The Tucker Carlson Show - Walter Kirn Provides Update on Luigi Mangione Case and the Strange Parallels to Lee Harvey Oswald

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00:00:13.800 there are certain moments in history that are so kaleidoscopically weird that it takes a great

00:00:21.700 novelist to understand them this is one of those moments walter kern is that novelist

00:00:30.000 the luigi story seems like like the kind of story that historians will write about as they try and

00:00:57.560 capture the essence of the time that we're living through right now i don't really understand what

00:01:02.240 it means he just issued a letter i think from jail yeah what do you what is that story well from the

00:01:09.920 moment the crime was committed i realized that we had a crime built engineered for the social media age

00:01:20.660 if you think about the oj crime as the the crime that made cable television and you know serial uh true

00:01:28.880 life uh crime shows uh an established thing in america yes or if you think about the lindbergh case

00:01:36.960 as having the synergy with the age of radio yes well the luigi case is the age of instagram tiktok

00:01:47.920 and uh twitter and it was that since day one remember the crime occurred on video on a surveillance

00:01:56.200 video um and the surveillance video was wonderfully staged if you know anything about how movies are set

00:02:05.340 up you had the killer in the foreground in a hood his face obscured you had the victim in the distance

00:02:13.240 a tiny stick figure he shoots the stick figure falls now the way that shot is set up if you were

00:02:20.520 to set it up you have a lot of interest in the shooter but none at all in the victim imagine it

00:02:26.900 reversed if the victim had been in the foreground and some tiny figure had shot him you would have had

00:02:32.220 sympathy for the victim you'd see him die you'd see his paroxysms his spasms as he expired but it was

00:02:39.480 the other way around from the moment that video hit the internet and it got onto it curiously early

00:02:46.020 you know within a very short time of the crime itself you had hordes of uh junior investigators

00:02:54.500 on twitter tiktok instagram examining it and there was a mystery in the video which was why did he have

00:03:01.380 such trouble uh charging his gun why did he have such trouble operating his gun so mystery one was

00:03:08.800 is this a professional killer or is it you know an amateur uh the amateur people argued well he can't

00:03:17.020 seem to he keeps getting jammed the professionals argued well that's this certain sort of firearm and

00:03:23.880 um you know it tends to do that so you immediately had this mystery of the gun and this mystery of the

00:03:31.440 killer's expertise then almost in no time it was revealed that he had rented a bike

00:03:38.780 an electric bike in new york city and had escaped on it and so once again thousands hundreds of

00:03:46.160 thousands of junior detectives using the maps and available public data about the distribution

00:03:52.580 of those public electric bikes in new york tried to trace his path a few days later or maybe even a day

00:04:01.160 later we find out that the hooded figure whose face we didn't see in the first video checked into a

00:04:07.980 youth hostel uh either before or after the crime but a video emerged from a youth hostel in which you can

00:04:15.860 see his partial face while he flirts with the obviously besotted clerk at the youth hostel so you had

00:04:25.760 this slow reveal almost like a striptease and at every stage you had a mystery that the community could solve that uh you know a sort of open source

00:04:36.460 investigation at that point i said this is too this is too perfect the well shot video from the killer's point of view the mystery of the gun

00:04:48.140 what kind of gun the uh you know following the bike path digitally and then it just got more and more

00:04:58.400 made for social media um you know he appears at a hearing wearing the outfit that lee harvey oswald

00:05:07.540 the exact sweater with collar combination that lee harvey oswald wore when he was you know brought to justice by

00:05:15.980 even the even the uh police and escorts around him were arrayed in something of the same way uh so he

00:05:23.400 dressed the part of the patsy or oswald the the hood part was of course redulant of the unabomber of course

00:05:34.440 and uh then whoa and behold a manifesto appears much like the unabombers in which you know he

00:05:43.400 outlines his motives he's avenging the uh torturous brutal american health care system

00:05:53.260 on behalf of all those who've been denied coverage he's a man of the people and so on it got so bad

00:05:59.620 at one point that i saw when he went to when he was arrested in a mcdonald's with all his stuff

00:06:06.060 with the gun with the manifesto you know with the costume that he'd been wearing um and was sent to jail

00:06:15.820 i saw a uh a news uh program in which the reporter was standing outside the jail while luigi was

00:06:24.800 presumably being processed in and he said to the uh you know headquarters uh anchor person

00:06:33.380 i can hear cheering inside the jail i can hear the cheering for luigi um we've now evolved to bill

00:06:43.360 burr the comedian going on tv free luigi uh there are candles uh you know votive candles sort of roman

00:06:52.420 catholic style candles usually devoted to saints but wearing luigi's image um there are fan clubs there

00:07:03.100 are reddit forums there are all across social media um adoring groups of people trying to build a

00:07:14.300 defense for him analyzing the evidence and honestly the evidence isn't very good america is under the

00:07:21.580 impression that they saw this murder take place but in fact they just saw a hooded figure another

00:07:27.840 almost amazing uh development was that when the gun was found it turned out to be a ghost gun so to

00:07:36.040 speak a 3d printed gun with a 3d printed muzzle a silencer well it just so happens the crime was

00:07:45.520 committed in december that there is a supreme court case in march i believe uh to adjudicate the question

00:07:52.620 of whether 3d printed uh accessories to firearms are legal uh there was already a supreme court that

00:08:00.200 allowed for them the receiver and and the basic parts of the gun to be printed but there was still

00:08:07.440 this question so the even the firearm itself played into a coming on the calendar supreme court case

00:08:16.440 and it was the first such weapon to be used in a murder i believe uh it also let's remember happened

00:08:24.860 right after the election uh it happened in december the left in america is uh completely demoralized

00:08:33.920 one of its uh one of its disappointments is that youth didn't come out to vote for harris and the number

00:08:40.140 they expected um they they really expected young women to swing that election and if you heard the

00:08:46.760 commentary right beforehand uh they almost considered a certainty well they hadn't but luigi who we when we

00:08:56.360 saw his casual photos and his family album in the first couple weeks after his arrest was perfect for

00:09:04.240 the arousal of the young american woman shirtless uh six-pack uh there used to be a magazine called tiger

00:09:13.660 beat in america which teenage girls would would you know put up pictures from on their walls donny osmond

00:09:20.880 yeah and so i i call him a tiger beat revolutionary he he appeals directly to the demographic that on the

00:09:29.340 democratic side they feel uh is most likely to be loyal to them and whose passivity in the last election

00:09:38.020 was a problem for them well they're reactivated he is a combination of kaczynski uh oswald he in his

00:09:47.040 dress he evoked that and charles manson uh you know beetle mania almost has been fomented around luigi

00:09:57.600 we had taylor taylor lorenz the strange you know ex-washington post reporter give an interview in

00:10:04.440 which she really tried to understand and almost fanned out in doing so the luigi phenomena how appealing

00:10:13.560 he is he was of course positioned as a you know robin hood like figure who had on behalf of the

00:10:20.420 downtrodden who are the victims of these health insurance companies come forth to you know administer

00:10:25.560 frontier justice but in fact he's comes from a very wealthy family east coast family went to the

00:10:32.800 university of pennsylvania um i noticed that in his letter he thanked uh people all over the world for

00:10:40.460 contributing to a go fund me like uh defense campaign he's he's brought in a million dollars well

00:10:45.880 his family has well over a hundred million dollars you'd think that he should maybe spare the poor

00:10:52.560 people of america having to pay for his uh murder defense and let his parents do it but in any case

00:11:00.800 in this letter he further extends his own image because he's quite conscious of himself as as a

00:11:07.920 living legend there are a couple quotes in it he says uh the artist's task is to save the soul of

00:11:15.340 mankind and anything less is dithering while rome burns and that's a quote from terence mckenna who is a kind of

00:11:23.780 psychedelic hippie philosopher you know disciple of timothy leary and so on so luigi considers himself an artist

00:11:31.200 he ends that letter with these telltale words never lose the plot written in his own hand the rest of it's

00:11:42.740 type to me all of this is evidence that whether he has done it himself whether he's done it with help

00:11:50.300 or i i can't speculate on that he created uh intentionally deliberately with some care a made for social media

00:12:00.940 assassination which he is continuing to cultivate with the help of now tens and hundreds of thousands

00:12:09.780 of volunteers he solves a problem he he he he solves a problem for for the left in america you know they

00:12:18.160 need a an appealing uh youthful uh attractive uh somebody younger than bernie to carry forth the torch of

00:12:29.740 you know of social justice um and he appeared at just the right time in just the right way with just

00:12:36.780 the right storylines people are still on social media comparing the two photos the first of the hooded

00:12:43.520 figure and then the one of him little later when he reveals part of his face checking the eyebrows the

00:12:50.240 eyebrows don't match his defense is going to be quite obvious i'm not the guy in the hood i'm not the guy

00:12:58.500 who you see fire the gun um and in fact he was not apprehended there he was not identified there

00:13:07.120 he he i think personally is part of a narrative that has been constructed in a way that a gamer or a

00:13:19.280 computer science uh student like him might have done personally but that it has carried on after he's

00:13:27.640 in jail as though with the help of others you know he didn't get to go shopping did he before he

00:13:34.520 dressed himself for the for the perp walk i mean i i guess maybe he stipulated i want that i want you know

00:13:42.340 that he seems to me to have accomplices in creating the luigi show and it says everything about america

00:13:54.300 that he has fans he has posters he has merch he has a gofundme or its equivalent and he has a story

00:14:03.560 the the avenger it breaks down a little when you realize he comes from this rich family and that in

00:14:09.500 fact he never would have been he never would have been denied coverage in a way that he couldn't have

00:14:14.720 paid that's the most perfect part yes the private school kid from penn gets immediate support from

00:14:22.380 the rich girl from greenwich taylor lorenz right i mean this the whole movement the whole bernie

00:14:27.460 movement um i don't think it started this way but it has ended up this way is the is the movement of

00:14:33.040 like rich kids right right yeah it's like when i was at princeton you know i got to princeton from

00:14:38.780 minnesota middle class minnesota and everybody's all the rich kids know about reggae i thought reggae was

00:14:44.700 of poor people's music from the slums of jamaica you know um so yeah he's a trust safarian for sure

00:14:53.220 and but what he's doing is he's rousing these anti-establishment emotions among a demographic

00:15:00.680 that has already predisposed to them but hasn't had a champion and certainly not a sex symbol

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00:19:06.740 wireless by americans for americans but the heart of the story is murder it's violence well

00:19:13.600 shooting a man who's the father of children who you know may have been a good man or a bad man i don't

00:19:18.880 even remember his name nobody does he's just some health care ceo i mean he's not in the story at all

00:19:24.420 and his but his murder is the story right and i just i'm amazed you can hate the health insurance

00:19:32.320 companies i certainly do i hate almost all big companies um but to endorse a murder of somebody

00:19:39.040 is a big step that's i never thought that that that would be widely accepted in america well when i

00:19:45.360 started narrating this i decided i was going to be the you know the garrison keeler or whatever the

00:19:50.660 luigi story i would tell the story as it as if it were a folk tale and try to point out to people how

00:19:57.140 artificial elements of it seem how contrived and how pre-planned um people said i was crazy they also

00:20:04.940 predicted the story would go away america get sick of him he was an unappealing character attached to a

00:20:11.520 murder that the very opposite has happened his cult has grown he has a cult and um the question is

00:20:20.600 when his actual trial comes around will they be able to find jurors who haven't been exposed to this

00:20:29.800 folk hero robin hood uh legend um i have a hard time believing that in new york city uh they will find

00:20:39.160 12 who will convict him in a case where he is linked circumstantially but also has several outs when

00:20:47.500 they when they investigated the uh electronic bike use they found out that he had picked up the bike

00:20:54.080 at one part of new york city three and a half miles from the site of the murder and somehow managed to get

00:21:01.220 there in four or five minutes and and the junior detectives have rerun the route and say there's

00:21:08.440 no way you can make that trip in less than 13 so there's the first flaw in the prosecution's case you

00:21:15.300 know they never saw his face and it's not the same eyebrows uh when you see the two uh versions of the

00:21:21.880 face there's check mark too i predict if you've ever seen the movie network a satire of american

00:21:29.680 television and mass media and news where they actually stage their own crimes in order to keep

00:21:35.560 the ratings high at this failing network i i see elements of that here you know uh cable news

00:21:43.500 not just social media social media is on the in the ascendant but cable news is dying but luigi when he

00:21:51.340 goes on trial is going to be an advertising boon like you can't imagine uh what do you think the truth

00:21:58.780 is of the murder i think the truth of the murder is murky there's no look that looking at the evidence

00:22:06.340 as it has been presented so far it does seem a little weak and contradictory um uh there's some

00:22:14.360 question as to whether the bag he was carrying at the mcdonald's was was taken from him in a way

00:22:22.800 that uh was unlawful uh technically um in violation of how you search a suspect um they separated him from

00:22:34.280 it early before really announcing themselves as police um there are a lot there are a lot of uh

00:22:41.920 weaknesses in the case and to be honest i play stories out not for their likelihood but for their

00:22:49.960 possible cultural impact and if i were in what they call the writer's room in hollywood scripting

00:22:56.340 luigi uh drama i would imagine that the ending they want is he is found not guilty he comes out of jail

00:23:05.980 a people's hero che Guevara you know uh whatever the revolutionary that all the girls can love with the

00:23:15.660 kissable face and the six-pack abs and he becomes a media star well he he will it will be ambiguous as

00:23:24.660 to whether he committed the murder or not um he's obviously pleading not guilty so what i mean so

00:23:30.600 you're saying that girls like murderers well they do i mean i they do that's something that we we

00:23:37.200 weren't told before we embraced female leadership of the country that the country became a lot more

00:23:42.240 violent and well less restraint i would say on people's behavior and there is a kind of bloodthirsty

00:23:48.880 quality to american culture that did not exist well years ago manson of course had his had his fans and

00:23:57.360 his minions and his groupies um he had them commit the crimes for him in many cases uh and it was mostly

00:24:05.320 female yeah richard ramirez the night stalker one of the most horrific serial killers in american

00:24:10.940 history who uh you know uh broke into bedrooms and tortured people in the 80s had an infamously

00:24:19.400 long list of female visitors and women courting him and proposing marriage and so on um you know

00:24:29.140 the bad boy uh is always an attractive figure in america james dean martin martin marlon brando but

00:24:36.880 the evil boy seems to have a constituency too no it's true and i think um i didn't grow up with a lot

00:24:44.760 of women and no women in the house and i always assumed that men you know men commit all most of

00:24:49.260 the violence in our society but i always assumed it was men who were for violence women were against

00:24:53.660 violence but i i've learned just by watching as i've gotten older that women is a broad generalization

00:25:00.120 but certainly female leaders are way more enthusiastic about violence than male leaders

00:25:04.480 well i'm not going to go as far as that in terms of my generalizations only because i you know i want

00:25:12.060 to live a free man for a few more months no i'm not i mean i don't mean it it's just an observation

00:25:17.660 it's not even an insult but it's like but but but but in favor of your thesis bonnie and clyde yeah

00:25:23.340 um you know uh was there ever a more six 60s style sexy romance than that between

00:25:33.000 faye dunaway and warren beatty and bonnie and clyde yeah no it's true and uh you know going back to

00:25:40.900 film noir and our sort of you know artistic history the femme fatale who often

00:25:47.380 often often causes the killing yes you know in double indemnity who who uh recruits poor fred

00:25:55.480 murray to kill her husband uh played by all those different actresses who who specialized in being

00:26:02.400 the dangerous heartless blonde is one of those motifs one of those tropes that has a basis in our

00:26:10.440 psychology you know i've i've certainly noticed um because you would think it would be disqualifying

00:26:15.820 you know despite the six-pack abs and the you know the dashing hood uh if you gotta murder a guy

00:26:22.120 on the sidewalk you would think people be like you know i i'm mad at the health care system i don't

00:26:26.420 like health insurers but you can't shoot a father and a husband like on the street like what and by

00:26:32.720 the way if you can do that if what this case does is introduces or reveals an acceptance of murder

00:26:39.600 then that's a predicate for what's to come i think well you know here he is writing his new age letter

00:26:47.060 from jail talking about you know the novels he's reading and he ends it not just with never lose

00:26:54.980 the plot but with the single word light you know light he's a bearer of light um and hill gabron kind

00:27:02.680 with a gun yeah killer killer poets um and we know from our uh experience of adolf hitler that

00:27:12.220 the frustrated artist can turn into the most prolific killer oh for sure and i know from a book i wrote

00:27:18.940 about a guy named clark rockefeller who had murdered a couple of people he was a he was a an imposter who

00:27:26.120 called himself a rockefeller but he murdered a couple of people and uh you know uh how can i put it

00:27:35.220 that can be by some considered a work of art a sort of higher nietzschean expression of self and when

00:27:45.020 when when when when lizi styles himself an artist here it's very troubling especially to me an artist who

00:27:51.900 doesn't kill people yes and also i mean i don't i don't know i mean this is like a theme in crime

00:27:58.120 and punishment too um i think there's nothing particularly artistic about shooting strangers

00:28:04.200 on the sidewalk yeah well i i will leave you with this i haven't seen the family of the victim come

00:28:13.860 out demanding uh that luigi be imprisoned or punished and i was just thinking i have i have reason to

00:28:23.160 believe that there are members of the family that aren't completely convinced he's guilty i'll leave

00:28:29.500 it at that it's not something i could report the family of the victim the family of the victim yeah

00:28:34.180 i i i think among certain people involved it is still a question as to whether he's you know

00:28:42.120 whether he's guilty of the murder itself whether he was involved in the crime but not the actual gunman

00:28:52.500 or whether he was a guy maybe told to do something and he found out later that

00:29:00.840 he was the wrong place in the in the wrong place in the wrong time at the wrong time all these things

00:29:08.480 are possible now especially and and when you see how much he seems to love jail he's reading

00:29:14.620 fahrenheit 451 he's reading ayn rand a book about a uh an imprisoned guy who becomes a scientist

00:29:21.660 and a hero um you sense that this is a guy who is acutely aware of the mythical and uh cultural

00:29:32.560 precedence for his own actions well and i mean is that seems like a pretty compelling argument

00:29:38.320 for his guilt that he's embraced the role yes as avenging murderer but in walter kern world where

00:29:45.720 everything's a novel and and and i i let me just put that out there i i think that we now have had

00:29:52.620 reality dissolve before our eyes enough times we've had we've had the experts um debunked enough times

00:29:59.860 we've learned enough about the um uh untrustworthiness of our media that we have every

00:30:06.760 right to speculate they used to call it conspiracy theory but we have every right to speculate on

00:30:12.880 what indeed we're watching when we watch huge stories i think especially huge stories that have

00:30:19.080 the potential to move political uh blocks and and and change sentiment over certain issues and uh

00:30:28.560 to me the jury is very much still out on whether what has become a kind of online reality game

00:30:37.160 has has the has the grounding in actual reality that we imagine it does well i just want to be in the

00:30:46.540 record uh in saying that convincing the american population to accept the murder of a stranger

00:30:53.820 um is a big big big step and it's a precedent we're going to regret and it's already been done

00:30:59.980 to some extent because just a couple of weeks ago when these two people were murdered out uh in washington

00:31:06.160 dc uh remember uh gunned down yeah right outside the israeli embassy right outside the israeli embassy

00:31:14.480 uh the killer fired numerous bullets into the crawling uh form of the female victim to dispatch her

00:31:24.580 completely a violent horrible crime not like the one shot that luigi did there were people who came

00:31:34.380 out immediately to say he's the new he's the new luigi so i'm opposed to that i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm not

00:31:40.100 you know well that we should have to say we're opposed to it as a measure of how terrible things

00:31:46.560 are it used to be without question that one was opposed to shooting people on sidewalks as they

00:31:53.200 crawl to safety or gunning down the father of a and husband on the streets of new york as he attends a

00:32:01.460 conference but apparently now there are two sides to those matters and one of the reasons is luigi

00:32:09.440 so the psychological damage if you look at this in some way as a psychological operation whatever

00:32:17.540 you look at it that way whatever else it is yes then it has succeeded already so you walk into my

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00:35:55.760 tucker code tucker for 25 off your first order highly recommended i feel like every society

00:36:03.760 people in general are always on the brink of homicidal violence like that's why we have laws and police and

00:36:11.060 courts and you know anyone who understands human nature knows that and so the second you you know

00:36:18.200 allow the acceptance of murder um boy you're just going to get a lot more than you imagine in return

00:36:25.820 once you drop that you know the final defense of the primary defense against murder is public sanction

00:36:32.120 against murder like we don't like murder no normal person likes murder and when that changes i don't care

00:36:37.460 how many cops you have or how many cct cameras you have like you're going to get a lot of murder if you

00:36:42.300 change that attitude no you're going to get a lot of murder and you're going to get a lot of

00:36:48.340 uncertainty on the part of people in power i i know for a fact certain uh security organizations were

00:36:59.820 called just after this murder to beef up the protection of ceos and billionaires and so on i

00:37:07.040 mean that that business went through the roof after luigi um even if there are no more murders

00:37:13.940 it causes those people to separate further from society you know we up until recently yeah

00:37:21.520 the richest people in the world they might have had security but you'd see them walking into restaurants

00:37:27.220 you'd you'd be able to have a conversation with them sometimes come up to their table

00:37:32.200 this will cause the further um social balkanization of the classes that's exactly right boy that's such

00:37:41.360 a smart point and i i know some of those people and they're living in a completely parallel world

00:37:46.340 yeah now it does feel a lot like amazingly like pre-revolutionary russia where you had a period of

00:37:55.560 like 40 years of anarchist assassinations of prominent people and it softened up the society

00:38:03.940 for october 1917 the bolshevik takeover by the time that happened with you know minority support and

00:38:11.340 whatever but they pulled it off they were able to pull it off because people were nihilistic by that

00:38:17.060 point because a lot of people have been killed yeah yeah it it does it does degrade the capacity

00:38:23.720 for empathy it in a strange way in some people causes them to flip and they start to become

00:38:31.160 attracted to the notion of power through a gun they start to see maybe they're saving the soul of

00:38:37.160 mankind um maybe the killer is on the side of light love psychedelic mushrooms and you know groovy

00:38:45.280 things remember the manson girls a couple of the manson girls uh went on to well at least one to

00:38:51.180 try to assassinate gerald ford squeaky from yeah and you know i grew up i'm at this strange point in life

00:38:57.520 where i'm just old enough to remember the last really radical period in american history from the

00:39:04.000 late 60s in into the mid 70s and it was a similar vibe uh you know you turn on the tv and rfk was

00:39:12.540 assassinated you turn on the tv and right up until reagan really and reagan had been shot um it cooled

00:39:21.000 off for a while but boy during the trump campaign did it get hot again with those assassination

00:39:27.340 attempts and now we've had with the israeli embassy and with the luigi thing two more prominent

00:39:34.600 assassinations an assassination being something that's planned in which someone lies in wait and in

00:39:40.680 which the symbolic character of the violence becomes the headline you know so one of the worst

00:39:47.380 things we do in america was we take crimes and we turn them into allegories exactly you know we find

00:39:54.960 out that we find out if you hear today on the drive home that five people were shot at a walmart in

00:40:02.080 kentucky the first thing that everybody says is what was the race of the shooter what were the political

00:40:09.300 beliefs of the shooter um as though we're going to what make policy or understand our ourselves and

00:40:17.840 our souls in terms of who kills who and what their motives are uh

00:40:24.580 and the truth is that a lot in in the old days when there were obvious political killings like the

00:40:34.000 shooting of jfk we developed this notion that i think is all american of the the random lone psycho

00:40:42.600 killer now anywhere else in the world of if a president yeah or whatever is killed you see it as

00:40:49.580 political violence in pakistan they don't believe in the lone gunman yes but here we developed this

00:40:55.580 sort of uh archetype of the lonely nervous psycho killer who's just kind of maybe sexually confused and

00:41:02.640 frustrated and and they just do it for no reason it's random violence now in ancient rome you know

00:41:09.700 or in any society in which political violence is being used constantly you know wives are assassinating

00:41:15.280 their husbands brothers are assassinating their sisters everybody's competing you know to succeed to

00:41:20.800 this office or the throne or whatever and then in the rest of the world they know political violence

00:41:25.860 for what it is and they know it by its fruits and yet we up until recently in america obscured all that

00:41:35.700 with this myth of the guy who just snapped but if you pull back a little bit it's clear that the you know

00:41:43.620 that these are maybe not the product of intentional conspiracies but certainly used as part of like a

00:41:51.000 strategy and this is kind of and this luigi uh murder is kind of a third thing in the sense that

00:41:57.400 the conspiracy might belong only to him he obvious obviously researched ted kaczynski and the unabomber

00:42:05.760 he dressed like him he wrote a manifesto that was a a sort of tribute to him he um used he used his tactics

00:42:14.120 of coming into and out of cities on buses and so on um he studied the case uh whether it's a game

00:42:21.660 designed by luigi as a solo act or one which he had help with it is definitely engineered to be a

00:42:30.800 compelling social media um retweetable viral drama and where it's going is what concerns me because i do

00:42:40.820 frankly expect he might not be convicted and in that case we will have maybe a podcast host

00:42:50.280 or well definitely a podcast at the least they'll have a podcast you know um maybe he'll have a fashion

00:42:57.940 line who knows 80 t-shirts who we kind of wink wink know is a cold-blooded murderer or at least

00:43:06.580 somehow participated in a cold-blooded murder plot and we will at that point have completed

00:43:14.320 a next step toward dehumanization doesn't seem like there's anybody left in the society who can

00:43:22.800 stand up and say this is wrong whatever you think of the health insurers uh and be taken seriously

00:43:28.500 there are i don't are there more authorities left in the united states well i mean it's hard to say

00:43:37.400 uh the church and various religious authorities of my youth who used to have popular uh

00:43:45.700 popular influence billy graham that kind of person they don't exist um the moral authorities who were in

00:43:56.120 the press you know walter cronkite or so who even though he you know he might have been a liberal

00:44:02.980 you know massachusetts uh democrat part of that establishment did act as though he was somehow

00:44:11.640 speaking for all of us in a in a common sense traditional moral way um some you know we still get

00:44:22.440 the posture of moralism especially on the left we're a little less we're a little less inundated

00:44:29.440 by right-wing religious fundamentalism than we were in the 80s say or even under bush but true people of

00:44:38.500 integrity who can stand up and denounce things in a way that really sears the conscience of the country

00:44:46.400 across different groups don't seem to exist is the country too big uh to manage as a country

00:44:57.300 well you know i come from the cultural side and i don't know if it's too big to manage as a political

00:45:05.840 financial and economic uh entity but it's too big to manage as a cultural entity that's for sure

00:45:13.780 we have promoted uh overly promoted i think often in the name of diversity but that was cynical

00:45:23.080 um not just a balkanization but a kind of um atomization of our culture in which every group

00:45:34.860 over 10 uh can't agree with any other group over 10 uh now murder itself cold-blooded murder not

00:45:43.080 murders of pat crimes of passion we traditionally understood as having a slightly lower status as

00:45:49.860 moral crimes i mean somebody come came in and saw their wife in bed with somebody or somebody hurt

00:45:56.420 your child and you did a vigilante killing we understood that kind of cold-blooded deliberate

00:46:03.920 bought the gun came to town watched the person learn their movements killed them

00:46:09.100 that being a matter of debate is new so as a culture which you know andrew breitbart the

00:46:20.180 conservative thinker said politics is downstream of culture and i i kind of agree with him on that

00:46:25.660 because you know we're not always walking around following rules we don't have the constitution in

00:46:30.840 our pocket we don't have right we don't have the the statutes of the state of maine in our pocket

00:46:36.400 we have to rely on tradition on what our parents told us on what our heroes might do on you know what

00:46:45.380 we heard in church or you know what we learned playing sports it it is culture that guides our

00:46:52.400 behavior and if a country's breaking down it almost by definition it means that its culture has broken

00:47:01.380 down and if its culture is strong it's very hard for a country to break down

00:47:08.580 yeah i mean there are countries that with long histories of you know being invaded famine that

00:47:16.820 are actually fine still coherent kind of russia is one of them coherent country like it or don't like

00:47:22.600 it you know russians have a real sense of themselves as russians as participating in a

00:47:26.700 national project that's gone on a thousand years right um it's kind of hard to wreck and break a

00:47:31.840 country like that but if a country doesn't know has no sense of itself if people don't know what it

00:47:37.020 is they're part of right um i don't understand how it hangs together well america has done a great job

00:47:43.680 of assimilating people from all over the world huge groups you know my mother's uh ancestors came

00:47:52.000 from the mists of the carpathian mountains in hungary it might have been gypsies they were people

00:47:58.620 without birth certificates they came to america speaking hungarian most difficult language to learn

00:48:04.060 and to understand in the world for others yes and you know they made their way out of the slums in new

00:48:10.220 york to cleveland became uh you know landlords bought an extra apartment lived off that slaughtered pigs

00:48:17.640 in their backyard in cleveland ohio you know kept the old ways they became americans it it's not

00:48:25.360 it's not diversity per se or uh you know the um uh multiplicity of the peoples the in the united

00:48:36.060 states that causes a culture to break down it's attacks on what all such groups have in common

00:48:43.220 like the aversion to murder yes all those groups have in common certain beliefs about what a man is

00:48:51.480 and what a woman is and what the duty of a father is and what the duty of a mother is and of a child

00:48:57.380 and so on you go outside of the united states and you go oh my gosh it's a traditional world we're we're

00:49:03.540 the ones who have so true somehow melted the uh the social compact in ways that i think seem almost

00:49:12.700 impossible and horrifying to a lot of the immigrants might come frankly they must find

00:49:18.780 themselves in a country where they're you know the family's under attack where uh education and uh is

00:49:27.980 overwhelmed by questions of social justice and so on rather than learning to read um in some ways i i have

00:49:37.820 a kind of poignant empathy for a lot of the immigrants to america who come from cultures much more intact

00:49:43.660 than ours that'd be almost every culture outside the u.s western europe australia new zealand canada

00:49:48.980 yeah um outside the anglosphere which is uniquely falling apart for reasons that i don't really

00:49:55.360 understand why is that well i i i went to oxford you know after i went to college here i had a fellowship

00:50:04.040 to oxford and i lived there for a couple of years studied there for a couple years and then lived in

00:50:08.700 london afterwards it was during the period of thatcher's kind of recapitalization of the society

00:50:15.700 yeah when i got there england was a kind of grim post-war uh nationalized space in which you know

00:50:24.000 people were used to rationing and lines and the coal miners would go on strike and the whole country

00:50:29.920 would shut down and you know in a couple of years thatcher had sort of caused it to be a

00:50:37.200 dynamic more modern money-making and and the british thought materialistic culture um but it

00:50:45.880 it was functioning pretty well that's mid-80s um especially around speech and the freedom to express

00:50:55.300 yourself england of today seems like a nightmare um a place that threatens to arrest elon musk uh if he

00:51:04.080 comes for his twitter uh you know failing to police twitter uh where you know resentments and antagonisms

00:51:13.940 that are natural to a system that is bringing in so many newcomers and so on uh are declared crimes

00:51:23.480 where uh thought policing really is a reality and so is thought detention you know yeah so so

00:51:32.340 what i thought of as the country that brought the full flower of human expression to perhaps its greatest

00:51:40.340 you know greatest level in history i mean if you think about elizabethan england and

00:51:45.920 next few hundred years of literature it's unmatched in its uh in its quality of expression its wit

00:51:54.320 its insight into the human condition its drama uh its eloquence uh every sort of character you can

00:52:03.780 find in charles dickens uh every sort of criminal every sort of hero but they are getting very narrow

00:52:11.300 and very censorious and very

00:52:16.100 politically um oppressive in a way i wouldn't have thought was possible

00:52:21.400 in the country of william shakespeare and

00:52:25.160 you know charles dickens and yeah and of the magna carta and of the magna carta yeah

00:52:31.440 you don't want to be passive and tired and dependent do you of course you don't

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00:53:12.120 comes with top selling creatine and protein powder that delivers what your body needs to perform

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00:53:29.500 just on that page for people who listen to this podcast only they're encouraging you to be weak

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00:54:54.460 ammo squared dot com to learn more so you got i i don't even know if you want to talk about this if

00:55:00.720 you don't it's okay but you came back uh from england and wound up at some point working for a magazine

00:55:08.660 called spy spy magazine spy magazine um and spy magazine long gone but hugely influential in uh the

00:55:18.000 1980s and into the 90s uh what was spy what was what was spy magazine exactly well spy magazine was

00:55:26.140 a sensation it was a humor and gossip magazine aimed at the upper echelons of new york city and and los

00:55:36.860 angeles and washington in other words we've got tabloids that tell us what you know the tv stars

00:55:43.740 are doing and what you know rock musicians are doing but spy magazine followed the careers of people

00:55:51.280 editors at the new york times assistant secretaries of state uh various business people socialites and

00:56:01.400 it did what in a way what twitter does now it it made fun of them it sometimes exposed scandals about

00:56:08.320 them it turned them into cartoon characters chief among them was donald the young donald trump uh spy

00:56:15.500 magazine had an almost uh patented or hallmark uh obsession with donald trump in the 1980s as a

00:56:25.700 well they called him short fingered vulgarian uh that was his the epithet they used um and he was

00:56:32.860 thought to be uncouth uh greedy uh narcissistic he plated everything in gold he wanted some kind of

00:56:43.440 power that he probably didn't deserve he did not have a pedigree like a lot of new york society does you

00:56:49.900 know a lot of new york society goes back to old families here was trump coming out of queens you know

00:56:54.960 and hanging out with celebrities and there was a kind of political moment where trump um rehabilitated

00:57:04.300 a skating rink in central park that had fallen into disrepair woman rink and the city had sort of

00:57:10.580 acted like it's just we'll never fix it it's too far gone you know it's too complicated trump came in

00:57:17.540 with his own money and his own crews and restored this rink in record time for less than it was thought

00:57:26.020 it would cost and he became a proto-political leader and spy magazine was absolutely uh devoted

00:57:34.120 to making sure that went no further which is interesting that so you know it's new york city so

00:57:40.440 there are lots of short-fingered vulgarians in the real estate business in new york city who

00:57:46.060 guild things and hit the nightclubs and like it's a type it's very common in new york but and certainly

00:57:53.340 was in the 80s but they focused on trump yeah i mean to the exclusion of everyone else i mean it was

00:57:59.400 just as a reader i was a reader of it trump was kind of the star of the magazine yeah issue after issue

00:58:05.620 why trump well you know if you go back you see that trump has had political ambitions for a long

00:58:12.780 time um he reagan i think famously said on meeting a young trump this man's going to be president

00:58:19.680 someday and he started giving interviews fairly early about how he'd fix the united states and what was

00:58:26.060 wrong with it so my guess is that donald trump's political ambitions which he maybe talked more

00:58:33.020 about in private but were known uh were troubling to the establishment in some way um wait you're

00:58:41.400 describing spy magazine as a tool of the establishment well spy magazine came out of harvard um it came out

00:58:47.580 of the harvard lampoon the the the this i guess private club secret society devoted to humor that has

00:58:56.220 given us a lot of you know our american comedy from the simpsons to saturday night live and so on

00:59:02.760 our publisher was the son of a of a raytheon executive um we uh it's not a sector you associate with

00:59:12.120 humor well what influence it had i can't tell it's just the fact that that is the nature of the

00:59:21.300 publisher's money um and uh it also include included a lot of time magazine characters you know walter

00:59:31.100 isaacson who became uh head of time magazine head of the aspen institute and so on was sort of around

00:59:39.640 the magazine he would he never wrote for them but he was a constant butt of jokes and kind of in that

00:59:45.740 sphere of influence graden carter who went on to become the head of vanity fair which really was

00:59:51.220 uh you know an establishment uh you know uh force to bring you know a lot of a lot of our worship of

01:00:04.160 the british royals and so on comes from that era of vanity fair magazine um and uh there were other

01:00:12.440 characters involved in that set in that group who came from very high families uh ivy league

01:00:20.600 backgrounds and since have gone on to all sorts of positions it was an in crowd it was as though

01:00:27.840 college had never ended for this set of people and they went on and created a magazine treating new

01:00:35.160 york as a campus in which you know the real cool people got rewarded and the uncool people

01:00:40.940 you know were were mercilessly made fun of um is it an accident that the main butt of that humor

01:00:49.320 donald trump became president united states well i don't know but one thing i've learned about america

01:00:55.300 in my long tour of our you know high echelon system is that presidents are spotted future presidents

01:01:06.220 are spotted and even start their campaigns as it were the campaign before the campaign much earlier

01:01:13.760 than you might recognize yes my daughter went to harvard at first year she came back she said dad

01:01:20.440 they're so pretentious i said why she said i actually was sitting in a room with two guys who

01:01:25.740 were arguing and one was saying i'm running in 2046 you have to wait till 2050 and she said they were

01:01:34.260 serious i'm not surprised what i am surprised by is that of all the egomaniacs out there who think

01:01:42.800 they're going to be president and there are as you said quite a few institutions like harvard

01:01:46.460 um the editors at spy took trump seriously like they were really 40 years ago they were trying to

01:01:54.200 strangle his campaign in the crib yes i just think that's that's just incredible the the way that they

01:02:01.440 could smell that this was real he's not like everybody else he's not like other real estate

01:02:05.680 developers who think they should be president this guy actually could be and we're going to stop him

01:02:09.300 well those who are ambitious in america and politically ambitious and socially ambitious in a way

01:02:17.920 are all aimed at the same culminating office whether they get there or not you know anybody who you

01:02:26.460 know i remember when jack welsh the president of ge was a big celebrity for or lee iacocca immediately

01:02:33.900 will they be president so of course there would have been rumors around trump that he might want to

01:02:39.660 be president maybe he fed them himself maybe spy was especially lucky in picking this uh butt of its jokes

01:02:48.740 or maybe in some sense they saw in him uh the beginnings of a kind of rough populist to them uncouth uh

01:03:01.700 political movement that he would lead the people it's by you know trump's fighting harvard today right

01:03:08.840 you know the the cultural arguments that trump is having right now with the elite institutions of america

01:03:16.480 uh uh show that he doesn't like them and they don't like him and i think that uh hostility goes back

01:03:24.940 a long time in his career i think he was i think he was discerned as a a threat to the hierarchies as

01:03:34.800 they existed at that point and he still is and that's the root of the hate for trump

01:03:41.540 it could be to the extent you know people always ask me is there an establishment is there a big club

01:03:50.340 you know it is is america really have a kind of insider ruling class and my experience coming from a farm

01:04:00.560 in minnesota getting to princeton wide-eyed a good observer a good listener a social guy who gets into all

01:04:09.460 kinds of room is the answer is yes most definitely yes um and the lineages of these uh of these ruling

01:04:19.700 class members they go back in all kinds of ways through certain law firms through you know military

01:04:26.600 service intelligence service through they go back to big commercial fortunes you know uh you know we

01:04:33.540 still have a basically a vanderbilt on tv on cnn you know um uh and that group knows itself as

01:04:43.220 and and sees itself as a kind of knighthood uh or a knight chivalric order that's guiding

01:04:52.000 the u.s that that has a right in some sense to rule it and when they talk when i hear the term

01:04:59.840 our democracy it's often spoken by these people in a possessive way you know right john our democracy

01:05:06.180 john kerry our democracy right where the vote is internal it's not a national vote it's a vote

01:05:11.860 exactly you know it's kurt anderson and walter isaacson john kerry and you know and hillary

01:05:18.000 clinton and whatever and so i think it was pretty easy to identify trump early as an outsider and a

01:05:27.380 you know what they call in great britain a bounder somebody who was trying to jump a class

01:05:33.620 without the pedigree without the proper credentials and without the right attitude well here's the

01:05:40.680 story you probably haven't heard a lot about the chinese mafia is exploiting rural america to create

01:05:46.040 a drug empire this is not available on cable news the network's not telling you about this but it's

01:05:52.160 totally real communist affiliated drug gangs destroying parts of the united states the parts

01:05:57.000 that washington ignores to sell drugs laundering money and building a black market network

01:06:03.160 inside this country's most beautiful but least served areas we've got a brand new documentary on

01:06:10.560 this it's called high crimes the chinese mafia takeover of rural america it's available now on

01:06:16.560 tucker carlson.com it's excellent the purchase of churches and schools to aid the operation the

01:06:22.580 jerry rigging of power boxes to steal electricity foreign pesticides collusion with the mexican

01:06:28.140 cartels it's it's unbelievable by the way one of the drug houses is like walking distance from my house

01:06:33.080 i didn't know that it's a layered and fascinating story head to tucker carlson.com to watch now

01:06:39.100 we think you'll love it

01:06:40.740 when you got to princeton from minnesota in the 80s were you impressed by these people did you think

01:06:50.400 they deserved to rule so i came out of minnesota to princeton with one mythology you know in my

01:06:59.920 foremind and that was the story of f scott fitzgerald i was about to say yeah f scott fitzgerald

01:07:04.620 he came from a pretty good family in saint paul roman catholic kid but his mother had fallen on

01:07:11.160 hard times and though they lived in the right neighborhood they didn't have a lot and he goes to

01:07:16.660 princeton in the you know right before world war one or during it and he sees the glory of the american

01:07:25.940 establishment the beautiful debutantes the you know the sons of industrialists at princeton of course

01:07:33.720 at that time was uh you know an all-male school but there were other sort of feeder schools that

01:07:38.800 they could date the girls from and he absolutely was enchanted by it he wrote a novel this side of

01:07:46.540 paradise you know which princeton still sort of exalts over as its most romantic portrayal um and

01:07:54.500 i got to princeton primed by that myth but of course i get there in 1980 at the on the heels of the 60s

01:08:02.700 and 70s when you know aristocratic and system-based establishment america was at a low ebb after the

01:08:10.060 vietnam war so i wasn't expecting the same great gaspish party but what i saw were people who were

01:08:17.220 connected by all sorts of family marital business and school ties in a much tighter in a much tighter

01:08:26.380 uh organization than i would ever have dreamed and i also found out that i wasn't one of them

01:08:32.440 um i could be if i wished i you know in america when you grow up middle class and you go to the

01:08:39.860 right schools and so on you have the option of joining that country club on an honorary basis

01:08:49.400 if the membership votes and if you behave correctly but i being a kind of dark brooding

01:08:58.500 wannabe poet artist wasn't willing to do that and so i i spent my time sort of like the little match

01:09:07.660 girl standing outside the window watching them conduct their rituals play their sports that i had

01:09:14.680 never seen i didn't know how lacrosse was played i thought field hockey was something you played in the

01:09:19.320 gym with hockey sticks uh and a ball um and uh so the whole thing was alien to me but not charming

01:09:31.500 it seemed a little brutal it seemed a little insular it seemed very judgmental and it seemed to be

01:09:39.060 that sounds like boarding school yeah yeah and and it seemed to be populated by people who

01:09:44.880 they didn't just have material entitlement they didn't just think they deserved a big house someday

01:09:51.200 they had social entitlement and political entitlement they really believed that they

01:09:56.640 should rule the country you know and we had a thing called the woodrow wilson school at that time

01:10:01.700 at princeton the the sort of woke hurricane has come through and taken everything named after

01:10:07.260 woodrow wilson blowing it off the princeton campus but in those days the woodrow wilson school

01:10:11.640 was a place where generals and secretaries of state and uh you know federal reserve chairs and so

01:10:17.900 taught and the the the creme de la creme at princeton were people who would turn out like james baker

01:10:25.480 the secretary of state or or paul voker uh the fed chairman or whatever the princeton mythos was that

01:10:33.360 you were the gentleman advisors the powers behind the throne almost too good to be the president yourself

01:10:39.060 i didn't find that as romantic as fitzgerald did but of course think about what happened to fitzgerald

01:10:45.320 that class which he was so besotted by never really accepted him he ends up a journeyman screenwriter

01:10:54.500 alcoholic out out in you know uh la uh he writes his greatest novel really about the pretense

01:11:02.540 and the tragedy of that class you know uh whose hero is someone who desperately the great gatsby is

01:11:10.400 actually you know a kid from north dakota who wants exactly and and and a gun runner and a uh you know

01:11:17.500 gangster basically who wants to get in and they go to his parties it's sort of like what we've seen you

01:11:24.020 know gatsby wasn't epstein gatsby wasn't diddy but he he served a similar role he threw the

01:11:30.600 biggest parties and everyone went but the minute he went down everybody forgot him and there's no one

01:11:37.160 at his funeral at the end of the great gatsby you know um and so that brutal insider class that will

01:11:44.760 certainly eat your free food and grace your uh you know grace your parties with their presence

01:11:51.200 runs out on you pretty quick and i was frankly scared by them to be honest you know what my view of

01:11:58.880 british society was that it was somehow a a more humane and um i don't know secure version of it

01:12:09.480 the thing about the upper classes in america they're very insecure because i've noticed because

01:12:13.440 secretly they know they aren't upper at all and that in fact they live in a middle-class society

01:12:18.840 whose cultural products you know hollywood movies rock and roll and so on which are the true genius of

01:12:25.960 america aren't created by them no no and also their place isn't secure because it's not granted

01:12:33.220 to them really by birth like at some point you have to perform right or else you lose your summer house

01:12:38.860 right you know and which they often do and so there is a there is a kind of anxiety to them um and you

01:12:47.700 really really feel it and which is one of the reasons i think they're so easy to control politically

01:12:52.240 if you tell them or tell their wives more precisely that you know like all the cool people

01:12:58.860 are doing something they'll just do it right have you noticed this oh yeah the american you know there's

01:13:05.480 a great book by a writer named paul fussell who used to hang out at princeton and who i knew a little

01:13:10.300 uh called class i recommend that everyone read it and its thesis is basically that the american class

01:13:16.180 system is fully as developed as any other countries and it's got as many signifiers and code words and

01:13:21.960 secret clubhouses and so on but that it obscures its presence in order to not be offensive to our

01:13:27.980 allegedly democratic system um and now we've just discussed one more example of that luigi mangioni

01:13:36.040 you know from the highest cast of baltimore at least you know income wise society making himself out to

01:13:46.940 be shea guevara or fidel castro or huey newton or something no total sacco and vanzetti sacco and

01:13:55.220 vanzetti um given everything you've just described like where is the country in five years

01:14:03.800 well you know as i said at the beginning i see things in terms of stories stories are different

01:14:13.860 than narratives everybody says now oh that doesn't fit the narrative and they think

01:14:17.860 that narrative means story a narrative is simply joe biden is actually uh fit as a fiddle and he just

01:14:26.900 stutters it a story has a logic to it a narrative is just a description of what's going on a story is

01:14:35.840 how did something start what is happening and what kind of conflict is determining its unfolding and

01:14:45.240 how will it end the american story is hard to tell because right now we don't have one um we used to

01:14:53.140 have one when i went to school for whatever reason it was thought to be too simplistic or maybe too

01:15:01.960 white or too that or too colonialist but it was people come from all over the world fleeing

01:15:11.600 oppression looking for opportunity from an old set of kingdoms and societies that had basically squeezed

01:15:19.820 out the individual or they are just don't have much and they don't see how they can get much where

01:15:25.320 they are they come to america they tame this resource rich land uh and using this constitution

01:15:33.580 that allows the individual to have rights that in other countries only the privileged and the uh you

01:15:40.480 know high echelon types have they unleash this economic cultural scientific dynamo that allows them

01:15:48.240 to become the most powerful and in some ways the most fun and the most appealing and the most

01:15:54.800 magnetic culture in human history one that is imitated in every continent in the smallest towns

01:16:02.940 whose music spans the world whose boxers muhammad ali become the most famous people in the world

01:16:09.640 now the american story has been reoriented either fractured or reoriented there was a formal attempt

01:16:19.660 to do it with the 1619 project you know america began as a place to have slaves and exploit you know

01:16:27.620 other races and its real founding is in that sin and its real story is how that sin propounded itself

01:16:37.880 made everything worse developed a brutal horrible oppressive almost sickening society and we have

01:16:45.600 to somehow get about the business of righting all those wrongs or we can't even get started as a

01:16:51.640 society we might even have to avenge those wrongs i mean we're not talking about civil rights like in

01:16:58.100 the 60s we're talking about anti-racism and we're talking about you know uh punishment punishment and and

01:17:04.240 overt promotion uh of people not giving them opportunity but actually giving them the job

01:17:13.880 and maybe even with less of a resume um president of harvard it's important that she'd be black

01:17:21.480 it's less important that she'd be a plagiarist uh so in that american story

01:17:28.920 i guess the louisies of the world and the people who are riding in los angeles now and

01:17:35.040 so on think we're paying for our sins this is the this is the scene in the godfather where everybody gets

01:17:43.900 gets their comeuppance so that we can have a new society

01:17:48.220 the other story is over you know no matter how much somebody like elon musk or you know vivik ramswamy or

01:18:02.140 other people come to this country and make fortunes and found companies or you know become great athletes

01:18:10.000 and so on even though that still goes on and and it still goes on in all kinds of prominent ways

01:18:16.280 it's not seen as of the essence of our american project um so where we'll be in five years

01:18:24.800 i think depends on whether or not we're able to

01:18:28.100 find a version of the american story that is less retributive less about vengeance less about

01:18:41.220 retribution less about the past less about um uh making up for past sins and more about uh

01:18:52.000 new horizons uh a fresh appreciation of our freedom which is terribly threatened and uh

01:19:04.280 a common sense that we actually have done a fairly good job despite terrible uh dissent and really i

01:19:15.200 think um sabotaged by our elites i i you know uh it seems to be the upper classes and the elites of

01:19:24.860 america who have the biggest questions about it who have the greatest doubts about it who are most

01:19:29.320 hostile to it they often do it on behalf of classes well below them you know as they see it you know

01:19:36.480 migrants or uh people of other races or people of uh sexual predilections which in the past were

01:19:44.100 thought to be aberrant they always make sure to team up with you know a client class yeah a human shield

01:19:51.980 yes exactly but um i think they're on their way out i think they're on their way out so to be honest i

01:20:00.640 think there is a path toward re

01:20:04.140 toward resurrection toward restoration toward maybe even a renaissance in the sense that we now have

01:20:12.880 technical tools that we didn't before uh we've got technologies and uh the ability to communicate

01:20:19.560 and meet and get around some of the old institutions america was a set of brokerages before every

01:20:26.700 relationship with power had to be brokered you have to call stockbroker to buy a stock now you can do it

01:20:31.520 on e-trade you if you wanted to communicate with a billionaire um i don't know through what series of

01:20:40.380 meetings and letters to join his club yeah you could join his club now you can dm mark andreson

01:20:48.500 yeah and he will respond in many cases yeah late at night at length

01:20:54.000 what a great guy mark is so so the american ingenuity which is i think the title force

01:21:03.840 that unless restrained will always dictate our future is still alive it's it's it's in some ways

01:21:12.260 more alive than ever we've gotten around you know here you are having this podcast with all these

01:21:17.180 viewers without a network behind you um uh you know the universe of media and communication is

01:21:24.680 is horizontal rather than vertical there's no broker here there's no executive waiting outside to tell you

01:21:31.820 tucker you can't talk about that you know we're gonna get sued um or whatever um walter kern doesn't

01:21:38.200 have five levels of editors above him when he writes a sub stack or yeah uh you know a book um

01:21:45.800 and so i think i think we the people can outmaneuver the last stand of the brokerage classes and i think

01:21:56.620 we're in the i think we're in the process of doing it but the problem is some of the loudest and most

01:22:02.140 prestigious voices are those who are losing out who are on their way out you know scott pelly giving a

01:22:08.980 of cbs news giving some you know terrible strident jeremiah about american society because 60 minutes

01:22:19.940 is no longer have the prestige that it did mostly due to 60 minutes not due to evil donald trump um

01:22:28.120 the screams that you're hearing are the screams of the defeated and the screams of the stressed and

01:22:35.820 and and i actually you know it's fashionable some days to say i'm a real optimist at the darkest times

01:22:43.680 but i am because i think we've done a better job in the last few years of facing our real problems

01:22:51.100 at least identifying them uh of liberating ourselves from the media brokerage um and of

01:23:00.820 getting real that now there are instruments for the uh manipulation of uh of opinion and sentiment

01:23:09.080 that are extremely powerful and on the horizon by you know ai possibilities for literally spoofing

01:23:16.380 history you know changing our view of things making false videos re-engineering the past in 1984-ish

01:23:25.720 ways you know um but i do think our ingenuity our our our restlessness are uh are a great genius for

01:23:38.240 seeing bullshit you know my hero is mark twain and mark twain was at when he was at the full

01:23:45.700 you know flow you know flow of his career said i'm not just an american i'm the american and by that he

01:23:52.200 meant that his uh attitude seeing through pretense uh pointing out hypocrisy uh laughing at pomposity

01:24:02.300 was the essential american attitude and insofar as we can bring back that twainian skepticism

01:24:10.760 uh self ability to self-criticize ability to see through our own egos and ability to see

01:24:18.400 that the institutions are in a weird way not what makes america great they are things that grow up

01:24:27.740 and become like giant you know um obstacles to further creativity and must be constantly questioned

01:24:35.920 constantly leveled so that spirit seems to have liberated itself uh and found all sorts of

01:24:43.960 technologies with which to propagate itself and i'm betting on that you're not worried about ai

01:24:50.760 you're not a doomer on the question i'm not a doomer on ai in certain areas i am there are certain

01:24:58.440 things that people do that i don't think ai can ever do by definition right now it's possible to

01:25:05.920 put in five prompts or a series of 10 prompts and write a novel you know i want a novel in which

01:25:13.060 tucker carlson and i are lost at sea in polynesia and are rescued by a you know a mysterious maiden

01:25:21.820 who takes us to her village where her village of love um well we can get that novel that's kind of

01:25:29.400 like an early conrad novel for uh five prompts 200 pages and it can be published we don't even have

01:25:36.620 to say it's ai uh we can pretend we wrote it in the future more and more of our literary product is

01:25:42.660 going to be produced that way but what i say to people is are you going to want to read the literature

01:25:48.620 and the novels of an entity that has never had sex are you going to want to read stories written by

01:25:56.860 people who have never held baby are you going to want to read stories by people who have never

01:26:04.180 worked hard all their life to get a job and then had the political asshole in the office beat them out

01:26:11.440 at the last minute ai has no experience all it can do is constantly remix and and and perfect the

01:26:20.880 surfaces of things it's essentially collage that already existed but we're going to need to tell our

01:26:28.260 stories ourselves so i don't fear ai but there are things that i think it will do very badly in which i

01:26:35.000 have no interest and one of them is write novels write stories report on life uh why should we fear

01:26:45.160 it though i mean we're told not to fear anything by our religious sages and uh i think it's a reflection

01:26:54.920 of us if if we fear it we're fearing ourselves and what in ourselves are we fearing if we fear ai

01:27:01.140 uh a lot of what people think will happen is that there will be a kind of totalitarian agreement

01:27:08.140 among the powers that be to uh constantly hypnotize us tell us stories you know do things like run

01:27:17.420 pandemics and and other panics that can almost be administered by a machine and then generate documents

01:27:25.660 and and and videos and so on in support of them uh and and that's the thing they fear but what are

01:27:32.840 you really fearing there what you're fearing there is power running amok because it's not going to do

01:27:38.480 it itself until it starts doing it itself i love your take on ai sort of cautious concern not panicked

01:27:49.020 it does seem like everything you just said makes the existence the possession of physical books

01:27:55.980 unchanging physical books not digital things that can't be revised without your knowing more important

01:28:01.420 absolutely i mean i'm i'm a literary survivalist at this point you know you're a book prepper

01:28:09.080 well i am i i i buy sets of encyclopedias that i believe represent you know the perfection of that

01:28:16.580 particularly encyclopedia like an encyclopedia britannica from the 80s uh say before they

01:28:25.460 start becoming politically sensitive and you know uh i uh actually carry in my car some people carry in

01:28:34.440 their car jumper cables um granola uh you know a spare tire i carry a box of books that if i were to be

01:28:43.240 stranded somewhere if the road system of america broke down i'm not kidding i have a box of them

01:28:49.960 i selected them carefully there's a norton anthology of english poetry oh wow you know there are a couple

01:28:55.420 novels by conrad there are uh some other you know favorite books the collected sherlock holmes to

01:29:03.200 entertain myself which is amazing yes you can't read the sign of four too much no a study in scarlet

01:29:09.780 sherlock holmes stories were the first literary story me too i read me too um edgar rice burroughs and

01:29:17.920 then sherlock holmes yeah and and and i gotta say if there's you know if i'm an anglophile it's because

01:29:25.860 of sherlock holmes because i could imagine no fate more romantic than having a little apartment in

01:29:34.440 london with a roommate a doctor injecting a little cocaine when i got bored

01:29:40.460 and being called upon by scotland yard to solve their you know solve their most naughty mysteries

01:29:48.640 um also that there were ladies flitting around we don't think of sherlock holmes as having much of a

01:29:55.660 love life but he actually did it's indicated just the discretion the civilization you know the the

01:30:03.800 parlor that he lived in the simplicity of his life and and the aliveness of his mind were an endless

01:30:11.660 curiosity and uh attention to detail were really my babe ruth or my you know elon musk

01:30:23.060 that was my role model so funny me too i got packed off to boarding school in 1983 and my father gave

01:30:30.400 me the collected sherlock holmes arthur conan doyle and that's what i read for that first semester

01:30:35.460 when i was 14 or whatever and that totally and from there it's like a short hop to evil noir or well

01:30:42.440 right you know and i just sort of stayed in that genre my pg woodhouse right my whole life i haven't

01:30:47.620 moved beyond that well in the back in the back of my ram truck there's a box with the collected

01:30:53.280 sherlock holmes and if a solar flare ever takes out the grid i will be found next to a fire in the

01:31:00.100 nevada desert reading those aloud so the i think the largest repository of books uh in the world larger

01:31:07.820 than the fabled library of alexandria is the library of congress it's one of them yes it's it's it's

01:31:15.020 unclear uh what the largest library just like it's unclear what the largest anything is right no

01:31:20.320 that's exactly right but it's it's got a claim on the title it's it's a massive repository of physical

01:31:26.120 book paper books um trump just fired the head of it i don't know if there kind of is a head of it

01:31:32.760 i heard someone say the other day that walter kern was going to be the head of it are you going to be

01:31:36.800 the librarian of congress would you want that job what is that job well total candor i was approached

01:31:43.520 by some people um in december asking if i might be interested in the job i thought about it uh

01:31:51.780 i actually grew up when i was a little kid on the outskirts of washington and i had a next door neighbor

01:31:58.400 he was a rear admiral he had been a uh sergeant in world war one his name was robert knox he was a

01:32:05.940 rear admiral in a thing called the coast and geodetic survey which was a um branch the government

01:32:12.180 founded by jefferson way back when to chart and map the uh coastlines of america and the world

01:32:20.700 it was kind of the nautical equivalent of the lewis and clark expedition and this man who was in his

01:32:28.280 70s uh introduced me to the smithsonian institute and he he was a member of a club called the cosmo

01:32:35.820 club in in washington dc and he'd take little me down there and that was a place where kind of

01:32:41.240 explorers generals admirals and that type gathered and he he introduced me to a vision of mankind he

01:32:49.820 used to call it humankind and our achievements that was as i say jeffersonian goes back to the belief

01:32:57.720 that if we can understand each other better if we travel more if we learn more if we uh read more

01:33:04.920 we will become more peaceful productive and happy people so when someone said would you be interested i

01:33:14.160 leapt back to that experience in that little garden apartment in park fairfax virginia with this man who

01:33:21.020 would show me his books teach me geography show me his globe take me to the smithsonian

01:33:29.140 introduce me to writers and other intellectuals at his club and i thought yes that's the continuation

01:33:36.960 of that spirit that that man uh brought into focus for me as a young man and i thought it's the only job

01:33:46.460 i would do in fact you could come to me and ask do you want to you know have this political office or

01:33:52.700 you know some kind of other uh role in in governance and i would say absolutely not

01:34:02.020 stuffy boring i'm a writer i'm an artist uh i'm a little bit of a freaky guy i'm an outside the box

01:34:10.340 thinker librarian of congress yes and the reason wasn't just because it goes back to jefferson you know

01:34:18.280 the library of congress uh was partly founded at by jefferson selling his library to the united

01:34:26.360 states uh the the the library of congress goes back to 1800 in fact it was proposed even before

01:34:34.340 the constitution that the u.s have a national library and it didn't fly the first time so the idea of a

01:34:40.440 national library is older than the united states uh and it exists in a beautiful building right up there

01:34:47.760 between the supreme court and and the uh capital and it represents to me the entire body of what

01:34:56.280 we've done what we've thought what we've written now it collects the movies we've made the music we've

01:35:02.440 made it has done a very good job of making them available to the public you know digitally and in

01:35:09.840 other ways and it is the shrine to american culture civilization more than that it cannot it can be

01:35:21.300 added to every every book that's published in america sends two copies to the library of congress

01:35:26.060 that's why it grows but it can't be changed and it needs to be protected what a librarian is to me is a

01:35:34.380 guardian who stands in front of this vast file of our accomplishments and says you're not going to

01:35:43.260 change it you're not going to harm it you're not going to destroy it i'm between you and it and we

01:35:51.140 are going to celebrate this because this is a temple you're not getting into the vatican to throw bombs

01:35:56.220 and you're not getting into the library in a congress to pull books to to to change editions to

01:36:02.760 retroactively rewrite history to play that role not just of guardian but of champion

01:36:11.520 would be a privilege to me a beyond beyond measure and next year is the 250 anniversary of the united

01:36:23.080 states as i say we're a little unclear about whether what our story is as a country but the library of

01:36:32.540 congress sits at the center of that story and is the place we can go to to find it and rediscover it

01:36:41.620 and i think it's an underappreciated and underutilized um institution in american life

01:36:49.480 that needs to be brought to the fore you know sometimes uh i imagined when this uh person suggested

01:36:58.040 i do it and i took it to various officials i i showed my interest and some of them were were

01:37:03.780 encouraging and they said you know you have to be confirmed by the senate and you're a weird guy

01:37:09.520 you've written all kinds of things there are scenes in your books you know um opinions have expressed

01:37:15.160 uh that aren't very political i said well nobody who's a writer grows up to want to be a politician i i

01:37:23.000 you know uh i was a writer but i think because i have books in the library of congress i'm probably

01:37:29.500 better qualified than people who don't i also i also i also think that you know if you want to talk

01:37:35.620 about diversity look at a bookshelf the works of william burroughs drug-addled madman homosexual

01:37:46.420 visionary uh crazed junkie wife killer wife killer sit next to the works of you know robert frost

01:37:59.360 peaceful vermonter peaceful vermonter in other words if we as a society can hold our differences

01:38:09.340 i like the word difference better than diversity uh can hold our differences in one building then we

01:38:16.040 can hold them in one country you know a book a great library is a tribute to variety and peaceful

01:38:23.100 coexistence that society could well model itself on and i'd love to be the face of that and it has a

01:38:31.720 great history you know franklin roosevelt appointed a poet archibald mcleish um uh ford gerald ford

01:38:39.560 appointed a historian daniel borsten um who was a great thinker too um we've not had many librarians

01:38:48.000 of congress because until the office was term limited under obama to 10 years sometimes people

01:38:55.760 held it for 40 that suggested it might be a job i'd like if people are willing to spend half their lives

01:39:04.940 in that job there must be something about it are books threatened oh absolutely well before i say

01:39:14.440 answer that question i i have a joke that i missed inserting and it's not the reason i really want to

01:39:20.440 be a librarian of congress is that i've already written the desk plate for my desk which says

01:39:25.340 the book stops here um well then you need a place to put that right and and and and that's the answer

01:39:32.820 to your question books are threatened in lots of ways first of all they're not physically of quality

01:39:40.300 in the way they used to be the way books are printed and the paper that they're printed on these days

01:39:44.960 is not designed to last for 100 years it's not designed to last more than a few years i i happen to

01:39:51.640 know this from discussions with publishers that they are now being forced to use paper that is of

01:39:57.820 such low quality that we cannot depend on these volumes staying bound or readable or intact for very

01:40:06.520 long books are threatened in all kinds of other ways there will be artificial books written by ai one of

01:40:13.000 the big questions is does every book length work created by ai belong on a shelf in the library of

01:40:20.240 congress well there's going to be zillions of them and a future librarian of congress is going to have to

01:40:26.360 answer that question do we just fill this up with you know the endless dreck produced by a mechanized form

01:40:33.200 of writing or does it have to have real authorship human authorship um books are threatened also because

01:40:41.700 we don't read we don't read we don't read at length anymore we read headlines we read the paragraph we read

01:40:50.960 the short take we read the sub stack we read the tweet but to read a book is a skill that might be lost

01:40:59.700 you know almost like sailing or you know or or or you know how how how to raise a garden it's it it takes

01:41:08.660 not just patience it takes a certain kind of mind to follow a complicated story that goes back and

01:41:16.880 forth and doesn't have simple resolutions or simple morals in which the characters are complicated a novel

01:41:23.800 for example you can lose the ability to read it and people are losing that ability i've noticed and

01:41:30.040 there's something really important about following a story a set of ideas unified by a theme a thesis a

01:41:38.060 narrative uh over you know a couple hundred pages it absolutely remember my once asking my father

01:41:45.000 about my real mother who was long gone and i said um she seems smart she's smart high IQ person and he

01:41:52.000 goes yeah she read magazines it's like i guess the most cutting thing you know you're speaking of ai one

01:41:59.320 feature that ai offers these days is it will interpret a tweet for you and i don't know if you've seen this

01:42:06.200 you're not a big social media guy no i'm not but uh people are using grok and other ais to interpret a

01:42:13.640 tweet what did that mean in other words they're now downloading their literary imagination and their

01:42:20.340 interpretive ability of of two sentence documents to machines reading is not just putting together the

01:42:30.880 words like a child and you know pronouncing them correctly or or you know knowing what a sentence is

01:42:39.640 reading is a set of reactions and echoes created in the mind that form an interpretation and an analysis

01:42:48.920 and an impression and maybe even a moral and it's just reading itself is just the start of the reading

01:42:56.660 process seeing the words is just the start of where a book enters mind the soul the culture and so on

01:43:05.160 and that process if it dims down if it thins away if it becomes so uncommon as to not be a regular

01:43:16.260 uh you know a regular habit or occasion in our society will leave us starved in a way that

01:43:25.400 bobby kennedy tells us our foods are starving us you know uh we're still going to be eating vast

01:43:32.260 quantities but the books will be velveta cheese uh pumped up with you know a hundred different uh

01:43:39.520 additives uh i look at what is contained in the library of congress the pre-ai library of the united

01:43:47.700 united states as um what they call in the vaccine world pure blood a pure blood or a control group

01:43:56.440 of of documents from the time when people thought without the intervention of the machine we're going

01:44:03.340 to need that we're going to need to compare the culture that comes after ai with the one that came

01:44:09.060 before and we're going to need to keep a relationship between them and it's not just a matter of keeping

01:44:14.740 those books from being altered or you know deleted it it's a question of keeping that shrine alive so

01:44:24.220 that when we come back from the wilderness of ai to the north star of this library of what we did when

01:44:33.740 it was all done by hand and by a person we can judge what we've lost what we've gained

01:44:41.280 and be whole as people

01:44:44.420 did you are you an adult man when the internet uh was invented so yes you remember um the hype that

01:44:54.560 surrounded it did you ever imagine 30 years ago when it was just starting that the internet would

01:44:59.280 lead to illiteracy well in some ways okay in some ways we're more illiterate than ever in that

01:45:06.920 we communicate by writing in more than ever yes people don't even talk on the phone no you know

01:45:14.140 text messages and and posts and and x posts and you know facebook pages and so on are all written

01:45:22.640 documents so people are in a sense writing more than they ever did sometimes they are writing more

01:45:28.160 than they speak you you can go through a whole day and realize you didn't even speak to another person

01:45:33.620 but you wrote plenty so literacy considered in its most you know basic and literal sense

01:45:41.340 has not died out we do a lot of writing and reading still its quality has suffered and there are

01:45:49.940 measurements of the vocabularies of americans and basically the vocabularies of ai programs and so on

01:46:00.540 that show our vocabularies are shrinking uh you know in orwell it's it the the totalitarian state

01:46:09.180 is actively engaged in shrinking the language and making it more simplistic less uh you know

01:46:17.040 less complex so that people can't think anymore you know they have fewer distinctions uh the word bad is

01:46:26.280 double plus ungood because why should you need another word than good for bad we'll just modify

01:46:33.060 the word good and call it ungood um and the idea there is that they will slowly gain control of the

01:46:38.960 human mind to the point where people won't be able to form ideas because they don't have the words

01:46:42.980 to some extent that's happening because of the internet for various reasons i mean we did ourselves

01:46:52.440 the greatest injury culturally that i've ever seen in my lifetime when we shut the schools during

01:46:57.880 covet i'm i mean there are kids who have a window to acquire language and reading skills and that window

01:47:04.900 was closed for them and i i can't think of a greater tragedy in american life than that no um literacy

01:47:12.300 as a real living uh you know complex uh phenomena is i think endangered terribly endangered there are words

01:47:25.520 everywhere but is there sense everywhere my last question has to something we talked about last night

01:47:31.300 at dinner you just referred to orwell you are rereading 1984 for the first time in 15 or 20 years

01:47:37.420 you said uh it's been 40 for me and i think for a lot of people my age i doubt it by the way is it still

01:47:44.960 assigned in schools 1984 well let me tell you something tucker um i picked up the 75th anniversary

01:47:53.240 uh edition of uh 1984 approved by the orwell estate it's got a little seal on the cover

01:48:00.460 it's the official edition this happens to be orwell month um celebration of orwell all across england and

01:48:08.720 the english-speaking world and there was an introduction that the estate approved for the

01:48:16.200 book which was one of the most orwellian things i've ever seen it was written by a novelist who said

01:48:22.680 well winston smith the hero is a misogynist and that's she literally used the word problematic

01:48:29.580 and usually i wouldn't read a book with a character like this but you know you should probably

01:48:37.460 it's still an important book and then and then she made other criticisms you know in the the prologue

01:48:44.440 it is it is the introduction to the book okay i noted this i i noted this on a podcast and i said

01:48:52.520 orwell now has an orwellian introduction which accuses him of thought crime and warns us that

01:48:59.320 though the book is problematic we might want to read it anyway she also notes the lack of racial

01:49:04.960 diversity in not really oh yeah who is that do you remember her name i do not remember her name uh

01:49:12.680 she's a harvard trained novelist uh but what was so odd about it was that following the introduction

01:49:21.020 there's a another introduction forward written by thomas pinchon thomas pinchon who many would argue

01:49:28.820 is our uh most mysterious and uh uh illustrious serious novelist yep alive he wrote well purportedly

01:49:40.720 alive purportedly alive nobody knows what his face looks like exactly um you know he's written these

01:49:46.760 magisterial books that are you know some believe almost too complex to understand

01:49:52.920 and he did a forward but he got second billing he got bumped out of first place in introduction world

01:50:03.480 by this ridiculous trigger warning it's a series of trigger warnings about the book and it's not ironic

01:50:12.480 not ironic at all so so so terrifyingly earnest that you can't believe it um she criticizes the

01:50:21.400 book for not reflecting her lived experience my god it's a dystopian novel you know written in 1948

01:50:29.640 about a future totalitarian state which resembles a combination of soviet russia and england and it

01:50:37.260 doesn't reflect your lived experience the only books i want to read are ones that don't reflect my

01:50:42.120 lived experience i i don't read moby dick to reflect my lived experience right your your lived

01:50:48.840 experience would consist of your diary yeah right my lived experience is a drag it's a limitation i go

01:50:55.300 to books to go to other parts of the world be in other heads be in other times other parts of history uh

01:51:01.180 and and and that that should be a criticism of 1984 um it's just the triumph of narcissism i mean

01:51:08.380 that's just basically what that you know so so how is this about me enough about you so so anyway you

01:51:14.820 know that was the first alarming thing about 1984 and i hadn't even gotten to the book yet

01:51:18.560 when i got to the book itself i i have to tell you prophetic isn't the word prophetic is overused it's not

01:51:28.100 that he predicts the society we live in today he finds the eternal formulas by which power defeats

01:51:39.200 the human mind and individual it wasn't that he was just extrapolating about historical trends yes

01:51:46.880 he was giving us a worst case scenario for group think over person think he was giving us a warning

01:51:58.240 about what happens when we lose our memories more than anything else 1984 is a book about time

01:52:06.000 about a society which doesn't have access to the past in which the past is constantly rewritten

01:52:13.540 to celebrate the current leaders so it's wikipedia yeah kind of yes and in which there is no future

01:52:22.200 because no one can plan a life no one can even expect that they won't go to jail tomorrow for some

01:52:30.280 tiny crime or offense um people in 1984 are stuck brutally and tragically in the present and the thing

01:52:40.940 that keeps the present their sole preoccupation is the violence of society you know the thing about

01:52:49.780 violence is it happens now it takes you out of the past it blocks out the future violence is a deep

01:52:57.260 experience of the present only from which you can't escape and in 1984 the reason they have a two

01:53:04.640 minute hate where the society gathers every day to throw oranges and you know hurl curses at this

01:53:14.220 imaginary enemy subversive Goldstein and the reason they have a actual hate week in the summer every

01:53:22.580 year where they do that for a week is that fear anger and violence are ultimately the weapons of

01:53:32.800 the control class and he he does a very good job of showing how eternal and perpetual war with unseen

01:53:43.020 enemies abroad keeps you know keeps the people in their place and keeps them insecure and anxious he does

01:53:49.460 another good job of showing how constant uh fear in the domestic realm you know will i be told on will i be

01:53:58.600 turned in uh you remember in 1984 there's a telescreen that watches you you don't watch it you know will i be seen

01:54:05.900 to have some uh you know item i shouldn't have uh i'm supposed to have black market cigarettes but somehow i found

01:54:14.140 some good ones will they see those and come to my house and take them take me and so the book is a nightmare and it's a

01:54:23.400 thorough nightmare which seems to offer no hope at all at the end it's not any spoiler to say the uh

01:54:31.640 hero who manages for a short time to think for himself to have a love affair to write a diary his

01:54:40.680 great his great crime in the book is starting a diary pens and paper are pens and paper pretty much

01:54:47.900 illegal in in the world because they create a record that can't be falsified you know and

01:54:54.900 so at the end he's completely crushed he's tortured he's brainwashed and he comes out at the end a thoroughly

01:55:06.020 broken person saying saying slogans i love big brother without spirit without hope it is a hopeless

01:55:17.600 portrait of what happens when an inner circle of people devoted to power above all take control of the human

01:55:28.460 mind and the individual and i uh if you want if you want to depress yourself read 1984

01:55:37.560 uh that it resembles in so many ways things that are happening now is uncanny but

01:55:45.980 i guess someone used it as a template at some point i mean you would almost think they did

01:55:54.020 in so many ways our censorship regime our surveillance regime in in in the book the young people are the

01:56:01.680 enemies of the old they're spying on them constantly children are the most distrustful uh and zealous

01:56:11.540 uh backers of party orthodoxy there yes they're especially young women and young women in particular

01:56:17.960 and orwell has been criticized for that you know thus the misogyny uh because it bears no resemblance

01:56:25.260 to our current reality whatsoever i mean he just made it up out of nothing no um sorry it we we we have

01:56:33.000 when i read it as a child the reason they assigned 1984 was to tell us that there's this place called the

01:56:37.980 soviet union that is much like this and by reading 1984 you can celebrate your freedom to read 1984

01:56:47.540 exactly which they can't do over there you can celebrate the superiority of our culture and our

01:56:53.880 you know value for the individual and our freedom to think express ourselves uh without fear

01:57:02.080 but when you read 1984 now it's not to feel superior to the old soviet union or you know hitler's germany

01:57:10.960 it's to realize we're there we're so there that in some ways orwell lacked imagination he he didn't know

01:57:21.700 ai though one in in in in the world of 1984 novels are written by machines uh to just take the elements

01:57:30.840 of novels and like a kaleidoscope they they crank a wheel and new combinations come out you know which

01:57:38.520 is very much like the ai literature i've been predicting in 1984 machines write novels yes i don't

01:57:45.200 know how i forgot winston's girlfriend julia is in the novel writing department and and it's a funny

01:57:51.020 book at one point she gets injured operating the novel writing machine and and he and he said but it

01:57:57.840 was a common injury in the novel writing department she got her fingers caught in a novel writing

01:58:02.860 machine yeah yeah so i mean prophetic doesn't fully describe it if there's a novel writing machine i mean

01:58:12.520 right exactly he was limited by the technology of his day and and some of the circumstances and how

01:58:19.660 he imagined things the one thing he gets wrong is that 1984 the the society called ocean eye

01:58:27.320 airstrip one is the new name for england uh it's allied with america in in an alliance against

01:58:35.700 eurasia which is basically russia and eastern europe and east asia which is basically china and they're

01:58:41.900 they're perpetually at war with each other and the war and the sides change constantly one of one of the

01:58:48.560 greatest black humor scenes in all of literature is winston smith in trafalgar square some london square

01:58:56.580 during a big demonstration against the enemy eurasia and there are posters up of the of the

01:59:01.780 eurasian you know evil leaders and their atrocities and so on and in the middle of the protest the word

01:59:10.200 comes down from big brother from the party from the government that we're no longer at war with

01:59:15.060 eurasia we're actually at war with east asia and the posters against eurasia are all still up

01:59:20.720 so how are the people going to reconcile the fact because they're told we've always been at war with

01:59:27.680 east asia and they go saboteurs put those posters up tear them down russian agents tear them down

01:59:34.680 you know and and how many times in the last few years have we been through those ridiculous pivots

01:59:41.000 where you know only the vaccine can save us next day no one ever said it stopped transmission of

01:59:48.340 covid um joe biden is just a a nice old man with a stutter he's had since childhood

01:59:55.200 oh we always knew he was a alzheimer's patient being hidden by you know his family and various

02:00:03.680 cunning uh uh you know subordinates we're going through that every day that scene where we are

02:00:12.140 suddenly expected to switch enemies you know we've switched elon musk being the enemy three times in

02:00:19.520 the last week i think you know about a week ago after his fight with trump i i saw a democrat saying

02:00:25.340 we should really we should court elon we should bring him into our movement you know now and now

02:00:31.300 he's apologized and it'll again be you know firebomb teslas oh yeah it's not just docility that or it's

02:00:44.420 not just so depressing what you just said i'm sorry it's not just festivity that orwell records it's the

02:00:49.300 ability of thinking people or allegedly thinking people to pretend that's what's happening isn't

02:00:56.080 happening that what just happened never happened and to go on mouthing these utopian slogans about a

02:01:03.960 future that no one actually believes will come what's so interesting i've never i've been an orwell

02:01:10.720 fan my whole life read the collected orwell orwell was uh a cheerleader for the second world war

02:01:16.400 he was a government propagandist he worked for bbc hate to say it but it's true and he wrote 1984

02:01:23.400 only three years after the end of the war yeah and points out you know it's a militarized society

02:01:29.040 yeah that's the essence of totalitarian control is war right right so i mean that seems like a big

02:01:36.840 like he seems to have changed his view what do you mean well i mean again orwell was oh you mean

02:01:45.720 he spent the war rallying england to war right right he participated in what he seemed to believe was a

02:01:51.860 just war and then afterward started to see it as a racket for the control of exactly yeah yeah he he does

02:02:01.300 and he also sees terrorism a form of terrorism as a control mechanism too in airstrip one in ocean i

02:02:12.360 every once in a while a rocket will just fall and wipe out a crowd and no one knows where they're fired

02:02:19.460 from uh they assume they come from the enemy and one day winston is with his girlfriend in this little

02:02:26.360 hideout that they have in the middle of the book in their you know very short and soon to be curtailed

02:02:33.620 love affair and she says you know we're shooting those i i know we shoot those rockets what he said

02:02:40.460 yeah we shoot those rockets it's what we call a false flag nowadays and and and winston says i never could

02:02:46.900 have imagined that that was possible here he lives in this nightmare society but he he still can't

02:02:53.040 believe that they would shoot rockets at their own people in order to keep them fearful the woman however

02:03:00.120 you know sees it clearly she's a little bit more cunning she has a lower estimation of people but

02:03:07.640 there's not much in orwell and in 1984 that doesn't have an equivalent now and and there's not much in

02:03:17.120 there that doesn't explain events these days you know um i you know as i read it i read it this morning

02:03:26.780 uh was uh there are riots going on in los angeles full of hate full of anger full of people brandishing

02:03:35.500 bricks maltov cocktails and so on and i thought is it does it really matter what they're supposedly

02:03:44.680 protesting no it's the rage that matters and is the rage really something that threatens america

02:03:52.980 threatens the state or is it are these outbreaks of rage and rioting in a way of service to power

02:04:00.820 because they keep us distrusting each other they keep us divided they keep us

02:04:07.960 rebuilding you know one of orwell's theses is that society's gotten so prosperous that you have to have

02:04:14.920 a war just to to to uh keep the economy going uh you know everybody has everything so you got to destroy

02:04:21.780 a lot of stuff in order to rebuild it you know abroad and at home and and and seen through the lens of

02:04:28.360 1984 protest doesn't look like it's about anything but riotous protest i mean but keeping the machine

02:04:38.500 going through channeling people's frustration anger and anxiety into these orgies that really lead

02:04:47.160 nowhere but always send always always cause us to need more surveillance more control etc you know um

02:04:56.940 it gives me a dour idea of the supposed idealism behind riotous protest i i see those people as tools

02:05:05.380 frankly i think they are uh walter kern i really hope soon to be the librarian of congress

02:05:14.420 certainly uh a beacon of perspective and erudition in a uh increasingly stupid world i appreciate it

02:05:23.540 thanks great conversation thank you

02:05:25.600 we want to thank you for watching us on spotify a company that we use every day we know the people

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02:05:40.680 an episode we have real conversations news things that actually matter telling the truth always you

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02:05:51.060 you

The Tucker Carlson Show - July 14, 2025

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

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