Tucker Carlson: CJ Hopkins on COVID, Censorship, and the New Totalitarianism

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When power and fear move together, freedom can start to look like a costume. Today we're discussing Tucker Carlson's conversation with CJ Hopkins, the playwright whose book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich, was banned in multiple countries after he challenged the COVID narrative. Hopkins has quite a journey. He went from Miami to New York, then spent 25 years in Berlin before the pandemic changed everything. What struck him immediately was how authoritarian the COVID measures felt when they rolled out in early 2020 Right, and he didn't just have a gut feeling about it. He actually started tracking headlines and propaganda in a long tweet thread that documented how fast this new order was taking shape. The fear campaign was intense, but he refused to accept it at face value. The WHO's 3.4% death rate claim particularly bothered him. He calls it nonsense, arguing the messaging didn't match the data. That gap between reality and official storytelling became his central conflict. But it wasn't just about data disagreements. Hopkins describes how social pressure hardened into accusation. A writing student called dissenters "neo-Nazis," and anyone questioning the official line was branded a far-right extremist or anti-Semite. That's what led him to write The Covidian Cult.

In Berlin, he watched the state move with startling speed. He compares Germany's Infection Protection Act to a modern Enabling Act, saying the emergency response suspended civil liberties in the name of public health.

One vivid moment came when armed police removed him from a grocery store for wearing a paper bag over his head that said, "Orders are orders." That's when the seriousness became impossible to ignore for him.

Hopkins argues COVID wasn't just about disease. It was about reminding people who was in charge, especially after Brexit and Trump had unsettled the establishment. Lockdowns became tools of obedience. The social segregation was precise.

Unvaccinated people in Germany were excluded from restaurants, museums, films, public buildings, and required to show papers everywhere. He describes it as a visible badge system designed to make compliance unmistakable. This led Hopkins to broader conclusions about totalitarianism. He rejects the idea this was mass confusion. Instead, any society can be pushed into totalitarian configuration if the powerful have the will and technology to do it. The legal fallout was severe. His tweets were censored, his book pulled from distribution, and he was eventually convicted. The first judge acquitted him, but the decision was overturned. Germany now treats him as a convicted hate criminal. Many former friends in the left cultural world fell in line, denouncing others and validating their loyalty online. For Hopkins, the deepest betrayal was moral, not just political.

He widens this to the world system, arguing global capitalism now behaves like a single ideology, dissolving borders and traditions. He calls it a struggle between neoliberalism and neonationalism. Yet he refuses despair. Hopkins says he lives with joy because life is temporary and everyone has a part to play.

He closes with: "They can kill me, but they can't eat me."