Tucker Carlson Today - Curtis Yarvin

Summary

In this engaging and thought-provoking episode of Tucker Carlson Today, host Tucker Carlson welcomes Curtis Yarvin, an influential but controversial public intellectual who blogs under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. The conversation spans a wide range of topics, from the erosion of the ruling class to the decline of government efficiency. Yarvin offers a critical perspective on the current political system, arguing for a need to challenge the decentralized and unaccountable nature of oligarchic power. While controversial, his views are eye-opening and aimed at stimulating critical thinking and debate.

Highlights

• Curtis Yarvin, writing as Mencius Moldbug, challenges today's intellectual climate with his unique perspective. 💡
• Yarvin critically examines the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, viewing it as a reflection of governmental incompetence. 🇦🇫
• He discusses the decentralization of power in modern America and its impact on governance. 🌪️
• Yarvin explores the distancing of public figures from true power and the illusion of democratic control. 🗳️
• The dialogue includes a rich historical comparison of political systems to understand current dynamics better. 📚

Key Takeaways

• Curtis Yarvin explores the evolution and decline of concentrated power in the United States. 🌍
• He argues that the system is designed to be self-sustaining, leaving little room for change. 🚧
• Yarvin likens modern political dynamics to historical empires and oligarchies. 🏛️
• He stresses the importance of understanding the true distribution of power beyond elected officials. 🕵️‍♂️
• Yarvin encourages readers to question traditional power structures and their purpose. 🤔

Overview

Curtis Yarvin, a distinct voice in the realm of modern intellectualism, emerges from the shadows to dissect the intricacies of power, governance, and societal change in America. Blogging under the name Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin inspires both controversy and admiration as he tackles the complexities of current political dynamics. His views, considered controversial by many, challenge the status quo and call for a reevaluation of the nature of political power.

During his conversation with Tucker Carlson, Yarvin delves deep into topics ranging from the erosion of intellectual rigor among public thinkers to the flawed systems governing American politics. He questions the effectiveness of present-day government structures, highlighting the superficial nature of democratic processes and the true nature of oligarchic control. His insights, though contentious, provide an essential critique of modern governance.

The dialogue ventures through historical parallels and theories, touching upon everything from the fall of ancient empires to the establishment of post-war American bureaucracy. Yarvin's thought-provoking critique urges audiences to question the assumed permanence and efficacy of existing power structures. Despite facing backlash, his ideas undeniably provide a fresh perspective, motivating individuals to critically examine and engage with the political landscape around them.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 03:00: Introduction and Background The chapter discusses the decline of the class of public intellectuals, philosophers who were once considered serious thinkers. While some were seen as inadequate even in the past, there was a subset who commanded respect due to their intellectual rigor. The text suggests that this class has largely disappeared, replaced by individuals who focus predominantly on their own identities and personal narratives. The new trend is characterized as narcissism rather than genuine philosophical inquiry.
• 03:00 - 09:00: Curtis Yarvin's Controversial Views Curtis Yarvin, also known by his pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, is a controversial figure who operates largely in the shadows of the internet. Despite being a software developer by profession, Yarvin has become known for expressing his life philosophy through extensive writing. He has authored around a million words on the internet, sharing his views freely. His philosophy, however, can be complex and is not easily understandable for everyone. Yarvin's writings, for all their influence and reach, continue to provoke discourse and debate among those who encounter them.
• 09:00 - 16:00: Critique of the U.S. Government System The chapter titled 'Critique of the U.S. Government System' explores the provocative and interesting ideas presented by Curtis Yarvin regarding the current state of the U.S. government. The author highlights Yarvin's work as thought-provoking and perspective-shifting in the context of present-day political dynamics. Despite the intelligence and innovation in Yarvin's ideas, he has faced relentless criticism and opposition from mainstream entities, including Wikipedia editors and financial institutions, which are depicted as defenders of the status quo. The chapter suggests that these ideas are worthy of more in-depth discussion and understanding, particularly as they offer a unique lens through which to examine modern governance.
• 16:00 - 23:00: The Role of Intellectuals and the Media The chapter discusses a conversation with Curtis Yarvin on the current state of affairs. Curtis is an author who writes on Substack under 'Grey Mirror'. The host, Tucker, expresses admiration for Yarvin and hints at an intriguing discussion ahead. This introduction sets the stage for a deep dive into Yarvin’s views on the roles of intellectuals and the media in contemporary society.
• 23:00 - 31:00: Oligarchies and Expertise The chapter discusses the controversial nature of the speaker's ideas. The interlocutor acknowledges not necessarily agreeing with the speaker but credits them for provoking thought. It is highlighted that while the speaker is seen as controversial, their ideas are valuable and worth considering. The listener admits to not having read much of the speaker's work but does not perceive the speaker as promoting harm or as being irrational. Despite being unconventional, the speaker's viewpoints are respected for their potential to foster meaningful discourse.
• 31:00 - 41:00: The Role of Experts in Government Decision-Making The chapter discusses the misrepresentation and misinformation surrounding public figures, particularly focusing on how statements can be taken out of context or misunderstood. The speaker refers to their own experience, highlighting a distorted view found online that misattributes a belief in racial inferiority to them, supposedly leading to personal repercussions such as their bank cancelling them. This example serves to illustrate the broader theme of how expert opinions and statements can be manipulated or misinterpreted in public discourse, impacting their role and influence in government decision-making.
• 41:00 - 55:00: Historical Context and Changes in Governance The chapter titled 'Historical Context and Changes in Governance' seems to discuss the impact of language and propaganda in historical narratives. The transcript snippet suggests there is a focus on how stereotypes and slurs have been used, possibly in political or social settings. Furthermore, the discussion touches upon modern-day examples, such as a child's exclusion from a soccer team, hinting at the ongoing relevance of these issues. The summary points towards an analysis of narrative construction and its implications in governance and societal behavior.
• 55:00 - 69:00: The Impact of Institutional Corruption The chapter discusses the pervasive nature of institutional corruption, highlighting how even subtle forms of misconduct can have significant impacts. It touches on the idea that in a world filled with millions of words and actions, only certain ones get noticed or penalized. The key takeaway is learning how to avoid creating opportunities that could lead to corruption, and understanding the complex dynamics involved. It stresses the importance for the audience to stay informed and critical about the mechanisms of corruption in institutions.
• 69:00 - 75:00: Curtis Yarvin's Perspective on Future Governance The chapter discusses Curtis Yarvin's perspective on governance and critiques the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, describing it as a profound humiliation for the United States and its empire. Yarvin is noted for having controversial views that threaten certain establishments, leading to attempts to shut him down. The chapter aims to clarify Yarvin's actual opinions and explore the broader philosophical implications of recent geopolitical events.
• 75:00 - 75:00: Conclusion and Reflections on the Discussion The chapter explores the theme of learning from humiliation, emphasizing its importance in personal growth. It highlights that experiencing humiliation, though painful, is an opportunity for learning and self-improvement. The discussion frames humiliation as a valuable and necessary part of personal development.

Tucker Carlson Today - Curtis Yarvin Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 this has put a lot of blood on my hands out god the fast and furious scandal only on fox nation it's had an entire class of people known roughly as public intellectuals philosophers now a lot of them even then were buffoons but not all there were some serious people that whole class is gone those who took their place study and talk about mostly themselves their identity it's narcissism not philosophy
• 00:30 - 01:00 one of the very few left operating in the shadows of the internet needless to say is a man called curtis yarvin for years he blogged under the name mencius moldbug now we should say that curtis yarvin has a job he's a software developer but purely because he had something to say he wrote about a million words for free on the internet about his life philosophy now personally i would be lying if i said i understood all of it don't have
• 01:00 - 01:30 the necessary iq to claim that but i can say having read a lot of it's interesting as hell provocative gets you thinking and more than anything adds needed perspective on the moment we're in now for the crime of saying interesting things curtis yarvin has been hounded non-stop by the people who write wikipedia by the banks by the people who maintain the status quo at all costs we think particularly because we have a full hour that it'd be
• 01:30 - 02:00 worth talking to curtis yarvin about what he makes of the moment we're living in right now by the way if you're interested in reading more he writes on sub stack it's called grey mirror is his feed i guess on sub stack anyway curtis jarvin a genuinely interesting person we're honored to have him with us today thank you for that lovely intro uh tucker i'm i'm i don't know this is one of those conversations does that sound too fake was that too fake no i mean i'm not i'm not even i just have wanted to have you on because i think you're really interesting i don't understand
• 02:00 - 02:30 everything that you're arguing i don't know if i agree with it or not but i do know that you're considered highly controversial um by people which is almost always a sign that you are saying things that are worth thinking about i don't think i've read a lot of your stuff i don't think you're a hater in any sense you're not calling for anyone to be heard i don't think you're crazy i think you're pretty far out in a way that is worth thinking about anyway thank you for coming i i i i i appreciate this i think
• 02:30 - 03:00 actually just to put the uh you know i i think the best slur out there is that if you read my wikipedia biography um it basically has me saying that black people should be enslaved because they're congenitally stupid um that's which is a remarkable thing to say actually i think that's what my bank canceled me for and it's if you actually read the place that it's coming from it's this sort of beautiful conjuncture of two sort of completely separate things neither neither of which
• 03:00 - 03:30 says that and but if you sort of read it straight out kind of stereotypically you read that and i'm just like this is beautiful i'm like this is a beautiful work of propaganda directed at it it's such a slur i mean i know i know i know children and yeah yeah yeah i think i think i think i think i think recently my son actually got cancelled from his soccer team uh for that i'm not sure but there was something like that it worked out well in the end um but uh you know it's it's
• 03:30 - 04:00 a it's it's a remarkable experience sort of and in a way like when i look at the things that you know sort of out of this million words that you get sort of noticed or cancelled for you basically learn not how to not do these things and how to not create the opportunity right for these kinds of strange constructions it's just so interesting that they want and i can't overstate this since for our audience that reads you know t take an
• 04:00 - 04:30 hour and read curtis yarvin and it's it it bears no resemblance to the way that it's characterized but it's interesting that they focused on you to shut you down you're clearly saying things that threaten them so let's just give our viewers a taste of what you actually think so our withdrawal from afghanistan devolved immediately into a profound humiliation for the united states and the american empire such as it is take three steps back as a philosopher and assess what this tells us about our
• 04:30 - 05:00 current system whenever you're humiliated um it should be always be a learning experience yes you're being as a person you're being humiliated because you learned something that was painful to you that you didn't want to know or didn't want to be reminded of yes um and and that's beautiful thing it's a beautiful thing having been been been humiliated and it's a beautiful and necessary and wonderful thing and there are two kinds
• 05:00 - 05:30 of people who respond to humiliation in two different ways either basically they take that in and they're like okay what was it that i learned that was so painful and how do i avoid making the same mistake again and getting humiliated again in the same way or you know they're sort of more than narcissistic type and they go into this kind of narcissistic rage where they're just like i never want to hear they blame the messenger essentially and and and they blame the messenger and so you know with sort of the fall of
• 05:30 - 06:00 afghanistan i think that there are a lot of people who still think of the us government as having the competence that it had 50 years ago 70 years ago even in the fall of saigon which was basically a masterpiece compared to this and and and and and so they look at this you know these are americans out there and they have a kind of you know deeply ritual association with the real washington and
• 06:00 - 06:30 both of us have a family background in the real washington yes and so you know what they think of and pause there and just tell our viewers what your background is oh um um you know my dad was a foreign service officer which is uh so i went around living in embassies and consulates around the world i was kind of a an international jew you might say actually i always wanted like a lifetime subscription to international jew magazine can't you see it um you know but i was i'm a rootless cosmopolitan so um so you know so i grew up really in the belly of this beast right and the thing is it's like for example i was
• 06:30 - 07:00 recently out i drove across the country in both directions with my kids an incredible experience and um beautiful amazing country we were driving through iowa you know on july 4th and all around all the little towns start setting up their fireworks you know boom boom whatever we went to the july 4th rodeo in livingston montana you know there were and they even dared to like you know the announcer even like talk trash about the liberal media you know you know so they basically they
• 07:00 - 07:30 know that something's up you know in a way and yet you know you have sort of all the paraphernalia of patriotism that you sort of feel so deeply out there and this patriotism is this kind of ritual sort of religious allegiance it's like if you're a catholic it isn't necessarily because you love the personal habits of the pope right right you know you're down on like vatican politics or whatever so you know the sort of the difference that that kind of i think needs to be exploded for a lot of people is what is the
• 07:30 - 08:00 difference between sort of my ritual respect for this thing and what it actually is because when i will actually look at you know what the vatican is or in this case the swamp the deep state as the cathedral as sometimes called it you know the sort of the oligarchic power structure of america which is completely decentralized there is no center to it anywhere there's no like they there's no one you can point to there's no race or class or little meeting of like protocols of elders of zion that's
• 08:00 - 08:30 happening there's no conspiracy it's completely decentralized that's what makes it so hard to kill and and um and so when you look at the way this ruling class works and governs it's a very different thing from these sort of abstractions that you learn in 11th grade civics class and you know and when you grow up in that in it you feel it you know extremely intensely and so for example people will go and they'll vote for president and they'll you know they sort of vote
• 08:30 - 09:00 as if who was sitting in the white house you know was who was in power and they'll use these terms like you know trump is in power biden is in power etc etc etc and it's like guys americans when you're inside the belly of this beast and you look at the white house as an organization and the white house is not even really properly controlled by the president you know the white house's whole budget and organization is set by congress it's full of permanent employees it's not
• 09:00 - 09:30 even but if you look at the white house as a whole and measure its kind of relevance to the normal process of the executive branch of the actual government that people like our parents lived and worked in you're like it has almost no relevance at all in the in the deep state uh you know as americans it's a turkish word that americans have learned to use it's a great word um you know in the deep state the way you regard this election this stupid really ceremony that happens
• 09:30 - 10:00 over there that's like for the clown show for the clowns it's like a storm on the surface above a coral reef you're a fish in the reef you know you're going about your fishy business um you know you're eating algae or whatever there's a big storm you know you're kind of sucked back and forth a little bit you feel it you know it makes a little harder to nibble algae but like waves are not breaking on you yeah and so waves are not breaking on you down there and so when people look at this thing you know they sort of make this kind of couple of mistakes they're like
• 10:00 - 10:30 okay we elected trump so trump's in power i'm like well if you took that phrase literally and you said trump is in power for example trump is the chief executive of the executive branch one way philosophically to think about this question is how much power does donald trump personally have over this executive branch that's a hard thing to measure but one way to measure this is to know that it has two endpoints so he could have no power or he could have complete power
• 10:30 - 11:00 he could have zero or one so where is he in his power over the executive branch which constitutionally is under his complete control where is he in terms of his power over this organization is he closer to zero or closer to one so one way to ask that question is to say well could we increase his power by 10 times could we make the white house 10 times as powerful over the executive branch very easily could we imagine you know at that point
• 11:00 - 11:30 we're reaching the powers of say lbj could we make the white house a hundred times as powerful over the executive branch at this point we're up to the powers of fdr so you know people think when they vote for donald trump that they're voting for the same job that fdr had they're actually voting for like 0.01 percent of that job which is a right like a really serious like that is a really serious misinterpretation of reality and forcing that level of misinterpretation of
• 11:30 - 12:00 reality on people is actually it's a really serious offense it's really not good and so why is it not good it's not good because you're gaslighting people they're living in they're basically looking at this simulated world one way to one way to think about this question i will get back to afghanistan one way to think about this question is to and this is a very fundamental question of political science um this is um i'm a member or a votery of
• 12:00 - 12:30 what some call the italian school of political science or the machiavellian school i want to just pimp the best intro to this school that is available which is the machiavellians by james burnham um written in 1940 it's actually his best book most people say the managerial revolution which is really not as good in my opinion it's good but this is amazing and burnham is basically like look you have to assume that you're living in the truman show you have to assume that the entire
• 12:30 - 13:00 nature of political reality may not be as you conceive it at all and so you know you're electing trump or you're electing biden and you're thinking you know you're sort of changing the course of the nation you're actually kind of moving these fish in the coral reef you know back and forth a few inches with you know the big waves you think you're generating um and you're making a misinterpretation of reality which is like someone who thought that queen elizabeth ii was actually in charge of the uk
• 13:00 - 13:30 and so everybody knows when they look at the queen of england that the queen of england does not actually run the government and cannot say off with his head and all the things that a queen queen could do they know she's not a queen they know she's basically just a um very classy kardashian yeah i'm sorry royal family uh you know um as a monarchist i'm never gonna live this one down but um um you know you know they know that she's just a very classy kardashian and the thing is that legally
• 13:30 - 14:00 you know what queen elizabeth ii can do she can veto an act of parliament she actually has the right to veto just like the president does do you know when that that power was last used was last used i believe in something like 1707 by queen anne and what the british did was i mean this is a very old thing what the british did was they basically had all of this conflict in the 17th century between you know the sort of the old the stuart monarchy and the rising middle classes
• 14:00 - 14:30 and the eventual solution was that they replaced the real monarchy with a fake monarchy right which you know had no actual sort of real power and this was kind of this transition was like through william of orange and queen anne and a lot of people hoped that queen anne who was actually a steward would restore the stewards and of course she didn't um and so at that time this myth that here you have the king or the queen and they're actually in charge but they're actually fake this is an active weapon of deception right up to world war ii people are like
• 14:30 - 15:00 charging who would die for the queen now like for this like you know uh classy kardashian right in world war one guys are going you know over the top across the trenches for you know the king and and they actually you know this legend is sort of more and more believed and at the equivalent of like the rodeo whatever they do in england in like 1910 people are like you know they stand up for this royal whatever this is a country that has ceased to be that ceased to be a monarchy in any kind of
• 15:00 - 15:30 real functioning way in 1688 so people can really very much misunderstand the system of government that that they live in and and feel you know if you're like one way very simple way to sort of think about you know the question of democracy is you can ask two questions do we live in a democracy and should we you will find very very few people who answer no to both of those questions
• 15:30 - 16:00 and so if you look at the question of basically but you will find many who will answer no to the first question yes you'll find many who will answer no to the first question but their ways of giving that answer are sort of biased by their feeling that living in a democracy is the way this should work and so when they look at you know why they often so people let's say you know how do you hack an election so you know people will be like oh you're going to the voting machines or you print up you
• 16:00 - 16:30 know spare ballots in in china or whatever no you know these are rookie user rookie numbers like this is not how you hack an election the way you hack an election is by changing the meaning of the election and the way you hack an election is not by changing eliminating your ability to vote for a certain candidate but by simply taking away the power from the politicians you elect in other words turning them from elizabeth the first who actually could say off of your head to elizabeth ii
• 16:30 - 17:00 and so when you look at the legal positions that elizabeth the first and elizabeth the second occupied they're exactly the same position she's the queen like you know she's she has you know uh in technically an english constitutional system it's called reserve powers she could declare martial law tomorrow like you know and and actually i think it would work that's a separate conversation um um you know and and she has all of these powers on paper
• 17:00 - 17:30 and in practice she's a classy kardashian and so the question you know of how do you hack an election is very very simple instead of turning the queen into a classy kardashian turn the electorate into a classy classy kardashian so if you basically say you're electing these politicians and you're behaving in this election as though these politicians you elected were actually in control of the government when they're actually about 0.001 percent in control of the government and the government is just
• 17:30 - 18:00 this permanent deep state thing that just sits there and kind of rots and gets worse every decade um then and you can't change this with elections at all sorry it's actually pretty funny that you tried when it's not scary it's like scary funny like one of those halloween movies this is the attitude of the lib right you know and and look at these you know it sort of goes from like look at these yokels with pitchforks to like ah they're gonna pitch forecast to like like these funny yokels with pitchforks right you grew up with this mentality so so did i uh you know the the that's how
• 18:00 - 18:30 you felt toward the people that you ruled over you're like these people are funny and dangerous this is the attitude of brooklyn toward you know the midwestern conservative you're giving me your famous tucker look is that because you're confused no i'm not confused do you not recognize this attitude i recognized it but all of a sudden the synapses are firing [Laughter] about right right so so so the thing by the way can i say one thing these conversa i mean whatever you know
• 18:30 - 19:00 people watching this think of what you're saying when was the last time you heard anybody say anything like that i mean i think the thing i object to most about modern america is how boring and repetitive it is no one with interesting thoughts is ever in public saying anything everyone is just like reading the same stupid stultifying slogans and it's just like the fact that you're crushed for saying something that's interesting it just tells you everything see you know aladdin these people let me let me actually correct you there but let's go back to the subject of um
• 19:00 - 19:30 cancellation that i started this episode with in uh in such a fun way um um which is actually i don't think that's true i actually don't think um one of the things one of the ways as a somewhat canceled person you know not that i'm not doing fine um is even though even though i'm certainly no longer a software developer the one of the things about sort of this conflict that i think is a mistake um you know i don't know how many libs
• 19:30 - 20:00 will be watching your show but you know certainly a lot of cons will be out there and there's a lot of kind of typical mistakes that people make that i want to caution people against and one of the biggest ones is that when you look at the libs you see an enemy that's true in a certain sense that's true kind of spiritually they see you as an enemy they have the friend enemy distinction and that you know you may not know it's a civil war conservatives but they know it uh it's a
• 20:00 - 20:30 cold civil war uh you know but um that's how they feel that's how they feel that's absolutely how they feel and that is not a new thing that is how i grew up feeling and and and i was born in the freaking nixon administration oh will you bleep me on the show if i swear or is that internet oh my god okay okay so so the um that's how that's how yes i mean you know my my grandparents were american communists that's how they felt that was the sort of the standard feeling about the yokels with the pitchforks when they they were either funny or dangerous yeah and and
• 20:30 - 21:00 and you look down you're flying from like you know new york to l.a uh you've got a thing to go to you look down you see all that flat and you think funny and then you think dangerous and those are the two neurons you have yeah and that is you're basically tolerance right you know and and that's that's what you that's what you learned at brown that's how you learn to think right you know um and um um which is just a remarkable way to see the world right and so
• 21:00 - 21:30 especially so spiritually especially if you're in charge of it as they are and and as we these are these are this is me this is my people uh of course we're in charge of it and and this way of seeing the world you know results in you know um i you know i was just um you know um talking to the uh your your makeup professional and she was like when you know she's not even like up from like a lib world like she's from she's
• 21:30 - 22:00 from a leftist kind of but a small town american world and like she goes to work for someone associated with fox and she gets all of this flack it's like basically she's like betrayed her world okay so there is that enemy you know psychology there right but in terms of how they act they're predators and not enemies and so if you don't give them anything they don't have anything and they'll basically move on it's it's an asymmetric now you know as
• 22:00 - 22:30 of course you increasing prominence you know it's it's harder to avoid this effect but i think for most ordinary people out there um it's really important to remember this it's an asymmetric conflict like it's not like a lion against a tiger it's like a lion against the buffalo as a buffalo your goal is not to be eaten by lions right you should not make any mistake that allows you to be eaten by lions your interest in herding lions killing lions harming lions doing any damage to this or any other lion
• 22:30 - 23:00 if it's a way to stop them from hurting you which in this case it's not go ahead otherwise you don't care and that's basically the attitude of a prey species what i'm saying is that basically cancellation attacks tend to be opportunistic if you were a dissident in say hungary in 1963 there would be an intelligence agency that was basically looking after you and basically finding ways to attack you we don't quite have anything like that yet
• 23:00 - 23:30 it's kind of you know they're working on it i will say they're working on it i will say it's more like that than it used to be i think you've had some experiences yeah um but it's still it's not that impressive compared to hungary in 1970 and it's certainly not something that's going to affect most people's lives in a centralized way and so what you're really looking at as someone who is a dissident in any way is the thing to avoid is sort of playing
• 23:30 - 24:00 into their game where you're this scary person and so whenever you try to scare them whenever you express hostility toward them whenever you basically you know sort of express any kind of sort of aggression you're basically behaving in a way that that buffalo would not behave and you're certainly behaving also in a way that mounts a tongue would not advise you to behave and so you know that that distinction for me you know is really really important no i don't think i get canceled for saying interesting things i think i get basically you know get cancelled for saying
• 24:00 - 24:30 things that people who hate me can easily misconstrue and and that's it but they hate you because why they hate you because you are they hate me because i sympathize with their enemies and so you know the the the um you know they hate me for the exact same reason they hate your makeup professional and when you sympathize when you have this friend enemy distinction when you have this sort of you know kind of idea of we're at war with these people i mean i can't tell
• 24:30 - 25:00 you how uh when walter mondale lost the election in 1984 i was living in cyprus um you know off the off the coast of turkey a little little island there yeah and i was getting my news two or three days late because we can only read the international herald tribune and i was 11 years old i was just utterly devastated that this like foul creature reagan had won an election over this like fundamentally good indecent and wise man walter mondale you might
• 25:00 - 25:30 have had the same word well you know i did not have the same you do not have the same reaction right you know um um um but that was absolutely my reaction and and and you have this reaction when you're part of and this is true by the way of any aristocracy and any sort of ruling class especially in an oligarchy where there's sort of no kind of center of power to balance aristocratic power in an oligarchy like ours in a world that's ruled by the deep state or the swamp or the cathedral or whatever you want to call it this world of permanent influential people inside
• 25:30 - 26:00 and outside the government and it's it's very important that many of them many of these power centers are outside the government proper and you might have noticed that um and and they're beyond the control of the population yeah yeah that makes them completely unaccountable you know to sort of digress a little bit if you took the new york times and or all you know all the prestigious mainstream media just shut down the rest it's all dying anyway you know like the two or three most prestigious outlets and instead of calling them private
• 26:00 - 26:30 companies you call them the department of information nothing about their lives of change they would still be the purveyor the official purveyors of official information what you have is actually these sort of government agencies that due to our wonderful constitution have grown up you know sovereign beyond the reach of any accountability whatsoever in fact you know you can make a pretty strong case that the most powerful organ of government
• 26:30 - 27:00 in the government today is not even in the government i would say it is probably the new york times it's at least a reasonable thought and you know the interesting question is okay is the new york times a democracy is it um how is the new york times governed and then you think about it and you're like oh i see it's a fifth generation hereditary absolute monarchy and try as you may you cannot eliminate this form of government and and and that's what gives it its weight and its
• 27:00 - 27:30 prestige the very font that the new york times is written in is saying respect this fifth generation it's fifth is it fifth at least at least generation absolute monarchy and in fact i think one of the reasons that we've had this sort of you know um woke explosion since um you know i try to not use that word because if you've noticed they've stopped using it yeah um um but uh you know it's so easy to say uh one of the reasons we've had this latest woke explosion since 2013 actually i think one of the problems the
• 27:30 - 28:00 times has now for any like times people who are listening i know it's not likely but anytimes people out there um i think your problem is that you have a weak king i think the latest salzburger is letting his office be run by the office slack yeah and i think that basically that is doing what an oligarchy does which is to reward increasingly unbalanced perspectives why do you that's a very interesting observation why do oligarchies reward increasingly unbalanced i mean
• 28:00 - 28:30 that would seem like not a great self-preservation strategy well yeah there's no strategy here it's a decentralized oligarchy right and so you know you basically have to sort of look within this mindset of the american governing class the people who went to you went to a good school right tucker i went to a bad school well really yeah i went to trinity college in hartford connecticut i wish i didn't never trust well you know i was unimpressed to be there i was unimpressive while i was
• 28:30 - 29:00 there and i'm ashamed that i wasted four years well i'm uh i'm a legacy brown admit and uh um i'm not sure i needed the legacy admissions but the fact is i got it and um um brown university and providence rhode island yes yes and brown university in providence providence rhode island and you know all i can say about these people who believe the woke explosion started in 2013 or whatever is uh you know they should have been a brown with me in 1991 because it's exactly the same doctrine yeah and
• 29:00 - 29:30 and you know so that just means that its roots cannot be later it's like if you found like a bat coronavirus from 1991 right you know you can't say well this was created in 2013 right right and and so so it's it's a very it's a very deep problem and you know it doesn't date to 1991 either this is a very this is sort of a deep strain of thinking in the american aristocracy in the american upper class it's the way these people who sort of were my people think
• 29:30 - 30:00 and you know where does it come from oh my gosh where does it come from i think that you know there's a couple of ways that you can answer that question uh a one fun way is to answer it genealogically and so you can kind of work backward in time and say where who are the people take the way the average american college student thinks in 2021. now let's find the people in 1921 who think like this person where are these people do they exist that these were these attitudes invented
• 30:00 - 30:30 and if you go back in 1921 and you look for people who think like americans today you will find these people um they'll be in granite village they'll be in provincetown they'll be you know you know contain many like super rich trust fund people um you know they're the people that john reed went to harvard with right one of the things i say is you know the the most accurate historical movie that i know of is red with john reed because all you have to do is take these people put them in funny clothes
• 30:30 - 31:00 give them funny accents and tell them to act naturally and and you basically you're like yeah well the hollywood stars of the 1980s they have the same sexual habits as the you know ruling class of the 1920s they hang out in the same places they're the same people right you know this is this is something once you establish that this sort of way of thinking and this way of being modern is older than anyone alive it's actually a really helpful
• 31:00 - 31:30 observation because it makes you sort of stop blaming people and start to think more about structures the system the system and it's like what rewards you know these kinds of ideas it's very very simple it's like if you read anyone's college application essay what is the most common thing that these people who are applying to college because they're applying literally you're on your college application you were ranked as the amer as a member of the american aristocracy as surely as peter the
• 31:30 - 32:00 great's table of ranks okay you were applying when you apply to college you were applying for a rank the fact that it's not official there isn't like some like badge you get or anything like that okay sure but you're applying for a rank and what do you say when you're applying for for a rank very simple you want to change the world you want to make an impact everyone basically who aspires to matter in this country in this world today is someone who wants to make an impact what you're saying when you say i want to
• 32:00 - 32:30 make an impact is literally you were saying i want power and because you're literally saying i want power and feeling powerful even though there's no possible world in which millions of people can actually literally hold power which means affect government decisions or affect government authority they're saying i want to be powerful and so if you want to be powerful and there's basically all of this essentially pornography of power out there saying
• 32:30 - 33:00 you can you know feel powerful by supporting this you can feel powerful by putting this sign in your yard this putting this sign in your yard reminds you that you matter that you're trying to make a difference that you realize how bad things are often you'll like think of the powers that be as completely imaginary corporate conspiracies or something like that um and you'll basically be like i'm making a difference what your sign actually says this sort of goes back to the kind of machiavellian approach of seeing you know the difference between sort of the objective and the subject of
• 33:00 - 33:30 reality what all of those signs really say i'm cribbing from a famous uh dissident essay from vaslav havel here what they really all all say is i support power i support the government i support the parties in charge exactly i am i think i think this every day you know and it's just like it's like it's like the glasses and they live you know i drive by and i see a black lives matter sign in someone's driveway what they're saying is i'm obedient to the regime yeah yeah or i love power and so
• 33:30 - 34:00 there's a sort of duality between loyalty and ambition and ambition because what you're saying is i am loyal to the regime and i am happy for the feeling of powerful that be the feeling of power that being part of the party is giving me exactly um and and so it's just it's the most common thing in the world and and you know you look at this regime and what's so funny is that americans are exposed to all of this starting in like you know childhood they're exposed to all of this like dystopian fiction like you're
• 34:00 - 34:30 constantly reading about dystopias in your like why a books and you're like you know it's it's non-stop and yet you know you have these sort of basic dystopian things like you know the government uh you know these signs actually say i love power which is exactly what vaslav havel said uh in czechoslovakia in 1976 i wonder if there's any way in which our system of government is anything like czechoslovakia is in 1976. well i think it's very close to it in some in some ways it's the difference is it had a
• 34:30 - 35:00 center it had a center and ours does not have a center and there was a there was a there was a polyp bureau in czechoslovakia in 1976 there was a central intelligence agency this was um you know this is a classic totalitarian structure and the thing is what happens to americans is they sort of look for this center and they don't find it and they don't understand how the system can basically evolve to this point
• 35:00 - 35:30 without having some kind of central control because they see they you know my one of the one of the various concepts that people find in this million words that they really like is my idea of the cathedral yes and the point that i keep making is is it's simply it's a socratic point it's simply a question what is your theory of why the washington post and the new york times and all every other prestigious and the guardian and every other prestigious voice in society and every prestigious university and society
• 35:30 - 36:00 is always on the same page yes it looks as though there was some so why does yale why do yale and harvard always agree on everything couldn't yale become go libertarian while you know harvard is is going woke like why wouldn't that happen and you just you look at reality and you're like that's there's no way that could happen that could never happen and if it could never happen it means that these organizations are essentially branches you know of the same thing of the same thing but when you look at the organizational structure you don't find
• 36:00 - 36:30 any evidence of that and you're like where is where are the wires like i'm looking at this and i'm not seeing the wires when i saw you know when you look at say the history of any authoritarian regime whether it's right i get asked my producer are you following this it's amazing when when when you look at you know sort of the power structure of eastern europe nazi germany or whatever it's a classic dictatorship classic dystopia you see the fewer the fuhrer has a minister of information right he's like print this there's an organization
• 36:30 - 37:00 and you know the whole rest of the system okay there are these accreditation bodies there are various funding things but there's no org chart and and the thing is you can sort of basically work very hard to kind of see an org chart that isn't really there or you can think very hard about why this happens and i can tell you very i mean it's really it's not a hard concept to explain i think it's a hard concept to evangelize or it's actually it's a pretty subtle concept unfortunately when you think about the way these
• 37:00 - 37:30 oligarchies work the model of the people who believe in these things that put the signs on you know their lawns is actually very reasonable they're like why should we delegate these decisions to harvard and the answer is harvard and yale and the whole you know other you know collective of this world why do we delegate this decision to these people these people there are very very clear pragmatic reasons for doing that one is we know that these institutions select the smartest people around they're incredibly competitive they're
• 37:30 - 38:00 incredibly hard to get into they're incredibly hard to rise in and they create these incredible concentrations of expertise and um well maybe maybe you know the way i think about covet is a good example of the way these things go wrong so basically that view of the world is says when the public has to make decisions about virology who are we going to call and the oligarchic answer is obviously we are
• 38:00 - 38:30 going to call the virologists what are we going to call your like aunt in iowa what excuse me the one i saw from the plane at 30 000 feet like are we gonna call them people with the rodeo uh no no we'll call the virologists right i got it i'm brilliant right so you know this was this was their you know this was their answer and this is a 20th century answer this is you know the idea of basically just delegating without any accountability responsibility for important decisions to academics basically kind of dates mostly to the
• 38:30 - 39:00 woodrow wilson era yes so you know the progressive era with the capital p right you know it's about and this is when basically america's so if you see like description of the gilded age like you know go to an old american city see all those like brick buildings and like you know beautiful old stuff you know all of like dc you know all of that is built in what we call the gilded age which is a period when america was governed very much the way china is now it was very corrupt politics was this incredibly sordid
• 39:00 - 39:30 screwed up business um got done yes it got done in a corrupt way with people stealing a bunch yeah did get done at enormous velocity really fast all the time in the physical world not just building some goddamn software absolutely right look at you know the way they built the empire state building right right this is the world to build the empire state building so and at this time america like china is a third world country it's culturally insecure it does not have before world war one it's like it's it's
• 39:30 - 40:00 a peninsula of anglo-american culture the center is in london and has always been in london the center of finances in london you know america is the periphery american intellectuals look at this and they're like we should be the future look at a map and what we actually need is essentially and you'll see this written very very explicitly for example in walter littman who i'm sure you've read right and and what america needs is basically a new class of platonic guardians a new class
• 40:00 - 40:30 of basically people who are sort of so you know just are not these like sordid stealing politicians like you know that so this comes out of people like henry adams for example yes who's like this like fourth generation super you know he's like you know from this amazing political dynasty he's like the intellectual leader of america's the editor of north american review which was like the new yorker of its day but better um and and you know he's basically like that whole world of old money and old
• 40:30 - 41:00 wealth is like no actually this isn't working and the new world will be a world of science and it needs to be guided by science and it needs to be guided by expertise what comes out of that is the invention of sort of all these social sciences which are really sciences of government or probably most cases pseudosciences of government because they don't actually seem to work out very well uh when you try them which is the thing that sociology yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and and so you know all of these things so you get sort
• 41:00 - 41:30 of all of these sciences that are basically sciences of government and sciences of how the government should do something and once sort of any kind of governing power whether it's the people or a king or anything other than an oligarchy decides that the oligarchy has the last vote and it's the oligarchy's opinion that counts and basically delegates it to the experts the scientists you know the mandarins the priests whatever you call them you've ceded power to these people
• 41:30 - 42:00 and then and and the concept democracy's done at that point oh yeah democracy yeah remember my remember remember my two nos right you know it isn't and it shouldn't be and it can't be and you the american people just simply don't have the power to do that um they don't have the energy they have they don't have the knowledge they don't have the energy it's not a question of even whether they would do it well or badly they would just do it weekly and power would be instantly ripped from their hands it would be like having an absolute monarch who's like six years old there's no way this kid even if he's
• 42:00 - 42:30 the rightful king of france is actually the king of france right so you know his best choice is to use whatever power he has to make sure some guy who's not molesting him is the game of france that's basically where we are right you know and and uh sorry that was uh that was a little coarser than my usual announcement so good but uh um let it rip yeah let her let it letter letter rip right um and so the um the problem is what this does to the
• 42:30 - 43:00 experts so it's like you basically have this pool of expertise you have this network of expertise and if you have a network of expertise in something that has no possible effect on power at all like astronomers you look at american astronomy and you say has this been corrupted by power you know have astronomers is there a woke astronomy not just staff practices and astronomy but like seeing like constellations that aren't there making up like new kinds of astronomical objects just like totally out of nowhere
• 43:00 - 43:30 like for like you know uh for headlines uh you know no no i don't think i don't think we see that is there a woke math no i don't think we see that when we look at the soviet union again centralized you know system not but still with many oligarchic you know had i had a party right uh you know but it also had a leader and and you look at the soviet union the math is fine the math is perfectly fine the astronomy is fine soviet astronomy no they're studying the same skies that we're studying soviet sociology soviet
• 43:30 - 44:00 psychology marx lenin studies it's just it's all just trash you know um and so when you look at american expertise you tend to notice that things the fields that are funny that get weird and kind of screwed up are ones that involve telling the government what decisions to make right and it seems that when you have a field a way of people thinking that involves telling the
• 44:00 - 44:30 government what decisions to make suddenly you have this marketplace of ideas and as a believer in oligarchy you're like okay not only do we now i have just one expert we have a whole network of experts and they're convincing each other they're always arguing and they're you know they're participating in this adversarial discourse yeah in math that's what's going on in astronomy that's what's going on in chemistry that's what's going on there's no politicized chemistry in the soviet union right but when it comes to sociology or like
• 44:30 - 45:00 anything that involves advising the government if you're advising the government to do more by definition you're making more of an impact you matter more and so what happens in an oligarchy is sort of this kind of currency of the trade becomes impact it becomes mattering and so you know let's say that you're studying earth's climate back in like 1970 you were just studying earth's climate you were just like a weather nerd who was like oh yeah let's study the weather in a long term
• 45:00 - 45:30 suddenly you're sort of forced into the position where there is this global effect does it matter is it scary what's going on here and you know i'm what's called a you know a lukewarmist where you know yes this effect is real but i don't think it's all that important um and if you're and there are plenty of very pedigreed climate scientists who are lukewarm and and let's say judith curry for example and if you're someone like judith curry you have um um great would be a great
• 45:30 - 46:00 person to have on by the way um um if you're someone like judith curry she ran like the whole like you know huge huge climatology lab for for many many years um if you're someone like judith curry and you basically write a paper that says this isn't very important this is like happening but you know there's probably you know afghanistan is something we should worry about more [Laughter] and you're attacking yourself you're attacking all of your peers
• 46:00 - 46:30 you're saying your work is not very important you should not be getting a lot of money you do not matter very much at all and you're basically you're not being a team player and so in the landscape of the marketplace of ideas things that say this whole marketplace is unimportant and shouldn't grow its budget next year are vastly disfavored because basically they're really really anti-social and all you know and so that's sort of craving when you're inside the deep
• 46:30 - 47:00 state and you're sort of and you have that craving for impact it has a much more definite form you're basically looking for funds you know there's this whole world of things that write grants that apply for funds and so this whole world basically has this enormous incentive to over enterprise and emphasize its importance and to matter and to make an impact well guess who wanted to make an impact some virologists and these virologists were like you know
• 47:00 - 47:30 going along doing virology just being virology nerds and then sars happened so ours happened and this virus jumped out of a bat into a civic cat into human beings and killed a lot of people unfortunately wasn't well enough adapted to humans to start a pandemic so naturally if something bad happens and you're writing a grant a good way to write that grant is to say well the something bad could happen again let's study this thing um to understand it to make sure we're
• 47:30 - 48:00 better equipped to something if it happens again we can predict it we can learn more about this phenomenon this is important science because this is something real that has affected the real world good grant proposal so basically you write that grant proposal and you're like i know what let's go into like bat caves in china and find all the bat viruses and see if these bat viruses could emerge into humans and how will we see if they can emerge into humans well we'll screw around with them and try to make
• 48:00 - 48:30 them into human viruses what could go wrong right and you know the the ostensible goal and this was not a chinese research project this was an american research project started by a chinese grad student here who went back to wuhan and was doing that there the infamous batwoman uh yeah jingly right and and but this was an ameri this was american science uh i think americans probably maintain their virology labs a little more carefully if you've ever been to china yeah and and um you know there's this word in
• 48:30 - 49:00 chinese um my daughter speaks chinese so she's going to yell at me for screwing this up on there ciao with will which means um good enough and so you're basically saying okay we're going to have this you know and that was one of the two things that happened in in china the other thing is i don't know if you're familiar with the phenomenon of the chinese paper mill so in science of course which has been subjected to these kind of bureaucratic um goals your goal is to publish as many papers as possible and so you do everything as
• 49:00 - 49:30 you can do to publish high impact papers as many as you can that's how you succeed in science today in china it's even much more rigorous than that it's like you've got to get five high impact papers in this journal to be the head of your lab it's like totally quantitative and so you get um a lot of production of basically low quality papers from china in a lot of different fields including my field of computer science um and so what you had was basically people going out virologists
• 49:30 - 50:00 going out finding all the bat viruses they could screwing around with them in labs in countries that all everyone involved in this research had an incentive to exaggerate the danger of the research because they had to exaggerate the importance of the research the more dangerous your virus is the more important it is so basically what you've done with virology by saying the virologists should run the show because decisions about what virology to study should be
• 50:00 - 50:30 taken by virologists naturally you're going to get gain of function research because these virologists are basically in this like darwinian cycle of exaggerating their own importance and the more dangerous these viruses are the more important they are so it's inevitable they will wind up creating viruses they they will actually wind up vlog creating the virus that they are then literally hired to solve okay so this is the case of dr fauci right you know and and and so you know you basically created the system of
• 50:30 - 51:00 incentives you know to sort of step back a second and talk about how these oligarchies work you know this is not a sustainable system this is not a sustainable system but it degrades slowly and so what happens is this system was initially populated by these really wise and capable people the americans of the first half of the century can we say they were diverse no we cannot say that but it was you know they were amazing people they got done they conquered the world they were a big deal they were the best and the
• 51:00 - 51:30 brightest they built the bomb you know et cetera et cetera et cetera biggest engineering you know hey libertarians libertarians out there biggest and best engineering project of the world manhattan project yeah government project run like a startup um and and the government project run like a startup how can you you can't do that anywhere today right and so you know you're looking at the system of like we're going to delegate these decisions to these oligarchs these experts these institutions these prestigious things
• 51:30 - 52:00 with the nice fonts and the black letter names that are super competitive and hard to get into and what's happening is that you're sort of you're feeding there's this great latin phrase who will watch the watch dogs i'd try latin but i don't really i'd screwed up um and and then people would yell at me and who should watch the watchmen right and our answer is oh we're going to have this decentralized collective network of watchmen that we're going to funnel all of this toxic we know that power corrupts and so we're going to basically act like an early well the early americans sucked at some things
• 52:00 - 52:30 and one of those things was environmentalism and so they're based we're going to basically say you know what we're going to do with all our power pollution we're basically going to just pipe it into this really big lake and for a while that worked for a while basically you have this field of experts and you say oh we're going to take these like intellectuals at these universities the ideas of of like universities telling what the government the government what to do like in 1900 is ridiculous it's like a weird they do that in germany right um
• 52:30 - 53:00 and and now it's like assumed like my god uh no how would you like the government would decide on its own on it maybe the intelligence community does that sometimes uh they don't seem to do a very good job of that um you know no of course you ask harvard and what you're doing is you're basically when you say of course you ask harvard you're pumping power into these institutions and what you don't realize is you're polluting them with power and after a while instead of getting
• 53:00 - 53:30 this answer which people have disagreed on and fought over intellectually and been all philosophical about like the way you imagining these things you know working no you're actually just being told what you wanted to hear and so you have this whole system of who actually makes decisions who actually makes calls so before our hour ends here um let's get back to afghanistan so what a lot of the people out there in america don't really understand is they think they still have a world war ii army out there just as they still think they have a
• 53:30 - 54:00 world war ii bureaucracy world war ii agencies i mean if you look at trust in these agencies like public trust in these agencies do i trust the government to do the right thing you know like 85 percent of americans in like 1950 will say yes of course and the ones who don't are like communists you know and and and and this was the level of trust under which the world was conquered and you know like all of these instincts the interstates were built this is a
• 54:00 - 54:30 lost and forgotten era and you know today of course people look at like they look at the congress like you know uh one thing that i like to observe that breaks people's brains but no one can disagree with if you look at the executive branch it's really the legislative branch it's managed by congress not by the white house this is why when you elect a president the wires of power basically go nowhere he can't reorganize these agencies he can't tell them what to do you know there no no congress never goes and testifies you know agencies never go and testify at the white house
• 54:30 - 55:00 um congress micromanages them completely through what are called laws and so you're looking at this this crazy thing in reality and there is no accountability there are sort of no incentives it's like if you ran like a you know a car factory for like 50 years and you ran it in soviet style and it had weird production quotas and things and it didn't matter what people thought of the cars so you know what most people don't know is that this
• 55:00 - 55:30 has affected dod as well this is not just a civilian thing this has affected both sides of washington red washington as well as blue washington well i think we've all discovered that so i just got to ask you you're describing a system that destroys itself yes it degrades over time that's right yeah but that degradation seems to be accelerating that's a hard thing to say it's it's it's a it's a really hard thing how long is this last and what is it replaced by
• 55:30 - 56:00 oh um i think it can go uh you know completely indefinitely i mean it basically just gets worse and worse uh you know if people always ask me you know there's a sort of trope in conservatism to always think you're at a turning point right i think there's an there's an organization called that or something um and you know there's this constant if you read old go back and read like you know the national review from like 1982 or something you know it's always a turning point uh it's always do we go this way or that way and send money now right and
• 56:00 - 56:30 sorry uh you know you should send money to i'm not gonna be doing that uh um and and um um televangelism i mean it works and and um um um all right sen send it to me subscribe to subscribe to my newsletter which you can find at gray mirror with an a at substance.com um and so you know there's this when you ask what comes now there's a sort of the reason i take issue the reason i'm busting your balls over this tucker is that when you ask what comes now there's a sense of helpless automatism
• 56:30 - 57:00 there and you're like okay well you know history has these big cycles and moves in these big waves and you know what's coming along sort of next for us and this is what's called the whig theory of history um you know which is well the wig theory of history that's wig with an h uh is that there's a sort of relentless progress of history and then it always things keep always getting getting better and better and i'm like you know that's funny when i look look at pictures of this place from like
• 57:00 - 57:30 50 years ago and now it actually like doesn't seem to be getting better like it seems actually be getting worse and and you know there are all these people in silicon valley who are like studying like you know progress i'm like well progress is great let's let's worry about like not regressing first shall we yeah and and and you just see all of you know the evidence of decline that you see when you look for it just the physical evidence like driving through america driving through america you know it's like um um how much time do we have left do we have
• 57:30 - 58:00 how much time are we in i don't know actually i think we're about an hour in uh you know i was i was uh you know okay decline everywhere etcetera you're the only person i've ever interviewed on this show where i said no we only have an hour so so so the automatism of oh you know this system is just you know is bound to collapse or something no there's no way in which it's bound to collapse i know and it's very easy to look at what the future is it's called the third world you can go
• 58:00 - 58:30 there you can see pictures of it everything is just going to continue to get more and more third world indefinitely until in like 100 years or so you're basically at venezuela or maybe 50 years i don't know but that's that's the you know that's sort of the default future that you're on let me give you the other future that because i know we're out of time that i think we're on which is one of the things uh it's interesting i was recently called out with uh by uh the um can i say this word on air the one that starts with the c i was recently called
• 58:30 - 59:00 out by the people at the bulwark or something for being friends with mike anton uh the flight 93 guy and i like mike anthony yeah i love mike anton he's awesome uh didn't you did you have them on here yeah of course yeah yeah my countdown is amazing right and and you don't want to keep the discourse online and and and and they're like my god you're friends with this curtis jarvin person right and uh curtis jarvin has this strange you know theory and then they went through uh sort of uh caricatures not actually terribly inaccurate character caricatures of uh
• 59:00 - 59:30 my perspective and one of the things that they mentioned which i happen to believe is true if you look at american history the way people read french history which is they number the republic so i think they're officially on their fifth republic i might call it the sixth um you know at present um this is also the way america works so actually we're on about our fourth republic here in america because the fund first of all you have a complete change of constitutional document
• 59:30 - 60:00 in 1789 with the constitution which is really basically a right-wing monarchical coup that results in what is essentially the hamilton administration yeah and so what you have at the start of you know american history the usg this thing in washington is alexander hamilton basically being the ceo of the united states government and even though he's nominally just the secretary of the treasury he's basically running everything and washington is running political interference for him so you
• 60:00 - 60:30 have this system which is actually it works a lot like a monarchy which is like a company like a startup it's like you know do you drive a car your car was made by a monarchy do you go to a restaurant your restaurant is a monarchy um every functional you know institution in the world has this you know very simple pyramid structure so at the beginning of this era kind of the second american republic the first being the the congress of the convention which is just a complete show and
• 60:30 - 61:00 has actually been really airbrushed out of history like you don't even know the the names of the politicians involved in that show um you know there's always this like who was the first president question yeah you know like the president of the congress um and i think people even disagree on that you know like it's this complete mess and out of this mess basically hamilton is like i'm gonna create a government i'm going to create what is essentially a sovereign company that is in charge of
• 61:00 - 61:30 all of these states that acts like a government that has that does government like financial things and foreign relation things and he wanted to do a lot of trade restriction which unfortunately he didn't get to but later that that became adopted in the so-called american system and um you know he created this monarchy right but of course you know he goes out in this stupid duel and the system degrades it basically falls apart and it becomes more and more oligarchic there's a lot of ways of
• 61:30 - 62:00 doing oligarchy you can have oligarchies of wealth you can have oligarchies of violence uh you know the sort of you know institutional test-based oligarchy that we have now which is so freaking strange is sort of only one of many ways to do this um and um you sort of get this kind of uh awesome kind of benign ossification of the us government right up to the civil war and then you know in the civil war you have this very small kind of out-of-touch government and again it
• 62:00 - 62:30 becomes completely revolutionized by america's third republic in which basically the constitution has a different meaning or rather resolves an ambiguity in the original meaning and once again you find one individual completely in charge of the government yes abraham lincoln and abraham lincoln is mainly kind of an intuitive you know politician and look who's actually in charge of the government uh john hay um and god what's his first name hey nicolet um and they're startup kids
• 62:30 - 63:00 they are kids just like all the founders you'll find running around san francisco here's this couple of incredibly smart you know kids with patrician backgrounds who are in their 20s and they're just like we're going to create a government we're going to do it we're going to found this thing it's like starting uber and and that was basically the third american republic was a kind of new generation of sort of monarchically organized civil
• 63:00 - 63:30 service that starts with these people then again you have another revolution in the form of fdr so fdr comes in and this thing has become tremendously ossified and full of these old corrupt politicians and hide bound and bureaucratic and small and just has not adapted to this itself to this new way of government by intellectual and fdr is fine that's fine we're just going to come in fdr could you know he had some trouble with some of the older line agencies he liked to create new
• 63:30 - 64:00 agencies he could create agencies he could destroy agencies you know no one can do that in washington now no one has that kind of power and so you know are there limit he has a basically a rubber stamp congress um he makes this incredible uh you know i do this uh there's no time for this here but i do this great rendition of fdr's first inaugural i've heard it you've heard it uh in which basically if i change a couple of names people think it's it's hitler is basically what he's doing is he's bullying congress and he's like congress you must give me absolute
• 64:00 - 64:30 power or i will just take it and you don't want that to happen that was basically fdr's message to congress right so the thing is again you see this sort of legitimate american monarchy where you see the presidency which was originally designed as a monarchy sort of as you know just not in the sense of a hereditary monarchy but just in the sense of one manager like again all other functional institutions in the universe and you know and you see it sort of reassert
• 64:30 - 65:00 that form and recreate and redefine what government is and just kind of road around this whole old mess so it's like when you look at afghanistan and you're like how would i fix dod so it wouldn't do this it's impossible just like lay the whole thing off keep keep the equipment keep you know some of the engineers basically at the contractors developing the equipment keep special ops like the rest of it like who's invading us anyway right you know we have some theoretical core all
• 65:00 - 65:30 over taiwan like what and you just you start to look at these whole systems which all date to fdr's world which are all sort of built on the assumptions that were made in fdr's world and those assumptions sort of keep getting rationalized over and over again and those rationalizations are incredibly deeply embedded at this kind of fundamental level in government so for example you've probably heard the term national security when does that term date to that term is an fdr era term
• 65:30 - 66:00 and it was sort of originally invented with most of the language of dod which used to be of course the war department um basically to tell americans that securing their own country the nation required providing global leadership to the entire entire world if you ever have a real state department believer on um and you want them to like you know spin around very quickly in their seat ask them what the difference is between global leadership and world domination and
• 66:00 - 66:30 and so you know you have this whole bureaucracy of world domination which won't even you know there's no world domination council there's no you know like which is under you know operating wholly under the theory that the only way to secure america is to secure the world which is not a ridiculous theory it's a theory worth considering it is definitely not a theory worth assuming and and and and so you know the capacity to sort of question a a a theory like
• 66:30 - 67:00 this at a very deep level does not exist in the regime and um and and so and so you don't have institutions and so you know just to finish my spiel when we have this amazing terrorism thing which has given just this amazing post-cold war like burst of life to dod which now seems to be ending so i guess you know maybe probably we'll get some more terrorism at some point and they'll get they'll get back on that but it gave this you know it created people's career as a dod they were
• 67:00 - 67:30 fighting in the global war on terror you know i saw this uh funny tweet uh congratulations to uh terror for winning the war on terror uh you know yeah i guess and to drugs drugs have also won the war on drugs poverty has obviously just kicked our asses all around and then we're on poverty right you know maybe it's time to realize that you're not as good at war as you think you know and and and this is a systemic problem across the regime you just can't imagine like fixing dod to be able to do something as
• 67:30 - 68:00 soon as it's occupied one minute answer how long are we in we're pretty far in we're pretty far in all right i got it you gotta come here you gotta cut me off you gotta cut me off well but i wanna know what the next regime is so you're describing uh uh it's very simple i'll give you you know like there's no leadership is basically what you keep saying yeah yeah essentially you know um the next regime and i think you know one of the differences i have with mike anton is that you know uh we talk about caesarism a lot and you know you're
• 68:00 - 68:30 clearly from my perspective looking very much in the fall of the roman republic event here in a best-case scenario uh worst case scenario is more like the fall of the roman empire right um let's go for the best case scenario but we're clearly at a transition between one form of government and another yes and the thing that to observe and the reason why the fall of the roman republic is a best best-case scenario is that it got a couple of very good ceos in a row it got caesar who was an excellent ceo but
• 68:30 - 69:00 could have worked a little harder on his personal security and then it got augustus who was merely a very good ceo who continued caesar's regime for like 30 years or whatever and and by the time you know augustus had reinvented the roman state it was a pretty effective organization and that's why it ruled the known world for the next 400 years despite you know some up yeah and and so and and one of the the sort of critical points of that transition and i think that's sort of one of the most important things is sort of am i really seeing this or am i not
• 69:00 - 69:30 really seeing this one of the important things about am i seeing this is that caesar although you know rome has this like red versus blue thing that's been going on for like 400 years you know the the conflict of the orders the padrians against the plebeians you know and then it turns into the popularis versus the optimadis and caesar is a red state guy he's a popul he's a populist he comes out of the party of the popularis um he's he's set against the old senate and the old senate basically is very oligarchical and one of the reasons why
• 69:30 - 70:00 they always lose their wars against caesar is they basically can't actually delegate their power to a single leader caesar so caesar comes he's a red state guy but he comes out he and that's where he comes out of but his mission in ruling rome is to rule all of rome and to unify rome and so you know the way he does that doesn't involve giving any power back to the senate but for example one of the things caesar doesn't do which is a normal
• 70:00 - 70:30 thing to do in a roman regime change is basically kill his enemies and take their money because he's basically like no actually you're not my enemies anymore because the struggle is over so you know the most important thing that you need to look for in kind of the next sort of regime change in this country assuming it follows the pattern of the past which is basically under the same constitution the regime reinvents itself every every 75 or 80 years kind of like an earthquake like the san andreas fault is about you to go
• 70:30 - 71:00 um quality and i can guess what you're going to say is does the next leader bring the professional class with him yes and and the thing is basically does he have a message to those people is his message to those people if his message you know to those people is i'm just going to kill you where you stand like rwanda and like throw your body in the stream um that's not going to work out very well right and so and but the thing is that the message of like this is a really you know
• 71:00 - 71:30 we're both from this class we can say this these are in many ways the best people in america and just as human beings their ideas are terrible but as human beings they're wonderful the best taste they eat the best food these are not insignificant things this is an aristocracy and so you know the thing is that basically populism has to kind of get beyond this aristophobia and basically say just as these you know these are wonderful people they've been corrupted by power
• 71:30 - 72:00 they're like a beautiful lake into which like 80 years of dioxin has been flowing and you know they just they don't think about anything besides making an impact and getting more status and getting you know their name and light to the new yorker or whatever and they know that these institutions have rotted and are actually horrible in a way it's like you know wherever they've been corrupted by power you know what the best thing in the new yorker is you know what the best thing in the new york times got some rumors no the car
• 72:00 - 72:30 the cartoons yeah of course they're the only subversive thing they're the only subversive thing and why is that because basically there isn't like a new breed of like they they're they're just above being woke they just don't matter enough to get woke right right and and so they're like math they've sort of been incorrupted and so the thing is that basically if you want to you know first of all there's just no world in which you can do this without electing a president who says i am the chief executive of the executive branch i am going to reinvent
• 72:30 - 73:00 the executive branch and the way i'm going to do it is simply by working around the one we have and creating a new one which has all the power as for the people we have with very few exceptions they'll be retired and we're just going to create a new government yeah next to the old one and we're gonna shut the old one down in a very nice and peaceful way that does not involve dragging any bodies through the street that involves probably your retirement benefits are gonna be increased you're gonna get an awesome
• 73:00 - 73:30 severance if you work for this old thing because we're actually buying you out we're saying you have power okay so here's what the american people are going to do to you we're going to print a whole bunch of money because that's really one of the things that we're still good at we're going to print a whole bunch of money and we're going to buy you out and you're just done and it's like the day after you know what there's a funny fact about regime change the federal republic of germany is still paying pensions not only to retired stasi officers but also to retired vermont officers
• 73:30 - 74:00 it is accepted that both of those regimes were germany if you serve those regimes and you weren't like some kind of major criminal who's been prosecuted yeah you're entitled to your pension and the way that shutdown worked is that the day the doors of the stasi building were closed and these people were sent home you couldn't reboot that system so what you don't do is disband the iraqi army and declare them all yeah yeah yeah well the thing is no you can disband the iraqi
• 74:00 - 74:30 army you can't like declare them persona and send them fleeing and you have to put in your own government as well curtis jarvan now i think we've gone like maybe an hour and 20 and i think anyone who's how long we've gone a long time oh and anybody who has watched to this point i think was expanded even people who didn't agree with the word you said and it just tells you again what a sad moment this is because you're not
• 74:30 - 75:00 talking on tv every day and people like you don't have an opportunity to talk more you can read what's the name of your rey mirror gray with an a the american way grey mirror dot sub stack s-u-b-s-t-a-c-k dot com if you just google grey mirror i think i'm above like the product ads now um so just type type gray mirror into your google bar and then send me money if you think
• 75:00 - 75:30 that a country this great deserves a you know robust scintillating conversation about what's happening if you think that like actual philosophy has a place in our life and i do then you got to let it be a grift and you got to pay me thank you so much tucker the name of the show is tucker carlson today it exists for conversations like this every monday wednesday and friday on fox nation we'll see you every week night on the fox news channel [Music]