CJ Hopkins is a playwright, novelist, political satirist, and essayist. He is also the founder of The Conventional Factory, a satirical blog, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. In this episode, CJ talks about how he got started in his career, why he writes about totalitarianism, and what it means to be honest in the 21st century. He also talks about his new book, "The Conspiracies of Stalinism," which he co-authored with Alex Blumberg, which is out now. CJ also discusses his new novel, "Dune," which is a dystopian sci-fi novel that he wrote in the late 90s and early 2000s. And he explains why he started his blog, The Consumptive Factory, and his satirical blog "Conventional Factory" in the first place. This episode is a must-listen for anyone who wants to understand what's going on in the world around them, and why they should be worried about it. It's a must listen, especially if you're interested in what's happening in our own society right now, and how we're being controlled by corporate intelligence and technocracy, and whether or not it's a symptom of something bigger than we think we know about it, or if it's something we should be concerned about, or whether it's really even exists at all. Thank you to CJ for coming on the show, and for being as honest as CJ is honest as he is, and being as lucid as he's honest as daylight. Thank you for being honest as always is a rare thing, CJ. I really appreciate it, and I hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast, and that you enjoy it! -Eugene P.S. - Thank you so much for listening to the podcast! -Bobby is a good friend of mine, and it's great to have him on the podcast. -J.J. Hopkins, too! -A. Thanks, Bobby, too, for being a friend of my podcast, CJ Hopkins, I really really does have a lot of good stuff to say, and he's a wonderful human being. -P.Sue Hopkins and I'm looking forward to hearing from you, my dear, thank you, CJ, for joining me in this episode. -R.A. (and I really hope you like it, too. -Jon)
00:00:02.000My guest today is CJ Hopkins, who I would describe as as honest as daylight.
00:00:10.000And his honesty gives him a clarity of thought and clarity of expression and a kind of landscape view of what's happening in our country today and across the world.
00:00:25.000Which is this unprecedented, I would say, emergence of totalitarian systems.
00:00:32.000And CJ has written about that extensively and beautifully in a way that I was tempted to just take A chapter of my book and devoted to his writings, and I quote him extensively in my book.
00:00:47.000CJ, you're a hard guy to get a hold of.
00:00:50.000I don't think you even own a telephone, but something about the way that you see the world is really, really unique, and I think really valuable for people.
00:01:51.000How do you explain that, you know, you kind of arrived at the place where...
00:01:58.000You're kind of a guru in terms of critical thinking and of explaining to people, being able to see with clarity and then explain with eloquence and precision to people in a way that I just don't see anybody else doing.
00:02:14.000You're kind of, in some ways, like the modern version of Noam Chomsky.
00:02:20.000If you read one of Noam Chomsky's books in the 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s, It was always revelatory because he had a capacity to interpret history in ways that were novel, but they were also, you know, they just gut-punched you at something that, oh, this is what's happening.
00:02:46.000And unfortunately, you know, probably one of my heroes, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Tom Hartman, many of the other kind of great leaders of liberal thought, of anti-corporate thought, have somehow been seduced by this model for corporate control of our society.
00:03:09.000And really, that's what we're dealing with, right?
00:03:11.000It's not even ideological, as you pointed out.
00:03:15.000And it can disguise itself because it isn't an ideology.
00:03:21.000It's not disguised as fascism or nationalism or communism.
00:03:26.000It's just We are protecting you from COVID. And, you know, all of this stuff is justified.
00:03:38.000It's the control of society by elites and by these large, particularly corporate, pharmaceutical, military intelligence and technocracy structures.
00:03:48.000I've got some theories about all of that, Bobby, which, you know, from my essays, you were just mentioning Chomsky, and, you know, yeah, it's heartbreaking watching.
00:03:59.000A lot of people succumb to this, but sure, back in the, well, for me, it was really the 80s and the 90s, reading Chomsky.
00:04:06.000I mean, what I always loved about Chomsky is I felt like he was telling the story that nobody else was telling him.
00:04:13.000In a nutshell, that's kind of what I've been trying to do.
00:04:16.000I started my blog, The Consent Factory, my satirical blog, back in 2016.
00:04:22.000And that's really when I started with writing my essays and my political satire.
00:04:29.000And as you said before, that life story in a nutshell, you know, I was born in Florida, ran away to San Francisco for a while.
00:04:36.000My ex-wife dragged me back into the theater.
00:04:39.000I was, you know, an actor when I was a kid.
00:04:41.000You know, I spent so much of my life, you know, in downtown theater in New York City making, you know, experimental plays that, you know, hardly anybody saw.
00:04:50.000You know, and then they took off after a while.
00:05:57.000I don't think we have gotten our minds around what it is yet, and that's part of what I've been trying to do to describe it.
00:06:05.000Talking about, you know, you touched on the totalitarianism, and as I've written in numerous of my columns, no, it's not 20th century totalitarianism.
00:06:59.000I'm struck by your idea that this began in 2016.
00:07:04.000And one of the things that was happening in the world at that point was the Syrian war.
00:07:09.000And the Syrian war was a really a product of CIA intervention because so that people understand the history, the Qatar, which people pronounce Qatar, which has the largest natural gas fields in the world, a very, very close ally in the United States, can only ship, it has the cheapest gas, it can only ship its gas to Europe through LNG, through liquefied natural gas, which is very expensive.
00:07:38.000It proposed with the United States government to put a pipeline through Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria into Turkey.
00:07:47.000If it got to Turkey, it would allow it essentially to bankrupt Russia, which is dependent on gas exports to Europe and oil exports through a network of pipelines that go through Turkey.
00:08:03.000And the Russians recognized this as a threat to their economy, to their power, to their identity, and to their national sovereignty.
00:08:12.000And they were able to persuade Bashar Assad to kill the pipeline and say, you can't bring it through Syria.
00:08:20.000The CIA and some of the European intelligence agencies essentially arranged a revolution in Syria, which ended up in the creation of ISIS.
00:08:34.000And drove 2 million refugees, Muslim refugees mainly, into Europe, which ended democracy or destabilized every democracy in Europe and created Brexit and the rise of what is the These populist impulses and nationalistic impulses.
00:08:55.000And, you know, this is one of the issues.
00:08:57.000That's a long build-up to one of the issues I really want to kind of get to with you, which is populism often begins with an idealistic impulse.
00:09:07.000But it also tends to align itself with all of the alchemies of dark demagoguery.
00:09:20.000So racism and nationalism and misogyny and xenophobia often find themselves able to attach themselves to populism.
00:09:31.000And then those tendencies are easily exploited by people who oppose the populist impulse.
00:09:39.000They say, oh, it's just about Trump and it's about racism.
00:09:43.000And we saw this recently in Canada, where you saw a genuinely idealistic populist convoy.
00:09:52.000And it was in the eyes of the world that became kind of a right-wing racist exercise.
00:10:00.000And, you know, that's what they've done to me.
00:10:56.000I lived in New York City with the man for 15 years, I think he's a clown.
00:11:02.000But nonetheless, he became a symbol for this populist I think it's an illustration for this populist rebellion.
00:11:11.000In a sense, I could almost translate it to that rebellion that you just described in Syria, in other countries, Russia, absolutely.
00:11:24.000The story, I think, that I've been trying to tell with my essays for the last few years and all the way up through the COVID narrative and everything, I often, I go back to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
00:11:36.000And this is actually when I wrote my first stage play.
00:11:39.000You know, when the Soviet Union collapsed, I sat down and I said, we're in a new world.
00:12:24.000It's not seven guys sitting around in a room making up conspiracies.
00:12:31.000It's a very, very complex situation, but nonetheless, This is the first time that one ideology, one power system dominates the entire globe.
00:12:42.000So much so, and this is a point that I've tried to make repeatedly in my writing, that in a sense, every conflict that we experience now is an insurgency.
00:12:58.000The system itself has no more outside enemies.
00:13:03.000The world that we used to live in where two large powers were competing with each other, most of us still see the world that way, naturally.
00:13:14.000We see it as the United States versus Russia or what have you.
00:13:18.000It's not the world that I'm looking at.
00:13:20.000The world that I'm looking at is a global capitalist world where all of the conflicts, every conflict is a different type of insurgency, whether you're talking about rebellion, refusal to play ball in the Middle East, you know, refusal to play ball in Russia, the populist uprisings, and they were, you know, primarily neo-nationalist uprisings.
00:13:43.000Here in Europe, and then with Brexit, and as you described them, all of these challenges or these conflicts are insurgencies, in a sense.
00:13:55.000And what I've been tracking is the power system's response to these different insurgencies.
00:14:04.000It makes absolutely no difference to Globocap, whether, you know, whether an insurgency is left wing or right wing or, you know, Islamic fundamentalist, Christian fundamentalist, or what type of insurgency it is.
00:14:19.000It's basically a rebellion against global capitalist dominance.
00:14:24.000I hope that I got close to addressing some of the stuff that you were talking about.
00:14:30.000Yeah, I mean, I think what happened in 1989 was that, you know, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, that capitalism had triumphed over in this, you know, 70-year war against communism.
00:14:47.000But then it turned and obliterated democracy.
00:14:53.000And, you know, that's kind of what we're seeing today.
00:14:56.000And one of the things that you described really brilliantly, That also was revelatory to me, which is this is the first time we've seen the rise in totalitarianism that is unaccompanied and unattached to ideology.
00:15:12.000It's actually, it's another point that I try to make often, and I'm just struggling to understand all of this stuff myself, and mostly I advocate that other people try to understand.
00:15:24.000If you look at the history of what's happened, you know, we could say the last 30 years, we could say the last, you know, six or eight years, it actually is quite logical and it makes perfect sense.
00:15:35.000Once a system really achieves global hegemony, de facto global hegemony, And it doesn't have any outside enemies anymore.
00:15:46.000Well, all that's really left to do is consolidate power, right?
00:15:51.000Consolidate power and increase control.
00:15:55.000It's the thing that makes Globocap interesting, Global Capitalist Hegemony interesting, is that it can't really have an ideology, as Nazism did, as It depends on all of us buying into the fairy tale.
00:16:21.000You know, we're all free and we live in democracies and it really depends on the fairy tale.
00:16:32.000What I think What has been astounding over the past two years to watch is that the system has shifted to a more openly totalitarian mode.
00:16:47.000I'm in the process of putting together my essays for a new collection of essays, and I'm going back over all of the essays that I wrote starting in Go back and look at, and I'm putting the footnotes in, documenting how totalitarian these measures have been from the very beginning.
00:17:10.000From the very beginning, I've described it in different ways.
00:17:14.000I feel like the last two years, whatever else, and they've been about many things and they are very complex, but I feel like the overarching message of the last two years Has been coming from, you know, power has been shut up and get in line because we're the ones running things.
00:17:37.000And we can do this to you anytime we want.
00:17:42.000Bobby, it's a more brazen totalitarianism than I've ever experienced, you know, from the West in my lifetime, and I can't help but see it as a message.
00:17:53.000On one of your essays, you talk about how all the lies are being exposed, and it reminded me a lot, you know, I didn't share your optimism that that means the collapse is imminent, because You know, what you call the COVID cult.
00:18:10.000I remember reading about the history of, the early history of Stalin.
00:18:16.000He starved to death three or four million people in Ukraine and the Soviet Union, Soviet citizens.
00:18:24.000And it was a catastrophe that was obvious to everybody except for the ideological commissars who were simply telling people what they saw with their own eyes was not true.
00:18:40.000Oh, if you were living in the Ukraine and you were starving to death, you were committing an act of treason against the Soviet Union.
00:18:49.000And it was presumptive that if you were starving that you were treason.
00:18:53.000And they literally, I mean, people were eating each other regularly, practicing cannibalism, eating their children.
00:19:00.000It was one of the most horrific crimes in history.
00:19:04.000And yet they were able to, simply by redefining it, they were able to, you know, to portray it as a great triumph.
00:19:14.000And I see today what they're doing with the pandemic.
00:19:17.000It's pretty obvious to me, and I assume to you, that they're going to spike the football, declare victory, and say all the things that we did worked.
00:19:26.000All of this factual infrastructure is now exposed to a lie, and what do they do?
00:20:28.000I was, you know, I guess more of an activist and I've been more of an activist.
00:20:31.000And I said, all we have to do is hold out and make it through the winter because they cannot keep this narrative going forever.
00:20:40.000Through another summer, through another winter, if we can hold out, those of us who are resisting, who are fighting this, if we can hold out and get to April, this thing is going to collapse.
00:20:52.000And it's just my sense was, you just can't continue the big lie that long.
00:20:59.000Not the way our society is structured, you Very prominent among them.
00:21:06.000People have been exposing and publicizing these lies from the very beginning.
00:21:12.000And the things, you just rattled them all off.
00:21:16.000masks, the completely artificial way that COVID cases were defined and COVID hospitalizations, anyone who's in the hospital for anything, if they test positive their COVID hospitalization, all of the components of the narrative, people if they test positive their COVID hospitalization, all of the components of the narrative, people have been exposing And it was only a month or so ago that it just went on too long.
00:21:44.000And the official voices had to start acknowledging it.
00:21:49.000And then the rebellion picked up, you know, culminating, I think, in what went on in Ottawa, but it wasn't just Ottawa.
00:22:00.000There are huge protests in Germany every Monday, all around Germany and all over Europe.
00:22:27.000For example, today, Today is the first day I am technically allowed to rejoin society in Germany, as long as I put on a medical-looking mask and am willing to get myself tested on a daily basis.
00:22:42.000And this is being sold as, ah, the return of freedom.
00:22:49.000I'm watching governments gradually pull back their restrictions, right, because they don't want truckers parked outside of their parliaments.
00:23:01.000I'm watching them gradually roll back their restrictions, but they're not rolling back the narrative.
00:23:08.000And I don't believe they're rolling back the project, the larger project, which I think I just referred to today as the pathologization of everyday life.
00:23:19.000Yeah, well, you know, I don't share your optimism that the whole thing is going to collapse.
00:23:24.000And I really try not to make predictions about the future because, you know, my job is to get up every day and, you know, say reporting for duty, sir, and then go out and fight the bad guys.
00:23:38.000And, you know, and to really let go of the outcomes, just to know that the only thing I really control is the A little piece of real estate inside of my own shoes.
00:23:50.000And as long as I can stand up, my job is to resist, resist, resist, and try to spread the resistance.
00:23:57.000But you get depressed if you weren't able to, you know, let go of the outcomes.
00:24:03.000And, you know, the big I lasted in Germany.
00:25:10.000And I said in that speech that governments love pandemics the same reason they love wars, because it gives them opportunities to clamp down police, state security controls on their society, to expand their powers, to reward their allies in the military-industrial to expand their powers, to reward their allies in the military-industrial complex, and to shift huge tsunamis of wealth from the middle class and poor to the ruling
00:25:40.000And, you know, it's just amazing to me the timing of, you know, of the Ukraine crisis and the predictable global response, propaganda response, but also just the unanimity of You look at Fox News and you get the same report as you get on CNN, MSNBC. It's just like before the Iraq war.
00:26:06.000And so you see the, you know, the COVID narrative collapsing, and they're not even allowed, you know, the response of the government is just to stop talking about COVID, to call it off, to spike the football, to declare victory.
00:26:22.000I was at that demo in Berlin for your speech, and you're absolutely right, of course.
00:26:27.000You really can't shift, you know, power systems can't shift To this type of nascent totalitarianism, totalitarianism, whatever you want to call it, without an emergency, without a crisis.
00:27:07.000The thing that disturbs me about where we are right now, I mean, there's several things that disturb me about where we are right now, but one thing that disturbs me about it is, again, I think when I say the Covidian cult and the official narrative is collapsing, people watched the narrative collapse.
00:27:30.000But what they do is they push Fauci away and they say, okay, that's all over and you're free now.
00:28:13.000The big narrative is over, but what's happening, and it's frightening to me, is all of this pathology theater is becoming incorporated into everyday life, right?
00:28:30.000And as far as this unanimity, it's terrifying to me, watching Watching it switch, I mean, there are funny memes all over the, you know, social media.
00:28:43.000I saw one meme where someone said, you know, I support the current thing, whatever it is.
00:28:49.000What I see is this global power system, which is dividing the world, dividing the world into there is us.
00:29:00.000Those of us who are in power and who are normal and we're the good guys and if you want to be part of us, then you will parrot whatever we tell you to parrot on any given day.
00:29:14.000It doesn't matter how ridiculous it is.
00:29:16.000You know, you will say it, and you will ignore all of the complexities in the history of everything, like the history of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
00:29:25.000You'll ignore all that, and you'll parrot this fairy tale that we're pumping out at you.
00:29:31.000If you don't, then you're a conspiracy theorist or a COVID denier or a reality denier or a terrorist or an extremist or a far-right, you know, domestic violent extremist or whatever.
00:29:45.000They have a million epithets that get rolled out.
00:29:49.000It's classic totalitarianism, but it's dividing the world into, you know, those, everyone who is with us And anyone who deviates from whatever we say the norm is.
00:30:01.000And I'm just watching the intensity of this build Yeah, and I mean, if I had to predict what they're going to do, which I really avoid going through things, looking into people's minds, you know, even people who are my adversaries and saying what they're thinking,
00:30:18.000and also making predictions, because I'm not very good at making predictions, but I would say worries me is that We're good to go.
00:30:48.000Communism, fascism, any idiot, Zionism, whatever.
00:31:09.000And every time they do it, they pass another version of the Patriot Act.
00:31:13.000We invade a country that didn't do anything to us and we tell a big lie about it.
00:31:20.000And we use it to pass the Patriot Act to loosen the Bioweapons Treaty to allow us to develop bioweapons, which ends up in Wuhan.
00:31:30.000You know, that's how we gave Tony Fauci a $2 billion raise to develop bioweapons in 2002 following the Iraq invasion and the anthrax attacks.
00:31:41.000And each one sets the stage for the next crisis and the next expansion of power.
00:31:47.000As soon as, if you were conspiratorial, you'd say, yeah, as soon as the COVID narrative begins to collapse of its own weight and its own contradictions, they roll out Putin.
00:31:59.000And when Putin's gone, they've got Marburg virus in the pipeline.
00:32:03.000They have Ebola virus and all these other viruses, and then they have China.
00:32:12.000And all of these, you know, and each one will come with a new imposition of government rollbacks or rights that are portrayed as a beneficent government moving in to protect the public.
00:32:27.000And each one will be accompanied by additional censorship.
00:32:32.000You know, the censorship around Putin.
00:32:34.000Listen, Putin is apparently a megalomaniac.
00:32:41.000But I really want to know more about the history and more about, you know, what is driving him and what is, as you say, there's tremendous complexities with former Soviet Union Russia's today's relationship with the Ukraine and the role of, you know, of the CIA and the U.S. administrations in breaking our word in surrounding Russia.
00:33:06.000With NATO. And would this have happened if we didn't do that?
00:33:10.000I want to know the answer to that question.
00:33:13.000You know, what are the benefits of surrounding Russia with NATO at a time when there's no Cold War?
00:33:19.000Is it recreating a new Cold War by making that country by waking the sleeping bear?
00:33:25.000When my uncle was president in 1962, Russia put missiles in Cuba.
00:33:45.000But I can see where maybe Russia feels the same way when we put bases in Poland and Yugoslavia and the Czech Republic and all of these Satellite nations that were once part of the Soviet Union.
00:34:33.000It's just, you know, there is one ideological story and you hear it on Fox, you hear it on MSNBC. You hear it on the CNN, and there is no dissent permitted.
00:34:45.000And anybody who's sad as it raises these issues is treasonous.
00:34:50.000They're a bad person because they're justifying the invasion of the Ukraine and all that.
00:34:57.000I just wish we didn't live in that world.
00:34:59.000I wish we lived in a world where we could talk with each other and really understand the complexities of this situation.
00:35:10.000You just said it, and you've experienced this much more than I have, but many of us have.
00:35:17.000The system has almost no tolerance whatsoever for discussions of history, for discussions of the complexities of politics, and those of us who try to engage in it are being just relentlessly And, you know, and called every name in the book.
00:36:00.000And when Putin, predictably, Putin came into power, he came into power and said, wait, we're going to stop this party and I'm going to take care of Russia.
00:36:13.000I don't want to play ball with Globocap at the expense of Russia, and I'm going to take care of Russia and Russians, right?
00:36:20.000And again, even just me bringing this up, okay, now I'm a Putin apologist, and I love the man and worship him or whatever, according to the mainstream narrative.
00:36:30.000But all I'm really trying to do is just look back at the history of what happened.
00:36:37.000You know, NATO just continually encroaching on Russia surrounding its western border, you know, bringing more and more countries in, you know, breaking the promises.
00:36:48.000Of course, at some point, one of two things was going to happen.
00:36:52.000Either Putin or whoever's running the Russian government was going to give up and say, you guys win.