know, my life was just going along, uh, as it had been until, uh, you know, the COVID measures got rolled out, and this is March and April of 2020.

So early.

Yeah. And I had been writing my satirical columns. I had been at that for about 4 years, covering the whole first Trump administration and the establishment's reaction to that. And when the COVID stuff started, at first I didn't take it very seriously. I started, I wrote a few humorous columns. I just thought it was a massive overreaction and that it would pass. And then it started getting really serious. One of the first things that I did, I think I was still in shock at the time, I compiled a 257-tweet thread on Twitter. It was still Twitter then. Just collecting the mainstream media news stories and headlines that were being pumped out. This is when they rolled out the new normal, is what I call it. People may remember that. A lot of people think I made that phrase up, and I didn't. It was put out by the establishment. That thread still exists. People can look at it. I think a lot of people have forgotten how authoritarian it was, how immediately authoritarian it was. By the end of April, I was quite alarmed by what was happening.

You were alarmed, but for some reason, the people you'd been living and working with and thought you shared a common worldview with, a lot of them were not alarmed. Was that weird?

Well, they were alarmed, but they were alarmed differently. They were alarmed about, they were alarmed about, uh, what they were being told was, you know, uh, an apocalyptic plague, basically. Um, again, you know, people forget in the early days, the— I think it was the World Health Organization actually came out and said, uh, you know, this virus has a 3.4% death rate. which was complete bullshit, of course. But that's a really scary number. And the way the official propaganda was all rolled out in the beginning, it was aimed at terrifying people. And so people were terrified.

Why were you not terrified?

Well, because I was actually looking at the data and the numbers that were coming out and paying attention to Well, I was also paying attention to the propaganda. It's what I do. And when this messaging started, I couldn't help but look at it and say, okay, does it line up with what we're learning about this supposedly novel virus? And does it make any sense? And it really didn't.

So you start to say this publicly in your column. and on Twitter, this doesn't make any sense. You're trying to apply the standards of science to what you're seeing in the media, and there's a huge disconnect between those two. And so you start to say this. What do the people around you respond with?

Well, uh, one of the first things that happened, um, I, I, I think I criticized— it was actually one of my writing students, um, who went kind of nuts on social media and was referring to people who were questioning and criticizing the narrative that was being rolled out. She started referring to them as Nazis, neo-Nazis, and so on. And I kind of took her to task and immediately she responded by calling me an antisemite and a far-right extremist.

Were you? Yes, of course.

No, of course not. This is an example of something that was happening on a much broader level in society. At the same time that the official propaganda was being rolled out, what was also being rolled out as part of the narrative was that anyone who is questioning the official propaganda is some kind of far-right extremist.

Yes.

Right? There's no valid reason to do this. This is back at the time, the early— there were those 2 doctors, I forget where they were in the States, and Jay Bhattacharya was coming out and respectable people, people with credentials were coming out and challenging and questioning the official propaganda and they were being delegitimized and demonized and in some cases already censored.

Was it— I mean, what was the experience if you spent a lot of your life as a playwright in Brooklyn? What's it like to be called a far-right extremist?

It was kind of— I don't know how to describe it really. One of the first pieces that got a lot of attention that I wrote, it's in the book, it's called The Covidian Cult. And my experience of it, it really felt like, like I and, and those of us who were criticizing or asking questions, it really felt like we were suddenly in a cult, surrounded by cult members who were pressuring us to conform to the official narrative of the cult, which obviously blatantly didn't make any sense. Um, so I don't know if you've ever spent any time around people who are in a cult or—

Oh yes.

Or what have you. I, um, I remember back in, uh, Florida, before I left Florida, I went to a big gathering. Uh, my girlfriend's mother at the time was hooked up with some Maharishi or something. And I went in, I went to one of their big gatherings and I had to run from the room because of the energy in the room. And, and, and I explained it to people. I said, you got to understand in that room, the reality in that room that's being generated by all these, these people believe that that little guy up on stage is God. Right? And so that's the actual reality that's being generated in that room.

What was the energy? When you say you had to run from the energy, can you describe that?

It just felt overwhelming. It just felt overwhelming.

And dark?

Yeah, to me, dark. Yeah. An authoritarian energy. Yeah, dark energy. But it was more that, I don't know how philosophical we want to get.

Very.

So early. In a sense, you know, there's a reality, there's, you know, this is reality, there's physical material reality, and then there's a reality, uh, right, which is something that is a collective and communal consensus that we all participate in.

Yes.

Um, and we don't notice our reality.

No.

Right, this reality. When you get into a cult, there's a separate reality, right? And that reality is no longer in line with the reality that we take for granted all the time. So you can become much more aware of it if you're not a part of it.

Yes, that's right.

Right? So I don't know how to describe it any better than that, but you can feel the energy of this, of this alternate reality that's being created by belief. Yeah, by belief. In the beginning, when in the early days of COVID I was very much aware of that. Suddenly everyone was walking around with medical-looking masks on their face. People in Berlin, they were following orders, they were observing the social distancing and all of this. And to me, as someone who did not believe the official narrative that they were all following, it felt like I was surrounded by cult members who were performing all of these ritualistic behaviors, um, that really only made sense in their fictional reality. Does that make sense?

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Join blokes. Get your edge back. Better with Cardiff. It's just interesting to me, and you're not the first person I thought this of. It's like, why did you see that when others didn't? And I always ask that question of dissidents, people who pivot against the new, new thing, especially when the new, new thing is evil. And obviously nonsensical. And COVID is not the only example of this, but whatever mass hysteria grips a group, there's always some small percentage who are like, wait, this is crazy. And I always wonder what they have in common, and I've never figured that out.

I don't think there's a single— people have asked me that before, and I don't think that there is a single answer to it. No, there's not. I think that, uh, for some people, um, it's their personal histories. Um, some people, you know, perhaps women who've been in abusive relationships have been manipulated by, uh, partners, people who have been in cults, people who have lived in authoritarian societies, totalitarian societies. I think that's part of it. I think part of it is just the nature of certain individuals. I have never been— I've never had a great deal of respect for authority. And, you know, the time that I grew, the years that I grew up in, I mean, we were encouraged to question authority.

Yes.

To challenge authority, to, you know, not believe everything that the authority said on face value. So it's just kind of second nature to me.

Me too.

I also, I think I just have a natural aversion when I see people, you know, be— when I see this type of herd mentality forming and this, this behavior, uh, it just sets off my alarm bells.

I mean, because, you know, at the bottom of the crowd is some individual getting his face stomped.

Yeah, of course. Yeah. Or a number of individuals. Um, it's, uh, You know, it's part of the irony of everything that's happened in my legal cases is, you know, I've spent my life writing, you know, anti-authoritarian literature. And I think I'm hyper-attuned to the formation of, you know, fascist or, you know, quasi-fascist social bodies. It just sets off my alarm bells.

It's remarkable that you were literally in Berlin of all cities when this happened. So what was, for those who weren't living in Berlin during COVID and can't really remember what happened during COVID just paint a word picture quickly of what life in Berlin was like during COVID Oh God, it's even hard to remember it all.

It's all in the book. The measures went into effect pretty quickly. The, uh, they, they passed— the government actually passed, and this is when I started covering what was happening in Germany and in Berlin more, um, they passed, uh, uh, legislation and it was called the Infektionsschutzgesetz, um, which is the Infection, uh, Protection Act. And, uh, Tucker, essentially it was a new Enabling Act. Um, if people will remember the Enabling Act of 1933, Um, which is a large part of how the Nazis took over power. In 1933, they passed legislation and they said, uh, we have a state of emergency, uh, you know, with all of these communists running around in the streets and the society is coming apart and, you know, all this social disorder. And we need to pass this emergency legislation which will allow us to suspend the Constitution. There was a constitution at the time. to suspend the Constitution and rule by decree. This is 1933. And in 2020, the German Bundestag passed legislation that said we have a state of emergency, there's a virus that is, you know, attacking society, and so we need to be able to suspend the Constitution and rule by decree.

And they did this. Um, uh, there were huge protests. There was a gigantic protest in Berlin in August of 2020, people may remember Bobby Kennedy was there, gave a big speech.

Never forget.

I don't know how many people, a million people in the streets, hundreds of thousands.

He was attacked as an antisemite for those things.

Of course, immediately. And people may remember, they may not remember the big demonstration, but they may remember the storming of the Reichstag.

Right?

This was actually a dress rehearsal for January 6th.

Yeah.

And a lot of people don't know this. The main protest was on the big street, the Street of 17 July in Berlin that runs from the Brandenburger Tor back to the Siegessäule, to the Victory Tower. This is the huge street, and this is where all of the demonstrators. The protesters were the main body of it. Aside from that, detached from that, apart from that was the Reichstag building, which is over to the side. A separate protest took place there. This protest was permitted by the German authorities. They granted the permit to an ex-member of the NPD, which was the neo-Nazi party, the now banned neo-Nazi party. So they granted a protest permit to this ex-neo-Nazi. And there was a small gathering there outside of the Reichstag, and the German police, which normally guards the Reichstag pretty well, they all pulled back hundreds of yards behind the protest and left the Reichstag unguarded. And so this group of wackos in front of the Reichstag said, oh, there's nobody guarding the Reichstag.

Let's break in.

And they go charge—

Are you serious?

I'm absolutely serious. This is documented. It's in the book. It's documented.

I don't know how I missed all this.

And the mainstream, of course, the mainstream German media happened to be right there at the Reichstag. And so when these people came running up the steps, and so the whole narrative, the entire news report was, the crazy COVID deniers have attacked the Reichstag trying to overthrow the government.

Well, since everything is World War II, I think You know, a lot of people are aware that this is not the first totalitarian movement that's used attacks on the Reichstag to seize power. Yeah. I mean, you would think they'd be like, okay, let's leave the Reichstag out of this.

It's just, I, I don't, I don't mean to insult the Germans or anything, but, you know, it's, they're not big on subtlety. You know, it's like, oh, they'll do the Reichstag again. Uh, but seriously, seriously, this is—

I had no idea that even happened.

Yeah, this is docu— this is documented. And, and I wrote it up. As to me, it was quite obviously a dress rehearsal for January 6th. When January 6th happened, I was like, there it is again. It's the same thing.

And they did it in Brazil, the same thing. Yeah. Yeah.

But in any event, Tucker, they passed this new enabling act. And from then on, I mean, it was the most horrifying, heartbreaking thing that I've been through in my life. I mean, Berlin, You know, people think of Berlin as this bohemian, you know, wild city.

Beautiful city.

And it transformed virtually overnight, overnight into this pathologized fascistic society where, you know, literally everyone was wearing masks everywhere. They were robotically following all the social distancing directions. You know, there were police you know, guarding the outdoor markets to make sure that no one was, you know, going to the outdoor market without a mask on. I was pulled out of a grocery store pretty early, uh, over a mask protest because I thought it was ridiculous. You know, at this— we already knew it was an airborne respiratory virus and everybody's going to get it, whatever it is. Um, and I was, uh, rebelling. I, I, I actually— I made a mask out of a paper bag. I took a paper bag and I cut eye holes and a little mouth thing, and I wrote a protest message on the paper bag, which was Befehl ist Befehl. It's German for orders are orders. It's the famous Nuremberg Defense.

Yeah.

You know, we're just following orders. And so I went into the grocery store with this paper bag on my head, and the grocery store clerks completely freaked out. It's like, what are you doing? You can't do this. You need to wear a mask. I said, I'm wearing a mask, you know. And it says, no, no, this is a paper, you have to wear a mask. I said, my mask is just as good as your mask, you know. So you have to leave or we're going to call the police. They called the police and I think it was 2 or 3 armed police pulled me out of the grocery store. That's when I— I think that's when I realized how serious it was going to be.

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So just to summarize your views as you explained them to me in one sentence, you lived in New York, you knew Trump, you were never besotted by Trump. You always thought he was buffoonish, but you had sympathy for Trump's voters because they were the working class that you'd spent your life as a leftist, like, thinking about and hoping to represent. So you saw COVID as kind of part of the response to what was, in effect, a populist rebellion.

Yes.

Can you flesh that out a tiny bit?

Sure. Yeah, I've got to go way back. I spent most of my life writing weird theater and then I wrote a novel, but I started writing political satire back in 2016 because I became interested in this rising populist pushback against what I see as the global system that we all live under and have been living under since the end of the Cold War. And as you said, I come from the left, but I became interested in this populist pushback that led to Brexit and led to Trump. And then for years I wrote satirical columns and it was so easy. It was like hitting cans of corn, just the hysterical overreaction and the establishment trying to demonize not just Trump. I mean, Trump is much less interesting to me than the people who were voting for him and who voted for Brexit and who were forming right populist parties all over Europe as a reaction to what this evolving system was doing to their societies. And so I watched for 4 years from 2016 to 2020, I watched the system, the establishment, responding to this populist uprising or whatever you want to call it, trying to put it down, trying to demonize everyone who was involved in it.

Yeah.

And trying to suppress it. And it didn't work. It was still there. It was still going. And then it rolled right into COVID. And, you know, a point that I made over and over during the COVID years, you know, people talk about lockdowns, you know, a lockdown, Where does that term come from? It comes from prison.

Yes.

Right? A lockdown, you lock everyone down when the prisoners are having a riot, when they're rebelling. And the point of it is to remind them, hey, you're in a fucking prison. Right?

Yeah, fair.

It's like, you know, you're in a prison. You guys have, you know, sharpened toothbrushes and spoons and stuff, and we have guns. All right, so maybe calm the hell down and get back in your cells, and we're going to lock you all down until you remember where you are. To me, that's the way— and I'm not trying to reduce the whole COVID event to this, but broadly, to me, this was, this was the message. This is what was happening.

Yes.

It was like, hey, you know, those democratic rights, That you think that you have. Well, you have those. You know, you, you can, you can exercise your democratic rights and you've got free speech and you can do all this and go to the mall and watch Netflix and everything. But if you step out of line a little too far and, you know, do crazy shit like leave the European Union or elect Donald Trump president, right? You know, well, we can take those rights away from you in a heartbeat. And remind you exactly who is in charge and who has the power. That's the way that I started reading the COVID event very early, and I read it that way all the way through.

And if you're running a federal government that's got millions of employees, is the largest institution in the world, and you want to eliminate from its ranks anyone who may cause you problems, who's thinking independently or has a disobedient cast of mind, then requiring a COVID shot that doesn't actually prevent COVID is a pretty easy way to identify them. So everyone who turns it down, just get rid of them immediately. It's like the perfect purge. It's like kind of brilliant.

You, you asked me about Berlin, um, and there's so much happened and I couldn't get to it. I mean, they literally brought up the COVID shots, um, they literally imposed a social segregation system based on people's compliance with the vaccination. So that by the end of it, uh, you know, they called it, you know, a lockdown of the unvaccinated, uh, by the end of the COVID period. And I don't think that happened in the US, but it happened in, in Germany and other places in Europe. In, in Germany, I literally— the only place that I was allowed to go in society was to the grocery store to buy food. And I had to do that with a mask on my face. It was the only way that I could get my food. But people who were not vaccinated, who didn't have vaccination papers, we couldn't go to restaurants, we couldn't go out to any films or museums or any type of— couldn't enter a public building, couldn't go into stores. We were completely segregated from society.

Did you have to wear a badge?

I joked about this. in my columns. No, it was the reverse. They were wearing the badges on their faces, right? Those of us without the badges, we were shut out. One of my favorite cafes right on the corner, and it wasn't alone, it was all of them, they had big signs out front that you had to show either proof of vaccination or proof that you had recently had the virus and recovered from it. Within a given period of time.

You had to show your papers.

You had to show your papers.

Show us your papers.

Absolutely. You had to show your papers everywhere. Everywhere. They literally implemented a social segregation system based on vaccination status.

I'm not big on Nazi analogies. I always try and stay away from them. But if you're living in Berlin and there's a fake attack on the Reichstag, there's a suspension of civil liberties because there's a state of emergency. You have to show your papers. People are going around, wearing badges on their faces, and then one tiny group of non-compliant people is segregated from public life. Kind of an inescapable, kind of inescapable comparison, no?

Yes, I've, I've, I've, I've never had, um, um, that hesitancy to go for the Nazi analogies, obviously.

I'm trying to be polite, but it's— but I mean, come on.

But it's Berlin, for God's sakes, you know? It's, it's Berlin. We have little— there are little plaques in the streets, you know, with the names of the families that pulled out of those buildings and sent to concentration camps. You know, it's Berlin. I, I, I joked about this, and— but it's actually very serious. Part of the reason I ended up in Berlin when I did is naively, you know, I feel like an idiot now, but naively I thought to myself, okay, given the Germans' history, right, first with the Nazis and then with the GDR, um, you know, This is the last place on Earth that is ever going to flirt with any kind of fascism or totalitarianism or anything like that. And it really—

I'm sorry to laugh at you, but the process of getting older is the process of discovering you're an idiot. I mean, that really is aging.

Exactly. Felt like such an ass. And they went totalitarian in a heartbeat. In a heartbeat.

Lots of people did. But the Germans have a well-deserved reputation for efficiency and just a systematic approach to everything that they do, which is great if you're building Audis. Not so great if you're trying to destroy the lives of a hated minority. Yeah. So at what point did you just say out loud what was obvious? Like, this is clearly—

Early on.

Oh, really?

Yeah, early on. I shifted from the— I wrote a couple of, I think, mostly funny columns in the very beginning, but I think it was still in March and definitely in April of 2020, I was going at it hard. I was saying, look, this is, you know, this is, again, I have to talk about it more broadly because what I was really, I was following up from my earlier columns.

Yes.

So it's not, what I was saying is this is a new form of totalitarianism.

Yes.

But I didn't mean just what was happening during COVID. I was— I meant it as an extension of what had been happening for the, for the 4 previous years. Um, I just felt like the COVID phase was the lockdown phase. This was the phase where we all get reminded, um, that our rights can be stripped away from us, um, in a heartbeat. So I was going on it— I was going at it pretty hard from, uh, from early on.

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I didn't— I don't think I really got in trouble until the first criminal investigation. began. I published the book, the second edition of which you just wrote the foreword to. I published that book in May of '22. May of '22. And what got me in trouble originally was in August of— this is 2022, and I know it was different in the States, but everything was still, you know, in effect in Germany at that time. Um, the Germany— the Germans that summer were starting to question and starting to ask themselves, you know, would it be all right maybe if we, you know, stopped with the mask mandates and, you know, let people go out into society without masks on? Um, and most people were saying, no, no, no, we need to continue to wear the masks, you know, forever. And, um, uh, I thought that was insane. And, uh, so I put out a couple of tweets and I used the COVID art of the book on the tweets. And one of the tweets— I wrote them in German— and one of the tweets basically said, look, these masks are just ideological conformity symbols. And, you know, that's all they are.

You know, come to terms with that or, you know, get used to wearing them forever. And the second tweet, I literally just quoted the Health Minister of Germany, Karl Lauterbach. He had been quoted in the press saying, the masks always send out a signal. And of course I said, yes, Karl, that's exactly right. That's what they're for, is to send out a signal. It's theater, basically.

As a playwright, you're qualified to make that observation.

Absolutely. Some other time maybe we'll talk about, you know, the theater, which is like a reality laboratory. Yes, it's theater. And so I put these 2 tweets out and I used the COVID artwork from the book. And if people don't know, I mean, maybe Americans are more familiar with William Shirer's classic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Right.

Yeah. One of the covers is, you know, it's all black. It's got the red lettering, you know, for the title.

Yes.

And there's a little white circle at the bottom with a swastika in it.

That would be the Third Reich.

Yeah, that's the history of Nazi Germany. And so my brilliant cover artist, Anthony Frada, and I, what we said is, okay, let's steal Shira's cover. And what we'll do is we'll just stretch a COVID mask over the top of the swastika so that you have to look at it and say, oh, there's a COVID mask. And oh, what's that behind? Right?

Yeah.

Swastika behind it. So that's the COVID art from the book. And I included that in the tweets. And the next thing I know, I get a notice from Twitter that says, okay, we're censoring your tweets in Germany because they violate Germany's hate speech laws. And so I challenged that and it didn't go anywhere. And then before I knew it, I get a notice from Amazon that says, oh, we're removing your book from distribution. We're banning your book in Germany, for sale in Germany. And so I wrote back to Amazon and said, what are you doing? And I quoted the law. A lot of people don't understand this. They think there's a Nazi symbol ban in Germany that you're not allowed to use swastikas, and you're not if you're a Nazi. The whole point of the law is to not have neo-Nazis running around waving swastikas.

We're against Nazis because they ban books.

Yeah. But of course, Tucker, there are exceptions written into this law. You couldn't you can teach a history class or show a film or make an artwork without these exceptions. So I quote this law back to Amazon and I say, it's not violating the law. You can't pull my book from distribution in Germany. And they said, oh, that's fine because now we're going to ban it in Austria and the Netherlands also. And what's going on? I didn't realize it at the time. I didn't know until much later, but what had happened was an element of the whole German censorship network, had found the tweets. They had contacted Twitter, they contacted Amazon, had the book banned and had the tweets censored. They had also contacted Germany's Federal Domestic Intelligence Agency about this, and the Federal Domestic Intelligence Agency passed the case on to the Berlin district prosecutor, and the Berlin prosecutor launched a criminal investigation of me, which eventually led— eventually they notified me of it. I think it was about 8 months later and said, you're under criminal investigation for disseminating Nazi, pro-Nazi propaganda.

Okay. Right?

So that's—

Did you say, no, no, I'm sorry, there's been a mistake. I'm actually against Nazis. That's the whole point. I'm not for Nazis. That's what I'm saying.

I went and got a German lawyer and that was the first thing I suggested. I said, could we just write to them and say, it's fucking obvious that I'm against Nazis. I'm comparing all of this stuff that I don't like and that I think is dangerous to the Nazis. Right? So It couldn't be more obvious. Went out and got a German lawyer. The next thing I know, I get an order of punishment is sent to me. So I've already been found guilty and I'm being sentenced to, I forget how many days in jail, and the alternative was a fine of €3,600. It's Germany, so they have a formula that however many days equals however much money in a fine. Anyway, I told my lawyer, we have to challenge this. I'm not paying this fine. This is completely ridiculous. That is the beginning of my numerous legal troubles. That's when I knew I was in trouble.

I mean, I don't even know what to say. I mean, for one thing, because everything is irony, you're likening the government of Germany to the Nazis, and they respond by calling you a Nazi and then behaving like Nazis.

Yes, that's it in a nutshell. That's it in a nutshell.

Stop hitting me, they say, as they punch you in the face. I mean, it's so Yeah.

I'll give them this though. We go to trial, right? We go to trial. The trial was what, January 24th, I think. And so I go to trial in district court in Berlin like a criminal, and the judge hates me, thinks that I'm a COVID-denying, conspiracy-theorizing COVID denier.

I totally forgot that that phrase existed. That was the ugliest of all phrases.

And it was not by accident. You know, you talk about people being deniers in Germany, and of course, it's evoking Holocaust denial, all right, which is the worst thing you can be in Germany. We go to trial, the judge can't stand me, but I am acquitted because she follows the law.

Yeah.

Right. And the law, you know, she says very clearly, you know, look, you know, Mr. Hopkins, you're an asshole. Yeah. Um, uh, for doing this, uh, but what you did is not illegal because it falls— you were protesting what you saw as anti-constitutional activity on the part of the German authorities, and that is allowed. And so I'm acquitted of the charges, and I think, fantastic, you know, the system works in Germany. I still live in a democratic country under the rule of law. Everything's fine. And my lawyer stops me afterwards and says, oh no, um, what you don't realize is the prosecutor can appeal your acquittal in Germany. I said, are you kidding me? That's double jeopardy. He said, no, in Germany the prosecutor can appeal. And of course they did.

Because there's no other crime in Germany at this point?

Absolutely none. No one. No, there's no—

there are no rapes in the parks, no stabbings, nothing like, you know.

Nothing, nothing else going on. Um, yeah, so they hauled me into Superior Court. Uh, I guess it's about a year later. Um, and this— yeah, I've got to tell you this. They scheduled a new trial in Superior Court after the prosecutor appeals my acquittal, and we are informed that this trial will be held under strict anti-terrorist security procedures.

Come on!

I am not bullshitting you. I am not bullshitting you. This is documented. People can look this up. They, the, uh, the trial, we all had to be body scanned, uh, empty our pockets, you know, like at the airport, you know, you, no one was allowed to bring anything in, no writing instruments. The press was not allowed to bring in, you know, computers or notebooks or any writing. I, they handed out little stubby pencils, you know, and sheets of paper so that the German press could scrawl. you know, on a piece of paper on their, on their knees and what have you. The, the, the, uh, uh, observers were, you know, put behind a, a bulletproof glass, uh, barrier. It was this whole humiliating, you know, bullying show of force procedure at my second trial. Um, which from the moment we walked in, yeah, I mean, it was a fait accompli. The, the, there was a panel of 3 judges and they were, you know, staring down at me with, It's just absolute hatred. Um, and so boom, summarily my acquittal was overturned and I was convicted. So I'm a convicted hate criminal.

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That is really beyond And it's also amazing that you didn't become a cause célèbre to civil libertarians anywhere that I noticed.

I got some action in the US. Matt Taibbi was one of the first ones to write about the case way back in the beginning. Jamie Kirchick wrote a piece that was in The Atlantic of all places. But it was a good piece about the case. FIRE, you know, the Foundation for Independence.

Of course. A virtuous group.

Yeah, absolutely. Love them.

Yeah, me too.

And they did a couple of features on it. And other people in the States, it's mostly Americans who covered it. For the longest time, I was just, I was stunned at The German press's, the German media's just utter refusal to even address it at all. Finally, at my second trial, when my acquittal was overturned, a bunch of German press came and they wrote it up. And unfortunately, most of it was, you know, yes, good. You know, the order is, you know, has been restored and, you know, swastikas remain illegal. And this COVID-denying American author who lives here has been sentenced for his crime. One of the exceptions, I have to mention a journalist called Eva Sudholt wrote a big piece for Die Zeit, which is a big mainstream paper, which was an absolutely fair piece. So that was an exception. And a lot of the independent German press covered it.

So you're what used to be called an intellectual. Like you make your living writing.

Sure.

Thinking, creating art. And so presumably you live in a world of people with similar jobs. How did they, your friends in Germany and the US, like how did they respond?

I lost them all. Yeah, I had—

Actually?

Yeah. I had a very a small group of close German friends who had been my dear friends for whatever it was, 16 years, for many, many years in Germany. And we, I think we corresponded once or twice at the very beginning. And I said, what are you doing? What's going on? What's happening? And they wrote back and said, what are you doing? You know, why are you questioning and making trouble and what have you? And then nothing. Radio silence.

And I assume if they were your friends, they were on the more free-thinking edge of Berlin society, right?

Well, it depends on what you mean by free-thinking.

Well, apparently they weren't. But I mean—

Yeah, these are, you know, this is, you know, this is the problem. This is the dilemma of people who are, you know, I hate to use the term, you know, on the left, liberals. whatever you want to call it on that side of the spectrum, the side that I come from, they, for the most part, they fell in line and started marching in lockstep right from the very beginning.

I don't understand that. I noticed that I don't have any liberal friends, but I have some friends on the left, what we used to call the left. We need a new name for it. But the traditional left that cares about economics. And there's some serious people there, not many, There are some, and I know them, and there are also some decent people there. And the ones I know in the US had exactly the same experience. All these people who you thought were on the side of the man against the machine, the individual against the group, the working class against the overlords, or however you want to frame it, but were for the weak in opposition to the strong, all of them joined. You know, join the machine. And I don't get that at all. What is that?

Well, one way to answer it is very complicated. There's another simpler aspect of it. Again, when the initial propaganda was rolled out, one key component of that initial propaganda was the demonization of anyone who was questioning or challenging the official narrative.

Yes.

And people forget this, but from the very beginning, this was part of the messaging that was rolled out. It was that if someone is questioning, you know, our official narrative, that person is a far-right extremist conspiracy theorist, Um, you know, basically a dangerous person. Oh, you don't want to—

these are the same people who spent 70 years warning us about the lessons that we should have learned from McCarthyism.

Yes.

And then 20 years saying the same thing about the war on terror.

Yeah.

And they're certainly right about the war on terror, at very least, if not McCarthyism. But they were absolutely right about the war on terror. So how could they fall for it? I don't get it.

I don't see it as them falling for it as much as— and this is a point, and I've argued with a lot of people about this. Do you remember there's a guy, a professor named Mattias Desmet? I know him. You know Mattias?

He's an amazing person. He's one of the amazing people in this world.

I completely disagree with his thesis. Right. He's got the mass formation—

Mass formation psychosis.

Thesis. And his thesis is basically society is ill to a certain degree and thus it becomes susceptible to totalitarianism and what have you. And I disagree completely. I think that any society, any society can be transformed into a totalitarian configuration if the powers that be in that society have the will and the technology to do it. And it happens just like it happened during COVID The message is put out and it is put out very clearly that, hey, all of your democratic rights and all that democracy bullshit that you thought was in effect, that's off now. That's suspended. That's canceled. Right? And we're going authoritarian. Right? And if you challenge us, we're going to hurt you. We're going to fuck you up. And most people, I'm an exception. You know, I don't have any kids. I don't have a job. I'm a writer. Yeah. Most people have families and mortgages and kids and they have things to lose. And the message that was put out very, very clearly in the beginning was challenge us, create a problem for us, challenge our official narrative, you know, become a COVID denier. We're going to demonize you and we're going to hurt you and your family.

You won't be able to work. You're going to, you won't be able to earn a living. You're going to lose your house after you can't pay your bills anymore. Your kids, not going to be able to go to school, you know, so on. Is it worth it to you to challenge this new authoritarianism that we're rolling out? Or wouldn't it be easier to just put on the fucking mask?

Right?

Yeah. And I don't mean that, I don't, I don't mean to say, by saying this, I, I don't mean to condemn people. I don't mean to say, you know, they're sheep or they're cowards or what have you. I've written numerous times, I said, who's smarter? Who's smarter? It's the idiots like me who stand up and shout and who challenge the authorities. We're the ones that get put up against the wall.

100%. Yeah.

Or dragged into court.

The occupying army shows up, they're here. You don't want them to rape your wife. On the other hand, what can you actually do about it?

Absolutely. And I think the vast majority of people consciously or unconsciously made the choice that the, the price for challenging this is too high and I'm not willing to pay it. Yeah, it's going to hurt me.

It's going to— people instinctively join the winning team. You're seeing this in the United States now. Um, I think you see it with China. Everyone knows China is going to run the world, and so a lot of American authorities are like, I don't really want that, but I can't stop it. Therefore, I'm, I'm on China's side.

Yeah, get on board.

Get on board.

Right.

Yeah.

I think, I think that, and I have that again, I have this argument all the time with a lot of people. Um, uh, we, we are amazing creatures. I think having consciously or unconsciously made that decision is, I'm not going to challenge this. I'm not going to risk my family or risk my you know, everything that I have in the world to challenge this. Having consciously or unconsciously made that choice, we humans, we are able to tell ourselves, okay, I've made that choice, therefore the virus really is kind of an apocalyptic plague.

Yeah.

Therefore, it really does make sense for me to wear a mask while I'm sitting at my table in the restaurant, or take off my mask while I'm sitting here eating dinner. And put it on when I need to walk to the bathroom.

And I'm doing my part.

And then come back. Well, it's, we're, we're, we, I think we can convince ourselves of anything when we have to.

I think that's right.

So when you, when you were talking about people falling for it, I don't, I don't see it that way. I see people operating on their survival instincts. And then performing whatever mental and psychological procedures they had to perform on themselves in order to reconcile it.

Yeah, I think it's a really deep analysis, smart analysis. I guess I, and I don't judge a lot of what you said, but when it crosses over into hurting other people, hey, let's demonize the apostates. Let's hurt people who don't go along with it. That's when it's like—

I'm trying not to use profanity, but, you know, I'll use all the profanity for you. Okay.

So the people in charge are not even pretending to care about your freedom anymore. Have you noticed? So you have certain freedoms. You can watch Netflix, you can doom scroll, you can rack up massive credit card debt, but think for yourself, go outside the boundaries and the illusion evaporates and you have no more freedom. In fact, you're in trouble. So this became obvious during COVID Remember when an engineered virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan? A virus created by the Chinese and American governments working together. What was that? And then throughout the West, the people in charge crushed anybody who questioned the narrative or refused to comply with their insane mask and vax mandates. Do you remember that happened? Yeah, we don't talk about it much, but it changed everything. That's when totalitarianism became the new normal for all of us. C.J. Hopkins is a political playwright who was on the left his whole life, but he noticed this. Wait, isn't this what we hate? Yeah, we thought we hated it, but now people who hate it are the bad guys. Well, he wrote a whole book about it, The Rise of the New Normal Reich.

It's now available on Tucker Carlson Books. So through a series of essays, Hopkins examines the propaganda and coercion used to groom citizens of the West during COVID And you know it's worth reading because after it became a bestseller, it was deemed dangerous terrorist by the German authorities, so they banned it. And so that's why we're proud to resurrect it, bring it to you in a new edition through Tucker Carlson Books. Get The Rise of the New Normal Reich today at tuckercarlsonbooks.com. That's tuckercarlsonbooks.com. We specialize in bringing banned books back to the public. I'm trying. This is my pledge this year. But, um, but you do feel like a rise in moral outrage when you think about that. Like, I know people who were totally fine with the unvaccinated dying. Dying?

Yeah.

How did you get so cruel and callous?

Well, Tucker, I said all of that, you know, uh, that I just said. This was all part of my, you know, later analysis and processing of what went on during the COVID years. Uh, you know, I was calling people Nazis. That's, you know, I said I lost my friends. I lost, you know, the people in the theater community, for God's sakes, you know, they shut me off, um, just immediately when I started in. I was, uh, I, I had a colleague, a, a British guy, um, in, in the UK, and he put some social media post up where he was like, I was on, you know, the bus today and I saw someone who, who wasn't wearing a mask, and I called him— You know, people were people were going online and kind of validating their credentials as party members.

Yes, yes. That's exactly right.

I saw a deviant today and we pointed him out.

I denounced my own parents.

Exactly. And I wrote back to this colleague and I said, you sound like a fucking Nazi.

Okay, so you lost some friends.

So what I'm saying is all of this analysis about, you know, how it happened and everything, this came later. During the COVID years, I was fighting. I felt like I was at war for, you know, 2 and a half years, and I was in people's faces, you know, calling them out and telling them, you are— that was the whole point of the book, was, you know, you're behaving like Nazis.

Yeah, well, I can see why you offended people. On the other hand, they gave you cause, to put it mildly. So, felt that way. And it was a kind of war. It was certainly an ideological war. It was a war of will. But what's very revealing is that they have not abided by an armistice and they're still going after you. They are grudge holders.

The German authorities are. Yeah.

Correct.

Yeah.

And so you're still in You're still being hassled.

Well, the status of it, just to make it clear, the reason that this new second edition of the book is coming out that you wrote the foreword for is because I had to pull my first edition, which I self-published, I had to pull this book out of worldwide distribution. Now, this is a book that did extremely well. It was a Barnes& Noble bestseller, bestseller on various, you know, Amazon things, um, in the beginning. Um, uh, very successful book. I had to pull it. Um, and the reason that I had to pull it is I have to back up, right? We talked about the tweets. I told you about the, the tweets and that, that was one prosecution. Um, the appeals court, the superior court overturned my acquittal. And so now, uh, I have to go back to district court. where I was originally acquitted, to be sentenced for this crime that I didn't commit. That's one case. Last year in November 2025, I get home from this extensive road trip that I took in the US for another book project. I fly back home to Berlin. I've just started recovering from 7 weeks on the road in a convertible, and I'm starting to feel human again.

And bang, bang, bang, the police show up, dawn raid at the door of my apartment with a search warrant. And they come in, terrorize my wife and our cats, confiscate my computer. And this house raid is in conjunction with a new investigation, a new criminal investigation, which has since led to a new indictment. And this time I'm not indicted for the tweets, That's the first case. This time, the indictment is I'm being charged with writing, publishing, and distributing the book itself. Okay, now this book is a book that has been banned in Germany since 2022. All right. So now I'm being indicted for publishing and distributing this book. And the second charge in the indictment is that I reported on my trial in the Superior Court and used the book cover again. The book cover is always the pretext for these things. So the police were actually in my home searching for evidence that I published this book, searching for copies of the book. So just to make—

Because they're not Nazis.

Correct.

Okay, so if you want to prove you're not a Nazi, a dawn raid on an author's house to find a book is a good way to do it.

This is absolutely— this is the point that I'm trying to make. It's, it's not even, it's not even, oh, he wrote some tweets anymore. It's— they're directly going after the fact that I published this.

I was just saying to one of my nephews, I said, you know, we all— let's be compassionate toward others. We all lack self-awareness. I can talk about my dogs endlessly. It's very boorish, and I lack the self-awareness to know that I'm boring people when I talk about my dogs. But even I, trying to be charitable, like, I have never seen a lack of self-awareness this Profound ever. I mean, ever in history.

I've come to believe it's really not a lack of self-awareness. It's they, on the one hand, they don't care.

Well, there's that.

On the one hand, they don't care. I mean, Germany has become, I don't know if laughingstock is the right word, but it's common knowledge. I mean, they arrest people for insulting politicians. Germans, somebody puts on social media, this person is a Dummkopf, and they come and arrest people for insulting politicians. Now, okay, this is how far that it's gone. And my case is one of many, Tucker. This is not an exception. This is one of many. There's an artist that is somewhere in the South and he created some artworks, COVID artworks, works like this. And they prosecuted him as well.

What, for degenerate art?

Exactly.

Did they burn it?

Exactly.

I mean, are you freaking kidding?

No, I'm not. And this is what I've been trying to get across to people is this, I've referred to it, I titled a couple of my essays, The Criminalization of Dissent. That is what is happening. That is what is happening. And it is so over the top in Germany that I have to believe, okay, yes, they're a bit dense, but part of it is this is the message that they are sending out. That's exactly right. They want this message sent out. And it's not restricted to Germany. There's a new report that came out I think it's Big Brother Watch, Silky Carlos' organization in the UK. I think over the last 5 years, over 60,000 people in the UK have been arrested for communications offenses.

Yeah, more than in Russia, which has a larger population. It's not a defense of the Russian system to say the British system is more authoritarian than the Russian system. That's just a fact based on those numbers.

Right away. What I've been trying to direct people's attention to is that this is a part of the evolution of the system that we're living in in the West. You know, people talk about that reaction to the populist uprising that started back in 2015, 2016. You know, a lot of the reaction to that is the system going authoritarian.

Yeah.

On us.

Yes.

And sending this message out very clearly and letting us know, oh no, you still use— you can still have those democratic rights and everything as long as you don't cross this line. And if you cross this line, democracy shit's over, right? We're going to arrest you for a communications offense.

So this is, I think, the, the deep value in your story and your analysis of it is this perspective. It's not just one man and If I can just throw you a compliment, which is deserved, you're not making this all about you. A lot of people under attack, as you are, make it about themselves. But you see this as part of a change in a mode of government, change in society, change in the expectations, relationship between the governed and the people in charge. And I think you're exactly right to see that. So what are those lines?

The new relationship you're talking?

Yeah. So there are lines you said that when you, you know, you can have like democracy, we're all about democracy.

The lines you don't cross. Yeah.

But how do we know what we can't do since no one will spell it out?

A, we don't, right, to begin with, because this is really the most effective message that they send out. It's, you know, in my case in Germany, for example, So I tweeted something with a swastika on it, right? So has Karl Lauterbach, right? So have their prominent—

The health minister. Yeah, yeah.

So prominent German celebrity figures, what have you. They've compared the Russians to the Nazis and put out tweets with swastikas on them and all of this. Now obviously that's fine because that's in line with the official narrative of the authorities. Right? But when I do it, no, because you don't compare the authorities to the Nazis. You compare the official enemies to. But other people have also put things out aimed at the authorities and they don't get prosecuted. And why? And you don't know. And that's the effectiveness of the tactic is maybe—

Exactly.

Maybe you're okay, but at any moment, and you never know when, they could come down on you. It's like, you know, it's, it's maybe it's like living with an alcoholic father.

Exactly right.

Right. And you never know which—

a husband who beats you up or a husband who beats you.

You never know which husband is coming home tonight. Exactly.

Because sometimes it's caring and nurturing and kind, and other moments it's explosive. And but it's arbitrary.

Exactly. And you never know what you're gonna get. So the point is, Be afraid.

Yes, exactly. They inculcate fear as a way to control. So here are the lines that I personally have noticed. I was thinking about this this morning in the sauna, actually. So Israel is the topic that people are mad about in the United States right now. I've done a million shows on Israel. My views are pretty conventional, really, about Israel. We shouldn't be controlled by Israel. That's it. But there's actually a pretty robust debate about that in the United States. That's supposedly a red line, but You go on Twitter, people are saying whatever they want about Israel. So that's probably not actually a red line, criticizing Israel. I have noticed. What are the red lines? Criticizing the war in Ukraine is a red line. Okay. I've definitely noticed that. Anything related to January 6th, boy, that's a real red line. Like, that's not even talked about. If you're asking, well, what was that? Are you comparing it to the fake attack on the Reichstag? The second fake attack on the Reichstag. That is absolutely a red line. Demographic change, absolute red line. That's what I've— so what do those things have in common? They're big. Those are big things.

Demographic change is big. It's enduring. It lasts for 1,000 years. The war in Ukraine somehow is the key to a lot. I can just tell by the reactions to it. January 6th, I'm still not exactly sure, but they're dead serious about shutting down that conversation. They're dead, way more than Israel. What do we learn from that?

I don't know. I think, and maybe I've got a bit of a different perspective because I'm looking at it from Berlin.

Yes.

Where criticizing Israel is absolutely verboten.

Is it really?

Oh yeah, absolutely. When the pro-Palestinian protests started, The police, I mean, the goon squads came down on them as heavy, if not heavier, than they came down on the COVID dissidents. They've just been absolutely brutal and banning—

Seriously?

Yeah. Banning protests, banning meetings. Oh yeah. Yeah. Because—

Same in the UK.

Yeah. The Germany-Israel connection, I mean, this is part of Germany's remembrance culture, it's, you know, just unqualified support of Israel is, it's the Staatsräson, you know, it's the—

So the idea is that we killed innocents, which the Nazis definitely did, therefore we have to defend the murder of innocents in a foreign country?

Uh, well, well, we have to defend Israel, you know, no matter what.

Even if they're doing the things that we hate ourselves for doing?

Absolutely. Yeah.

Man.

Absolutely.

Layers upon layers of irony.

So I think maybe my perspective is a little different, but where the lines are, I mean, what I would say is where the lines are, are wherever someone is actually posing a potential problem. There's a lot of dissent There's a lot of dissent that the system can tolerate.

Or encourages.

And encourages, yeah.

And whiteness. Race war. They love race war.

Well, that's a whole separate thing and we can get into that because that's interesting. But there's a lot of dissent that doesn't really pose a problem. But then there are other areas of dissent that really do. COVID, the COVID thing is something that I don't see any shift whatsoever. It's basically you either subscribe to the official narrative, the official, you know, COVID pandemic narrative, or you are a far-right COVID-denying conspiracy theorist extremist. I mean, those, those COVID dissidents, have to continue to be delegitimized and demonized. And I think that is so essential because the event itself was so dramatic and so severe and so significant. So that's one example of that. I think the Israel question is an interesting question. I have a different perspective on Israel. like I said, I come from the left and I'm no fan of, of, of the state of Israel. Um, but I think what is allowed is basically if, if, if you can put all of your focus on Israel and on Zionism, right, and you can go after and attack Israel, well, that's fine because then you're an antisemite and then, you know, we can put you over here and everybody is fighting back and forth.

That's why they secretly like Nick Fuentes.

What doesn't surface though, and where I was coming from originally after October 7th, that's what I was trying to point out to people is, you guys, these are people over on my side of the equation. I say, you guys are all focused on Zionism and what have you. I say, Israel is global capitalist headquarters in the Middle East.

Of course. Yes.

You know, this, this new system that we all live under, we've been living under for, you know, almost 35 years now. Um, this system, they've been, they've been destabilizing and restructuring the Middle East for the last 30 years. And Israel, the state of Israel, is, you know, Globocap headquarters.

Of course.

In the Middle East.

Um, for global spying, for terrifying biotech, for every to dark technological advance. It's all there.

And I see a lot of folks, you just had Max Blumenthal on recently, and I love Max, but I disagree with him. I keep trying to say it's not about the crazy Israelis, the crazy Zionists that control the world. Look at a map of the Middle East and ask yourself which countries are playing ball with the global capitalist system and which countries are not. Saudi Arabia, Israel has an insane national ideology. So does Saudi Arabia.

Right.

But they're both playing ball and playing their parts within the global capitalist system. When I look at You know, when I look at the liquidation of Gaza in the aftermath of October 7th, I see this same message again, Tucker, this message that the system has been sending over and over again. There's a line that you don't cross. You don't breach the border fence and come and mass murder a bunch of Israeli settlers on the other line because then we'll wipe out, we'll liquidate your entire territory. And we'll, you know, ask everyone to watch, watch what happens when you do this. This message, and let me just harp on this for a second, because it's what I've been trying to get across, you know, I'm a very, very minor version of this message. And as I said, there are many cases like mine. Julian Assange is a much more major version of this message. And to me, it's the same message.

Yes, it is.

You know, look, this guy created an actual problem for us. Watch what we're going to do to him. Watch what we're going to do to him.

And like COVID, everyone went along with it pretty much. I mean, no one really said anything about it. He was an Australian citizen. Australian government went along with it. He was held in Britain for 7 years in the embassy and in maximum security prison and never charged. You'd never charge a Brit with anything.

No.

That was, uh, that was really shocking to me and radicalizing to me to watch that and to know him and to know that he's one of the most decent, one of the smartest people I've ever met. I mean, top 3 smartest people I've ever known. Um, but yeah, his crime was just telling the truth.

And, you know, I've been, I, I've been trying to get this across. Um, This message is a part of the evolution of the system that we all live under. In a sense, if you go back and look at Russiagate and all of the mass hysteria during Trump's first term, again, the message was— Okay, you populists are actually presenting a problem for us. You crazy idiots left the European Union in Brexit. You elected Donald Trump president.

We're going to punish you for that.

We are going to punish you and we want everyone to watch us punish you. In just very simplistic terms, it's heads on spikes. It's one of the oldest tactics in the world.

How has rural America done in the last 10 years since it voted for Trump in 2016? Life expectancy has gone down. Rural hospitals are closed. Massive, massive third world migration into rural America. It's all been a punishment for doing that, I think. So then the question becomes, okay, so this is literally dynamic. It's changing as we watch. The system that we grew up with, Um, is played out, obviously, and the people administering it don't believe in its stated precepts. They don't believe it's a liberal democracy. Who knows if they ever did, but they definitely don't now. So then the question is like, what is it becoming? Any guesses?

Yeah, well, this is actually, ah, this is what I've got in front of me, and I've been, I've been stating it. I've been, uh, what I've been saying over and over again is we are at the beginning, the very beginning of a new system that none of us really can get our heads around yet.

Yes.

And it's a global system. I refer to it as global capitalism because that's what it is. A lot of my conservative readers, and I have a lot of conservative readers, they get upset when I refer to it as global capitalism. So call it crony capitalism or whatever you want to call it, but it's global capitalism. We live in a one-system world, and that system, it doesn't really have anything else to do except evolve in a more totalitarian direction. There's a military term called clear and hold.

Yeah.

When you occupy a territory, when you have conquered, you know, whatever territory it is and you occupy that territory, what you have left to do at that point is clear and hold. And so what you're trying to do is consolidate your new ideology in the territory and wipe out little pockets of internal resistance.

Right.

The system that we all live under and that all nations are a part of to one degree or another. I'm talking including Russia, including China. I mean, of course there's still competition between nation states, just like there's competition between corporations, but none of them are trying to change the system, right? With the collapse of the Soviet Union and Marxism and all of this, it's one Ideology world. Yeah, one system. And that system doesn't have any outside adversaries. So the only thing that it really has left to do is to try to strengthen and consolidate its ideology and wipe out these little pockets of internal resistance. Now, this is, if you want me to go on about this, I will. It's where it's It's where it gets a bit theoretical and philosophical, and people should really understand that, you know, I'm not a communist. I'm not trying to overthrow capitalism. I like private property. I'd like to have some more private property if someone wants to give me some. But what I'm talking about is what this global capitalist system has done and is doing is trying to basically create one big global marketplace, right? And the way that works is you go into territories that are still dominated by traditional, or if I can use the word despotic values, religious values, traditional values, family values, values that You mentioned them before, that a lot of the working classes still maintain.

Yes.

Right?

That is the problem with the working class. They're not on board with the cultural stuff.

Some of them, some of them are bigoted. Some of them are racist values. We're not going to cure human kind of racism. These values kind of create impediments to transforming all of these territories into sectors of this one big global marketplace. Iran is a problem.

Yeah.

They want to actually run their society according to religious values. Christian fundamentalists out here in the woods, this is a problem, right? These people actually want to live according to their values, not just, you know, give them lip service on Sunday and then go back to the marketplace for the rest of the week. They actually want to have communities, or in some cases nation-states, that are constructed according to these values that are not the values of the marketplace. And so what the system as it evolves, as it has been evolving, is doing is wiping away these values, dissolving borders, right? Because it's one big global marketplace, dissolving cultures, Right? Because we need to have the same corporate stores in every territory on the face of the earth because it's one big global market. And this is what the system is doing. People have been responding to that by saying, wait, I don't want to live in one big valueless marketplace. I want to hang on to my values. I'm getting lost. I don't know why I started on this rant, but—

No, because it's so real. People don't want to live in the parking lot of Best Buy.

No, they don't.

Why would they?

They don't. I said years ago when I first started, I wrote the fundamental conflict of our times is neoliberalism, and this is what I mean by the global capitalist system that is expanding, versus neonationalism. And I'm an old lefty, so when people hear that, they think, oh, he's being a— I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. I mean that in a purely objective sense of people trying to hold on to the structure of their nation states.

Yeah.

Their national cultures.

Their languages.

Their languages, right? Their beliefs, their values, regardless of what I think of them.

The memories of their ancestors.

Yes.

Not everyone cremates their dead and throws them into the wind.

Exactly.

People still care about their ancestors.

And the evolving system is trying to dissolve of that. I think that's the broad context of everything that is going on these days.

I don't think I've heard it summarized better, more crisply than you just did. I agree with every word that you said. And I think that one of the challenges of our time is to see our own lives in the context of what you just described. And there's so many distractions. And I do think social media makes them more tempting and certainly ubiquitous. There's always some scandal of the moment.

Sure.

That can be revealing and interesting and inherently important, maybe, but that obscures where we are on history's timeline. The old system is going away and it's being replaced as we watch. with the predictable birth pangs by something totally different. And no one will admit it. That's the other thing. Like, why not just be open about it?

Because it doesn't work. It's, um, it's a point that I've, uh, made. What, you know, I, I talk about, I talk about this system that we live under, this new global system evolving in a totalitarian direction. And of course, it's natural when people hear the word totalitarianism and they think of totalitarian, we immediately think of the 20th century forms of totalitarianism, Nazis and communists and Stalinism and what have you, because that's what we know.

Boots marching on cobblestones.

That's right. This isn't that.

Of course.

There are components of that, sure. The truncheons and the cops and all of those components are there. But I think the form of totalitarianism that This system is evolving into is a form, when I say we can't get our heads around it yet, it's because it isn't 20th century totalitarianism. It isn't something that we've already experienced. It is new and it is different and it cannot, it cannot come out and announce itself as totalitarian. It can't put up the big banners and send the guys out with the jackboots, or not for very long. Anyway, we can send the jackboot goon squads out for a little while, but then we have to pull them back because this, if I'm right, this is a global capitalist form of totalitarianism and capitalism doesn't do totalitarianism. Capitalism has to say to us, you are a consumer.

It's the veneer of choice.

Yes. You are a consumer. There's a You are free. You can— it has to continue to present this veneer, if you want to call it that. It's the same reason that, you know, the German authorities can't just, you know, call me an enemy of the state and lock me up. They have to pretend that I have violated some law. They have to pretend that they are still operating under the rule of law.

So that pretense exists forever? Or just during the transition into the new thing? I don't know. What does happen to people like you?

Um, I think— are you winning? Uh, not so far.

So do you live with a sense of doom?

I, I don't know. I said, I said, you know, maybe I read too much Nietzsche, but I, I, I actually live with a sense of joy. Um, I, I have a strange, uh, outlook Oh, you know, you and I talked a little bit over breakfast about life and death and people's perspective. You know, we are here for such a short period of time. I know that more and more the older that I get. It's just this short moment. And I kind of see it like theater, you know, like we've all been cast in our parts.

That's right.

You've been cast as Tucker Carlson.

You know?

Yeah.

Strange to wake up and realize that.

I've been cast as myself. And so what I try to think is, how can I play my part, you know, to the best of my ability today? This is what God has given me. You know, this is what has been put in front of me. So how can I do this? How can I play my part? And at the end of it, you know, I'm going to be gone anyway. So I don't know, there was a strange phrase that I heard a lot when I was growing up in the South, and I never really knew what it meant. But people said, you know, they can kill me, but they can't eat me.

I've never heard that.

What does that mean? Exactly. But I think it has something, I think it has, I think it has something to do with this. It's, They can beat— there's a famous, who was it? Sophie Scholl. She was a teenager who stood up to the Nazis in the beginning.

Yes.

Yeah, they put her in the guillotine, they cut her head off, whatever. And if I remember, the day of her execution, she went out thinking, it's just a beautiful day and what does it matter if I'm gone because people will stand up. And she saw herself as her life, her individual life was not the main thing. She had played her part. She had done what was there for her to do and she had no regrets.

In some sense, she was right. We're talking about her now 80 years later.

Yeah. And even if we weren't, I mean, she played her part.

I don't know that I can improve on that. C.J. Hopkins, what an amazing, what an extraordinary conversation. We're really proud to get behind your book, and I hope it sells as many copies as it deserves.

Thanks so much. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for watching. Get a copy of C.J. Hopkins's book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich, banned in multiple countries but resurrected by tuckercarlsonbooks.com. We hope you'll buy a copy.