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

When C. J. Hopkins wrote a book about Covid zealots, he compared them to Nazis, because Nazis are bad. In response, Amazon banned his book and the German government arrested him. We’ve decided to republish the book, “The Rise of the New Normal Reich” available now at TuckerCarlsonBooks.com. (00:00) Why Did Hopkins End Up Getting Arrested? (06:02) The Backlash Against Hopkins (30:06) The Comparison Between Berlin During Covid and Nazi Germany (39:16) The Moment Hopkins Started Getting Into Legal Trouble (47:22) Hopkins’s Court Trial Paid partnerships with: Cardiff: Get fast business funding without bank delays—apply in minutes with Cardiff and access up to $500,000 in same‑day funding at https://Cardiff.co/TUCKER Cozy Earth: Luxury shouldn't be out of reach. Get up to 20% off at https://cozyearth.com/TUCKER American Financing: NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. Average savings based on borrowers who save over $199.99. Call 800-685-5696 or visit http://www. AmericanFinancing.net/Tucker. Mars Men: For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off FOR LIFE, free shipping, AND 3 free gifts at Mars Men at MenGoToMars.com TCN: Get "The Rise of the New Normal Reich" only on https://TuckerCarlsonBooks.com/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 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' healthcare 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.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Now, if there's one hallmark of totalitarianism of the 1930s, it's banning books, book burning. Remember that? We're against it. That couldn't possibly happen now. Oh, it happens a lot, more than it happened in the 1930s, in fact. We're going to talk to a man whose book became a bestseller and then was banned by the government. His crime? He accurately described what once-free Western societies have become. Western freedom is only the semblance of the real thing. Sure, you're free to watch Netflix and smoke weed and doom scroll and order DoorDash and live alone, racking up credit card debt in your apartment that you don't own. But if you step out of line and notice what's happening around you, your freedom evaporates instantly,

• 1:12Speaker 01

  and you could find yourself in handcuffs. We watched that happen in 2020. People who challenged the official story refused to comply were censored, treated like a despised, hated minority group, ostracized, punished. C.J. Hopkins documented all of that as it happened in a series of essays collected in this book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich. And we are proud to bring this book back because it was banned. It was banned. It was kicked off Amazon, was banned in multiple countries in Europe. And so we're publishing a new edition of it. I wrote the foreword to it. Available now on Tucker Carlson Books dot com. And we operate on the assumption, because it's true, that authorities only censor the truth, and they only censor it when it threatens their power.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  We specialize in bringing back banned books. We're proud to do that. And C.J. Hopkins' observations really resonate now, six years later. He joins us for a conversation about the book and what led him to write it.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  C.J. Hopkins, thank you very much for doing this.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Thanks so much.

• 2:19Speaker 01

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

• 3:05Speaker 02

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

• 3:26Speaker 01

  So early.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I had been writing my satirical columns. I had been at that for about four years, you know, covering the whole, you know, first Trump administration and the establishment's reaction to that. And when the COVID stuff started, I, at first, I didn't take it very seriously. I started, I wrote a few humorous columns. I just thought it was a massive overreaction and that it would pass. And then it started getting really serious. One of the first things that I did, I think I was still in shock at the time.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  I compiled a 257 tweet thread on Twitter. It was still Twitter then. Just collecting the mainstream media news stories and headlines that were being pumped out. This is when they rolled out the new normal, is what I call it. People may remember that. A lot of people think I made that phrase up, and I didn't. It was put out by the establishment. That thread still exists. People can look at it. I think a lot of people have forgotten how authoritarian it was, how, how immediately authoritarian it was.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  By the end of April, I was just, I was quite alarmed by what was happening.

• 5:02Speaker 01

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

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Well, they were alarmed, but they were alarmed differently. They were alarmed about, they were alarmed about what they were being told was, you know, an apocalyptic plague, basically. Again, you know, people forget, in the early days, the, I think it was the World Health Organization actually came out and said, you know, this virus has a 3.4% death rate, which was complete bullshit, of course. But, but that's a really scary number.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  And the, the way the official propaganda was all rolled out in the beginning, it was aimed at terrifying people. And so people were terrified.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  So why were you not terrified?

• 6:01Speaker 02

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

• 6:31Speaker 01

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

• 6:49Speaker 02

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

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Were you?

• 7:31Speaker 02

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

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:57Speaker 02

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

• 8:28Speaker 01

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

• 8:37Speaker 02

  It was, it was kind, I don't, I don't know how to describe it. Really, I, one of, one of the first pieces that got a lot of attention that I wrote, it's in the book, is called The Covidian Cult. And my experience of it, it really felt like.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Like I and and those of us who are criticizing or asking questions, it really felt like we were suddenly in a cult, surrounded by cult members who were pressuring us to conform to the official narrative of the cult, which obviously blatantly didn't make any sense. So I don't know if you've ever spent any time around people who are in a cult

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 9:35Speaker 02

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

• 10:14Speaker 01

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

• 10:18Speaker 02

  It just felt overwhelming. You know, it just felt overwhelming.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  And dark?

• 10:24Speaker 02

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

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Very.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  so early. You know, in a sense, in a sense, you know, there's a reality, there's, you know, this is reality, there's physical material reality. And then there's a reality. Right? Which is something that is a collective and communal consensus that we all participate in.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  And we don't notice our reality.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  No.

• 11:07Speaker 02

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

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right.

• 11:26Speaker 02

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

• 12:08Speaker 02

  I was surrounded by cult members who were performing all of these ritualistic behaviors that really only made sense in their fictional reality. Does that make sense?

• 12:26Speaker 01

  It certainly does.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

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• 15:35Speaker 01

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

• 16:06Speaker 02

  I don't think there's a single people have asked me that before, and I don't think that there is a single answer to it.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  No, there's not.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  I think that for some people, it's their personal histories. Some people, you know, perhaps women who've been in abusive relationships have been manipulated by partners, people who have been in cults, people who have lived in authoritarian societies, you know, totalitarian societies. I think that's part of it. I think part of it is just the nature of, you know, of certain individuals. You know, I have never been, I've never had a great deal of respect for authority.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  And, you know, the time that I grew, the years that I grew up in, I mean, we were, we were encouraged to question authority.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:05Speaker 02

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

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 17:16Speaker 02

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

• 17:35Speaker 01

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

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. Yeah. Or a number of individuals. It's

• 17:47Speaker 02

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

• 18:14Speaker 01

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

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Oh, God, it's even hard to remember it all. It's all in the book. The measures went into effect pretty quickly. The, they, they passed, the government actually passed, and this is when I started covering what was happening in Germany and in Berlin more. They passed a legislation and it was called the Infektionsschutzgesetz, which is the Infection Protection Act. And Tucker, essentially, is a new enabling act. If people will remember the Enabling Act of 1933, which is a large part of how the Nazis took over power. In

• 19:14Speaker 02

  1933, they passed legislation and they said, we have a state of emergency, you know, with all of these communists running around in the streets and the society is coming apart and, you know, all this social disorder, and we need to pass this emergency legislation, which will allow us to suspend the constitution, there was a constitution at the time, to suspend the constitution and rule by decree. This is 1933. And in 2020, the German Bundestag passed legislation that said, we have a state of emergency. There's a virus that is, you know, attacking society. And so we need to be able to suspend the constitution and rule

• 19:58Speaker 02

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

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Never forget.

• 20:14Speaker 02

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

• 20:19Speaker 01

  He was attacked as an anti-Semite for this speech.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Of course, immediately, immediately. And people may remember, they may not remember the big demonstration, but they may remember the storming of the Reichstag, right? This was actually a dress rehearsal for January 6th.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  And a lot of people don't know this. The, the main protest was on the big street, the, you know, the street of 17 July in Berlin that runs from the Brandenburger Tor back to the Zeges, to the Victory Tower, right? This is the huge street. And this is where all of the demonstrators, the protesters were the main body of it. Aside from that, detached from that, apart from that, was the Reichstag Building, which is over to the side. A separate protest took place there. This protest was permitted by the German authorities. They granted the permit to an ex-member of the NPD, which was the neo-Nazi

• 21:23Speaker 02

  party, the now banned neo-Nazi party. So they, they granted a protest permit to this ex-neo-Nazi. And there was a small gathering there outside of the Reichstag. And the German police, which normally guards the Reichstag pretty well, they all pulled back, you know, hundreds of yards behind the protest and left the Reichstag unguarded. And so this group of wackos in front of the Reichstag said, there's nobody guarding the Reichstag. And they go.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Are you serious?

• 21:55Speaker 02

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

• 22:00Speaker 01

  I don't know how I missed all this.

• 22:01Speaker 02

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

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Well, since everything is World War II, I think, you know, a lot of people are aware that this is not the first totalitarian movement that's used attacks on the Reichstag to seize power.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  I mean, you would think, be like, okay, let's leave the Reichstag out of this.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  It's, I don't, I don't mean to insult the Germans or anything, but you know, they're big on subtlety, you know?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  It's like, oh, they'll do the Reichstag again.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  But seriously, seriously, this is.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  I had no idea that even happened.

• 22:53Speaker 02

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

• 23:08Speaker 01

  They did it in Brazil, the same thing.

• 23:09Speaker 02

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

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Beautiful city.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  And it transformed virtually overnight, overnight into this pathologized fascistic society where, you know, literally everyone was wearing masks everywhere. They were robotically following all the social distancing directions. You know, there were police, you know, guarding the outdoor markets to make sure that no one was, you know, going to the outdoor market without a mask on. I was pulled out of a grocery store pretty early over a mask protest because I thought it was ridiculous. You know, at this, we already knew it's an airborne respiratory virus and everybody's going to get it, whatever it is. And I was rebelling.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  I, I, actually, I made a mask out of a paper bag. I took a paper bag and I cut eye holes and a little mouth thing. And I wrote a protest message on the paper bag, which was Befehl ist Befehl. It's German for orders are orders. It's the famous Nuremberg Defense.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:37Speaker 02

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

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• 25:59Speaker 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' healthcare 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.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Check out. Be sure to tell them that you heard about Cozy Earth right here on this show. Can I ask you to pause there? Yeah. And put this in the context that you explained this morning at breakfast, which I thought was fascinating. So just to summarize your views, as you explain them to me in one sentence, you lived in New York, you knew Trump, you were never besotted by Trump, you always thought he was buffoonish. But you had sympathy for Trump's voters because they were the working class that you'd spent your life as a leftist, like thinking about and hoping to represent.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  So you saw COVID as kind of part of the response to what was in effect a populist rebellion?

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Can you flesh that out a tiny bit?

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Sure. Um, yeah, I've got to go way back. I, you know, I started, I spent most of my life, you know, writing weird theater and then I wrote a novel, but I started writing political satire back in 2016, uh, because I became interested in this rising populist pushback against, you know, what I see as the global system that we all, uh, live under and then, and have been living under since the end of the Cold War. Um, and as you said, I, you know, I come from the left, um, but I became interested in this, in, in this populist pushback that led to Brexit and led to Trump. And then for years I wrote satirical columns, um, and it was so easy. It's like hitting

• 27:52Speaker 02

  cans of corn, you know, the, just the hysterical overreaction, um, and the establishment trying to demonize, uh, not just Trump. I mean, Trump is much less interesting to me than the people who were voting for him and who voted for Brexit and, you know, who were forming, uh, right populist parties all over Europe, um, as a reaction to what this evolving system was doing to their societies. And so I watched for four years from 2016 to 2020, I watched the, the system, the establishment responding to this populist uprising, or whatever you want to call it,

• 28:35Speaker 02

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

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:07Speaker 02

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

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Right? Yeah, fair.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  It's like, you know, you're in a prison, you, you guys have, you know, sharpened toothbrushes and spoons and stuff, and we have guns, right? So maybe calm the hell down and get back in your cells. I'm going to lock you all down until you remember where you are. To me, that's the way, and I'm not trying to reduce the whole COVID event to this, but broadly to me, this was, this was the message. This is what was happening. It was like, hey, you know, those democratic rights that you think that you have, well, you have those, you know, you, you can, you can exercise your democratic rights and you've got free speech and you can do all this and go to

• 30:04Speaker 02

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

• 30:36Speaker 01

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

• 31:06Speaker 02

  You, you asked me about Berlin, um, and there's so much happened and I couldn't get to it. I mean, they literally brought up the COVID shots. Um, they literally imposed a social segregation system based on people's compliance with the vaccination. So that by the end of it, uh, you know, they called it, you know, a lockdown of the unvaccinated, uh, by the end of the COVID period. And I don't think that happened in the US, but it happened in, in Germany and other places in Europe. In, in Germany, I literally, the only place that I was allowed to go in society was to the grocery store to buy food and I had to do that with a mask on my face. It was

• 31:49Speaker 02

  the only way that I could get my food. But I was not, you know, people who were not vaccinated, who didn't have vaccination, vaccination papers, um, you know, we couldn't go to restaurants. We couldn't go out to any, you know, the films or museums or any type of, couldn't enter a public building, couldn't go into stores. We were, we were completely segregated from society.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Did you have to wear a badge?

• 32:12Speaker 02

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

• 32:45Speaker 01

  You had to show your papers.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  You had to show your papers.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Show us the papers.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  You had to, absolutely. You had to show your papers everywhere, everywhere. They literally implemented a social segregation system based on vaccination.

• 32:58Speaker 01

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

• 33:26Speaker 02

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

• 33:33Speaker 01

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

• 33:35Speaker 02

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

• 34:17Speaker 02

  or totalitarianism or anything like that, you know? And, and it really-

• 34:22Speaker 01

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

• 34:28Speaker 02

  Exactly. It felt like such an ass and they went, it, they went totalitarian in a heartbeat, in a heartbeat.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Lots of people did, but the Germans have a well-deserved reputation for efficiency, um, and just a systematic approach to everything that they do, which is great if you're building Audis, not so great if you're, uh, trying to destroy the lives of a hated minority.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So at what point did you just say out loud what was obvious? Like this is clearly-

• 35:00Speaker 02

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

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:28Speaker 02

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

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:34Speaker 02

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

• 36:00Speaker 01

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  bucks a month. That's nearly $10,000 a year. It's not just a loan, it's a total financial reset. And so American Financing is worth looking at. They're called America's Home for Home Loans for a reason. Find out more at 800-685-5696, 800-685-5696, or visit americanfinancing.net/tucker. When did you start to get in trouble, not including your grocery store episode?

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Um, I didn't, I, I don't think I really got in trouble until the first criminal investigation began. I, you know, I published the book, you know, the second edition of which you just wrote the foreword, um, too. I published that book in May of 22, May of 22, and-

• 37:43Speaker 02

  What got me in trouble originally was in August of, this is 2022, and I know it was different in the States, but everything was still, you know, in effect in Germany at that time. The Germany, the Germans, that summer, were starting to question and starting to ask themselves, you know, would it be all right, maybe if we, you know, stopped with the mask mandates and, you know, let people go out into society without masks on? And most people were saying, no, no, no, we need to continue to wear the masks, you know, forever. And I thought that was insane. And so I put out a couple of tweets,

• 38:25Speaker 02

  and I used the cover art of the book on the tweets. And one of the tweets, I wrote them in German, and one of the tweets basically said, look, these masks are just ideological conformity symbols. And, you know, that's all they are, you know, come to terms with that, or, you know, get used to wearing them forever. And the second tweet, I literally just quoted the Health Minister of Germany, Karl Lauterbach. He, he had been quoted in the press, saying, the masks always send out a signal. And of course, I said, yes, Karl, that's exactly right. That's what they're for, is to send out a signal. It's, you know, it's, it's theater, basically.

• 39:07Speaker 01

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

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Some other time, maybe we'll talk about, you know, the theater, which is like a reality laboratory. Yes, it's theater. And so I put these two tweets out, and I used the cover artwork from the book. And if people don't know, I mean, maybe Americans are more familiar with William Shire's classic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Yeah. One of the covers is, you know, it's all black, it's got the red lettering, you know, for the title.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:41Speaker 02

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

• 39:44Speaker 01

  That would be the Third Reich.

• 39:45Speaker 02

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

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  You know, swastika behind it. So that's the cover art from the book. And I included that in the tweets. And the next thing I know, I get a notice from Twitter that says, okay, we're censoring your tweets in Germany, because they violate Germany's hate speech laws. And so I challenged that, and it didn't go anywhere. And then before I knew it, I get a notice from Amazon, that says, oh, we're removing your book from distribution, we're banning your book in Germany, for sale in Germany. And so I wrote back to Amazon, I said, what are you doing? You know, and I quoted the law. A lot of people don't understand

• 40:47Speaker 02

  this. They think there's a Nazi symbol ban in Germany, that you're not allowed to use swastikas. And you're not. If you're a Nazi, the whole point of the law is to not have neo-Nazis running around waving.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  We're against Nazis, because they like ban books.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. But of course, Tucker, there are exceptions written into this law. You know, you couldn't, you can teach a history class, or show a film, or make an artwork, you know, with, without these exceptions. So I quote this law back to Amazon, and I say, you know, it's not violating the law. You can't pull my book from distribution in Germany. And they said, oh, that's fine, because now we're going to ban it in Austria and the Netherlands also. And I didn't realize it at the time. I didn't know until much later. But what had happened was, an element of the whole German censorship network had found the tweets,

• 41:43Speaker 02

  they had contacted Twitter, they contacted Amazon, had the book banned, and had the tweets censored. They had also contacted the Germany's Federal Domestic Intelligence Agency about this. And the, the Federal Domestic Intelligence Agency passed the case on to the Berlin District Prosecutor. And the Berlin Prosecutor launched a criminal investigation of me, which eventually led, eventually, they notified me of it, I think it was about eight months later, and said, you're under criminal investigation for disseminating Nazi, pro-Nazi propaganda.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  Okay, right. So that's.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  No, no, I'm sorry. There's been a mistake. I'm actually against Nazis. This whole point. I'm not for Nazis. That's what I'm saying.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  I, I went and got a German lawyer, and that's the first thing I suggested. I said, could we just write to them and say, it's fucking obvious that I'm against Nazis. I'm comparing, I'm comparing all of this stuff that I don't like, and that I think is dangerous to the Nazis, right? So it couldn't be more obvious. Went out and got a German lawyer. The next thing I know, I get an order of punishment is sent to me. So I'm already, I've already been found guilty. And, and I'm, and I'm being sentenced to, I forget how many days in jail. And the alternative was a fine of 3,600 euros. It's Germany, so

• 43:19Speaker 02

  they have a formula that, you know, however many days equals however much money in a fine. Anyway, I told my lawyer, it's, you know, we have to challenge this. I'm not paying this fine. This is completely ridiculous. That's, that is the beginning of my numerous legal troubles. That's when I knew I was in trouble.

• 43:44Speaker 00

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• 44:15Speaker 01

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

• 44:32Speaker 02

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

• 44:39Speaker 01

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

• 44:44Speaker 02

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

• 45:09Speaker 01

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

• 45:18Speaker 02

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

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Right? And the law, you know, she says very clearly, you know, look, you know, Mr. Hopkins, you're an asshole.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  For doing this. But what you did is not illegal, because it falls, you were protesting what you saw as anti-constitutional activity on the part of the German authorities. And that is allowed. And so I'm acquitted of the charges. And I think, fantastic, you know, the system works in Germany. I still live in a democratic country under the rule of law. Everything's fine. And my lawyer stops me afterwards and says, oh, no. What you don't realize is the prosecutor can appeal your acquittal.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  In Germany. I said, are you kidding me? It's the double jeopardy. I said, no, in Germany, the prosecutor can appeal. And of course, they did.

• 46:25Speaker 01

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

• 46:27Speaker 02

  Absolutely none. No one, no.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  There are no rapes in the

• 46:31Speaker 02

  No, no stabbing, nothing like, you know, nothing, nothing else going on.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they hauled me into Superior Court. I guess it's about a year later.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  And this, yeah, I've got to tell you this is they scheduled the new trial in Superior Court. After the prosecutor appeals my acquittal. And we are informed that this trial will be held under strict anti terrorist security.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Come on.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  I am not bullshitting you. I am not bullshitting you. This is documented. People can look this up. They, the, the trial, we all had to be body scanned. Empty our pockets, you know, like at the airport, you know, you, no one was allowed to bring anything in. No writing instruments, the press was not allowed to bring in, you know, computers or notebooks or any writing. I, they handed out little stubby pencils, you know, and sheets of paper so that the German press could scrawl, you know, on a piece of paper on their, on their knees and what have you. The, the, the observers were, you know, put behind a bulletproof glass.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  Barrier. It was this whole humiliating, you know, bullying show of force. Procedure at my second trial. Which from the moment we walked in, yeah, I mean, it was a fa, a complete, the, the, there was panel of three judges and they were, you know, staring down at me with just absolute hatred. And so boom, summarily, my acquittal was overturned and I was convicted. So I'm a convicted hate criminal.

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• 49:15Speaker 01

  That's one of the crazier story, and I specialize in hearing crazy stories. That is really beyond.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  And it's also amazing that you didn't become a cause celeb to civil libertarians. Anywhere that I noticed.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  I got some action in the U.S. Matt Taibbi was one of the first ones to write about the case way back in the beginning.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  James, Jamie Kerchick wrote a piece that was in the Atlantic of all places. But it was a good piece about the case. Fire, you know, the foundation for independent.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Virtuous group.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Love them.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  And they did a couple of features on it. And other people in the States, it's mostly Americans who covered it for the longest time. I was just, I was stunned at the German presses, the German media's just utter refusal to even address it. At all. Finally, at my second trial, when my acquittal was overturned, a bunch of German press came. And they wrote it up and unfortunately, most of it was, you know, yes, good, you know, the order is, you know, has been restored and, you know, swastikas remain illegal.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  And this, you know, this COVID denying American author who lives here, you know, has been sentenced for his crime.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  One of the exceptions I have to mention, a journalist called Eva Sudholt. Wrote a big piece for Deitscheit, which is a big, you know, mainstream paper. Which was an absolutely fair piece. So that was an exception and a lot of the independent German press covered it.

• 51:07Speaker 01

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

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 51:13Speaker 01

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

• 51:25Speaker 02

  I lost them all. Yeah, I had.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Actually?

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. I had, I had a, a very

• 51:33Speaker 02

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

• 52:04Speaker 01

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

• 52:10Speaker 02

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

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Well, apparently they weren't, but I mean.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're, these are, you know, this is. You know, this is the problem. This is the dilemma of people who are, you know, I hate to use the term, you know, on the left liberals. Whatever you want to call it on, on that side of the spectrum, the side that I come from.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  They, for the most part, they fell in line and started marching in lockstep. Right from the very beginning.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  I don't understand that. I noticed that. I don't have any liberal friends, but I have some friends on the left, or we used to call the left, we need a new name for it, but. You know, the traditional left that cares about economics.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  You know, and, and there are some serious people there, not many, but there are some and I know them. And there are also some decent people there. And they, the ones I know in the U.S. had exactly the same experience, like all these people who you thought were on the side of the man against the machine. The individual against the group, the working class against the overlords or whatever, you know, however you want to frame it, but we're for the weak. In opposition to the strong. All of them joined. You know, join the machine and I don't, I don't get that at all. What is that?

• 53:27Speaker 02

  Well, I, and

• 53:31Speaker 02

  one way to answer it is, is very complicated. There's, there's another simpler aspect of it. Again, when the initial propaganda was rolled out. One key component of that initial propaganda was the demonization of anyone who was questioning or challenging the official narrative. And people forget this, but from the very beginning. This was part of the messaging that was rolled out. It was that if someone is questioning, you know, our official narrative, that person is a far right extremist. Conspiracy theorist.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  You know, basically a dangerous person that you don't want to.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  But these are the same people who spent 70 years warning us about the lessons that we should have learned from McCarthyism. And then 20 years saying the same thing about the war on terror. And they're certainly right about the war on terror, at very least, if not McCarthyism, but they were absolutely right about the war on terror. So how could they fall for it? I don't get it.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't see it. I don't see it as them falling for it. As much as, and this is a point I'm, and I've argued with a lot of people about this.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  Do you remember, there's a guy, a professor named Matthias Dusmet.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  I know him.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  Who, you know Matthias.

• 55:04Speaker 01

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

• 55:07Speaker 02

  I completely disagree with his thesis, right? He's got the mass formation.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  And psychosis.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  Thesis and his thesis, basically, you know, society is, is ill to a certain degree. And, and thus it becomes susceptible to, you know, totalitarianism and what have you. And I disagree completely. I, I think that any society, any society can be transformed into a totalitarian configuration if the powers that be in that society have the will and the technology to do it. And it happens just like it happened during COVID. The message is put out and it is put out very clearly that, hey, all of your democratic

• 55:57Speaker 02

  rights and all that democracy bullshit that you thought was in effect, that's off now. That's suspended, that's canceled, right? And we're going authoritarian, right? And if you challenge us, we're going to hurt you. We're going to fuck you up. And most people, I'm an exception, you know, I don't have any kids, I don't have a job. I'm a writer, you know, most people have families and mortgages and kids and they have things to lose. And the message that was put out very, very clearly in the beginning was, challenge us, create a problem for us, challenge our official narrative, you know,

• 56:40Speaker 02

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

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:12Speaker 02

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

• 57:38Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, or dragged into court.

• 57:40Speaker 01

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

• 57:46Speaker 02

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

• 58:06Speaker 01

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

• 58:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, get on board.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Get on board.

• 58:24Speaker 02

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

• 59:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:04Speaker 02

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

• 59:16Speaker 01

  And I'm doing my part.

• 59:17Speaker 02

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

• 59:27Speaker 01

  I think that's right.

• 59:28Speaker 02

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

• 59:49Speaker 01

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

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  I'll use all the profanity for you. Okay.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

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

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  he was on the left his whole life, but he noticed this. Wait, isn't this what we hate? Yeah. We thought we hated it, but now people who hate it are the bad guys. Well, he wrote a whole book about it, The Rise of the New Normal Reich. It's now available on Tucker Carlson Books. So through a series of essays, Hopkins examines the propaganda and coercion used to groom citizens of the West during COVID. And you know, it's worth reading because after it became a bestseller, it was deemed dangerous by the German authorities, so they banned it. And so that's why we're proud to resurrect it, bring it to you in a new edition through Tucker Carlson Books. Get The Rise of the New Normal Reich today at

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  tuckercarlsonbooks.com. That's tuckercarlsonbooks.com. We specialize in bringing banned books back to the public.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  I'm trying. This is my pledge this year, but, um, but you do feel like a rise in moral outrage when you think about that. Like, I know people who were totally fine with the unvaccinated dying, dying. How did you get so cruel and callous?

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

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

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  were, people were going online and kind of validating their credentials as, you know, party members.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, that's exactly right.

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  I saw a deviant today and, yes, we pointed him out and.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  I denounced my own parents.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

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

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  So, okay, see you lots of friends.

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

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

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I can see why you offended people. On the other hand, they gave you cause, to put it mildly. So.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  Felt that way.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  And it was a kind of war. It was certainly an ideological war, it was a war of will. But what's very revealing is that they have not abided by an armistice and they're still going after you. They are grudge holders.

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  The German authorities are, yeah.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Correct. Yeah. And so you're still in, you're still being hassled.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  Well, the, the, the status of it, I, you know, just to make it clear, you know, the reason that this new second edition of the book is coming out that you wrote the foreword for is because I had to pull my first edition, which I self-published, I had to pull this book out of worldwide distribution. Now, this is a book that did extremely well. You know, it was Barnes and Noble bestseller, bestseller on various, and, you know, Amazon things in the beginning, very successful book. I had to pull it. And the reason that I had to pull it is, I have to back up, right? We talked about the tweets. I told you about

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  the, the tweets and that, that was one prosecution. The appeals court, the superior court overturned my acquittal. And so now I have to go back to district court where I was originally acquitted to be sentenced for this crime that I didn't commit. That's one case.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  Last year in November 2025, I get home from this extensive road trip that I took in the US for another book project. I fly back home to Berlin. I've just started recovering from seven weeks on the road in a convertible and I'm starting to feel human again and bang, bang, bang, the police show up, dawn raid, you know, at the door of my apartment with a search warrant. And they come in, terrorize my wife and our cats, confiscate my computer. And this, this house raid is in conjunction with a new investigation, a new criminal investigation,

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  which has since led to a new indictment. And this time, I'm not indicted for the tweets. That's the first case. This time, the indictment is I'm being charged with writing, publishing, and distributing the book itself. Okay, now, this book is a book that has been banned in Germany since 2022. All right. So now I'm being indicted for publishing and distributing this book. And the second charge in the indictment is that I reported on my trial in the Superior Court and used the book cover again. The book cover is always the pretext

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  for these things. So the police were actually in my home, searching for evidence that I published this book, searching for copies of the book. So it just to me-

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Because they're not Nazis.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

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

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

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

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

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

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

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

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  Well, there's that.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  You know, on the one hand, they don't care. I mean, Germany has become, I don't know if laughing stock is the right word, but it's common knowledge. I mean, they, they arrest people for insulting politicians. You know, Germans, you know, they, somebody puts on social media, this person is a dummkopf. Right? And they come and arrest, they arrest people for, for insulting politicians. Now, okay, this is how far that it's gone. And my case is one of many, Tucker. This is not an exception. Yeah, this is one of many. There's an artist that is somewhere in the South, and he created some artworks, COVID artworks

• 1:08:16Speaker 02

  like this. And they, they prosecuted him as well.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  For what? For degenerate art?

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  Uh, but exactly.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Did they burn it?

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  Are you freaking kidding?

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  No, I'm not. And, and this is what I've been trying to, to get across to people is this, you know, I, I've, I've referred to what I titled a couple of my essays, you know, the criminalization of dissent. That is, that is what is happening. That, that is what is happening. And it is so over the top in Germany that I have to believe, you know, okay, yes, they're a bit dense. But part of it, part of it is, this is the message that they are sending out.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  That's exactly-

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  They want this message sent out. It's, and it's not, it's not restricted to Germany. I just, there's a new report that came out, I think it was Big Brother Watch, Silky Carlo's organization in the UK. I think over the last five years, and over 60,000 people in the UK have been arrested for communications offenses.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, more than in Russia, which has a larger population.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  It's not a defense of the Russian system to say that British system is more authoritarian than the Russian system. That's just a fact, based on those numbers.

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

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

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

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

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

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

• 1:10:56Speaker 00

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• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  The, the new relationship you're talking?

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

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

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  The lines you don't cross.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. But how, how, how do we know what we can't do? Since no one will spell it out?

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

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

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  The health minister.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

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

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

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

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  Exactly right.

• 1:13:05Speaker 02

  Right? And you never know-

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  Or a husband who beats you up.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  Or a husband who beats you. You never know which husband is coming home tonight.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

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

• 1:13:17Speaker 02

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

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. They inculcate fear as, as a way to control. So here are the lines that I personally have noticed. I was thinking about this this morning in the sauna, actually. So Israel is the topic that people are mad about in the United States right now. I've done a million shows on Israel. My views are pretty conventional, really, about Israel. We shouldn't be controlled by Israel. That's it. But there's actually a pretty robust debate about that in the United States. That's supposedly a red line. But you go on Twitter, people are saying whatever they want about Israel. So that's probably not actually a red line, criticizing Israel. I have noticed. What are the red lines? Criticizing the war in Ukraine is a red line. Okay, I've definitely noticed that. Anything related to January

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  6th, boy, that's a real red line. Like, that's not even talked about. If you're asked, like, well, what was that? Are you compared it to the, the fake attack on the Reichstag? The second fake attack on the Reichstag? That is absolutely a red line. Demographic change, absolute red line.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  That's what I've, so what do those things have in common? They're big. Those are big things. Demographic change is big. It's, it's, it's, it's enduring. It lasts for a thousand years. You know, the war in Ukraine somehow is the key to a lot. I can just tell by the reactions to it. January 6th, I'm still not exactly sure, but they're dead serious about shutting down that conversation. They're dead way more than Israel. What do we learn from that?

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

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

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  Where, uh, you know, criticizing Israel is absolutely verboten.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  Is it really?

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, absolutely. The, they, when the pro Palestinian protests started, um, the police, I mean, the goon squads came down on them as heavy, if not heavier than they came down on the COVID dissidents. Um, you know, they've just been absolutely brutal and banning, you know?

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  Seriously?

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, banning protests, banning meetings. Oh yeah, yeah. Because-

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  Same in the UK?

• 1:15:29Speaker 02

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

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

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

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

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

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

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

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yeah.

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  Man.

• 1:16:06Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  Layers upon layers of irony.

• 1:16:08Speaker 02

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

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  Or encourages.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  And encourages, yeah.

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  And whiteness, race war. They love race war.

• 1:16:42Speaker 02

  Uh, well, that's a whole separate thing and we can get into that because that's interesting. Um, uh, but there's a lot of dissent that doesn't really pose a problem. But then there are other areas of dissent that really do. The COVID, uh, the COVID thing is something that I, I don't see any shift whatsoever. It's basically you either subscribe to the official narrative, the official, you know, COVID pandemic narrative, um, or you are a far right COVID denying conspiracy theorist, extremist.

• 1:17:21Speaker 02

  I mean, those, those COVID dissidents have to continue to be delegitimized and, and demonized. And I think, uh, I think that is so essential because the event itself was so dramatic and so severe and so significant. So that's, that's one example of that. I think, I think the Israel question is an interesting question. I, you know, I, I have a different perspective on, on Israel. I, like I said, I come from the left and I'm no fan of, of, of the state of Israel.

• 1:18:02Speaker 02

  But I think what is allowed is basically if, if, if you can put all of your focus on Israel and on Zionism, right? And you can go after and attack Israel. Well, that's fine because then you're an anti Semite and then, you know, we can put you over here and everybody is fighting back and forth.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  Um, uh, that's why they secretly like Nick Fuentes.

• 1:18:28Speaker 02

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

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

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

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:19:11Speaker 02

  -in the Middle East.

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

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

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

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

• 1:20:00Speaker 02

  You know, but they're both playing ball and playing their parts within the global capitalist system. When I look at, uh, you know, when I look at the, the liquidation of Gaza in the aftermath of October 7th, I see the same message again, uh, Tucker, this message that the system is being, has, has been sending over and over again. There's a line that you don't cross. You don't, you don't, you know, breach the border fence and come and, you know, mass murder a bunch of Israeli settlers on the other line because then we'll wipe out, we'll liquidate your entire territory.

• 1:20:43Speaker 02

  And we'll, we'll, you know, ask everyone to watch, watch what happens when you do this, this message. And let me just harp on this for a second because it's what I've been trying to get across, you know, and I'm a very, very minor version of this message. And as I said, there are many cases like mine. Julian Assange-

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:21:03Speaker 02

  -is a much more major version of this message. And to me it's the same message.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  Yes, it is.

• 1:21:07Speaker 02

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

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

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

• 1:21:36Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

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

• 1:21:55Speaker 02

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

• 1:22:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, we're going to punish you for that.

• 1:22:44Speaker 02

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

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

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

• 1:23:42Speaker 02

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

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:24:04Speaker 02

  And it's, it's a, it's a global system. Um, you know, I refer to it as global capitalism because that's what it is. A lot of my conservative readers, and I have a lot of conservative readers, um, uh, they get upset when I refer it to it as global capitalism. So, you know, call it crony capitalism or, you know, whatever you want to call it, but it's global capitalism. It's, we live in a, in a one system world and that system-

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  It doesn't really have anything else to do except evolve in a more totalitarian direction. There's a military term called clear and hold. When you occupy a territory, when you have conquered, you know, whatever territory it is, and you occupy that territory, what you have left to do at that point is clear and hold. And so what you're trying to do is consolidate your new ideology in the territory and wipe out little pockets of internal resistance, right? The system that we all live under and that all nations

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  are a part of to one degree or another, including Russia, including China. I mean, of course, there's still competition between nation-states, just like there's competition between corporations, but none of them are trying to change the system, right? With the collapse of the Soviet Union and Marxism and all of this, it's one ideology world, one system. And that system doesn't have any outside adversaries. So the only thing that it really has left to do is to try to strengthen and consolidate its ideology and wipe out these little pockets of internal resistance. Now, this is, if you want me

• 1:25:59Speaker 02

  to go on about this, I will. It's where it gets a bit theoretical and philosophical, and people should really understand that, you know, I'm not a communist. I'm not trying to overthrow capitalism. I like private property. I'd like to have some more private property if someone wants to give me some. But what I'm talking about is what this global capitalist system has done and is doing is trying to basically create one big global marketplace, right? And the way that works is you go into territories that are still

• 1:26:43Speaker 02

  dominated by traditional, or if I can use the word despotic, values, religious values, traditional values, family values, values that, you mentioned them before, that a lot of the working classes still maintain.

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

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

• 1:27:04Speaker 02

  Some of them, some of them are bigoted. Some of them are racist values. We're not going to cure human kind of racism. These values kind of create impediments to transforming all of these territories into sectors of this one big global marketplace. Iran is a problem. They want to actually run their society according to religious values. Christian fundamentalists out here in the woods, this is a problem, right? These people actually want to live according to their values, not just, you know, give them lip service on Sunday and then go back to the marketplace for the rest of the week. They actually want

• 1:27:49Speaker 02

  to have communities, or in some cases, nation-states, that are constructed according to these values that are not the values of the marketplace. And so what the system, as it evolves, as it has been evolving, is doing, is wiping away these values, dissolving borders, right? Because it's one big global marketplace. Dissolving cultures, right? Because we need to have the same, you know, corporate stores in every territory on the face of the earth because it's one big global. And this is what the system is doing. People, people

• 1:28:28Speaker 02

  have been responding to that by saying, wait, I don't want to live in one big valueless marketplace. I want to hang on to my values. I'm getting lost. I don't know why I started on this rant, but...

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

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

• 1:28:47Speaker 02

  No, they don't.

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  Why would they?

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

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

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  Their languages.

• 1:29:25Speaker 02

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

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  The memories of their ancestors.

• 1:29:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  Not everyone cremates their dead and throws them into the wind. People still care about their ancestors.

• 1:29:36Speaker 02

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

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

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

• 1:30:15Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

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

• 1:30:41Speaker 02

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

• 1:31:09Speaker 01

  Boots marching on cobblestones.

• 1:31:10Speaker 02

  That's right. This isn't that.

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:31:13Speaker 02

  There are components of that, sure. You know, the truncheons and the cops and all of those components are there. But what I think, I think, I think that the form of totalitarianism that this system is evolving into is a form, when I say we can't get our heads around it yet, it's because it isn't 20th century totalitarianism. It isn't something that we've already experienced. It is new, and it is different, and it cannot, it cannot come out and announce itself as totalitarian. It can't put up the big banners and send the guys out with the jackboots, or not for very long. Anyway, we can, you know, send

• 1:31:55Speaker 02

  the jackboot goon squads out for a little while, but then we have to pull them back. Because this, if I'm right, this is a global capitalist form of totalitarianism, and capitalism doesn't do totalitarianism. Capitalism has to say to us, you are a consumer.

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  It's the veneer of choice.

• 1:32:17Speaker 02

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

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  So that pretense exists forever or just during the transition into the new thing?

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  What does happen to people like you?

• 1:32:54Speaker 02

  I think...

• 1:32:56Speaker 01

  Are you winning?

• 1:32:57Speaker 02

  Not so far.

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  So do you live with a sense of doom?

• 1:33:03Speaker 02

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

• 1:33:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Strange to wake up and realize that.

• 1:33:46Speaker 02

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

• 1:34:22Speaker 01

  I've never heard that. What does that mean?

• 1:34:28Speaker 02

  Exactly. But I think it has something, I think it has, I think it has something to do with this. It's, you know, they, you know, they can, they can beat, there was, there's a famous, who was it? Sophie Scholl, one of the, you know, the, she was a teenager who stood up to the Nazis in the beginning.

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:34:48Speaker 02

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

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

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

• 1:35:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. And even if we weren't, I mean, that's, you know, they, she played her part.

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

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

• 1:35:45Speaker 02

  Thanks so much. It's been a pleasure.

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

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