Walter Kirn Provides Update on Luigi Mangione Case and the Strange Parallels to Lee Harvey Oswald

Only a great novelist can understand a story as weird as the Luigi Mangione murder case. Walter Kirn on what actually happened. (00:00) Introduction (04:22) The Strange Similarities Between Mangione, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Unabomber, and Charles Manson (10:21) Was Mangione a Patsy for the Radical Leftist Social Justice Movement? (16:30) The Cult of Mangione and the Left’s Strange Glorification of Murder (24:50) Why Do Women Love Murderers? (39:13) The “Lone Gunman” Narrative Paid partnerships with: Levels: Get 2 free months on annual membership at https://Levels. Link/Tucker Liberty Safe: Visit https://LibertySafe.com to see the whole Centurion line Beam: Get 30% off the American Strength Bundle using the code TUCKER at https://ShopBeam.com/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Tucker Carlson?

  There are certain moments in history that are so kaleidoscopically weird that it takes a great novelist to understand them. This is one of those moments. Walter Kern is that novelist.

• 1:04Tucker Carlson?

  The Luigi story seems like the kind of story that historians will write about as they try and capture the essence of the time that we're living through right now. I don't really understand what it means. He just issued a letter, I think, from jail.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20Tucker Carlson?

  What is that story?

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Well, from the moment the crime was committed, I realized that we had a crime built, engineered for the social media age. If you think about the O.J. crime as the crime that made cable television and serial, true-life crime shows an established thing in America.

• 1:48Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  Or if you think about the Lindbergh case as having...

• 1:55Speaker 02

  The synergy with the age of radio. Yes. Well, the Louisiana case is the age of Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. And it was that since day one. Remember, the crime occurred on video, on a surveillance video. And the surveillance video was wonderfully staged, if you know anything about how movies are set up. You had the killer in the foreground, in a hood, his face obscured. You had the victim in the distance, a tiny stick figure. He shoots, the stick figure falls. Now, the way that shot is set up, if you were to set it up, you have a lot of interest in the shooter, but none at all in the victim.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Imagine it reversed. If the victim had been in the foreground and some tiny figure had shot him, you would have had sympathy for the victim. You'd see him die, you'd see his paroxysms, his spasms as he expired, but it was the other way around. From the moment that video hit the internet, and it got onto it curiously early, you know, within a very short time of the crime itself, you had hordes of junior investigators on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, examining it. And there was a mystery in the video, which was, why did he have such trouble charging his gun? Why did he have such trouble operating his gun? So, mystery one was, is this a professional killer?

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Or is it, you know, an amateur? The amateur people argued, well, he can't seem to, he keeps getting jammed. The professionals argued, well, that's this certain sort of firearm and, you know, it tends to do that. So, you immediately had this mystery of the gun and this mystery of the killer's expertise. Then, almost in no time, it was revealed that he had rented a bike, an electric bike in New York City and had escaped on it. And so... Once again, thousands, hundreds of thousands of junior detectives using the maps and available

• 4:05Speaker 02

  public data about the distribution of those public electric bikes in New York tried to trace his path. A few days later, or maybe even a day later, we find out that the hooded figure, whose face we didn't see in the first video, checked into a youth hostel, either before or after the crime, but a video emerged from a youth hostel in which you can see his partial face while he flirts with the obviously besotted clerk at the youth hostel. So you had this slow reveal, almost like a striptease, and at every stage, you had

• 4:44Speaker 02

  a mystery that the community could solve, that, you know, sort of open source investigation. At that point, I said, this is too, this is too perfect. The well-shot video from the killer's point of view, the mystery of the gun, what kind of gun, the, you know, following the bike path digitally. And then it just got more and more made for social media. You know, he appears at a hearing, wearing the outfit that Lee Harvey Oswald, the exact sweater with collar combination that Lee Harvey Oswald wore when he was, you know,

• 5:29Speaker 02

  brought to justice by, even the, even the police and escorts around him were arrayed in something of the same way. So he dressed the part of the Patsy, or Oswald. The hood part was, of course, redulent of the Unabomber. Of course. And then, woe and behold, a manifesto appears, much like the Unabomber's, in which, you know, he outlines his motives, he's avenging the...

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Torturous, brutal, American healthcare system on behalf of all those who've been denied coverage. He's a man of the people and so on. It got so bad at one point that I saw when he went to, when he was arrested in a McDonald's with all his stuff, with the gun, with the manifesto, you know, with the costume that he'd been wearing, um, and was sent to jail, I saw a, a news, um, program in which the reporter was standing outside the jail while Luigi was presumably being processed in. And he said to the, uh, you

• 6:44Speaker 02

  know, headquarters, uh, anchor person, "I can hear cheering inside the jail. I can hear the cheering for Luigi." Um, we've now evolved to Bill Burr, the comedian going on TV, "Free Luigi." Uh, there are candles, uh, you know, votive candles, sort of Roman Catholic style candles usually devoted to saints, but wearing Luigi's image. Um, there are fan clubs, there are Reddit forums, there are all across social media, um, adoring, uh, groups of people

• 7:27Speaker 02

  trying to build a defense for him, analyzing the evidence. And honestly, the evidence isn't very good. America is under the impression that they saw this murder take place, but in fact, they just saw a hooded figure. Another almost amazing, uh, development was that when, when the gun was found, it turned out to be a ghost gun, so to speak, a 3D printed gun with a 3D printed muzzle, a, a silencer. Well, it just so happens, the, the crime was committed in December, that there's a Supreme Court case in March, I believe, uh, to adjudicate

• 8:06Speaker 02

  the question of whether 3D printed, uh, accessories to firearms are legal. Uh, there was already a Supreme Court that allowed for them.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  The receiver and the basic parts of the gun to be printed, but there was still this question. So the even the firearm itself played into a coming on the calendar Supreme Court case, and it was the first such weapon to be used in a murder, I believe. It also, let's remember, happened right after the election. It happened in December. The left in America is completely demoralized. One of its one of its disappointments is that youth didn't come out to vote for Harris in the number they expected. They really

• 8:57Speaker 02

  expected young women to swing that election. And if you heard the commentary right beforehand, they almost considered a certainty. Well, they hadn't. But Luigi, who we when we saw his casual photos and his family album in the first couple of weeks after his arrest, was perfect for the arousal of the young American woman shirtless, six pack. There used to be a magazine called Tiger Beat in America, which teenage girls would, you know, put up pictures from on their walls. Donny Osmond, yeah.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  And so I call him a Tiger Beat revolutionary. He appeals directly to the demographic that on the Democratic side, they feel is most likely to be loyal to them and whose passivity in the last election was a problem for them. Well, they're reactivated. He is a combination of Kaczynski, Oswald, in his dress, he evoked that, and Charles Manson, you know.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Beatlemania almost has been fomented around Luigi. We had Taylor Lorenz, the strange, you know, ex-Washington Post reporter, give an interview in which she really tried to understand and almost fanned out in doing so, the Luigi phenomena, how appealing he is. He was, of course, positioned as a, you know, Robin Hood-like figure who had on behalf of the downtrodden who are the victims of these health insurance companies come forth to, you know, administer frontier justice. But in fact, he comes from a very wealthy family, East Coast family, went to the University of Pennsylvania.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Um, I noticed that in his letter, he thanked, uh, people all over the world for contributing to a GoFundMe-like, uh, defense campaign. He's, he's brought in a million dollars. Well, his family has well over a hundred million dollars. You'd think that he should maybe spare the poor people of America having to pay for his, uh, murder defense and let his, uh, parents do it. But in any case, in this letter, he further extends his own image because he's quite conscious of himself as, as a living legend. Uh, there are a couple of quotes in it. He says, uh, "The artist's task is to save the soul of mankind, and anything less is

• 11:33Speaker 02

  dithering while Rome burns." And that's a quote from Terrence McKenna, who is a kind of psychedelic hippie philosopher, you know, disciple of Timothy Leary and so on. So Luigi considers himself an artist. He ends that letter with these telltale words, "Never lose the plot." Written in his own hand, the rest of it's typed. To me, all of this is evidence that whether he has done it himself, whether he's done it with help, or I can't speculate on that, he created intentionally, deliberately, with some care,

• 12:13Speaker 02

  a made-for social media assassination, which he is continuing to cultivate with the help of now tens and hundreds of thousands of volunteers. He solves a problem. He solves a problem for the left in America. You know, they need an appealing, youthful, attractive, somebody younger than Bernie to carry forth the torch of, you know, of social justice. And he appeared at just the right time and just the right way with just the right storylines. People are still on social media comparing the two photos, the first of the hooded figure,

• 12:58Speaker 02

  and then the one of him a little later when he reveals part of his face, checking the eyebrows. The eyebrows don't match. His defense is going to be quite obvious. I'm not the guy in the hood. I'm not the guy who you see fire the gun. And in fact, he was not apprehended there. He was not identified there. He, I think personally, is part of a narrative that has been constructed in a way that a gamer or a computer science student like him might have done personally, but that it

• 13:40Speaker 02

  has carried on after he's in jail, as though with the help of others, you know. He didn't get to go shopping, did he, before he dressed himself for the perp walk? I mean, I guess maybe he stipulated, I want that, I want, you know, that. He seems to me to have accomplices in creating The Luigi Show. And it says everything about America that he has fans, he has posters, he has merch, he has a GoFundMe or its equivalent, and he has a story, The Avenger. It breaks down a little when you realize he comes from this rich family and that in

• 14:23Speaker 02

  fact, he never would have been, he never would have been denied coverage in a way that he couldn't have paid for.

• 14:29Tucker Carlson?

  I think that's the most perfect part.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:31Tucker Carlson?

  The private school kid from Penn gets immediate support from the rich girl from Greenwich, Taylor Lorenz.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:40Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, this, the whole movement, the whole Bernie movement, I don't think it started this way, but it has ended up this way, is the, is the movement of like, rich kids.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Right, right. Yeah, it's like when I was at Princeton, you know, I got to Princeton from Minnesota, middle class Minnesota, and everybody's, all the rich kids know about reggae. I thought reggae was a poor people's music from the slums of Jamaica.

• 15:01Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  You know, so, yeah, he's a trust safari-ian for sure. And, but what he's doing is he's rousing these anti-establishment emotions among a demographic that has already predisposed to them, but hasn't had a champion and certainly not a sex symbol. And he is nothing if not a sex symbol.

• 15:27Tucker Carlson?

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• 16:57Tucker Carlson?

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• 18:53Tucker Carlson?

  But the heart of the story is murder. It's violence.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  Well, isn't that-

• 18:57Tucker Carlson?

  Shooting a man who's the father of children, who, you know, may have been a good man or a bad man. I don't even remember his name. Nobody does. He's just some healthcare CEO. I mean, he's not in the story at all in his, but his murder is the story.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:10Tucker Carlson?

  And I just, I'm amazed you can hate the health insurance companies. I certainly do. I hate almost all big companies. But to endorse a murder of somebody is a big step. That's, I never thought that, that that would be widely accepted in America.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Well, when I started narrating this, I decided I was going to be the, you know, the Garrison Keillor or whatever, the Luigi story. I would tell the story as, as if it were a folk tale and try to point out to people how artificial elements of it seem, how contrived and how pre-planned. People said I was crazy. They also predicted the story would go away. America would get sick of him. He was an unappealing character attached to a murder. That, the very opposite has happened. His cult has grown. He has a cult. And the question is, when his actual trial comes around,

• 20:06Speaker 02

  will they be able to find jurors who haven't been exposed to this folk hero, Robin Hood legend? I have a hard time believing that in New York City, they will find 12 who will convict him in a case where he is linked circumstantially- But also has several outs. When they, when they investigated the electronic bike use, they found out that he had picked up the bike at one part of New York City, three and a half miles from the site of the murder, and somehow managed to get there in four or five minutes. And, and the junior detectives have rerun the route and say,

• 20:50Speaker 02

  there's no way you can make that trip in less than 13. So there's the first flaw in the prosecution's case, you know? They never saw his face, and it's not the same eyebrows when you see the two versions of the face. There's check mark two. I predict, if you've ever seen the movie Network, a satire of American television and mass media and news, where they actually staged their own crimes in order to keep the ratings high at this failing network. I, I, I see elements of that here. You know, cable news, not just social media, social media is on, in the ascendant, but cable news is dying. But Luigi, when he goes on trial,

• 21:35Speaker 02

  is going to be an advertising boon like you can't imagine. What do you think the truth is of the murder? I think the truth of the murder is murky. There's no look that, looking at the evidence as it has been presented so far, it does seem a little weak and contradictory. Um, there's some question as to whether the bag he was carrying at the McDonald's was, was taken from him in a way that was unlawful, technically in violation of how you search a suspect.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  They separated him from it early before really announcing themselves as police. Um, there are a lot, there are a lot of weaknesses in the case. And to be honest, I play stories out not for their likelihood, but for their possible cultural impact. And if I were in what they call the writer's room in Hollywood, scripting Luigi drama, I would imagine that the ending they want is he is found not guilty. He comes out of jail, a people's hero, Che Guevara, you know.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  Whatever, the revolutionary that all the girls can love with the kissable face and the six pack abs, and he becomes a media star. Well, he, he will, it will be ambiguous as to whether he committed the murder or not. Um, he's obviously pleading not guilty.

• 23:12Tucker Carlson?

  So what, I mean, so you're saying that girls like murderers?

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Well, they do. I mean, I, I, I.

• 23:17Tucker Carlson?

  They do. That's something that we, we weren't told before we embraced female leadership of the country, that the country became a lot more violent and there's a lot less restraint, I would say, on people's behavior. And there is a kind of bloodthirsty quality to American culture that did not exist thirty years ago.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  Well, Manson, of course, had his, had his fans and his minions and his groupies. He had them commit the crimes for him in many cases.

• 23:46Tucker Carlson?

  And it was mostly female.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. Richard Ramirez, the night stalker, one of the most horrific serial killers in American history, who, you know, broke into bedrooms and tortured people in the eighties, had an infamously long list of female visitors and women courting him and proposing marriage and so on. Um, you know, the bad boy is always an attractive figure in America, James Dean, Martin, Marlon Brando, but the evil boy seems to have a constituency too.

• 24:22Tucker Carlson?

  No, it's true. And I think, um, I didn't grow up with a lot of women and I know women in the house, and I always assumed that men, you know, men commit all, most of the violence in our society, but I always assumed it was men who were for violence, women were against violence. But I, I've learned just by watching as I've gotten older that women, it is a broad generalization, but certainly female leaders are way more enthusiastic about violence than male leaders.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Well, I'm not going to go as far as that in terms of my generalizations, only because I, you know, I want to live a free man for a few more months.

• 24:56Tucker Carlson?

  No, I'm not. I mean, I don't mean it. It's just an observation. It's not even an insult.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  But, but, but, but in favor of your thesis, Bonnie and Clyde.

• 25:05Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Um, you know, uh, was there ever a more six sixties style sexy romance than that between Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde?

• 25:19Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, no, it's true.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  And, uh, you know, going back to film noir and our sort of, you know, artistic history, the femme fatale who often, often causes the killing.

• 25:32Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  You know, in Double Indemnity, who, who, who, uh, recruits poor Fred Murray to kill her husband, uh, played by all those different actresses who, who specialized in being the dangerous, heartless blonde, is one of those motifs, one of those tropes that has a basis in our psychology.

• 25:53Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, well, I've, I've certainly noticed. Um, cause you would think it would be disqualifying, you know, despite the six pack abs and the, you know, the dashing hood.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Well, the goddess of-

• 26:04Tucker Carlson?

  If you murder a guy on the sidewalk, you would think people would be like, you know, I, I'm mad at the healthcare system. I don't like health insurers, but you can't shoot a father and a husband like on the street. Like what? And by the way, if you can do that, if what this case does is introduces or reveals an acceptance of murder, then that's a predicate for what's to come, I think.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Well, you know, here he is writing his new age letter from jail, talking about, you know, the novels he's reading and he ends it not just with never lose the plot, but with the single word light, you know, light. He's a bearer of light. Um,

• 26:43Tucker Carlson?

  It's Cahill Gubron, kind of with a gun.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, Cahill Gubron, killer poets. Um, and we know from our, uh, experience of Adolf Hitler, that the frustrated artist can turn into the most prolific killer.

• 26:59Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, for sure.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  And I know from a book I wrote about a guy named Clark Rockefeller, who had murdered a couple of people. He was a, he was a, an impostor who called himself a Rockefeller, but he murdered a couple of people and, uh, you know, uh,

• 27:16Speaker 02

  How can I put it? That can be by some considered a work of art, a sort of higher Nietzschean expression of self. And when Luigi styles himself an artist here, it's very troubling, especially to me, an artist who doesn't kill people.

• 27:35Tucker Carlson?

  Yes. And also, I mean, I don't, I don't know, I mean, this is like a theme in Crime and Punishment, too. I think there's nothing particularly artistic about shooting strangers on the sidewalk.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I will leave you with this. I haven't seen the family of the victim come out demanding that Luigi be imprisoned or punished.

• 28:02Tucker Carlson?

  I was just thinking that.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  I have reason to believe that there are members of the family that aren't completely convinced he's guilty. I'll leave it at that. It's not something I could report on.

• 28:14Tucker Carlson?

  The family of the victim.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  The family of the victim, yeah. I think among certain people involved, it is still a question as to whether he's, you know, whether he's guilty of the murder itself, whether he was involved in the crime but not the actual gunman, or whether he was a guy maybe told to do something and he found out later that he was wrong place in the wrong place in the wrong time, at the wrong time. All these things are possible now, especially. And when you see how much he seems to love jail, he's reading Fahrenheit 451, he's reading

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Ayn Rand, a book about an imprisoned guy who becomes a scientist and a hero, you sense that this is a guy who is acutely aware of the mythical and cultural precedence for his own actions.

• 29:18Tucker Carlson?

  Well, and I mean, that seems like a pretty compelling argument for his guilt that he's embraced the role.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:24Tucker Carlson?

  As avenging murderer.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  But in Walter Kern world where everything's a novel, and I, let me just put that out there. I think that we now have had reality dissolved before our eyes enough times. We've had, we've had the experts debunked enough times. We've learned enough about the untrustworthiness of our media that we have every right to speculate. They used to call it conspiracy theory, but we have every right to speculate on what indeed we're watching when we watch huge stories.

• 29:59Tucker Carlson?

  I think you're right.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Especially these huge stories that have the potential to move political blocks and change sentiment over certain issues. And to me, the jury is very much still out on whether what has become a kind of online reality game has, has the grounding in actual reality that we imagine it does.

• 30:28Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I just want to be in the record in saying that convincing the American population to accept the murder of a stranger is a big, big, big step, and it's a precedent we're going to regret.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  And it's already been done to some extent because just a couple of weeks ago, when these two people were murdered out in Washington DC, remember, gunned down.

• 30:53Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. Right outside the Israeli embassy.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Right outside the Israeli embassy. The killer fired numerous bullets into the crawling form of the female victim to dispatch her completely.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  A violent, horrible crime, not like the one shot that Luigi did. There were people who came out immediately to say, he's the new Luigi.

• 31:20Tucker Carlson?

  So I'm opposed to that. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  That we should have to say we're opposed to it as a measure of how terrible things are. It used to be without question that one was opposed to shooting people on sidewalks as they crawl to safety, or gunning down the father of a husband on the streets of New York as he attends a conference. But apparently now, there are two sides to those matters, and one of the reasons is Luigi. So the psychological damage, if you look at this in some way as a psychological operation, whatever else it is, yes, then it has succeeded already.

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• 33:09Speaker 00

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• 33:52Tucker Carlson?

  I feel like every society, people in general are always on the brink of homicidal violence. Like, that's why we have laws and police and courts. And, you know, anyone who understands human nature knows that. And so, the second you, you know, allow the acceptance of murder, um, boy, you're just gonna get a lot more than you imagine in return. Once you drop that, you know, the final defense, the primary defense against murder is public sanction against murder. Like, we don't like murder. No normal person likes murder. And when that changes, I don't care how many cops you have, or how many CCT cameras you have, like, you're gonna get a lot of murder if you change that attitude, no?

• 34:35Speaker 02

  You're gonna get a lot of murder, and you're going to get a lot of uncertainty on the part of people in power. I know for a fact, certain, um, security organizations were called just after this murder to beef up the protection of CEOs and billionaires and so on. I mean, that, that business went through the roof after Luigi. Even if there are no more murders, it causes those people to separate further from society. You know, we, up until recently, yeah, the richest people in the world, they might have had security, but you'd see them walking into restaurants.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  You'd, you'd be able to have a conversation with them sometimes, come up to their table. This will cause the further, um, social balkanization of the classes.

• 35:30Tucker Carlson?

  That's exactly right. Boy, that's such a smart point. And I know some of those people, and they're living in a completely parallel world.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:37Tucker Carlson?

  Now, it does feel a lot like...

• 35:41Tucker Carlson?

  Amazingly like pre-revolutionary Russia, where you had a period of like 40 years of anarchist assassinations of prominent people. And it softened up the society for October 1917, the Bolshevik takeover. By the time that happened with, you know, minority support and whatever, but they pulled it off. They were able to pull it off because people were nihilistic by that point. Cause a lot of people had been killed.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It does, it does degrade the capacity for empathy. It, in a strange way, in some people causes them to flip. And they start to become attracted to the notion of power through a gun. They start to see, maybe they're saving the soul of mankind. Um, maybe the killer is on the side of light, love, psychedelic mushrooms and, you know, groovy things. Remember the Manson girls, a couple of the Manson girls went on to, well, at least one to try to assassinate Gerald Ford.

• 36:43Tucker Carlson?

  Squeaky from.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, you know, I grew up, I'm at this strange point in life where I'm just old enough to remember the last really radical period in American history from the late 60s into the mid 70s. And it was a similar vibe. Uh, you know, you turn on the TV and RFK was assassinated. You turn on the TV and right up until Reagan, really, and Reagan had been shot. Um, it cooled off for a while, but boy, during the Trump campaign, did it get hot again with those assassination attempts. And now we've had with the Israeli embassy and with the Luigi thing, two more prominent assassinations.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  An assassination being something that's planned in which someone lies in wait and in which the symbolic character of the violence becomes the headline, you know? So one of the worst things we do in America was we take crimes and we turn them into allegories.

• 37:42Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  You know?

• 37:43Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  We find out that, we find out if you hear today on the drive home that five people were shot. At a Walmart in Kentucky, the first thing that everybody says is what was the race of the shooter? What were the political beliefs of the shooter? As though we're going to what? Make policy or understand ourselves and our souls in terms of who kills who and what their motives are? And the truth is that in the old days, when there were obvious political killings, like

• 38:24Speaker 02

  the shooting of JFK, we developed this notion that I think is all American of the random lone psycho killer. Now, anywhere else in the world, if a president or whatever is killed, you see it as political violence.

• 38:42Tucker Carlson?

  In Pakistan, they don't believe in the lone gunman.

• 38:43Speaker 02

  Yes, but here we developed this sort of archetype of the lonely nervous psycho killer who's just kind of maybe sexually confused and frustrated and they just do it for no reason. It's random violence. Now, in ancient Rome, you know, or any society in which political violence is being used constantly, you know, wives are assassinating their husbands, brothers are assassinating their sisters, everybody's competing, you know, to succeed to this office or the throne or whatever. And then in the rest of the world, they know political violence for what it is. And they know it by its fruits. And yet, we, up until recently in America, obscured all that with this myth of the guy

• 39:28Speaker 02

  who just snapped.

• 39:29Tucker Carlson?

  But if you pull back a little bit, it's clear that, you know, that these are maybe not the product of intentional conspiracies, but certainly used as part of like a strategy.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  And this is kind of, and this Louise murder is kind of a third thing in the sense that.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  The conspiracy might belong only to him. He obviously researched Ted Kaczynski and the Unabomber. He dressed like him. He wrote a manifesto that was a sort of tribute to him. He used his tactics of coming into and out of cities on buses and so on. He studied the case. Whether it's a game designed by Luigi as a solo act or one which he had help with, it is definitely engineered to be a compelling, social media, retweetable, viral drama.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  And where it's going is what concerns me because I do frankly expect he might not be convicted. And in that case, we will have maybe a podcast host or...

• 40:42Tucker Carlson?

  Well, definitely a podcast.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  At the least, they'll have a podcast, you know. Maybe he'll have a fashion line. Who knows?

• 40:50Tucker Carlson?

  Eighty-dollar t-shirts.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  Who we kind of wink, wink, know is a cold-blooded murderer or at least somehow participated in a cold-blooded murder plot. And we will at that point have completed a next step toward dehumanization.

• 41:08Tucker Carlson?

  Doesn't seem like there's anybody left in the society who can stand up and say, "This is wrong," whatever you think of the health insurers, and be taken seriously. There are, I don't, are there moral authorities left in the United States?

• 41:24Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, it's hard to say. The church and various religious authorities of my youth who used to have popular, popular influence, Billy Graham, that kind of person, they don't exist. The moral authorities who were in the press, you know, Walter Cronkite or so, who even though he, you know, he might have been a liberal, you know, Massachusetts Democrat, part of that establishment, did act as though he was somehow speaking for all of us in

• 42:03Speaker 02

  a, in a common sense, traditional moral way. Some, you know, we still get the posture of moralism, especially on the left.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  We're a little less inundated by right-wing religious fundamentalism than we were in the 80s, say, or even under Bush. But true people of integrity who can stand up and denounce things in a way that really sears the conscience of the country across different groups don't seem to exist.

• 42:43Tucker Carlson?

  Is the country too big to manage as a country?

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I come from the cultural side, and I don't know if it's too big to manage as a political, financial, and economic entity. But it's too big to manage as a cultural entity, that's for sure. We have promoted, overly promoted, I think often in the name of diversity, but that was cynical, not just a balkanization, but a kind of atomization of our culture, in which every group over 10 can't agree with any other group over

• 43:29Speaker 02

  10. Now murder itself, cold-blooded murder, not murders of pa- crimes of passion we traditionally understood as having slightly lower status as moral crimes. I mean, somebody came in and saw their wife in bed with somebody, or somebody hurt your child and you did a vigilante killing, we understood that kind of cold-blooded deliberate, bought the gun, came to town, watched the person, learned their movements, killed them. That being a matter of debate is new. So, as a culture, which-

• 44:09Speaker 02

  You know, Andrew Breitbart, the conservative thinker, said, "Politics is downstream of culture." And I kind of agree with him on that because, you know, we're not always walking around following rules. We don't have the Constitution in our pocket. We don't have, we don't have the statutes of the state of Maine in our pocket. We have to rely on tradition, on what our parents told us, on what our heroes might do, on, you know, what we heard in church, or, you know, what we learned playing sports. It is culture that guides our behavior. And if a country's breaking down, it almost,

• 44:49Speaker 02

  by definition, it means that its culture has broken down. And if its culture is strong, it's very hard for a country to break down.

• 45:00Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, I mean, there are countries with long histories of, you know, being invaded, famine, that are actually fine, still coherent. Russia is one of them, coherent country, like it or don't like it. You know, Russians have a real sense of themselves as Russians, as participating in a national project that's gone on a thousand years.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:21Tucker Carlson?

  It's kind of hard to wreck or break a country like that. But if a country doesn't know, has no sense of itself, if people don't know what it is they're part of.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:30Tucker Carlson?

  I don't understand how it hangs together.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  Well, America has done a great job of assimilating people from all over the world, huge groups. You know, my mother's ancestors came from the mists of the Carpathian Mountains in Hungary. They might have been gypsies. They were people without birth certificates. They came to America, speaking Hungarian, most difficult language to learn and to understand.

• 45:55Tucker Carlson?

  In the world.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  For others, yes. And, you know, they made their way out of the slums of New York to Cleveland, became, you know, landlords, bought an extra apartment, lived off that, slaughtered pigs in their backyard in Cleveland, Ohio, you know, kept the old ways.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  They became Americans. It's not, it's not diversity per se, or, you know, the multiplicity of the peoples in the United States that causes a culture to break down. It's attacks on what all such groups have in common, like the aversion to murder.

• 46:35Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  All those groups have in common certain beliefs about what a man is and what a woman is, and what the duty of a father is, and what the duty of a mother is, and of a child, and so on. You go outside of the United States and you go, oh my gosh, it's a traditional world. We're, we're the ones-

• 46:54Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, that is so true.

• 46:56Speaker 02

  -who have somehow melted the, the social compact in ways that I think seem almost impossible and horrifying to a lot of the immigrants might come, frankly. They must find themselves in a country where they're, you know, the family's under attack, where education is overwhelmed by questions of social justice and so on, rather than learning to read. In some ways, I, I have a kind of poignant empathy for a lot of the immigrants to America who come from cultures much more intact than ours.

• 47:35Tucker Carlson?

  That'd be almost every culture outside the US, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:41Tucker Carlson?

  Outside the Anglosphere, which is uniquely falling apart for reasons that I don't really understand. Why is that?

• 47:48Speaker 02

  Well, I, I went to Oxford. You know, after I went to college here, I had a fellowship to Oxford and I lived there for a couple of years, studied there for a couple of years, and then lived in London afterwards. It was during the period of Thatcher's kind of recapitalization of the society.

• 48:06Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  When I got there, England was a kind of grim, post-war, nationalized space in which, you know, people were used to rationing and lines, and the coal miners would go on strike and the whole country would shut down. And, you know, in a couple of years, Thatcher had sort of caused it to be a-

• 48:28Speaker 02

  Dynamic, more modern, money-making, and the British thought, materialistic culture. But it was functioning pretty well. That's mid-eighties. Especially around speech and the freedom to express yourself. England of today seems like a nightmare, a place that threatens to arrest Elon Musk if he comes for his Twitter, you know, failing to police Twitter, where, you know, resentments and antagonisms that are natural to a system that is bringing in so many newcomers

• 49:09Speaker 02

  and so on are declared crimes, where thought policing really is a reality and so is thought detention, you know? Yeah. So, so what I thought of as the country that brought the full flower of human expression to perhaps its greatest, you know, greatest level in history. I mean, if you think about Elizabethan England and next few hundred years of literature, it's unmatched in its, in its quality of expression, its wit, its insight into the

• 49:46Speaker 02

  human condition, its drama, its eloquence, every sort of character you can find in Charles Dickens, every sort of criminal, every sort of hero. But they are getting very narrow and very censorious and very politically oppressive in a way I wouldn't have thought was possible in the country of William Shakespeare and, you know, Charles Dickens and... Yeah, and of the Magna Carta. And of the Magna Carta, yeah.

• 50:22Tucker Carlson?

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• 50:41Tucker Carlson?

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• 51:25Tucker Carlson?

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• 51:30Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked $350,000 for Janine's health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 52:00Speaker 06

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• 52:03Speaker 07

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• 52:29Tucker Carlson?

  So you got, I, I- I don't even know if you want to talk about this. If you don't, it's okay. But you came back from England and wound up at some point working for a magazine called Spy?

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Spy Magazine.

• 52:43Tucker Carlson?

  Spy Magazine. And Spy Magazine, long gone, but hugely influential in the 1980s and into the 90s. What was Spy Magazine exactly?

• 52:57Speaker 02

  Well, Spy Magazine was a sensation. It was a humor and gossip magazine aimed at the upper echelons of New York City and Los Angeles and Washington. In other words, we've got tabloids that tell us what the TV stars are doing and what rock musicians are doing. But Spy Magazine followed the careers of people, editors at the New York Times, assistant secretaries of state, various business people, socialites. And it did, in a way, what Twitter does now. It made fun of them. It sometimes exposed scandals about them.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  It turned them into cartoon characters. Chief among them was Donald, the young Donald Trump. Spy Magazine had an almost patented or hallmark

• 53:54Speaker 02

  obsession with Donald Trump in the 1980s as a, well, they called him "short-fingered vulgarian." That was the epithet they used. And he was thought to be uncouth, greedy,

• 54:10Speaker 02

  narcissistic. He plated everything in gold. He wanted some kind of power that he probably didn't deserve. He did not have a pedigree like a lot of New York society does. A lot of New York society goes back to old families. Here was Trump coming out of Queens, you know, and hanging out with celebrities. And there was a kind of political moment where Trump rehabilitated a skating rink in Central Park that had fallen into disrepair. And the city had sort of acted like it's just we'll never fix it. It's too far gone. You know, it's too complicated. Trump came in with his own money and his own crews and restored

• 54:53Speaker 02

  this rink in record time for less than it was thought it would cost. And he became a proto political leader and Spy Magazine was absolutely devoted to making sure that went no further.

• 55:09Tucker Carlson?

  Which is just interesting that so, you know, it's New York City. So there are lots of short-fingered vulgarians in the real estate business in New York City who gild things and hit the nightclubs and like it's a type. It's very common in New York, but and certainly was in the eighties, but they focused on Trump. Yeah, I mean, to the exclusion of everyone else. I mean, it was just as a reader, I was a reader of it. Trump was kind of the star of the magazine.

• 55:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:37Tucker Carlson?

  Issue after issue. Why Trump?

• 55:40Speaker 02

  Well, you know, if you go back, you see that Trump has had political ambitions for a long time. He Reagan, I think famously said on meeting a young Trump, this man's going to be president someday. And he started giving interviews fairly early about how he'd fix the United States and what was wrong with it. So my guess is that Donald Trump's political ambitions, which he maybe talked more about in private, but were known, were troubling to the establishment in some way. Um,

• 56:13Tucker Carlson?

  Wait, you're describing Spy Magazine as a tool of the establishment?

• 56:16Speaker 02

  Well, Spy Magazine came out of Harvard. It came out of the Harvard Lampoon, the, the, I guess, private club, secret society devoted to humor that has given us a lot of, you know, our American comedy from The Simpsons to Saturday Night Live and so on. Our publisher was the son of a, of a Raytheon executive. Um, we,

• 56:43Tucker Carlson?

  It's not a sector you associate with humor.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Well, What influence it had, I can't tell. It's just the fact that that is the nature of the publishers' money. And it also included a lot of Time Magazine characters, you know, Walter Isaacson, who became head of Time Magazine, head of the Aspen Institute and Head of CNN. So on, was sort of around the magazine. He would, he never wrote for them, but he was a constant butt of jokes and kind of in that sphere of influence. Graydon Carter, who went on to become the head of Vanity Fair, which really was, you know, an establishment,

• 57:27Speaker 02

  burnishing, you know, force to bring, you know, a lot of, a lot of our worship of the British royals and so on. Yes. Comes from that era of Vanity Fair magazine. And there were other characters involved in that set, in that group, who came from very high families, Ivy League backgrounds, and since have gone on to all sorts of positions. It was an in crowd. It was as though college had never ended for this set of people. And they went on and created a magazine treating New York as a campus in which, you know, the real cool people got rewarded and the

• 58:12Speaker 02

  uncool people, you know, were mercilessly made fun of. Is it an accident that the main butt of that humor, Donald Trump, became president of the United States? Well, I don't know. But one thing I've learned about America in my long tour of our, you know, high echelon system, is that presidents are spotted, future presidents are spotted and even start their campaigns, as it were, the campaign before the campaign, much earlier than you might recognize. Yes. My daughter went to Harvard, and first year she came back, she said, Dad, they're

• 58:53Speaker 02

  so pretentious. I said, why? She said, I actually was sitting in a room with two guys who were arguing, and one was saying, I'm running in 2046. You have to wait till 2050. And she said, and they were serious.

• 59:09Tucker Carlson?

  I'm not surprised. What I am surprised by is that of all the egomaniacs out there who think they're going to be president, and there are, as you said, quite a few institutions like Harvard, the editors at Spy took Trump seriously. Like, they were really, 40 years ago, they were trying to strangle his campaign in the crib.

• 59:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 59:30Tucker Carlson?

  I just think that's just incredible, the way that they could smell that this was real. He's not like everybody else, he's not like other real estate developers who think they should be president. This guy actually could be, and we're gonna stop him.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  Well, those who are ambitious in America, and politically ambitious and socially ambitious in a way, are all aimed at the same culminating office, whether they get there or not, you know? Anybody who, you know, I remember when Jack Welch, the president of GE, was a big celebrity for, or Lee Iacocca, immediately, will they be president? So, of course, there would have been rumors around Trump that he might want to be president, maybe he fed them himself. Maybe Spy was especially lucky in picking this butt of its jokes, or maybe, in some

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  sense, they saw in him the beginnings of a kind of rough populist, to them uncouth, political movement that he would lead. The people at Spy, you know, Trump's fighting Harvard today, right? You know, the cultural arguments that Trump is having right now with the elite institutions of America show that he doesn't like them and they don't like him. And I think that hostility goes back a long time in his career. I think he was, I think he was discerned as a threat to the hierarchies as they existed

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  at that point. And he still is.

• 1:01:11Tucker Carlson?

  And that's the root of the hate for Trump.

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  It could be, to the extent, you know, people always ask me, is there an establishment? Is there a big club? You know, is, is America really have a kind of insider ruling class? And my experience, coming from a farm in Minnesota, getting to Princeton, wide-eyed, a good observer, a good listener, a social guy who gets into all kinds of room is, the answer is yes, most definitely yes. And the lineages of these, of these ruling class members, they go back in all kinds of ways, through certain law firms, through, you know,

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  military service, intelligence service, through, they go back to big commercial fortunes, you know, you know, we still have basically a Vanderbilt on TV on CNN, you know, and that group knows itself as, and sees itself as a kind of knighthood, a knight chivalric order that's guiding the US, that has a right in some sense to rule it. And when they talk, when I hear the term our democracy, it's often spoken by these people in a possessive way, you know?

• 1:02:37Tucker Carlson?

  Right, our democracy.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  John Kerry, our democracy.

• 1:02:40Tucker Carlson?

  Right, where the vote is internal. It's not a national vote, it's a vote.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:02:45Tucker Carlson?

  You know, it's Kurt Anderson and Walter Isaacson.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  And John Kerry, and, you know, and Hillary Clinton and whatever. And so, I think it was pretty easy to identify Trump early as an outsider and a, you know, what they call in Great Britain, a bounder, somebody who was trying to jump a class without the pedigree, without the proper credentials, and without the right attitude.

• 1:03:12Tucker Carlson?

  Well, here's a story you probably haven't heard a lot about. The Chinese mafia is exploiting rural America to create a drug empire. This is not available on cable news. The network's not telling you about this, but it's totally real. Communist affiliated drug gangs destroying parts of the United States, the parts that Washington ignores, to sell drugs, laundering money and building a black market network inside this country's most beautiful but least served areas. We've got a brand new documentary on this. It's called High Crimes: The Chinese Mafia Takeover of Rural America. It's available now on TuckerCarlson.com. It's excellent. The purchase of churches and schools to aid the operation, the jerry rigging of power

• 1:03:56Tucker Carlson?

  boxes to steal electricity, foreign pesticides, collusion with the Mexican cartels. It's unbelievable. By the way, one of the drug houses is like walking distance from my house. I didn't know that. It's a layered and fascinating story. Head to TuckerCarlson.com to watch now. We think you'll love it.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:04:46Tucker Carlson?

  When you got to Princeton from Minnesota in the 80s, were you impressed by these people? Did you think they deserved to rule?

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  So I came out of Minnesota to Princeton with one mythology, you know, in my foremind, and that was the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

• 1:05:04Tucker Carlson?

  I was about to say, yeah.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  F. Scott Fitzgerald. He came from a pretty good family in St. Paul, Roman Catholic kid, but his mother had fallen on hard times, and though they lived in the right neighborhood, they didn't have a lot. And he goes to Princeton in the, you know, right before World World War I during it and he sees the glory of the American establishment, the beautiful debutantes, the, you know, the sons of industrialists at Princeton, of course, at that time was, you know, an all male school, but there were other sort of feeder schools that they could date the girls from. And he absolutely was enchanted by it. He wrote a novel, This Side

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  of Paradise, you know, which Princeton still sort of exalts over as its most romantic portrayal. And I got to Princeton primed by that myth, but of course I get there in 1980 at the, on the heels of the 60s and 70s, when, you know, aristocratic and system-based establishment America was at a low ebb after the Vietnam War. So I wasn't expecting the same great Caspianish party. But what I saw were people who were connected by all sorts of family, marital, business, and school ties in a much tighter, in a much tighter organization than

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  I would ever have dreamed. And I also found out that I wasn't one of them. I could be if I wished. I, you know, in America, when you grow up middle class and you go to the right schools and so on, you have the option of joining that country club on an honorary basis if the membership votes and if you behave correctly. But I being a kind of dark, brooding wannabe poet, artist, wasn't willing to do that. And so I spent my time sort of like the little match girl, standing outside the window, watching them conduct their rituals,

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  play their sports that I had never seen. I didn't know how lacrosse was played. I thought field hockey was something you played in the gym with hockey sticks and a ball. And so the whole thing was alien to me, but not charming. It seemed a little brutal. It seemed a little insular. It seemed very judgmental and it seemed to be.

• 1:07:41Tucker Carlson?

  That sounds like boarding school.

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And it seemed to be populated by people who.

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  They didn't just have material entitlement. They didn't just think they deserved a big house someday. They had social entitlement and political entitlement. They really believed that they should rule the country, you know, and we had a thing called the Woodrow Wilson School at that time at Princeton. The sort of woke hurricane has come through and taken everything named after Woodrow Wilson and blown it off the Princeton campus. But in those days, the Woodrow Wilson School was a place where generals and secretaries of state, you know, Federal Reserve Chairs and so taught. And the creme de la creme at Princeton were people who would turn out like James Baker, the Secretary of State, or Paul Volcker,

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  Fed Chairman, or whatever. The Princeton mythos was that you were the gentlemen advisors, the powers behind the throne, almost too good to be the president yourself. I didn't find that as romantic as Fitzgerald did. But of course, think about what happened to Fitzgerald. That class, which he was so besotted by, never really accepted him. He ends up a journeyman screenwriter, alcoholic, out in, you know, LA. He writes his greatest novel, really about the pretense and the tragedy of that class, you know, whose hero is someone who desperately, the Great Gatsby is actually, you know, a kid from North Dakota who wants Exactly.

• 1:09:15Speaker 02

  And a gun runner and a, you know, gangster, basically, who wants to get in. And they go to his parties. It's sort of like what we've seen, you know, Gatsby wasn't Epstein, Gatsby wasn't Diddy, but he served a similar role. He threw the biggest parties and everyone went. But the minute he went down, everybody forgot him. And there's no one at his funeral at the end of The Great Gatsby, you know. And so that brutal insider class that will certainly eat your free food and grace your, you know, grace your parties with their presence runs out on you pretty quick. And I was frankly scared. Scared by them, to be honest, you know.

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  What my view of British society was that it was somehow a more humane and um, I don't know, secure version of it. The thing about the upper classes in America, they're very insecure because

• 1:10:14Tucker Carlson?

  I've noticed.

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  Because secretly, they know they aren't upper at all. And that, in fact, they live in a middle class society whose cultural products, you know, Hollywood movies, rock and roll and so on, which are the true genius of America, aren't created by them.

• 1:10:30Tucker Carlson?

  No.

• 1:10:32Tucker Carlson?

  No, and also their place isn't secure because it's not granted to them really by birth. Like, at some point, you have to perform.

• 1:10:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:10:39Tucker Carlson?

  Or else you lose your summer house.

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:10:42Tucker Carlson?

  You know, and which they often do. And so there is a, there is a kind of anxiety to them. And you really, really feel it, and which is one of the reasons I think they're so easy to control politically. If you tell them, or tell their wives, more precisely, that, you know, like, all the cool people are doing something, they'll just do it.

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:11:04Tucker Carlson?

  Have you noticed this?

• 1:11:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. The American, you know, there's a great book by a writer named Paul Fussell, who used to hang out at Princeton and who I knew a little, called Class. I recommend that everyone read it. And its thesis is basically that the American class system is fully as developed as any other countries, and it's got as many signifiers and code words and secret clubhouses and so on, but that it obscures its presence in order to not be offensive to our allegedly democratic system. And now we've just discussed one more example of that. Luigi Mangione, you know, from the highest caste of Baltimore, at least, you know,

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  income-wise, society, making himself out to be Che Guevara, or Fidel Castro, or Huey Newton, or something.

• 1:11:54Tucker Carlson?

  No, totally. Sacco in Vansetti.

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  Sacco in Vansetti.

• 1:12:02Tucker Carlson?

  Given everything you've just described, like, where is the country in five years?

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  Well, you know, as I said at the beginning, I see things in terms of stories. Stories are different than narratives. Everybody says now, "Oh, that doesn't fit the narrative," and they think that narrative means story. A narrative is simply Joe Biden is actually fit as a fiddle and he just stutters. A story has a logic to it. A narrative is just a description of what's going on. A story is, how did something start? What is happening and what kind of conflict is determining its unfolding? And how will it end?

• 1:12:48Speaker 02

  The American story is hard to tell because right now, we don't have one. We used to have one when I went to school. For whatever reason, it was thought to be too simplistic, or maybe too white, or too that, or too colonialist. But it was people come from all over the world, fleeing oppression, looking for opportunity from an old set of kingdoms and societies that had basically squeezed out the individual. Or they just don't have much, and they don't see how they can get much where they are.

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  They come to America, they tame this resource-rich land, and using this constitution that allows the individual to have rights that in other countries, only the privileged and, you know, high-echelon types have. They unleash this economic, cultural, scientific dynamo that allows them to become the most powerful, and in some ways, the most fun, and the most appealing, and the most magnetic culture in human history. One that is imitated in every continent, in the smallest towns, whose music spans the world, whose boxers, Muhammad Ali, become the most famous people in the world.

• 1:14:13Speaker 02

  Now, the American story has been reoriented, either fractured or reoriented. There was a formal attempt to do it with the 1619 Project. You know, America began as a place to have slaves and exploit, you know, other races, and its real founding is in that sin, and its real story is how that sin propounded itself, made everything worse, developed a brutal, horrible, oppressive, almost sickening society, and we have to somehow get about the business of righting all those wrongs, or we can't even get started as a society. We might even have to avenge those wrongs.

• 1:14:57Speaker 02

  I mean, we're not talking about civil rights like in the 60s. We're talking about anti-racism. We're talking about, you know... Punishment. Punishment and overt promotion of people, not giving them opportunity, but actually giving them the job, and maybe even with less of a resume. President of Harvard, it's important that she be black, it's less important that she be a plagiarist. So, in that American story, I guess the Luizies of the world, and the people who are rioting in Los Angeles now and so on, think we're paying for our sins.

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  This is the scene in The Godfather where everybody gets their comeuppance so that we can have a new society. The other story is over. No matter how much somebody like Elon Musk, or Vivek Ramswami, or other people come to this country and make fortunes and found companies, or, you know, become great athletes and so on, even though that still goes on, and it still goes on in all kinds of prominent ways, it's not seen as of the essence of our American project.

• 1:16:25Speaker 02

  So, where we'll be in five years, I think, depends on whether or not we're able to... Find a version of the American story that is less retributive, less about vengeance, less about retribution, less about the past, less about making up for past sins and more about New Horizons, a fresh appreciation of our freedom, which

• 1:17:02Speaker 02

  is terribly threatened, and a common sense that we actually have done a fairly good job despite terrible dissent and really, I think, sabotage by our elites. You know, it seems to be the upper classes and the elites of America who have the biggest questions about it, who have the greatest doubts about it, who are most hostile to it. They often do it on behalf of classes well below them, you know, as they see it, you know, migrants, or people of other races, or people of sexual predilections, which

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  in the past were thought to be aberrant. They always make sure to team up with, you know, a client class. Yeah, a human shield. Yes, exactly. But I think they're on their way out. I think they're on their way out. So, to be honest, I think there is a path toward resurrection, toward restoration, toward maybe even a renaissance, in the sense that we now have technical tools that we didn't before. We've got technologies and the ability to communicate and meet and get around some of the old institutions. America was a set of brokerages before.

• 1:18:28Speaker 02

  Every relationship with power had to be brokered. You had to call a stockbroker to buy a stock. Now you can do it on E-Trade. If you wanted to communicate with a billionaire, I don't know through what series of meetings and letters. You have to join his club. Yeah, you could join his club. Now you can DM Mark Andreessen. Yeah. And he will respond in many cases. He will, actually. Yeah. Late at night, at length.

• 1:18:58Speaker 02

  What a great guy, Marcus. No, I agree. So, so the American ingenuity, which is, I think, the title force, that unless restrained, will always dictate our future, is still alive. It's, it's, it's in some ways more alive than ever. We've gotten around, you know, here you are, having this podcast with all these viewers without a network behind you. Um, uh, you know, the universe of media and communication is, is horizontal rather than vertical. There's no broker here. There's no executive waiting outside to tell you, Tucker, you can't talk about that. You know, we're gonna get sued, um, or whatever.

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  Um, Walter Kern doesn't have five levels of editors a- a- a- above him when he writes a Substack or, uh, uh, you know, a book. Um, and so I think, I think we, the people, can outmaneuver the last stand of the brokerage classes. And I think we're in the, I think we're in the process of doing it. But the problem is, some of the loudest and most prestigious voices are those who are losing out, who are on their way out. You know, Scott Pelley giving a, of CBS News, giving some, you know, terrible, strident, Jeremiahed about American society because 60 Minutes is no longer have the prestige

• 1:20:24Speaker 02

  that it did, mostly due to 60 Minutes, not due to evil Donald Trump. Um, I, the screams that you're hearing are the screams of the defeated and the screams of the stressed. And, and, and, and I actually, you know, it, it's fashionable some days to say, I'm a real optimist at the darkest times. But I am, because I think we've done a better job in the last few years of facing our real problems, at least identifying them, of liberating ourselves from the media brokerage, um, and of...

• 1:21:03Speaker 02

  Getting real. There are instruments for the manipulation of opinion and sentiment that are extremely powerful. And on the horizon lie, you know, AI possibilities for literally spoofing history, you know, changing our view of things, making false videos, re-engineering the past in 1984-ish ways, you know. But I do think our ingenuity, our restlessness, our great genius for seeing bullshit. You know, my hero is Mark Twain.

• 1:21:43Speaker 02

  And Mark Twain was at, when he was at the full, you know, flow of his career, said, "I'm not just an American, I'm the American." And by that, he meant that his attitude, seeing through pretense, pointing out hypocrisy, laughing at pomposity, was the essential American attitude. And insofar as we can bring back that Twainian skepticism, ability to self-criticize, ability to see through our own egos, and ability to see that the

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  institutions are in a weird way, not what makes America great. They are things that grow up and become like giant, you know, obstacles to further creativity and must be constantly questioned, constantly leveled. So that spirit seems to have liberated itself and found all sorts of technologies with which to propagate itself. And I'm betting on that. You're not worried about AI? You're not a doomer on the question. I'm not a doomer on AI. In certain areas, I am. There are certain things that people do that I don't think AI can ever do by definition.

• 1:23:06Speaker 02

  Right now, it's possible to put in five prompts or a series of 10 prompts and write a novel. You know, I want a novel in which Tucker Carlson and I are lost at sea in Polynesia and are rescued by, you know, a mysterious maiden who takes us to her village where her village of love. Well, we can get that novel. It's kind of like an early Conrad novel for five prompts, 200 pages, and it can be published. We don't even have to say it's AI. We can pretend we wrote it. In the future, more and more of our literary product is going to be produced that way. But what I say to people is, are you going to want to read the literature

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  and the novels of an entity that has never had sex? Are you going to want to read stories written by people who have never held baby? Are you going to want to read stories by people who have never worked hard all their life to get a job and then had the political asshole in the office beat them out at the last minute? AI has no experience. All it can do is constantly remix and perfect the surfaces of things. It's essentially collage that already existed. But we're going to need to tell our stories ourselves. So I don't fear AI, but there are things that I think

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  it will do very badly in which I have no interest. And one of them is write novels, write stories, report on life. Why should we fear it, though? I mean, we're told not to fear anything by our religious sages. And I think...

• 1:24:56Speaker 02

  It's a reflection of us. If we fear it, we're fearing ourselves. And what in ourselves are we fearing if we fear AI? A lot of what people think will happen is that there will be a kind of totalitarian agreement among the powers that be to constantly hypnotize us, tell us stories, you know, do things like run pandemics and other panics that can almost be administered by a machine and then generate documents and videos and so on in support of them. And that's the thing they fear. But what are you really fearing there? What you're fearing there is power running amok because it's not going to do

• 1:25:40Speaker 02

  it itself, until it starts doing it itself.

• 1:25:43Tucker Carlson?

  I love your take on AI. Sort of cautious concern, not panicked. It does seem like everything you just said makes the existence, the possession of physical books, unchanging physical books, not digital, things that can't be revised without your knowing, more important.

• 1:26:04Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, I'm a literary survivalist at this point, you know.

• 1:26:09Tucker Carlson?

  You're a book prepper?

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

  Well, I am. I buy sets of encyclopedias that I believe represent, you know, the perfection of that, particularly encyclopedia, like Encyclopedia Britannica from the 80s, say, before they start becoming politically sensitive and, you know. I actually carry in my car, some people carry in their car jumper cables, granola, you know, a spare tire. I carry a box of books that if I were to be stranded somewhere, if the road system of America broke down, I'm not kidding, I have a box of them. I selected them carefully. There's Norton Anthology of English Poetry.

• 1:26:55Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:26:56Speaker 02

  You know, there are a couple of novels by Conrad. There are some other, you know, favorite books, the collected Sherlock Holmes to entertain myself.

• 1:27:06Tucker Carlson?

  Which is amazing.

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:27:08Tucker Carlson?

  You can't read The Sign of Four too much.

• 1:27:10Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:27:11Tucker Carlson?

  A Study in Scarlet.

• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  Sherlock Holmes.

• 1:27:14Speaker 02

  Stories were the first literary stories.

• 1:27:16Tucker Carlson?

  Me too.

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  I read.

• 1:27:17Tucker Carlson?

  Me too. Edgar Rice Burroughs and then Sherlock Holmes.

• 1:27:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and, and I gotta say, if there's, you know, if I'm an Anglophile, it's because of Sherlock Holmes. Because I could imagine no fate more romantic than having a little apartment in London with a roommate, a doctor, injecting a little cocaine when I got bored.

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  And being called upon by Scotland Yard to solve their, you know, solve their most naughty mysteries. Also, there were ladies flitting around, we don't think of Sherlock Holmes as having much of a love life, but he actually did, it's indicated. Just the discretion, the civilization, you know, the parlor that he lived in, the simplicity of his life and the, and the aliveness of his mind were an endless curiosity and attention to detail were really my Babe Ruth or my, you know, Elon Musk. That was my role model.

• 1:28:27Tucker Carlson?

  So funny, me too. I got packed off to boarding school in 1983 and my father gave me the collected Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, and that's what I read for that first semester when I was 14 or whatever. And that totally, and from there, it's like a short hop to Evelyn Waugh or Orwell.

• 1:28:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:28:45Tucker Carlson?

  You know, and I just sort of stayed in that genre, my P G Wodehouse.

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:28:48Tucker Carlson?

  My whole life. I haven't moved beyond that.

• 1:28:51Speaker 02

  Well, in the back, in the back of my Ram truck, there's a box with the collected Sherlock Holmes. And if a solar flare ever takes out the grid, I will be found next to a fire in the Nevada desert, reading those aloud. So the.

• 1:29:06Tucker Carlson?

  I think the largest repository of books in the world, larger than the fabled Library of Alexandria, is the Library of Congress.

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  It's one of them, yes. It's unclear what the largest library, just like it's unclear what the largest anything is.

• 1:29:22Tucker Carlson?

  Right, that's exactly right. But it's got a claim on the title. It's a massive repository of physical book, paper books. Trump just fired the head of it. I don't know if there kind of is a head of it. I heard someone say the other day that Walter Kern was going to be the head of it. Are you going to be the librarian of Congress? Would you want that job? What is that job?

• 1:29:42Speaker 02

  Well, total candor. I was approached by some people in December, asking if I might be interested in the job. I thought about it. I actually grew up, when I was a little kid, on the outskirts of Washington, and I had a next door neighbor. He was a rear admiral. He had been a sergeant in World War I. His name was Robert Knox. He was a rear admiral in a thing called the Coast and Geodetic Survey, which was a branch of the government founded by Jefferson way back when, to chart and map the coastlines of America and the world. It was kind of the nautical equivalent of the Lewis and Clark

• 1:30:27Speaker 02

  Expedition. And this man, who was in his 70s, introduced me to the Smithsonian Institute, and he was a member of a club called the Cosmo Club in Washington DC, and he'd take little me down there. And that was a place where kind of explorers, generals, admirals, and that type gathered. And he introduced me to a vision of mankind. He used to call it humankind, and our achievements. That was, as I say, Jeffersonian. It goes back to the belief that if we can understand each other better, if we travel more, if we learn more, if we read more, we will become more peaceful, productive, and happy people.

• 1:31:13Speaker 02

  So when someone said, would you be interested? I leapt back to that experience in that little garden apartment in Park Fairfax, Virginia with this man who would show me his books, teach me geography, show me his globe, take me to the Smithsonian, introduce me to writers and other intellectuals at his club. And I thought, yes, that's the continuation of that spirit that that man brought into focus for me as a young man. And I thought, it's the only job I would do. In fact, you could come to me and ask, do you want to, you know, have this political

• 1:31:53Speaker 02

  office or, you know, some kind of other role in governance? And I would say, absolutely not. Stuffy, boring, I'm a writer, I'm an artist, I'm a little bit of a freaky guy, I'm an outside the box thinker. Librarian of Congress? Yes. And the reason wasn't just because it goes back to Jefferson, you know, the Library of Congress was partly founded by Jefferson selling his library to the United States. The Library of Congress goes back to 1800. In fact, it was proposed even before the Constitution that the US have a national

• 1:32:38Speaker 02

  library, and it didn't fly the first time. So the idea of a national library is older than the United States. And it exists in a beautiful building right up there between the Supreme Court and the Capitol. And it represents to me the entire body of what we've done, what we've thought, what we've written. Now it collects the movies we've made, the music we've made. It has done a very good job of making them available to the public, you know, digitally and in other ways. And it is the shrine to American culture, civilization.

• 1:33:20Speaker 02

  More than that, it cannot, it can be added to. Every, every book that's published in America sends two copies to the Library of Congress. That's why it grows. But it can't be changed, and it needs to be protected. What a librarian is to me is a guardian who stands in front of this vast

• 1:33:42Speaker 02

  File of our accomplishments and says, you're not going to change it. You're not going to harm it. You're not going to destroy it. I am between you and it, and we are going to celebrate this because this is a temple. You're not getting into the Vatican to throw bombs and you're not getting into the Library of Congress to pull books, to, to, to, to change additions, to retroactively rewrite history.

• 1:34:10Speaker 02

  To play that role, not just of guardian, but of champion.

• 1:34:15Speaker 02

  Would be a privilege to me, a beyond, beyond measure. And next year is the 250 anniversary of the United States.

• 1:34:27Speaker 02

  As I say, we're a little unclear about whether, what our story is as a country. But the Library of Congress sits at the center of that story and is the place we can go to, to find it and rediscover it. And I think it's an underappreciated and underutilized institution in American life that needs to be brought to the fore. You know, sometimes I imagined when this person suggested I do it and I took it to various officials, I showed my interest and some of them were, were encouraging. And they said, you know, you have to be confirmed by the Senate. And you're a weird guy.

• 1:35:12Speaker 02

  You've written all kinds of things. There are scenes in your books, you know, opinions have expressed

• 1:35:19Speaker 02

  that aren't very political. I said, well, nobody who's a writer grows up to want to be a politician. I, you know, I, I was a writer, but I think because I have books in the Library of Congress, I'm probably better qualified than people who don't. I also, I also, I also think that, you know, if you want to talk about diversity,

• 1:35:40Speaker 02

  look at a bookshelf. The works of William Burroughs, drug-addled madman, homosexual visionary, crazed junkie. Wife killer. Wife killer. Sit next to the works of, you know, Robert Frost.

• 1:36:03Speaker 02

  Peaceful Vermont. Peaceful Vermont. In other words, if we, as a society, can hold our differences, I like the word difference better than diversity, can hold our differences in one building, then we can hold them in one country. You know, a book, a great library is a tribute to variety and peaceful coexistence that society could well model itself on. And I'd love to be the face of that. And it has a great history, you know, Franklin Roosevelt appointed a poet, Archibald MacLeish. Ford, Gerald Ford appointed a historian, Daniel

• 1:36:43Speaker 02

  Boorstein, who was a great thinker, too. We've not had many librarians of Congress because until the office was term limited under Obama to 10 years, sometimes people held it for 40. That suggested it might be a job I'd like. If people are willing to spend half their lives in that job, there must be something about it.

• 1:37:12Speaker 02

  Are books threatened?

• 1:37:14Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. Well, before I say, answer that question, I have a joke that I missed inserting, and it's not, the reason I really want to be librarian of Congress is that I've already written the desk plate for my desk, which says, "The book stops here." Well, then you need a place to put that. Right. And, and, and, and that's the answer to your question. Books are threatened in lots of ways. First of all, they're not physically of quality in the way they used to be. The way books are printed and the paper that they're printed on these days is not designed to last for 100 years. It's not designed to last more than a few years. I happen to know this from discussions with publishers, that they are now being forced

• 1:37:58Speaker 02

  to use paper that is of such low quality that we cannot depend on these volumes staying bound or readable or intact for very long. Books are threatened in all kinds of other ways. There will be artificial books written by AI. One of the big questions is, does every book-length work created by AI belong on a shelf in the Library of Congress? Well, there's going to be zillions of them, and a future librarian of Congress is going to have to answer that question. Do we just fill this up with? You know, the endless drack produced by a mechanized form of writing? Or does it have to have real authorship, human authorship?

• 1:38:41Speaker 02

  Books are threatened also because we don't read, we don't read at length anymore. We read headlines, we read the paragraph, we read the short take, we read the sub stack, we read the tweet. But to read a book is a skill that might be lost. You know, almost like sailing or, you know, or, or, or, you know, how, how, how to raise a garden. It's, it, it takes not just patience, it takes a certain kind of mind to follow a complicated story that goes back and forth and doesn't have simple resolutions or simple morals in which the characters are complicated.

• 1:39:25Speaker 02

  A novel, for example, you can lose the ability to read it and people are losing that ability.

• 1:39:31Tucker Carlson?

  I've noticed. And there's something really important about following a story, a set of ideas unified by a theme, a thesis, a narrative, uh, over, you know, a couple hundred pages.

• 1:39:43Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:39:44Tucker Carlson?

  I remember my, once asking my father about my real mother, who was long gone. And I said, um, she seemed smart, she was a smart, high IQ person. And he goes, yeah, she read magazines. It's like, I guess the most cutting thing.

• 1:39:59Speaker 02

  You know, you're, you're speaking of AI. One feature that AI offers these days is it will interpret a tweet for you. And I don't know if you've seen this, you're not a big social media guy.

• 1:40:10Tucker Carlson?

  No, I'm not.

• 1:40:11Speaker 02

  But, uh, people are using Grok and other AIs to interpret a tweet. What did that mean? In other words, they're now downloading their literary imagination and their interpretive ability of, of two sentence documents to machines.

• 1:40:30Speaker 02

  Reading is not just putting together the words like a child and, you know, pronouncing them correctly, or, you know, knowing what a sentence is. Reading is a set of reactions and echoes created in the mind that form an interpretation, and an analysis, and an impression, and maybe even a moral. And it's just, reading itself is just the start of the reading process. Seeing the words is just the start of where a book enters mind, the soul, the culture, and so on.

• 1:41:07Speaker 02

  And that process, if it dims down, if it thins away, if it becomes so uncommon as to not be a regular, you know, a regular habit or occasion in our society, will leave us starved in a way that Bobby Kennedy tells us our foods are starving us. You know, we're still gonna be eating vast quantities, but the books will be Velveeta cheese pumped up with, you know, 100 different additives. I look at what is contained in the Library of Congress, the pre-AI Library of the United

• 1:41:49Speaker 02

  States, as what they call in the vaccine world, pure blood, a pure blood or a control group of documents from the time when people thought without the intervention of the machine. We're gonna need that. We're gonna need to compare the culture that comes after AI with the one that came before, and we're gonna need to keep a relationship between them. And it's not just a matter of keeping those books from being altered, or, you know, deleted. It's a question of keeping that shrine alive so that when we come back from the wilderness

• 1:42:28Speaker 02

  of AI to the north star of this library of what we did when it was all done by hand and by a person, we can judge what we've lost, what we've gained, and be whole as people.

• 1:42:50Tucker Carlson?

  Did you, are you an adult man when the internet was invented?

• 1:42:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:42:54Tucker Carlson?

  You remember the hype that surrounded it? Did you ever imagine 30 years ago, when it was just starting, that the internet would lead to illiteracy?

• 1:43:04Speaker 02

  Well, in some ways, okay, in some ways, we're more literate than ever in that we communicate by writing in more than ever.

• 1:43:14Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:43:14Speaker 02

  People don't even talk on the phone.

• 1:43:15Tucker Carlson?

  No.

• 1:43:16Speaker 02

  You know, text messages and posts and X posts and, you know, Facebook pages and so on are all written documents. So people are, in a sense, writing more than they ever did. Sometimes they are writing more than they speak. You can go through a whole day and realize you didn't even speak to another person, but you wrote plenty. So literacy, considered in its most, you know, basic and literal sense, has not died out. We do a lot of writing and reading still. Its quality has suffered. And there are measurements of the vocabularies of Americans and basically the vocabularies

• 1:43:58Speaker 02

  of AI programs and so on, that show our vocabularies are shrinking. You know, in Orwell, it's the totalitarian state is actively engaged in shrinking the language and making it more simplistic, less, you know, less complex, so that people can't think anymore. You know, they have fewer distinctions. The word bad is double plus ungood, because why should you need another word than good for bad? We'll just modify the word good and call it ungood. And the idea there is that they will slowly gain control of the human mind to the point where people won't be able to form ideas

• 1:44:43Speaker 02

  because they don't have the words.

• 1:44:47Speaker 02

  To some extent, that's happening because of the internet for various reasons. I mean, we did ourselves the greatest injury culturally that I've ever seen in my lifetime when we shut the schools during COVID. I mean, there are kids who have a window to acquire language and reading skills, and that window was closed for them. And I can't think of a greater tragedy in American life than that.

• 1:45:12Tucker Carlson?

  No.

• 1:45:14Speaker 02

  Literacy as a real, living, you know, complex phenomenon is, I think, endangered, terribly endangered. There are words everywhere, but is there sense everywhere?

• 1:45:31Tucker Carlson?

  My last question asks you something we talked about last night at dinner. You just referred to Orwell. You are rereading 1984 for the first time in 15 or 20 years.

• 1:45:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:41Tucker Carlson?

  It's been 40 for me. And I think for a lot of people my age, I doubt it. By the way, is it still assigned in schools, 1984?

• 1:45:49Speaker 02

  Well, let me tell you something, Tucker. I picked up the 75th anniversary edition of 1984, approved by the Orwell estate. It's got a little seal on the cover. It's the official edition. This happens to be Orwell Month, celebration of Orwell all across England and the English-speaking world. And there was an introduction that the estate approved for the book, which was one of the most Orwellian things I've ever seen. It was written by a novelist who said, "Well, Winston Smith, the hero, is a misogynist." And that's, she literally used the word problematic.

• 1:46:32Speaker 02

  And usually, I wouldn't read a book with a character like this. But, you know, you should probably, it's still an important book. And then she made other criticisms, you know?

• 1:46:44Tucker Carlson?

  That's in the prologue, didn't I say?

• 1:46:47Speaker 02

  It is, it is the introduction to the book, okay? I noted this, I noted this on a podcast, and I said Orwell now has an Orwellian introduction, which accuses him of thought crime. And warns us that though the book is problematic, we might want to read it anyway. She also notes the lack of racial diversity in-

• 1:47:08Tucker Carlson?

  Not really.

• 1:47:09Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:47:10Tucker Carlson?

  Who is the, do you remember her name?

• 1:47:12Speaker 02

  I do not remember her name. Uh, she's a Harvard trained novelist. But what was so odd about it was that following the introduction, there's a, another introduction, foreword written by Thomas Pynchon. Thomas Pynchon, who many would argue is our most mysterious and illustrious, serious novelist.

• 1:47:38Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 1:47:39Speaker 02

  Alive. He wrote.

• 1:47:41Tucker Carlson?

  Well, purportedly alive.

• 1:47:43Speaker 02

  Purportedly alive. Nobody knows what his face looks like.

• 1:47:46Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 1:47:47Speaker 02

  Um, you know, he's written these magisterial books that are, you know, some believe almost too complex to understand. And he did a foreword, but he got second billing. He got bumped out of first place in introduction world by this ridiculous trigger warning. It's a series of trigger warnings about the book.

• 1:48:13Tucker Carlson?

  And it's not ironic.

• 1:48:15Speaker 02

  Not ironic at all. So, so terrifyingly earnest that you can't believe it. Um, she criticizes the book for not reflecting her lived experience.

• 1:48:28Speaker 02

  My God, it's a dystopian novel, you know, written in 1948 about a future totalitarian state which resembles a combination of Soviet Russia and England, and it doesn't reflect your lived experience? The only books I want to read are ones that don't reflect my lived experience. I, I don't read Moby Dick to reflect my lived experience.

• 1:48:49Tucker Carlson?

  Right. Your, your lived experience, it consists of your diary.

• 1:48:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. My lived experience is a drag. It, it's a limitation. I go to books to go to other parts of the world, be in other heads, be in other times, other parts of history, uh, and, and, and that should be a criticism of 1984.

• 1:49:08Tucker Carlson?

  It's just the triumph of narcissism. I mean, that's just basically what that, you know.

• 1:49:12Speaker 02

  So, so.

• 1:49:13Tucker Carlson?

  How is this about me? Enough about you.

• 1:49:15Speaker 02

  So, so anyway, you know, that was the first alarming thing about 1984 and I hadn't even gotten to the book yet. When I got to the book itself. I have to tell you, prophetic isn't the word. Prophetic is overused. It's not that he predicts the society we live in today. He finds the eternal formulas by which power defeats the human mind and individual. It wasn't that he was just extrapolating about historical trends. Yes. He was giving us a worst-case scenario for group think over person think.

• 1:49:58Speaker 02

  He was giving us a warning about what happens when we lose our memories. More than anything else, 1984 is a book about time. About a society which doesn't have access to the past, in which the past is constantly rewritten to celebrate the current leaders. Oh, it's Wikipedia. Yeah, kind of, yes. And in which there is no future, because no one can plan a life. No one can even expect that they won't go to jail tomorrow for some tiny crime or offense. People in 1984 are stuck brutally and tragically in the present.

• 1:50:42Speaker 02

  And the thing that keeps the present, their sole preoccupation, is the violence of society. You know, the thing about violence is, it happens now. It takes you out of the past, it blocks out the future. Violence is a deep experience of the present only, from which you can't escape. And in 1984, the reason they have a two-minute hate where the society gathers every day to throw oranges and, you know, hurl curses at this imaginary enemy, subversive Goldstein. And the reason they have an actual hate week in the summer every year, where they do that

• 1:51:26Speaker 02

  for a week, is that fear, anger, and violence are ultimately the weapons of...

• 1:51:36Speaker 02

  The control class. And he, he, he does a very good job of showing how eternal and perpetual war with unseen enemies abroad keeps, you know, keeps the people in their place and keeps them insecure and anxious. He does another good job of showing how constant fear in the domestic realm, you know, will I be told on, will I be turned in? Uh, you remember in 1984, there's a telescreen that watches you, you don't watch it, you know? Will I be seen to have some, uh, you know, item I shouldn't have? Uh, I'm supposed to have black market cigarettes, but somehow I found some good ones. Will they see those and come to my house and take them, take me?

• 1:52:20Speaker 02

  And so the book is a nightmare and it's a thorough nightmare, which seems to offer no hope at all. At the end, it's not any spoiler to say the, uh, hero who manages for a short time to think for himself, to have a love affair, to write a diary. His great, his great crime in the book is starting a diary. Pens and paper are, uh, pens and paper are pretty much illegal in, in the world because they create a record that can't be falsified, you know? And so at the end, he's completely crushed. He's tortured.

• 1:53:03Speaker 02

  He's brainwashed and he comes out at the end, a thoroughly broken person saying, saying slogans, I love big brother without spirit, without hope. It is a hopeless portrait of what happens when an inner circle of people devoted to power above all, take control of the human mind and the individual. And I, uh, if you want, if you wanted to press yourself, read 1984, uh, that it resembles in so many ways, things that are happening now is uncanny, but.

• 1:53:50Speaker 02

  I guess someone used it as a template at some point. I mean, you would almost think they did. In so many ways, our censorship regime, our surveillance regime, in the book, the young people are the enemies of the old. They're spying on them constantly. Children are the most distrustful and zealous backers of party orthodoxy.

• 1:54:16Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, especially young women.

• 1:54:18Speaker 02

  And young women in particular. Orwell has been criticized for that, you know, thus the misogyny.

• 1:54:25Tucker Carlson?

  Because it bears no resemblance to our current reality whatsoever. I mean, he just made it up out of nothing.

• 1:54:30Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:54:31Tucker Carlson?

  Sorry.

• 1:54:32Speaker 02

  We have, when I read it as a child, the reason they assigned 1984 was to tell us that there's this place called the Soviet Union that is much like this. And by reading 1984, you can celebrate your freedom to read 1984.

• 1:54:50Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 1:54:51Speaker 02

  Which they can't do over there. You can celebrate the superiority of our culture and our, you know, value for the individual and our freedom to think, express ourselves without fear. But when you read 1984 now, it's not to feel superior to the old Soviet Union or, you know, Hitler's Germany. It's to realize we're there. We're so there that in some ways Orwell lacked imagination. He didn't know AI. Though, in the world of 1984, novels are written by machines. They just take the elements of novels and like

• 1:55:34Speaker 02

  a kaleidoscope, they crank a wheel and new combinations come out, you know, which is very much like the AI literature I've been predicting.

• 1:55:44Tucker Carlson?

  In 1984, machines write novels?

• 1:55:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:55:47Tucker Carlson?

  I don't know how I forgot that.

• 1:55:48Speaker 02

  Winston's girlfriend, Julia, is in the novel writing department. And it's a funny book. At one point, she gets injured operating the novel writing machine. And he said, but it was a common injury in the novel writing department.

• 1:56:02Tucker Carlson?

  She got her fingers caught in a novel writing machine?

• 1:56:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:08Tucker Carlson?

  So, I mean, prophetic doesn't fully describe it if there's a novel writing machine. I mean,

• 1:56:14Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. He was limited by the technology of his day and some of the circumstances and how he imagined things. The one thing he gets wrong is that 1984, the society called Oceania, airstrip one is the new name for England. It's allied with America in an alliance against Eurasia, which is basically Russia and Eastern Europe and East Asia, which is basically China. And they're perpetually at war with each other and the war and the sides change constantly. One of the greatest black humor scenes in all of literature is

• 1:56:54Speaker 02

  Winston Smith in Trafalgar Square, some London Square during a big demonstration against the enemy Eurasia. And there are posters up of the Eurasian, you know, evil leaders and their atrocities and so on. And in the middle of the protest, the word comes down from Big Brother, from the party, from the government, that we're no longer at war with Eurasia. We're actually at war with East Asia. And the posters against Eurasia are all still up. So how are the people going to reconcile the fact because they're told, we've always been at war with East Asia. And they go saboteurs, put those posters up, tear them down.

• 1:57:35Tucker Carlson?

  Russian agents.

• 1:57:36Speaker 02

  Tear them down, you know, and how many times in the last few years have we been through those ridiculous pivots where, you know, only the vaccine can save us. Next day, no one ever said it stopped transmission of COVID. Joe Biden is just a nice old man with a stutter he's had since childhood. Oh, we always knew he was Alzheimer's patient being hidden by, you know, his family and various cunning.

• 1:58:09Speaker 02

  You know, subordinates. We're going through that every day, that scene where we are suddenly expected to switch enemies. You know, we've switched Elon Musk being the enemy three times in the last week, I think, you know, about a week ago after his fight with Trump, I saw Democrats saying, we should really, we should court Elon, we should bring him into our movement, you know. Now, now he's apologized and it'll again be, you know, firebomb Teslas.

• 1:58:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's not just docility that, or it's not just- It's so depressing what you just said. I'm sorry. It's not just festivity that Orwell records, it's the ability of thinking people, or allegedly thinking people, to pretend that what's happening, isn't happening, that what just happened, never happened, and to go on mouthing these utopian slogans about a future that no one actually believes will come. What's so interesting, I've never, I've been an Orwell fan my whole life, read The Collective Orwell. Orwell was a cheerleader for the Second World War. He was a government propagandist, he worked for BBC, hate to say it, but it's true. And he wrote 1984 only three years after the end of the war. Yeah.

• 1:59:28Speaker 02

  And points out, you know, it's a militarized society. Yes. That's the essence of totalitarian control is war. Right. Right. So, I mean, that seems like a big, like, he seems to have changed his view.

• 1:59:43Speaker 02

  What do you mean? Well, I mean, again, Orwell was- Oh, you mean, you mean- He spent the war rallying England to war. Right, right. He participated in what he seemed to believe was a just war, and then afterward, started to see it as a racket for the control of people. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, he does. And he also sees terrorism, a form of terrorism, as a control mechanism, too. In airstrip one, in Ocean Eye, every once in a while, a rocket will just fall and wipe out a crowd. And no one knows where they're fired from. They assume they come

• 2:00:23Speaker 02

  from the enemy. And one day Winston is with his girlfriend in this little hideout that they have in the middle of the book in their, you know, very short and soon to be curtailed love affair. And she says, you know, we're shooting those, I know we shoot those rockets. What? He said, Yeah, we shoot those rockets. It's what we call a false flag nowadays. And Winston says, I never could have imagined that that was possible. Here he lives in this nightmare society, but he still can't believe that they would shoot rockets at their own people in order to keep them fearful. The woman, however, you know, sees it clearly.

• 2:01:05Speaker 02

  She's a little bit more cunning. She has a lower estimation of people. But there's not much in Orwell and in 1984 that doesn't have an equivalent now. And there's not much in there that doesn't explain events these days, you know. You know, as I read it, I read it this morning, there are riots going on in Los Angeles, full of hate, full of anger, full of people brandishing bricks, Molotov cocktails, and so on. And I thought, does

• 2:01:44Speaker 02

  it really matter what they're supposedly protesting? No, it's the rage that matters. And is the rage really something that threatens America, threatens the state? Or are these outbreaks of rage and rioting, in a way, of service to power? Because they keep us distrusting each other. They keep us... Divided. They keep us rebuilding. You know, one of Orwell's thesis is is that society has gotten so prosperous that you have to have a war just to to to to keep the economy going. Everybody has everything. So you got to destroy a lot of stuff in order

• 2:02:25Speaker 02

  to rebuild it, you know, abroad and at home. And and and seen through the lens of 1984, protest doesn't look like it's about anything but riotous protest, I mean, but keeping the machine going through channeling people's frustration, anger, anxiety into these orgies that really lead nowhere, but always send always, always cause us to need more surveillance, more control, etc. You know, it gives me a dour idea of the supposed idealism behind riotous protest. I see those people as tools, frankly.

• 2:03:08Tucker Carlson?

  I think they are. Walter Kern, I really hope soon to be the librarian of Congress. Certainly a beacon of perspective and erudition in a increasingly stupid world. I appreciate it.

• 2:03:25Speaker 02

  Thanks. Great conversation.

• 2:03:27Tucker Carlson?

  Thank you.

• 2:03:32Speaker 02

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