00:00:18.000Thanks for joining us today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:22.000Today I'm talking with Tucker Carlson, one of the most influential and controversial voices in modern media, a man who spent decades at the heart of American political journalism and now finds himself questioning the very system he once helped interpret.
00:00:38.000There's a link in the description if you want to see that conversation.
00:00:40.000And now he's here with me continuing what has become a much deeper and more urgent dialogue.
00:00:46.000In this conversation, Tucker lays out why he believes the political system is no longer responding to voters, how power may sit beyond elected leaders, and why recent events from war to culture point to something far bigger than conventional politics.
00:01:00.000We talk about Trump, influence, foreign policy, faith, and whether what we're witnessing is the unraveling of the model itself or the revealing of what was always there beneath it.
00:01:13.000Tucker, Russell, you're right at the middle of the culture again.
00:01:18.000Indeed, watching you move through what seemed to be vocal, and one might have imagined from the state that your country was in at the point and what appeared like a crisis, vociferous and meaningful support of President Trump to skepticism, now to the point where it seems that your criticism of him, and in particular his actions or announcements around, of course, war, which you've always been anti war, strongly anti war in all contexts.
00:01:46.000But also with some of the announcements or posts that he's made regarding religion, have led you to as close to condemnation as I can imagine you being of him and his presidency.
00:01:59.000It seems like it's a really significant moment, I think, for him, let alone you.
00:02:04.000And I wonder how you feel at the middle of it, whether you feel like you're participating in some significant moment, indeed, whether or not your support is so pivotal and important that its denial could cost Trump.
00:02:17.000Presidency in, well, it's not the free.
00:02:20.000But, like, I wonder how you have moved from a position of support to a position of condemnation and how critical you imagine it might be for him.
00:02:30.000In reverse order, I don't think it's critical at all.
00:03:26.000Again, it's not personal in the slightest, but I felt that the war in Iran was not only a mistake, but it was a mistake that revealed the problem, the core problem of the United States, which is the system produces these really evil results against the will of the population or without reference to it.
00:03:44.000In any case, it doesn't matter what people think.
00:03:47.000We get what we get no matter what we vote for.
00:04:10.000So I argued passionately my position on the war with Iran, which is it's not in America's interest at all.
00:04:20.000And Trump agreed with me for 10 years.
00:04:23.000I mean, I've been talking with him about this topic for 10 years since 2016 and a bunch of different points in the first term.
00:04:31.000And now in this term, which has been dominated by it, you know, there, there, there's been real press on Trump to commit the United States to some sort of war with Iran.
00:04:39.000And so I've been there and talked to him about it.
00:04:42.000And I think I spoke to him, you know, not long before this war started and I never detected any enthusiasm from him.
00:04:55.000Could be wrong, can't know a man's heart, but I mean, I talked to him a lot and I never thought he wanted to do it.
00:05:01.000And I think he fully understood the potential consequences.
00:05:04.000I think he's got a reckless streak, as I do too.
00:05:06.000So I'm not judging, but I think he's a dice roller and the kind of guy who could say, as he did say to me, no matter what happens, it's going to be okay because it always is.
00:05:25.000So he's just decided to accept it, I think the latter.
00:05:28.000But the facts are that he was under enormous pressure from the prime minister of Israel to do this and from advocates for Israel in the United States and around him, not really in the White House, but among donors and advisors and friends.
00:07:34.000When Barack Obama in 2008 elected to bail out the banks, it was as if there's some inevitable machinery that moves beyond and behind the office of the president.
00:07:44.000And in a way, it marred perhaps irrevocably the presidency of Obama, even in the eyes of those that.
00:07:51.000And I suppose similarly, it's an indication of a machine that operates beyond the purview of what we consider to be democracy.
00:07:59.000Like, so when you say, I don't know anything like as much about politics as you do, but when I felt that the moment of, I thought that going to a war, going to war with Iran maybe represented the obvious assertion that geopolitics is not influenced and maybe even domestic politics in the ways that are super significant.
00:08:23.000By whoever is the incumbent or occupant of that office.
00:08:26.000And that's really frightening, I suppose, in the instance of Trump, because in a way, he was an anti political candidate from the get go and the truth teller and the person that was going to drain the swamp.
00:08:36.000And so, do you think that that war is the end of that populist moment?
00:08:43.000And where does America first go if Trump is a captive to political maneuvers that transcend what most people regard as the.
00:08:58.000Well, I think it's the end of politics.
00:09:00.000If you define politics as the debate over how best to represent the voters, which is what I thought it meant, then at this point it's very, very clear that the view of voters is just immaterial.
00:09:11.000It doesn't matter at all who you vote for or what you think.
00:09:15.000Many times over the past 35 years, covering politics and being mostly around mainstream people, but occasionally you cover some third party campaign and you hear people say that.
00:09:25.000It doesn't matter who you vote for, you get the same result every time.
00:10:09.000I have a lot of theories on it, but I don't know.
00:10:12.000But I know that it happens because I've seen it, and now we've all seen it.
00:10:16.000So then you have to ask like, you know, there will be a time during which, if the current system remains in place, that we go through the motions in the way that the Roman Senate went through the motions and continue to be a Senate and convene and issue proclamations and da But once it became an empire, like it didn't matter.
00:10:32.000I think something like that you could imagine happening here where the mechanics of democracy are still in place, but people by and large don't believe that they're real and for good reason.
00:10:42.000You know, a reformation of the system, which is what I personally would like to see someone who was kind of pleased with the system, as imperfect as it was.
00:10:49.000You know, and I don't know which one's going to happen, but I don't think we will in the near term find ourselves in a place where anybody believes that electing candidate X over candidate Y is going to solve the problems that led to our current decline.
00:11:05.000I don't think anyone believes, you know, is Keir Starmer better than Rishi Sunak?
00:11:09.000You know, like what does that even mean?
00:12:59.000My sense is that Trump is making it easier for the rest of us to understand what's at stake and what the potential solution is by framing the current war in religious terms.0.93
00:13:09.000I think that's actually a good thing.0.85
00:13:10.000Now, obviously, it's grotesque and scary because the last thing you want is a religious war.1.00
00:13:15.000Do you really want to be at war with 2 billion Muslims?
00:13:24.000But I am glad that they're using the language of the supernatural because it is a.
00:13:29.000In a secular society like ours, it's a much needed reminder that everything we see is the product of supernatural conflict of spiritual war, that we live in a supernatural world.
00:13:42.000And by supernatural, I mean specifically, we live in a world in which things happen due to forces that can't be sensed or measured.
00:13:49.000So it's outside of science, it's supernatural or supranatural, really.
00:13:58.000It's so good for all of us to know that.
00:14:00.000So when the president posts a picture of himself as Jesus, And then intentionally puts a demon over his own head, which he did last night, Sunday night, Sunday night, and then denies he did it or whatever, whatever, but he did it.
00:14:18.000It causes the rest of us to pause and ask, like, what is this?
00:14:22.000It's not exactly clear what it is, but what it's not is a continuation of the mirage that we've lived with my entire lifetime, which is this is like a conflict between left and right, Republicans and Democrats, and they're trying to, you know, Come to some consensus on the best way to govern the country or the world.
00:14:45.000And it's only by keeping that in mind that we can get closer to the truth of what it actually is.
00:14:50.000But everything, and the last thing I'll say is I know a lot of people who run countries because that's my job is to interview people.
00:14:57.000And a lot of people with power, I'm not one of them, but I've been around them a lot.
00:15:02.000And they're, to a man, to a person, religious people.
00:15:07.000Every single one of them, every single one of them, and almost every single one of them, with very few exceptions, poses as a secular person.
00:15:14.000They are observant religious people.0.89
00:15:16.000Now, they are not serving the Christian God.1.00
00:15:32.000They think in terms of supernatural power.
00:15:34.000They all believe correctly, in my opinion, that they are being guided by and strengthened by, given authority by supernatural powers, and they appease those powers.
00:15:45.000Not accusing them of what we'd call witchcraft, but it is, in fact, witchcraft, is what it really is.
00:16:07.000Well, that right there is an admission of faith.
00:16:10.000Every single one of them and every single one of them has, you know, things they will do and things they won't do, things they feel compelled to do because of a higher calling.
00:16:17.000These are all expressions of religious faith.
00:16:20.000And all of them have red lines in their minds and we can call that they're superstitious.
00:16:25.000There's no such thing as superstitious religious faith.
00:16:28.000Now it could be faith in demons, which it typically is, but it doesn't make it any less religious.
00:16:34.000So I think we should know that there's a sense in what you've just described that the model has exhausted itself, that the model has expired.
00:16:43.000That there was something about Trump always that was, you could put it that he's vivid, lurid, a self caricature, a person who's very aware of his own mythology while it's unfolding.
00:16:55.000His mythology draws from the lexicon and values of the immediate culture.
00:16:59.000I mean, it's things like his own name at the top of buildings and Coca Cola and a fetish from McDonald's and all of these things and an amplification of male values.
00:17:08.000So many things that are kind of recognizable from the period of time he's been alive, the 1980s.
00:17:15.000Thing to see the implosion of that because it's difficult to imagine that can't be accompanied by an implosion of the system itself, in so much as how can the next natural step be the ascent of another Republican figure or the vicissitude delivering Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom or AOC?
00:17:35.000Like you say, it's like the system is spent, wrung out through this sort of last peculiarly postmodern.
00:17:45.000And yet, aged political figure, someone that was both simultaneously nostalgic and progressive in a way that's unimaginable.
00:17:52.000I mean, just through his means of communication and his expertise with new media, and the fact that he was a person primed in the world of television before entering into politics.
00:18:01.000Well, just a point about what you said about the UK.
00:18:04.000And secondly, for a while, because it's a sort of like an old, arcane, deep culture, I've got the sense that true British power has even migrated to institutions and agencies that are beyond the way we regard national power and.
00:18:19.000Institutional power, and that for a time it's been subterranean, real British power is invisible.
00:18:26.000That there are peculiar anomalies in British power, like the city of London being its own sort of tax exile in the middle of a capital city, the sort of lingering monarchy, the peculiarly technocratic politicians, actually, like Keir Starmer, who one finds it hard to imagine donning a robe and worshipping Moloch just because I would almost improve my view of him if I thought that.
00:18:50.000And so, in a way, are we saying that, you know, in this kind of post Epstein, Middle Eastern, seemingly apocalyptic moment, that all leaders are in some way compromised?
00:19:03.000Are we saying that real power is supranational as well as supranatural, that real power is concentrated elsewhere?0.68
00:19:13.000And what gave you the courage to start talking about Israel's agenda?0.66
00:19:20.000Israel's war, Israel's expansion into Lebanon.
00:19:24.000And do you see occultism as being part of that facet of this conflict and this moment of revelation and decline, which you've described in a way as the end of democracy?
00:19:35.000And it's difficult to argue with that aspect, certainly.
00:19:37.000I mean, I, well, to again answer your last question first on the question of Israel, I mean, I have felt for a long time, decades, you know, having lived in Washington, son of a federal employee, and just watching the system most of my life since for 40 years, since the mid 80s.
00:19:54.000I felt very strongly that the relationship between the United States and Israel was not healthy and that it would, in the end, probably gravely harm the United States.0.99
00:20:05.000I felt that not because I hate Jews, which I don't and never have and never will, not because I hate Israel, because I don't, but because Israel is a lot less like the United States than Americans understand.0.59
00:20:27.000Got one large resource dense global power and one tiny, kind of irrelevant country with a lot of ancient monuments on the shores of the Mediterranean.
00:20:38.000Like, one should not be in the little ones, should not be in charge of the big ones.
00:20:41.000I just always felt that was unnatural, but I didn't say anything about it because it wasn't worth it.
00:20:45.000And I had lots of other things going on, and I also had small children, and like, and I understood the penalties very, very clearly for doing that.
00:20:58.000I don't even want to say it, but I had, I mean, there was something in my, you know, because by marriage, I'm related to a United States senator who was, you know, who I didn't admire as a senator, but whose career was destroyed because he said something about the influence.0.57
00:21:17.000He was not an anti Semite or an Israel hater, but he was like, hey, why is Israel calling the shots here?
00:21:22.000And he was a very, very famous senator.
00:21:24.000And I watched him get taken out for saying that.
00:21:27.000And it was obvious living in Washington, like, that's the one thing you can't say.
00:21:30.000Is that maybe this relationship is unhealthy?
00:21:43.000I still feel that, but we're not doing that.
00:21:47.000Then the war in Iran really changed it.
00:21:50.000And what really changed it, two things one, the persecution of Christians by Israel, which is widespread and longstanding and ignored, started to drive me crazy.
00:22:00.000Killed by the state of Israel with my tax dollars, and I'm not allowed to say anything about it.
00:22:06.000I don't have a ton of self respect, but enough that I had to say something.0.93
00:22:10.000Then, two, and most pressingly, really, was this acceleration of the effort to get the US into war.
00:22:17.000I think the Israelis understood that this was really their last chance.
00:22:21.000Right after the inauguration, Netanyahu showed up at the White House, was there more than half a dozen times pushing for this.
00:22:28.000Of course, I knew a lot of people who worked there, including the president, and so I knew this was happening and I knew the details of it.
00:22:33.000And I just pushed back as hard as I could.
00:22:35.000And then, of course, they just attacked me in public and my family.0.96
00:22:51.000Like, what do you, you can't use the US military to genocide people and get us into wars that are going to destroy the US dollar and double gas prices and get Americans killed.
00:23:15.000You try and sink a US naval vessel, you get the president of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, on board, and we all have to ignore the USS Liberty.
00:23:23.000And, and other things, and other things too.
00:23:31.000I don't even have to say everything you think.
00:23:32.000You're not required to give every opinion.
00:23:35.000Jesus didn't say everything he thought, you know?
00:23:38.000But when the war in Iran, when I could see that it was actually moving toward a war with Iran, I thought, I don't even care what the effect on me is.
00:25:05.000The people that have always hated Trump will say that this is exactly what they were warning us against.
00:25:14.000Similarly, they will say that Trump has been using Christianity, a kind of Margaret Atwood dystopic version of Christianity, to legitimize patriarchy and misogyny and all of the things that Trump has said.0.98
00:25:28.000You know, like, for example, the famous crotch grabbing speech were indications that Trump's a degenerate.0.90
00:25:35.000And then some will say, About you significantly and me, less so, hugely less so.0.98
00:25:54.000And I noticed that a lot of people say from the liberal left whose affiliations and associations are so strongly focused on.
00:26:05.000Israel and Palestine, and what many people regard as a genocide in Gaza.0.66
00:26:10.000It's difficult to think of a better word than that.
00:26:13.000I'm talking about British journalists like, say, Owen Jones, very much over the left, or Mehdi Hussein, who's worked in your country, but it's very much over the left.
00:26:20.000Those people, I know you don't look at social media, but like are very much using your position to legitimize their own positions.
00:26:30.000Now, truth is truth and right is right.
00:26:59.000Don't you think that this is going to lead to, you know, in the midterms, more Democrats and that, you know, do you have any concerns about the impact of it?
00:27:59.000Um, I would also argue that, and I'm get many future things wrong.
00:28:03.000I know that I will, but I would also say that it was a process, um, of understanding for me.
00:28:11.000But I think, you know, there were changes along the way and I don't into Trump and to his intent and his worldview.
00:28:18.000And I don't fully understand all of them.
00:28:20.000Now, Joe Kent, who was one of the top intel officials in the United States, suggested the Butler shooting and the murder of Charlie Kirk were related in some way to those changes.
00:28:36.000For example, I was sitting directly across from him when he didn't put his hand on the Bible and it was a refusal to put his hand on the Bible at his inauguration.
00:28:55.000But I sublimated it, and that's my fault.
00:28:58.000And I would say I'm sorry for doing that.
00:29:02.000So, but I'm not sure it's about me or my faults.
00:29:05.000I mean, if what I'm saying is dependent on my own personal virtue or foresight or wisdom, then you should ignore everything I say because I lack all of those things from time to time.
00:29:15.000It hasn't helped me to say any of the things I'm saying.
00:29:20.000Here's what makes me hopeful, however, is I think because politicians, and I can't speak to Mehdi Hassan or whoever that is or the other guy who's now I've never even heard of, to their criticism, but I can say that.
00:29:33.000I think normal, most people watching this, I shouldn't say normal people, but just most people like trying to figure out what is this and what does it mean, will come away probably with a conclusion that I'm reaching, which is that politics doesn't solve the core problems here.
00:29:46.000And that maybe one of the most basic problems is you can't, there's never been a secular society in history.
00:30:33.000And by the way, I travel a lot internationally.
00:30:37.000And one of the things you notice is that the Islamic world, which I've been going to for 25 years since 9 11 because of my job, the Islamic world is booming.
00:30:45.000And it's not because there's no more oil and gas there today than there were 25 years ago.
00:30:50.000It's because those societies got the religious extremism under control, but they are not secular societies.
00:30:57.000And Europe, which is more secular now than it was 25 years ago, is that much more degraded and sad and kind of coming apart on every level.0.51
00:31:06.000So it's just another reminder that that just doesn't work.
00:31:08.000And I, there's a Christian religious revival underway in the United States.
00:31:12.000It's measurable by church attendance, by conversions at Easter in the Catholic Church, for example, the growth in the Orthodox Church.
00:31:18.000That to me is the, A is the only answer.
00:31:22.000And B is like the sign of hope in all of this and Trump framing everything or Pete Hegseth calling this a crusade, which, you know, obviously I find grotesque and, an offense against the gospel.
00:31:33.000I'm still grateful that they're saying it because it gets all of us thinking like, what is this?
00:31:39.000What could possibly be the motive, not just of the United States, but of Israel too, which is risking its own destruction?
00:31:46.000What could possibly be the motive for attacking Iran in a regime change where like no normal person thought, no smart person thought that could work?
00:32:27.000And I think that's an essential conclusion to reach.
00:32:29.000And I can just say the last thing I'll say is in my own life, I've been a Christian my whole life.
00:32:34.000I mean, I was baptized in the Episcopal church by my uncle, the bishop, but I, it wasn't, it didn't occupy the place in my daily life that it does now.
00:32:44.000And what changed was the realization watching the politics around 2021, the height of COVID, and concluding that whatever was going on here wasn't political.
00:32:56.000It wasn't part of the recognizable struggle between political parties or between nations or anything like that.
00:33:00.000There was something way bigger and very hard for me as a man to understand.
00:33:06.000There was a force, an unseen force, a spiritual force, I concluded, that had at its core aim the destruction of people, of humanity.
00:33:16.000That hated people because they're created in the image of God.
00:33:19.000Well, that is the definition of evil, of the evil one, as described in the Lord's Prayer.
00:33:24.000So, that understanding, which came to me slowly because my job every day was to think of what was going on in the world and write a script about it.
00:33:33.000Over about six months, I began to really think, wow, the spiritual war is real.
00:33:54.000I feel that the model has exhausted itself, that the performance is over, that the claim of secularism, I thought that was really profound, is important because secularism is, yes, the separation of religious ideals from the matter of politics, almost as if we can go with operations and management without any kind of divine inspiration.
00:34:15.000In fact, just recently, someone explained to me that one of the Greek words for sin, one of the etymological Roots is a kind of formlessness, this claim of neutrality.
00:34:30.000Now, when you sort of like, that's one of the claims of secularism.
00:34:33.000We'll just get all religion out of it.
00:34:35.000Then we've got this thing called neutrality.
00:34:38.000It's almost like the establishment of this field that's so open to bias.
00:34:43.000And one would have to exclude the possibility that there are nefarious biases being continually introduced, masked, occultist, nefarious intent.
00:34:55.000Sometimes the worst motives hidden beneath a good one.
00:34:59.000We just want to protect you all and help you.
00:35:01.000I mean, that's what's become sort of impossible to participate in.
00:35:06.000The idea that this war against Iran is because otherwise Iran are going to become super powerful and develop a nuclear weapon.0.77
00:35:13.000And to protect you, the people of America, we better go to war now.0.75
00:35:16.000Well, that sounds really similar to weapons of mass destruction, seems really similar to American foreign misadventure in the period ever since the.0.52
00:35:25.000And one can't help but be struck by your observation that the advent of secularism coincides with this goriest period of industrialized warfare in our history, where we have the facility to conduct these kind of destructive and brutal experiments near continually.
00:35:41.000So the fact that it is primarily supernatural and only plays out materially and rationally, I think, is the dialectic that we're going to have to become well versed in describing and explaining because otherwise.
00:35:56.000I'm starting to look at the instruments, ornaments, and participants in this peculiar moment.
00:36:03.000Cause when I'm like, when say being English, British, like, and looking at my country and a lot of people are deeply concerned about the, what they would call the Islamification of Britain and migrants and people praying and like doing fighting age males and things.
00:36:15.000Remember, Tucker, the ideas that a lot of people will have learned about through watching your content, like what people call population replacement theory, stuff like that.0.54
00:36:24.000Like when I envisage the forces that likely control the world and it is just a vision, I've got nothing to corroborate it.
00:36:32.000I don't see, uh, the weaponry of Sharia law.0.93
00:36:37.000And some kind of Islamic might masquerading behind all of these instruments and implementing the Muslim lobby doing this.0.97
00:36:46.000I just feel like their communication skills have been sort of off key and like they've been, if anything, too authentic and too overt with some of their feelings.0.99
00:36:57.000Um, and But I do see that in my country, say, it seems that from the top, the imposition of bureaucracy that seems to be outside of British political will is certainly not democratic.
00:37:11.000But from the top down, British people feel they're being controlled.
00:37:14.000And from the bottom up, people feel like they're experiencing excessive migration, deterioration of their culture and their values.
00:37:21.000And migration, it seems like from watching British culture and British media, seems to be a significant portion of many people's concern.
00:37:29.000But really, what sort of struck me in this moment is when the Iran war started, and I've been, as you know, somewhat sort of stymied and hobbled by my own personal challenges for the last year or so.
00:37:40.000It felt what hit me was this would have happened in ways in no meaningfully different way had Kamala Harris been president right now.0.82
00:37:48.000You would have that war with Iran.0.86
00:37:50.000It's kind of Kissinger level politics.
00:37:52.000It's that there's a sort of a trajectory that can bypass all of these participants and players on the political stage, and therefore, Before the whole thing's a kind of mirage, we're content to quarrel about ridiculous details, and real power is transcendent of even international power.
00:38:11.000And one eventually arrives at a point where you start to think, is it sort of an occultist power?
00:38:17.000And indeed, to your point, I don't think that the motivation is resources and finances.
00:38:22.000I think it's both subtler and more powerful than that.
00:38:26.000And that's kind of both frightening and encouraging because it seems like the solution is surrender to Christ.
00:38:33.000But again, How do you imagine and do you feel like it's your job to even imagine?
00:38:37.000We conduct this conversation as participants in media, and do you feel like part of this conversation will ultimately mean systemic disruption and becoming an advocate for and participant in systemic disruption?
00:38:54.000And also, by the way, Mehdi Hussain and Owen Jones, these kind of people are posting your stuff favorably, saying, Look, Tucker Carlson's putting this stuff better.
00:39:00.000You know, when you, that woman, when you said Israel interest, you said, What do you mean by Israel interest and all that kind of thing?
00:39:07.000And a lot of people were watching that.
00:39:08.000And a lot of people are watching, obviously, many of the things, even prior to the more overt condemnation of Trump for some of his irreligious statements, people were observing what you were talking about with regard to the benefits of America's involvement in the Iran conflict and what the motivation might be and who the true beneficiary of this conflict is.
00:39:30.000So, how do we ensure that people understand that what they're participating in is something that's kind of supernatural, therefore religious?
00:39:38.000And what do you think is Your role, and I don't mean in a sort of grandiose and personal way, what is our role?
00:39:44.000What needs to be done to ensure that we don't just, like, if the result of this is, and then a Democrat candidate wins in 28, and then, like, you know, do you feel that the real trajectory is to centralize power, bureaucratic, globally, and imperially, while creating sort of disarray and despair?
00:40:39.000So I am suited for, you know, being paid to think about what's happening, talking to a million people constantly, traveling constantly, just trying to understand what's going on and then explaining it to the extent of my ability, which is sometimes limited.
00:41:44.000But I'm going to continue doing that because I think it's what I can do.
00:41:49.000As to what happens next, I don't really know, but I would say one of the great lies we've been told, and I have fallen for it up until very recently, is that.
00:41:58.000Geopolitics is a contest between sovereign states.
00:42:02.000You know, that the way to think of the world is 190 or whatever, I can't even remember the number of like countries.
00:42:08.000And they all go to the UN or most go to the UN except for those outlaw states like North Korea or whatever.0.71
00:42:13.000But generally, the world meets on the east side of New York to like hammer out agreements on the basis of the relative power and their separate interests.
00:43:59.000So, the larger stake you have in the enterprise, the bigger say you get.
00:44:04.000So, the idea that some election in New Hampshire is going to turn control over the world's biggest corporation to one guy is like a fiction, always has been.
00:44:15.000But the idea that those shareholders don't like to make the big decisions in the meantime, that's absurd.
00:44:23.000And most of the time, the mechanics of this are just not visible because there's no crisis that rises them to the surface.
00:44:29.000It's only when you have someone like Trump, who's like 90% compliant, 10% uncontrollable, that makes the people and the shareholders so nervous that they just can't deal with this guy.
00:44:41.000Like, yeah, we can basically trust him.
00:44:42.000He puts Jared Kushner in charge of the White House.
00:45:45.000And there's nothing they haven't done.
00:45:47.000And then the last thing I'll say is that the second you have dense concentrations of power, you have evil.
00:45:55.000And this is the message of Jesus' very famous observation that it's more difficult to get into heaven than for a camel to get through the eye of a needle, not simply because wealth is inherently bad.
00:46:06.000It doesn't say that, but because it presents the temptation of evil, because it creates the illusion that you can rely on your own power, that you're in charge.
00:46:17.000And I do think leaders get tripped up every time in exactly the same way.
00:46:21.000They're searching for the same thing the rest of us are searching for, which is the illusion of control, power, and immortality.
00:46:27.000And so, if you go to a leader who is about to turn 80 in June and say to him, if you, I mean, you can threaten him and you can shoot him in the ear, you can do whatever, a bunch of different things, you can threaten his family.
00:46:38.000But in the end, if you say to him, you want to live forever, you want to be Jesus on earth, you want to be king of the world, you don't fulfill the prophecy in order to be fully in charge and to be enshrined both in statue and in memory for the rest of time, then you do this.
00:46:55.000And I think having seen his tweet in which he, Compared himself to Jesus or made himself Jesus, made himself God.
00:47:02.000I don't think that's a crazy explanation.
00:47:04.000I mean, having spent a lot of time at the White House in the last few months or in the last year, really, and seen the physical changes to it, I'm a big believer in architecture as an expression of values and desires and hopes.
00:47:18.000It's more than just aesthetics, it's more than just aesthetics, right?
00:47:24.000And watching the physical transformation of the West Wing, which I visited pretty regularly since I was a teenager, so I know the layout.
00:47:36.000I see expressed, and I'm not, this is not criticism because I feel bad about it, but I see an older man hoping to live forever, hoping to be remembered, hoping to be seen as significant, having lived a life worth remembering.
00:47:50.000I see someone building a memorial to himself on the edge of eternity.
00:48:44.000One time, one of the movies I'd done, a guy that was running the show.
00:48:50.000He had previously worked for Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch of News International, Fox, the great oligarch and media operator.
00:48:58.000And I suppose, in the sort of relatively recent incarnation of world power, Rupert Murdoch seemed to have the kind of maneuver, the ability to maneuver that one might now accredit to the powerful figures of big tech, say, those that seem to have a kind of ability that transcends nation, incredible financial control, influence, power, ability to manipulate and control reality.
00:49:20.000I said, Tell me, could it be like, I was pretty young then, still at.
00:49:23.000I said, can you tell me something about Rupert Murdoch that, like, that you know from working near him?
00:49:28.000And this guy said, yeah, he acts as if he's going to live forever.
00:49:33.000He has a kind of, this guy didn't say Mephistelian, Mephistelian kind of quality of like, if he doesn't, if a deal don't work out for him, he acts as if he has endless time to resolve it.
00:49:45.000This idea of entering into eternity in the body, in form, of denying that eternity can only be achieved through resurrection, that you might know eternity by your own terms.
00:49:56.000Seems to me to be kind of almost the apex of the fallen one's promise.
00:50:02.000The idea that you could grasp and hold on to time.
00:50:05.000Now, like Rupert Murdoch, he's still alive.
00:50:07.000He's 93, 94, 95, whatever, four, five, six wives in, getting divorced in his 90s.
00:50:15.000I wonder what's playing out here those old and aged desert fathers, those fallen prophets, those broken people.
00:50:23.000As I get more familiar with scripture, I see that, of course, obviously, it's a supernatural proposition.
00:50:28.000And secularism in itself, you can't divorce.
00:50:32.000You can't run an operating system without an ideal.
00:50:36.000Even the claims that are being made by AI look, we've got access to this endless intelligence, but of course, one sees the imprature, the fingerprint, the signature, the image of its creator.
00:50:46.000ChatGPT has a different image to Grok.
00:50:49.000You can see that the intelligence has an imposition within it, it's bearing some kind of fruit.0.57
00:50:56.000And what it seems to me is happening now is that the technology could be utilized to create entirely different systems where something closer to a church could be at the center of a community as opposed to governance.
00:51:12.000That we could run with consent and real eternal principle rather than the continual imposition of fake compassion.
00:51:27.000Identity politics is a kind of fakeness of your individual beauty.
00:51:32.000And I suppose that in this late empire moment, Tucker, it really does seem to be we, you know, who knows how long it takes?
00:51:41.000Because if it's finished by Christ on the cross, then all of this is some sort of denouement.
00:51:45.000The whole of history since the resurrection has just been the unfolding and unfurling.
00:51:51.000But I wonder if we might see and might advocate for the introduction and implication of different systems that allow.
00:52:00.000For true freedom, a different kind of democracy, absolute and real democracy, because I don't see how we can do anything other than remain in continual tension by accepting that, well, the answer to this problem is that Trump is replaced by Gavin Newsom or even JD Vance.
00:52:19.000So, from the position that you're now in, like as a Christian commentator, do you think that, you know, there's going to be an election in 2028?
00:52:26.000Do you envisage yourself advocating for one party or one candidate?
00:52:29.000I know you have friendships, you know, you've been in Washington, D.C., you've been around power all your life.
00:52:33.000How are you proposing that you're going to even personally navigate that?
00:52:37.000How do you feel when someone that you know is like rude about you and sort of puts you in this sort of almost a sort of a basket of deplorables point O with Alex Jones and Candace, et cetera?
00:52:50.000I, I wonder how you remain like, because what it seems like from the outside watching you is you've advanced into a new territory now.
00:52:57.000You've advanced into a territory of you saying to people in the same way you said it was relevant that I was on YouTube during COVID because I still had some of the allure of like, oh, this person was in Hollywood and married to Katy Perry.
00:53:08.000Well, now you have all your own constituency and your own magnetism and charisma.0.57
00:53:14.000And so when you start saying, Hey, my real concern is that Trump's a puppet, that Israel are pulling the strings that like that.0.66
00:53:23.000That's going to, I think, is somewhat epochal.
00:53:26.000And it really fascinates me because if you keep going, there's going to be resistance, there's going to be challenges, there's going to be consequences, there's going to be results.
00:54:05.000I just felt like I was forced into it.
00:54:09.000As for where the country - so my role in it, I don't know.
00:54:12.000i mean i've certainly lost a lot of friendships most lately or just since in the last two years i would say i've lost uh acquaintanceships i mean i i don't read about myself ever but i do hear about it you know people People I really liked or helped, more precisely, people I've helped.
00:54:32.000Denouncing me and calling me names and whatever.
00:54:35.000It doesn't have as much effect on me as it would on most people just because of the weirdness of my childhood.
00:54:53.000My strong instinct is, however, that as in foreplay, the tension is building to an unmanageable point and that humanity kind of almost demands or expects catharsis at a certain point.
00:55:07.000And that catharsis, uh, is likely to be violent as it so often has been.
00:55:13.000And I, boy, I sure hope I'm wrong, but I don't, I don't actually believe that we're going to live In a world controlled by AI for very long.
00:55:55.000For many years, I've recommended his first book and his second, by the way, that he wrote from prison, but to people as much as I, you know, obviously sending mail bombs is terrible, you know, in no sense.
00:56:06.000I'm totally opposed to that in every way.
00:56:53.000But there's really not a lot of energy spent trying to convince you that this is good for you or ever.
00:56:58.000Could be good for you, and the downsides are obvious.0.96
00:57:02.000And in that way, it's very much like the war with Iran.0.65
00:57:05.000The difference between George W. Bush and Donald Trump is that George W. Bush spent, and I participated in this, so I know better than most, a year and a half trying to convince people that we needed to do this and constructing this whole architecture of lies about how actually, though no Iraqis flew the planes in the World Trade Center, Saddam was really behind 9 11.
00:57:25.000It was all fake, but there was a kind of respect that he gave to the population by bothering to construct these lies and spending so many months doing it.0.58
00:57:33.000This current administration decided outside of public view, most people didn't even know this was like on the verge of happening.
00:57:40.000Most people had no idea we're about to go to war with Iran.
00:57:42.000Now, I did, and I was like on fire about it, but most people weren't interested because they didn't really believe it was going to happen because this administration didn't bother to make the case.
00:59:00.000And I do not believe my great grandchildren, God willing, if they exist, are going to have to live in a world governed by AI because I think the whole system will blow itself up.
00:59:08.000You know, sometimes we talk about stuff.
00:59:58.000Once the Epstein files were out, it was a kind of a giddy, nauseating, and some of the things that just seemed like, you know, that piece of gay thing, that can't be real.1.00
01:00:28.000It's anti life, it's anti Christ, it's the destruction of the most holy and divine principles that we have beauty, good faith, it's all being annihilated.
01:00:39.000And what I see that brilliant Whitney Webb, she goes, You know, one time I was hitting her with, but what I've been struck by is because before being like in movies and all that, I was like a drug addict.
01:00:51.000So I was like going around doing acid and tripping out and reading the crazy books of these folks like David Icke and interested in extraterrestrials.
01:00:59.000You know, and having weird and not defined shamanic encounters with drugs.0.86
01:01:05.000And what's been extraordinary is to, as a person that had a kind of a very visceral dislike of systems, like these things are corrupt, they're disgusting and they're wrong.
01:01:15.000And then, like, oh, maybe they're all right now that I'm in them.