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

Tucker Carlson (0:00)

Now, if there's one hallmark of totalitarianism of the 1930s, it's banning books, book burning. Remember that? We're against it. That couldn't possibly happen now. Oh, it happens a lot. More than it happened in the 1930s, in fact. We're going to talk to a man whose book became a bestseller and then was banned by the government. His crime? He accurately described what once free Western societies have become. Western freedom is only the semblance of the real thing. Sure, you're free to watch Netflix and smoke weed and doom scroll and order door dash and live alone, racking up credit card debt in your apartment that you don't own. But if you step out of line and notice what's happening around you, your freedom evaporates instantly and you could find yourself in handcuffs. We watched that happen in 2020 People who challenged the official story, refused to comply were censored, treated like a despised, hated minority group, ostracized, punished. CJ. Hopkins documented all of that as it happened in a series of essays collected in this book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich. We are proud to bring this book back because it was banned. It was banned. It was kicked off Amazon. It was banned in multiple countries in Europe. So we're publishing a new edition of it, I wrote the foreword to it, available now on tuckercarlsonbooks.com.

We operate on the assumption because it's true that authorities only censor the truth and they only censor it when it threatens their power.

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

CJ. Hopkins, thank you very much for doing this.

C.J. Hopkins (1:48)

Thanks so much.

Tucker Carlson (1:49)

You have an amazing life trajectory which our viewers can read about. But just to, if I could just summarize it, you begin life in America, Miami, you wind up in New York as a playwright, very much a figure of the left, I think, culturally and politically.

Then you wind up in Berlin, almost 25 years you've lived in Europe, really since the Iraq War. And, but on the left, and then Covid happens, and then the next thing you know, we're reading about you getting arrested by the German anti-racist authorities for something, even though you're not a racist. And like, so what happened? What was the pivot point that got you from your previous life to wherever you are now?

C.J. Hopkins (2:35)

I think it's Covid. Yeah, that's the one.

Yeah, I mean, my life was just going along as it had been until the Covid measures got rolled out. And this is March and April of 2020

So early. Yeah. And I had been writing my satirical columns. I had been at that for about four years, covering the whole first Trump administration and the establishment's reaction to that. And when the Covid stuff started, at first I didn't take it very seriously. I wrote a few humorous columns. I just thought it was a massive overreaction and that it would pass. And then it started getting really serious. One of the first things that I did, I think I was still in shock at the time, I compiled a 257 tweet thread on Twitter, it was still Twitter then, just collecting the mainstream media news stories and headlines that were being pumped out. This is when they rolled out the New Normal is what I call it. People may remember that. A lot of people think I made that phrase up and I didn't. It was put out by the establishment.

That thread still exists. People can look at it. I think a lot of people have forgotten how authoritarian it was, how immediately authoritarian it was.

Tucker Carlson (4:20)

Yes.

C.J. Hopkins (4:22)

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

Tucker Carlson (4:33)

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

C.J. Hopkins (4:46)

Well, they were alarmed, but they were alarmed differently.

They were alarmed about what they were being told was an apocalyptic plague, basically. Again, people forget, in the early days, I think it was the World Health Organization actually came out and said, this virus has a 3.4% death rate, which was complete bullshit, of course, but that's a really scary number. Yeah. And the way the official propaganda was all rolled out in the beginning, it was aimed at terrifying people. And so people were terrified.