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

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

Only a great novelist can understand a story as weird as the Luigi Mangione murder case. Walter Kirn on what actually happened. (00:00) Introduction (04:22) The Strange Similarities Between Mangione, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Unabomber, and Charles Manson (10:21) Was Mangione a Patsy for the Radical Leftist Social Justice Movement? (16:30) The Cult of Mangione and the Left’s Strange Glorification of Murder (24:50) Why Do Women Love Murderers? (39:13) The “Lone Gunman” Narrative Paid partnerships with: Levels: Get 2 free months on annual membership at https://Levels.Link/Tucker Liberty Safe: Visit https://LibertySafe.com to see the whole Centurion line Beam: Get 30% off the American Strength Bundle using the code TUCKER at https://ShopBeam.com/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are certain moments in history that are so kaleidoscopically weird that it takes a great novelist to understand them. This is one of those moments. Walter Kern is that novelist. The Luigi story seems like the kind of story that historians will write about as they try and capture the essence of the time that we're living through right now? I don't really understand what it means. He just issued a letter, I think, from jail. What is that story? Well, from the moment the crime was committed, I realized that we had a crime built, engineered for the social media age.

If you think about the OJ crime as the crime that made cable television and, you know, serial, true life crime shows an established thing in America. Yes. Or if you think about the Lindbergh case as having the synergy with the age of radio. Yes. Well, the Luigi case is the age of Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. And it was that since day one. Remember, the crime occurred on video, on a surveillance video. And the surveillance video was on a surveillance video. And the surveillance video was wonderfully staged,

if you know anything about how movies are set up. You had the killer in the foreground in a hood, his face obscured. You had the victim in the distance, a tiny stick figure. He shoots, the stick figure falls. Now, the way that shot is set up, if you were to set it up, you have a lot of interest in the shooter, but none at all in the victim. Imagine it reversed.

If the victim had been in the foreground and some tiny figure had shot him, you would have had sympathy for the victim. You'd see him die, you'd see his paroxysms, his spasms as he expired, but it was the other way around. From the moment that video hit the internet and it got onto it curiously early, you know, within a very short time of the crime itself, you had hordes of junior investigators on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram examining it. And there was a mystery in the video, which was, why did he have such trouble charging

his gun? Why did he have such trouble operating his gun? So mystery one was, is this a professional killer or is it an amateur? The amateur people argued, well, he can't seem to, he keeps getting jammed. The professionals argued, well, that's this certain sort of firearm and, you know, it tends to do that. So you immediately had this mystery of the gun and this mystery of the killer's expertise. Then, almost in no time, it was revealed that he had rented a bike, an electric bike in New York City and had escaped on it. And so once again, thousands, hundreds of thousands of

junior detectives using the maps and available public data about the distribution of those public electric bikes in New York tried to trace his path. A few days later later or maybe even a day later we find out that the hooded figure whose face we didn't see in the first video checked into a youth hostel either before or after the crime but a video emerged from a youth hostel in which you can see his partial face while he flirts with the obviously besotted clerk at the youth hostel. So you had this slow reveal almost like a striptease and at every stage you had a mystery that the community could solve that you know sort of open source investigation.

You know, it's sort of open source investigation. At that point I said, this is too, this is too perfect. The well shot video from the killer's point of view, the mystery of the gun, what kind of gun, the, you know, following the bike path digitally. And then it just got more and more made for social media. He appears at a hearing wearing the outfit that Lee Harvey Oswald, the exact sweater with collar combination that Lee Harvey Oswald wore when he was brought to justice by... Even the police and escorts around him were arrayed in something of the same way. So he dressed the part of the Patsy or Oswald. The hood part was of

course, reduent of the Unabomber. Of course. And then, woe and behold, a manifesto appears, much like the Unabombers, in which he outlines his motives, he's avenging the torturous, brutal American healthcare system on behalf of all those who've been denied coverage, he's a man of the people and so on. It got so bad at one point that I saw when he was arrested in a McDonald's with all his stuff, with the gun, with the manifesto, with the costume that he'd been wearing and was sent to jail, I saw a news program in which the reporter was standing outside the jail while Luigi was presumably being processed in and he said to the headquarters anchor

person, I can hear cheering inside the jail. I can hear the cheering for Luigi." We've now evolved to Bill Burr, the comedian going on TV, free Luigi! There are candles, you know, votive candles, sort of Roman Catholic style candles, usually devoted to saints, but wearing Luigi's image. There are fan clubs, there are Reddit forums, there are all across social media adoring groups of people trying to build a defense for him, analyzing the evidence. And honestly, the evidence isn't very good. America is under the impression that they saw this murder take place but in fact they just

saw a hooded figure. Another almost amazing development was that when the gun was found it turned out to be a ghost gun so to speak, a 3D printed gun with a 3D printed muzzle, a silencer. Well it just so happens, the crime was committed in December, that there is a Supreme Court case in March, I believe, to adjudicate the question of whether 3D printed accessories to firearms are legal. There was already a Supreme Court that allowed for them, the receiver and the basic parts of the gun to be printed, but there was still this question. So even the firearm itself played into a coming on the calendar Supreme Court case, and it was the first such weapon to be used in a murder, I believe. It also, let's remember, happened right after the election. It happened in December. The left in

America is completely demoralized. One of its disappointments is that youth didn't come out to vote for Harris in the number they expected. They really expected young women to swing that election, and if you heard the commentary right beforehand, they almost considered it a certainty. Well, they hadn't. But Luigi, who we, when we saw his casual photos and his family album in the first couple weeks after his arrest was perfect for the arousal of the young American woman shirtless six-pack there used to be a magazine called Tiger Beat in America which teenage girls would you know put up pictures from on their walls.

Donny Osmond, yeah. And so I call him a Tiger Beat revolutionary. He appeals directly to the demographic that, on the democratic side, they feel is most likely to be loyal to them and whose passivity in the last election was a problem for them. Well, they're reactivated. He is a combination of Kaczynski, Oswald in his dress, he evoked that, and Charles Manson. Beatlemania almost has been fomented around Luigi. We had Taylor Lorenz, the strange ex-Washington Post reporter, give an interview in which she really tried to understand and almost fanned out in doing so the

Luigi phenomena, how appealing he is. He was of course positioned as a Robin Hood-like figure who had on behalf of the downtrodden who are the victims of these health insurance companies, come forth to administer frontier justice. But, in fact, he comes from a very wealthy family, East Coast family. He went to the University of Pennsylvania. I noticed that in his letter he thanked people all over the world for contributing to a GoFundMe-like defense campaign.

He's brought in a million dollars. Well, his family has well over a hundred million dollars. You'd think that he should maybe spare the poor people of America having to pay for his murder defense and let his parents do it. But in any case, in this letter, he further extends his own image because he's quite conscious of himself as a living legend. There are a couple quotes in it. He says, the artist's task is to save the soul of mankind and anything less is dithering while Rome burns. And that's a quote from Terence McKenna who is a kind of psychedelic hippie philosopher,

a disciple of Timothy Leary and so on. So Luigi considers himself an artist. He ends that letter with these peltail words, never lose the plot,itten in his own hand, the rest of it's typed. To me, all of this is evidence that whether he has done it himself, whether he's done it with help, or I can't speculate on that, he created intentionally, deliberately, with some care, a made-for social media assassination, which he is continuing to cultivate with the help of now tens and hundreds of thousands of volunteers. He solves a problem. He solves a problem for the left in America. They need an appealing, youthful, attractive, somebody

younger than Bernie to carry forth the torch of social justice. And he appeared at just the right time in just the right way with just the right storylines. People are still on social media comparing the two photos the first of the hooded figure and then the one of him little later when he reveals part of his face checking the eyebrows. The eyebrows don't match. His defense is going to be quite obvious. I'm not the guy in the hood. I'm not the guy who you see fire the gun.

And in fact, he was not apprehended there. He was not identified there. He he I think personally is part of a narrative that has been constructed in a way that a gamer or a computer science student like him might have done personally but that it has carried on after he's in jail as though with the help of others you know he didn't get to go shopping did he before he dressed himself for the for the perp walk I mean I guess maybe he stipulated I want that

I want you know that he seems to me to have accomplices in creating the Luigi show and it says everything about America that he has fans he has posters he has merch he has a go fund me or its equivalent and he has posters, he has merch, he has a GoFundMe or its equivalent, and he has a story, the Avenger. It breaks down a little when you realize he comes from this rich family and that in fact he never would have been denied coverage in a way that he couldn't have paid for. I think that's the most perfect part. Yes.

The private school kid from Penn gets immediate support from the rich girl from Greenwich, Taylor Lorenz. Right. I mean, the whole movement, the whole Bernie movement, I don't think it started this way, but it ended up this way, is the movement of rich kids. Right, right. Yeah, it's like when I was at Princeton, I got to Princeton from Minnesota, middle class Minnesota and everybody's, all the rich kids know about reggae.

I thought reggae was a poor people's music from the slums of Jamaica. You know, so yeah, he's a trustafarian for sure. But what he's doing is he's rousing these anti-establishment emotions among a demographic that has already predisposed to them but hasn't had a champion and certainly not a sex symbol. And he is nothing if not a sex symbol. Last year we did an interview with a woman called Casey Means. She's a surgeon educated at Stanford. She's the nominee for Surgeon General right now.

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Pickles on pizza? Amazing. It shouldn't work. But it's so good. Try the Nashville Hot lineup at Pizza Hut. Your mouth will get it. But the heart of the story is murder. It's violence. It's shooting a man who's the father of children who may have been a good man or a bad man. I don't even remember his name. Nobody does. He's just some healthcare CEO. I mean, he's not in the story at all. But his murder is the story. I'm amazed you can hate

the health insurance companies. I certainly do. I hate almost all big companies. But to endorse a murder of somebody is a big step. That's, I never thought that that would be widely accepted in America. Well, when I started narrating this, I decided I was going to be the, you know,

the Garrison Keeler or whatever, the Louise story. I would tell the story as if it were a folk tale and try to point out to people how artificial elements of it seem, how contrived and how pre-planned. People said I was crazy. They also predicted the story would go away. Merrick would get sick of him. He was an unappealing character attached to a murder.

The very opposite has happened. His cult has grown. He has a cult. And the question is, when his actual trial comes around, will they be able to find jurors who haven't been exposed to this folk hero Robin Hood legend? I have a hard time believing that in New York City they will find 12 who will convict him in a case where he is linked circumstantially but also has several outs. When they investigated the electronic bike use,

they found out that he had picked up the bike at one part of New York City, three and a half miles from the site of the murder, and somehow managed to get there in four or five minutes. And the junior detectives have rerun the route and say there's no way you can make that trip in less than 13 So there's the first flaw in the prosecution's case, you know They never saw his face and it's not the same eyebrows when you see the two versions of the face there's check mark to I predict if you've ever seen the movie network a satire of American television and mass media and news

where they actually stage their own crimes in order to keep the ratings high at this failing network, I see elements of that here. Cable news, not just social media, social media is in the ascendant, but cable news is dying. But Luigi, when he goes on trial, is going to be an advertising boon like you can't imagine. What do you think the truth is of the murder? I think the truth of the murder is murky. Looking at the evidence as it has been presented so far, it does seem a little weak and contradictory.

There's some question as to whether the bag he was carrying at the McDonald's was taken from him in a way that was unlawful, technically in violation of how you search a suspect. They separated him from it early before really announcing themselves as police. There are a lot of weaknesses in the case. And to be honest, I play stories out not for their likelihood, but for their possible cultural impact. And if I were in what they call the writer's room

in Hollywood scripting the Luigi drama, I would imagine that the ending they want is he is found not guilty. He comes out of jail, a people's hero, Che Guevara, He comes out of jail, a people's hero, Shegwavara, you know, whatever, the revolutionary that all the girls can love with the kissable face and the six-pack abs, and he becomes a media star. Whoa. He will, it will be ambiguous as to whether he committed the murder or not.

He's obviously pleading not guilty. So what, I mean, so you're saying that girls like murderers. Well, they do. I mean, I- Yeah, they do. That's something that we weren't told before we embraced female leadership of the country, that the country became a lot more violent

and there's a lot less restraint, I would say, on people's behavior. And there is a kind of bloodthirsty quality to American culture that did not exist 30 years ago. Well, Manson, of course, had his fans and his minions and his groupies. He had them commit the crimes for him in many cases. And it was mostly female.

Yeah. Richard Ramirez, the night stalker, one of the most horrific serial killers in American history who, you know, broke into bedrooms and tortured people in the 80s, had an infamously long list of female visitors and women courting him and proposing marriage and so on. You know, the bad boy is always an attractive figure in America, James Dean Marlon Brando, but the evil boy seems to have a constituency too. No, it's true.

And I think I didn't grow up with a lot of women and no women in the house and I always assumed that men, men commit most of the violence in our society, but I always assumed it was men who were for violence, women were against violence, but I've learned just by watching as I've gotten older that women is a broad generalization, but certainly female leaders are way more enthusiastic about violence than male leaders. Well, I'm not going to go as far as that in terms of my generalizations only because I want to live a free man for a few more months.

No, I'm not. I mean, I don't mean it. It's just an observation. It's not even an insult, but it's like... But in favor of your thesis, Bonnie and Clyde, was there ever a more 60s style sexy romance than that between Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty and Bonnie and Clyde? Yeah, I know it's true. And you know, going back to film noir and our sort of, you know, artistic history, the The femme fatale who often causes the killing.

You know, in double indemnity, who recruits poor Fred Murray to kill her husband, played by all those different actresses who specialized in being the dangerous, heartless blonde, is one of those motifs, one of those tropes that has a basis in our psychology. You know, I've certainly noticed. Because you would think it would be disqualifying, you know, despite the six-pack abs and the,

you know, the dashing hood. Well, the goddess of- If you murder a guy in the sidewalk, you would think people would be like, you know, I'm mad at the healthcare system, I don't like health insurers, but you can't shoot a father and a husband like on the street Like what and by the way if you can do that if what this case does is introduces or reveals an acceptance of murder Then that's a predicate for what's to come. I think well, you know here He is writing his new age letter from jail talking about about, you know, the novels he's reading, and he ends it not just with Never Lose the Plot,

but with the single word, light. You know, light. He's a bearer of light. And- It's Cahill Gibran kind of, with a gun. Yeah, Cahill Gibran, killer poets. And we know from our experience of Adolf Hitler that the frustrated artist can turn into

the most prolific killer. Oh, for sure. And I know from a book I wrote about a guy named Clark Rockefeller who had murdered a couple of people. He was an imposter who called himself a Rockefeller, but he murdered a couple of people. And you know, an imposter who called himself a Rockefeller, but he murdered a couple of people and, you

know, how can I put it? That can be by some considered a work of art, a sort of higher Nietzschean expression of self. And when, when, when, when, when Luigi styles himself an artist here, it's very troubling, especially to me, an, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when,

when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, sidewalk. Yeah. Well, I will leave you with this. I haven't seen the family of the victim come out demanding that Luigi be imprisoned or punished. I was just thinking that. I have reason to believe that there are members of the family that aren't completely convinced

he's guilty. I'll leave it at that. It's not something I could report on. The family of the family that aren't completely convinced he's guilty. I'll leave it at that. It's not something I could report on. The family of the victim. The family of the victim, yeah. I think among certain people involved, it is still a question as to whether he's guilty of the murder itself, whether he was involved in the crime but not the actual gunman, or whether he was a guy maybe told to do something and he found out later that he was in the

wrong place at the wrong time. All these things are possible now especially and and when you see how much he seems to love jail he's reading Fahrenheit 451 he's reading Ayn Rand a book about a an imprisoned guy who becomes a scientist and a hero. You sense that this is a guy who is acutely aware of the mythical and cultural precedents for his own actions. Well, and I mean, that seems like a pretty compelling argument for his guilt that he's embraced the role as a venging murderer. But in Walter Kern's world where everything's a novel, and and I let me just put that out there I Think that we now have had reality dissolved before our eyes enough times. We've had we've had the experts debunked enough times we've learned enough about the

Untrustworthiness of our media that we have every right to speculate, they used to call it conspiracy theory, but we have every right to speculate on what indeed we're watching when we watch huge stories. I think you're right. Especially huge stories that have the potential to move political blocks and change sentiment over certain issues. And to me, the jury is very much still out on whether what has become a kind of online reality game has the grounding in actual reality that we imagine it does.

Well, I just wanna be in the record in saying that convincing the American population to accept the murder of a stranger is a big, big, big step and it's a precedent we're going to regret. And it's already been done to some extent because just a couple of weeks ago when these two people were murdered in Washington, D.C., remember gun down. down yeah right outside the Israeli embassy right outside the Israeli embassy the killer fired numerous bullets into the crawling form of the female victim to dispatch her completely a violent horrible crime not like the one shot that Luigi did.

There were people who came out immediately to say, he's the new Luigi. So I'm opposed to that. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I've got, you know, well that we should have to say we're opposed to it as a measure of how terrible things are. It used to be without question that one was opposed to shooting people on sidewalks as they crawl to safety or gunning down the father of a

a husband on the streets of New York as he attends a conference. But apparently now there are two sides to those matters and one of the reasons is Luigi So the psychological damage if you look at this in some way as a psychological operation Whatever you look at it that whatever else it is. Yes Then it has succeeded already So you walk into my garage my actual garage. one of the first things you see is a Liberty safe. We trust it. All my family's guns are in there,

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That's why we have laws and police and courts. Anyone who understands human nature knows that. And so the second you allow the acceptance of murder, boy, you're just gonna get a lot more than you imagine in return. Once you drop that, the final defense, the primary defense against murder is public sanction against murder. We don't like murder.

No normal person likes murder. And when that changes, I don't care how many cops you have or how many CCT cameras you have, like you're gonna get a lot of murder if you change that attitude, no? You're gonna get a lot of murder and you're going to get a lot of uncertainty on the part of people in power.

I know for a fact, certain security organizations were called just after this murder to beef up the protection of CEOs and billionaires and so on. I mean, that business went through the roof, I know, Luigi. Even if there are no more murders, it causes those people to separate further from society.

You know, up until recently, yeah, the richest people in the world, they might have had security, but you'd see them walking into restaurants. Exactly. You'd be able to have a conversation with them sometimes, come up to their table. This will cause the further social balkanization of the classes. That's exactly right. Boy, that's such a smart point. And I know some of those people and they're living in a completely parallel world. Yeah. Now, it does feel a lot like, amazingly like, pre-revolutionary Russia, where you had a period of like 40 years of anarchist

assassinations of prominent people, and it softened up the society for October 1917, the Bolshevik takeover. By the time that happened, with minority support and whatever, but they pulled it off, they were able to pull it off because people were nihilistic by that point, because a lot of people had been killed. Yeah, yeah. It does degrade the capacity for empathy. It, in a strange way, in some people, causes them to flip,

and they start to become attracted to the notion of power through a gun. They start to see maybe they're saving the soul of mankind. Maybe the killer is on the side of light, love, psychedelic mushrooms and groovy things. Remember the Manson girls, a couple of the Manson girls went on to, well, at least one to try to assassinate Gerald Ford.

It's squeaky from. Yeah. And I grew up, I'm at this strange point in life where I'm just old enough to remember the last really radical period in American history from the late sixties and into the mid seventies. And it was a similar vibe. You know, you turn on the TV and RFK was assassinated.

You turn on the TV and right up until Reagan really, and Reagan had been shot. It cooled off for a while. But boy, during the Trump campaign did it get hot again with those assassination attempts. And now we've had with the Israeli embassy and with the Luigi thing, two more prominent assassinations. An assassination being something that's planned in which someone lies in wait and in which the symbolic character of the violence becomes the headline, you know.

So one of the worst things we do in America was we take crimes and we turn them into allegories. Exactly. You know. Exactly. We find out that, we find out if you hear today on the drive home that five people were shot at a Walmart in Kentucky, the first thing

that everybody says is what was the race of the shooter? Of course. What were the political beliefs of the shooter? As though we're going to what, make policy or understand ourselves and our souls in terms of who kills who and what their motives are. And the truth is that in the old days when there were obvious political killings, like the shooting of JFK, we developed this notion that I think is all American

of the random lone psycho killer. Now, anywhere else in the world, if a president or whatever is killed, you see it as a political violence. In Pakistan, they don't believe in the lone gunman. Yes, but here we developed this sort of archetype of the lonely, nervous, psycho killer who's just kind of maybe sexually confused and frustrated and they just do it for no reason. It's random violence.

Now in ancient Rome, you know, or in any society in which political violence is being used constantly, you know, wives are assassinating their husbands, brothers are assassinating their sisters, everybody's competing to succeed to this office or the throne or whatever. And then the rest of the world, they know political violence for what it is and they know it by its fruits. And yet, we up until recently in America obscured all that with this myth of the guy who just snapped. But if you pull back a little bit, it's clear that these are maybe not the product of intentional conspiracies but certainly used as part of like a strategy.

And this is kind of, and this Luigi murder is kind of a third thing in the sense that the conspiracy might belong only to him. He obviously researched Ted Kaczynski and the Unabomber. He dressed like him. He wrote a manifesto that was a sort of tribute to him. He used his tactics of coming in and out of cities on buses and so on. He studied the case. Whether it's a game designed by Luigi as a solo act or one which he had help with, it is definitely engineered to be a compelling social media, retweetable viral drama and where it's going is what concerns me because I do frankly expect he might not be convicted and in that case we will have maybe a podcast host or well definitely a. At the least they'll have a podcast, you know. Maybe he'll have a fashion line, who knows.

$80 t-shirts. Who we kind of wink, wink, know is a cold blooded murderer or at least somehow participated in a cold blooded murder plot. And we will at that point have completed a next step toward dehumanization. Doesn't seem like there's anybody left in the society who can stand up and say this is wrong, whatever you think of the health insurers, and be taken seriously.

Are there moral authorities left in the United States? left in the United States? Well, I mean It's hard to say The church and various religious authorities of my youth who used to have popular Popular influence Billy Graham that kind of person they don't exist The Moral authorities who were in the press, you know, Walter Cronkite or so on, who even though he, you know, he might have been a liberal, you know, Massachusetts Democrat,

part of that establishment did act as though he was somehow speaking for all of us in a he was somehow speaking for all of us in a common sense, traditional moral way. Some, you know, we still get the posture of moralism, especially on the left. We're a little less, we're a little less inundated by right wing religious fundamentalism than we were in the 80s, say, or even under Bush. But true people of integrity who can stand up and denounce things in a way that really sears the conscience of the country across different groups don't seem to exist. Is the country too big to manage as a country? Well, you know, I come from the cultural side, and I don't know if it's too big to manage as a political, financial, and economic entity, but it's too big to manage as a cultural entity, that's for sure. We have promoted, overly promoted,

I think often in the name of diversity, but that was cynical, not just a Balkanization, but a kind of atomization of our culture in which every group over ten Can't agree with any other group over ten Now murder itself cold-blooded murder not murders of Pat crimes of passion We traditionally understood as having slightly lower status as moral crimes. I mean somebody come up came in and saw their

wife in bed with somebody, or somebody hurt your child and you did a vigilante killing. We understood that kind of cold-blooded, deliberate, bought the gun, came to town, watched the person, learned their movements, killed them. That being a matter of debate is new. So as culture, which, you know, Andrew Breitbart, the conservative thinker said, politics is downstream of culture. And I kind of agree with him on that because, you know,

we're not always walking around following rules. We don't have the constitution in our pocket. We don't have the statutes of the state of Maine in our pocket. We don't have the statutes of the state of Maine in our pocket. We have to rely on tradition, on what our parents told us, on what our heroes might do, on what we heard in church or what we learned playing sports. It is culture that guides our behavior. And if a country's breaking down, almost by definition, it means that its culture has broken down. And if its culture is strong, it's very hard for a country to break down.

Yeah, I mean, there are countries with long histories of being invaded being invaded famine that are actually fine It's still coherent kind of Russia is one of them coherent country like it or don't like it You know Russians have a real sense of themselves as Russians is participating in a national project. That's gone on a thousand years, right? It's kind of hard to wreck and break a country like that But if a country doesn't know has no sense of itself, if people don't know what it is they're part of, I don't understand how it hangs together. Well, America has done a great job of assimilating people from all over the world, huge groups.

My mother's ancestors came from the mists of the Carpathian Mountains in Hungary. They might have been gypsies. They were people without birth certificates. They came to America speaking Hungarian, most difficult language to learn and to understand in the world for others, yes. And you know, they made their way out of the slums in New York to Cleveland, became landlords, bought an extra apartment, lived off that, slaughtered pigs in their backyard in Cleveland, Ohio, kept the old ways. They became Americans.

It's not diversity per se or the multiplicity of the peoples in the United States that causes a culture to break down. It's attacks on what all such groups have in common, like the aversion to murder. All those groups have in common certain beliefs about what a man is and what a woman is and what the duty of a father is and what the duty of a mother is and of a child and so on. You go outside of the United States and you go, oh my gosh, it's a traditional world. We're the ones who have somehow melted

the social compact in ways that I think seem almost impossible and horrifying to a lot of the immigrants might come frankly. They must find themselves in a country where the family's under attack, where education is overwhelmed by questions of social justice and so on, rather than learning to read. In some ways I have a kind of poignant empathy for a lot of the immigrants to America who come from cultures much more intact than ours. That'd be almost every culture outside the US, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada.

Outside the Anglosphere, which is uniquely falling apart for reasons that I don't really understand. Why is that? Well, I went to Oxford. After I went to college here, I had a fellowship to Oxford, and I lived there for a couple of years, studied there for a couple of years, and then lived in London afterwards. It was during the period of Thatcher's kind of recapitalization of the society. When I got there, England was a kind of grim post-war nationalized space in which people were used to rationing in lines and the coal miners would go on strike and the whole country would shut down. And And, you know, in a couple of years, Thatcher had sort of caused it to be a dynamic, more modern money-making and the British thought materialistic culture.

But it was functioning pretty well. That's mid-'80s. Especially around speech and the freedom to express yourself. England of today seems like a nightmare, a place that threatens to arrest Elon Musk if he comes for his Twitter, failing to police Twitter where resentments and antagonisms that are natural to a system that is bringing in so many newcomers and so on

are declared crimes where thought policing really is a reality and so is thought detention. You know? Yeah. So what I thought of as the country that brought the full flower of human expression to perhaps its greatest, you know, greatest level in history. I mean, if you think about Elizabethan England and next few hundred years of literature, it's unmatched in its quality of expression, its wit, its insight into the human condition, its drama, its eloquence.

Every sort of character you can find in Charles Dickens, every sort of criminal, every sort of hero. But they are getting very narrow and very censorious and very politically oppressive in a way I wouldn't have thought was possible in the country of William Shakespeare and you know Charles Dickens and yeah and of the Magna Carta and of the Magna Carter yeah you don't want to be passive and tired and dependent do you of course you don't you want to be strong and self-sufficient that's the goal and our friends at beam can help you they understand that real strength does not come from drugs it comes from inside you internal motivation internal strength health that's the key bigger so we partner with beam because they

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Spy Magazine. And Spy Magazine, long gone, but hugely influential in the 1980s and into the 90s. What was Spy Magazine exactly? Well, Spy Magazine was a sensation. It was a humor and gossip magazine aimed at the upper echelons of New York City and Los Angeles and Washington.

In other words, we've got tabloids that tell us what the TV stars are doing and what rock In other words, we've got tabloids that tell us what, you know, the TV stars are doing and what, you know, rock musicians are doing. But Spy Magazine followed the careers of people, editors at the New York Times, assistant secretaries of state, various business people, socialites. And it did in a way what Twitter does now. It made fun of them. It sometimes exposed scandals about them. It turned them into cartoon characters. Chief among them was the young Donald Trump. Spy Magazine had an almost patented or hallmark

obsession with Donald Trump in the 1980s as a, well they called him short-fingered vulgarian. That was his the epithet they used and he was thought to be uncouth, greedy, narcissistic. He plated everything in gold. He wanted some kind of power that he probably didn't deserve. He did not have a pedigree like a lot of New York society does. A lot of New York society goes back to old families. Here was Trump coming out of Queens and hanging out with celebrities.

There was a kind of political moment where Trump rehabilitated a skating rink in Central Park that had fallen into disrepair, a woman rink, and the city had sort of acted like, it's just, we'll never fix it, it's too far gone, you know, it's too complicated. Trump came in with his own money and his own crews and restored this rink in record time for less than it was thought it would cost and he became a proto-political leader and Spy Magazine was absolutely devoted to making sure that went no further. It's just interesting that so you know it's New York City so there are lots of short-fingered vulgarians

in the real estate business in New York City who guild things and hit the nightclubs and like, it's a type that's very common in New York, but, and certainly was in the eighties, but they focused on Trump. I mean, to the exclusion of everyone else. I mean, it was just as a reader, I was a reader of it. Trump was kind of the star of the magazine,

issue after issue. Why Trump? Well, you know, if you go back, you see that Trump has had political ambitions for a long time. Reagan, I think famously said on meeting a young Trump, this man's gonna be president someday. And he started giving interviews fairly early about how he'd fix the United States and what was wrong with it.

So my guess is that Donald Trump's political ambitions, which he maybe talked more about in private, but were known, were troubling to the establishment in some way. Wait, you're describing Spy Magazine as a tool of the establishment? Well, Spy Magazine came out of Harvard. It came out of the Harvard Lampoon, the, I guess, private club secret society devoted to humor that has given us a lot of our American comedy from The Simpsons to Saturday Night Live and so on.

Our publisher was the son of a Raytheon executive. We, uh, it's not a sector you associate with humor. Well, what influence it had, I can't tell. It's just the fact that that is the nature of the publisher's money. And it also included a lot of Time Magazine characters. You know, Walter Isaacson, who became head of Time Magazine, head of the Aspen Institute, and so on, was sort of around the magazine. He never wrote for them, but he was a constant butt of jokes and kind of in that sphere of influence. Graydon Carter, who went on to become the head of the Vanity Fair, which really was an establishment, burnishing force

to bring a lot of our worship of the British Royals and so on comes from that era of Vanity Fair magazine. And there were other characters involved in that set, in that group, who came from very high families, Ivy League backgrounds and Since have gone on to all sorts of positions. It was an in crowd It was as though college had never ended for this set of people and they went on And created a magazine treating New York as a campus in which you know The real cool people got rewarded and the uncool people, you know, were, were

mercilessly made fun of. Um, is it an accident that the main butt of that humor, Donald Trump became president of the United States? Well, I don't know, but one thing I've learned about America in my long tour of our, you know, high echel system, is that presidents are spotted, future presidents are spotted, and even start their campaigns, as it were, the campaign before the campaign, much earlier than you might recognize. Yes.

My daughter went to Harvard, and first year she came back, she said, Dad, they're so pretentious. I said, why? She said, I actually was sitting in a room with two guys who were arguing and one was saying I'm running in 2046 you have to wait till 2050 and she said they were serious I'm not surprised

What I am surprised by is that of all the egomaniacs out there who think they're going to be president, and there are, as you said, quite a few institutions like Harvard, the editors at Spy took Trump seriously. They were really, 40 years ago, they were trying to strangle his campaign in the crib. Yes. I just think that's just incredible, the way that they could smell that this was real. He's not like everybody else. He's not like other real estate developers who think they should be president.

This guy actually could be, and we're going to stop him. Well, those who are ambitious in America and politically ambitious and socially ambitious in a way are all aimed at the same culminating office, whether they get there or not. You know, anybody who, you know, I remember when Jack Welch, the president of GE, was a big celebrity for, or Lee Iacocca, immediately, will they be president? So, of course there would have been rumors around Trump that he might want to be president, maybe he fed them himself. Maybe Spy was especially lucky in picking this, uh, but of its jokes, or maybe in some sense,

they saw in him, uh, the beginnings of a kind of rough populist to them uncouth political movement that he would lead. The people that spy, you know, Trump's fighting Harvard today, right? The cultural arguments that Trump is having right now with the elite institutions of America show that he doesn't like them and they don't like him. And I think that hostility goes back a long time in his career. I think he was, I think he was discerned as a threat to the hierarchies as they existed at that point. And he still is.

And that's the root of the hate for Trump. It could be. To the extent, you know, people always ask me, is there an establishment? Is there a big club? You know, is America really have a kind of insider ruling class? And my experience coming from a farm in Minnesota getting to Princeton wide-eyed a good observer a good listener a social guy who gets into all kinds of room is the answer is yes most definitely yes and the lineages of these

of these ruling class members they go back in all kinds of ways through certain law firms, through military service, intelligence service, they go back to big commercial fortunes. We still have basically a Vanderbilt on TV, on CNN, and that group knows as and sees itself as a kind of knighthood, a knight chivalric order that's guiding the US, that has a right in some sense to rule it. And when they talk, when I hear the term our democracy, it's often spoken by these people in a possessive way you know right our democracy john carry our democracy right where the vote is internal it's not a national vote it's a vote exactly you know it's curt anderson and walter isaacson and john carry and you know and hillary quentin and whatever And so I think it was pretty easy to identify Trump early

as an outsider and a, what they call in Great Britain, a bounder. Somebody who was trying to jump a class without the pedigree, without the proper credentials and without the right attitude. Well, here's the story you probably haven't heard a lot about. The Chinese mafia is exploiting rural America to create a drug empire.

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inside this country's most beautiful but least served areas. We've got a brand new documentary on this. It's called High Crimes, the Chinese mafia takeover of rural America. It's available now on tuckercarlson.com. It's excellent. The purchase of churches and schools

to aid the operation, the jerry-rigging of power boxes to steal electricity, foreign pesticides, collusion with the Mexican cartels. It's unbelievable. By the way, one of the drug houses is like walking distance from my house. I didn't know that. It's a layered and fascinating story. Tucker Carlson dot com to watch now. We think you'll love it. No Frills delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC optimum points on your first five orders.

Shop now at NoFrails.ca. When you got to Princeton from Minnesota in the 80s, were you impressed by these people? Did you think they deserved to rule? So I came out of Minnesota to Princeton with one mythology, you know, in my fore mind, and that was the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I was just about to say, yeah. F. Scott Fitzgerald, he came from a pretty good family in St. Paul, Roman Catholic kid, but his mother had fallen on hard times and though they lived in the right neighborhood,

they didn't have a lot. And he goes to Princeton in the, you know, right before World War I or during it. And he sees the glory of the American establishment, the beautiful debutantes, the sons of industrialists. Princeton, of course, at that time was an all-male school, but there were other sort of feeder schools that they could date the girls from, and he absolutely was enchanted by it. He wrote a novel, This Side of Paradise, which Princeton still sort of exalts over as its most romantic portrayal. And I got to Princeton primed by that myth, but of course I get there in 1980, on the heels of the 60s and 70s when aristocratic know, aristocratic and system-based establishment America was

at a low ebb after the Vietnam War. So I wasn't expecting the same great Gaspies party. But what I saw were people who were connected by all sorts of family, marital, business, and school ties in a much tighter organization than I would ever have dreamed and I also found out that I wasn't one of them. I could be if I wished I you know in America when you grow up middle class and you go to the right schools and so on you have the option of joining that country club on an honorary basis if the membership votes and if you behave correctly.

But I being a kind of dark, brooding, wannabe poet artist wasn't willing to do that. And so I spent my time sort of like the little match girl, standing outside the window, watching them conduct their rituals, play their sports that I had never seen. I didn't know how lacrosse was played. I thought field hockey was something you played in the gym with hockey sticks and a ball. And so the whole thing was alien to me, but not charming. It seemed a little brutal. It seemed a little insular. It seemed very judgmental.

And it seemed to be- That sounds like boarding school. Yeah, yeah. And it seemed to be populated by people who, they didn't just have material entitlement, they didn't just think they deserved a big house someday. They had social entitlement and political entitlement. They really believed that they should rule the country.

We had a thing called the Woodrow Wilson School at that time at Princeton. The sort of woke hurricane has come through and taken everything named after Woodrow Wilson, blowing it off the Princeton campus. But in those days, the sort of woke hurricane has come through and taken everything named after Woodrow Wilson, blowing it off the Princeton campus. But in those days, the Woodrow Wilson School was a place where generals and secretaries of state, you know, federal reserve chairs and so taught. And the creme de la creme at Princeton were people who would turn out like James Baker,

the secretary of State, or Paul Volcker, the Fed Chairman, or whatever. The Princeton mythos was that you were the gentlemen advisors, the powers behind the throne, almost too good to be the president yourself. I didn't find that as romantic as Fitzgerald did. But of course, think about what happened to Fitzgerald. That class, which he was so besotted by, never really accepted him. He ends up a journeyman screenwriter, alcoholic, out in, you know, L.A. He writes his greatest novel really about the pretense and the tragedy of that class, you know, whose hero is someone who desperately,

the great Gatsby is actually, you know, a kid from North Dakota who wants exactly and a gun runner and a, you know, gangster basically, who wants to get in and they go to his parties. It's sort of like what we've seen, you know, Gatsby wasn't Epstein, Gatsby wasn't Diddy, but he served a similar role. He threw the biggest parties and everyone went, but the minute he went down, everybody forgot him and there's no one at his funeral at the end of the Great Gatsby, you know. And so that brutal insider class that will certainly eat your free food and grace your, you know, grace your parties with their presence runs out on you pretty quick. And I was

frankly scared by them to be honest. You know, my view of British society was that it was somehow a more humane and I don't't know, secure version of it. The thing about the upper classes in America, they're very insecure because- I've noticed. Because secretly they know they aren't upper at all. And that in fact, they live in a middle-class society whose cultural products, you know, Hollywood movies,

rock and roll and so on, which are the true genius of America aren't created by them. No. No and also their place isn't secure because it's not granted to them really by birth like at some point you have to perform right or else you lose your summer house right you know and which they often do and so there is a there is a kind of anxiety to them, and you really, really feel it, which is one of the reasons I think they're so easy to control politically. If you tell them or tell their wives more precisely that, you know, like all the cool

people are doing something, they'll just do it. Right. Have you noticed this? Oh, yeah. The American, you know, there's a great book by a writer named Paul Fussell who used to hang out at Princeton and who I knew a little, called Class. I recommend that everyone read it. And its thesis is basically that the American class system is fully as developed as any

other countries and it's got as many signifiers and code words and secret clubhouses and so on, but that it obscures its presence in order to not be offensive to our allegedly democratic system. And now we've just discussed one more example of that. Luigi Mangione, you know, from the highest caste of Baltimore, at least, you know, income wise society, making himself out to be Che Guevara or Fidel Castro or Huey Newton or something. Sacco Invenzetti. Given everything you've just described, like, where is the country in five years? Well, you know, as I said at the beginning, I see things in terms of stories. Stories are different than narratives.

Everybody says now, oh, that doesn't fit the narrative, and they think that narrative means story. A narrative is simply Joe Biden is actually fit as a fiddle and he just stutters. A story has a logic to it. A narrative is just a description of what's going on. A story is how did something start, what is happening and what kind of conflict is determining it's unfolding and how will it end?

The American story is hard to tell because right now we don't have one. We used to have one when I went to school. For whatever reason, it was thought to be too simplistic or maybe too white or too that or too colonialist, but it was people come from all over the world fleeing oppression, looking for opportunity from an old set of kingdoms and societies that had basically squeezed out the individual or they just don't have much and they don't see how they can get much where they are. They come to America, they tame this resource-rich land and using this constitution that allows the

individual to have rights that in other countries only the privileged and high-asphalon types have, they unleash this economic, cultural, scientific dynamo that allows them to become the most powerful and in some ways the most fun and the most appealing and the most magnetic culture in human history. One that is imitated in every continent in the smallest towns whose music spans the world, whose boxers Muhammad Ali become the most famous music spans the world, whose boxers, Muhammad Ali, become the most famous people in the world. Now the American story has been reoriented, either fractured or reoriented.

There was a formal attempt to do it with the 1619 Project. America began as a place to have slaves and exploit, you know, other races, and its real founding is in that sin, and its real story is how that sin propounded itself, made everything worse, developed a brutal, horrible, oppressive, almost sickening society, and we have to somehow get about the business of writing all those wrongs or we can't even get started as a society. We might even have to avenge those wrongs. I mean, we're not talking about civil rights like in the 60s.

We're talking about anti-racism. We're talking about, you know, punishment and overt promotion of people not giving them opportunity, but actually giving them the job. And maybe even with less of a resume. President of Harvard, it's important that she be black. It's less important that she be a plagiarist. So in that American story, I guess the Luigis of the world and the people who are writing in Los Angeles now and so on think we're paying for our sins. This is the scene in The Godfather where everybody gets their comeuppance so that we can have a new society. The other story is over. No matter how much somebody like Elon Musk

or Vivek Ram Swamy or other people come to this country and make fortunes and found companies or become great athletes and so on, even though that still goes on, and it still goes on in all kinds of prominent ways, it's not seen as of the essence of our American project. So where we'll be in five years, I think depends on whether or not we're able to find a version of the American story that is less retributive, less about vengeance, less about the past, less about making up for past sins, and more about New

Horizons, a fresh appreciation of our freedom, which is terribly threatened, and and a common sense that we actually have done a fairly good job despite terrible dissent and really I think sabotage by our elites. You know it seems to be that upper classes and the elites of America who have the biggest questions about it who have the greatest questions about it, who have the greatest doubts about it, who are most hostile to it. They often do it on behalf of classes well below them, you know, as they see it, you know, migrants

or people of other races or people of sexual predilections, which in the past were thought to be aberrant. They always make sure to team up with, you know, a client class. Yeah, a human shield. Yes, exactly. But I think they're on their way out. I think they're on their way out.

So to be honest, I think there is a path toward toward resurrection, toward restoration, toward maybe even a Renaissance in the sense that we now have technical tools that we didn't before. We've got technologies and the ability to communicate and meet and get around some of the old institutions. America was a set of brokerages before. Every relationship with power had to be brokered. You had to call a stock broker to buy a stock.

Now you can do it on E-Trade. If you wanted to communicate with a billionaire, I don't know through what series of meetings and letters. You have to join his club. Yeah, you could join his club. Now you can DM Mark Andreessen and he will respond in many cases. He will actually. Yeah.

Late at night, at length. What a great guy, Mark. So the American ingenuity, which is I think the title force that unless restrained will always dictate our future future is still alive. It's in some ways more alive than ever. We've gotten around, you know, here you are having this podcast with all these viewers without a network behind you.

You know, the universe of media and communication is horizontal rather than vertical. There's no broker here. There's no executive waiting outside to tell you, Tucker, you can't talk about that. We're going to get sued or whatever. Walter Kern doesn't have five levels of editors above him when he writes a substack or a book. he writes a sub stack or a book. And so I think we the people can out maneuver the last stand of the brokerage classes. And I think we're in the process of doing it.

But the problem is some of the loudest and most prestigious voices are those who are losing out, who are on their way out. You know, Scott Pelly giving a CBS News, giving some terrible, strident jeremiad about American society because 60 Minutes is no longer have the prestige that it did mostly due to 60 Minutes, not due to evil Donald Trump. The screams that you're hearing are the screams of the defeated

and the screams of the stressed. And I actually, you know, it's fashionable some days to say, I'm a real optimist at the darkest times, but I am because I think we've done a better job in the last few years of facing our real problems, at least identifying them, of liberating ourselves from the media brokerage and of getting real.

Now there are instruments for the manipulation of opinion and sentiment that are extremely powerful and on the horizon lie you know AI possibilities for literally spoofing history you know changing our view of things making false videos re-engineering the past in 1984-ish ways, you know. But I do think our ingenuity, our restlessness, our great genius for seeing bullshit. You know, my hero is Mark Twain,

and Mark Twain was at, when he was at the full, you know, flow of his career said I'm not just an American I'm the American and by that he meant that his attitude seeing through pretense, pointing out hypocrisy, laughing at pomposity was the essential American attitude. And insofar as we can bring back that Twainian skepticism, ability to self-criticize, ability to see through our own egos, and ability to see that the institutions are in a weird way, not what makes America great.

They are things that grow up and become like giant, you know, obstacles to further creativity and must be constantly questioned, constantly leveled. So that spirit seems to have liberated itself and found all sorts of technologies with which to propagate itself. And I'm betting on that. You're not worried about AI. You're not a doomer on the question. I'm not a doomer on AI. In certain areas I am.

There are certain things that people do that I don't think AI can ever do by definition. Right now it's possible to put in five prompts or a series of ten prompts and write a novel. I want a novel in which Tucker Carlson and I are lost at sea in Polynesia and are rescued by a mysterious maiden who takes us to her village, her village of love. Well, we can get that novel, that's kind of like an early Conrad novel, for five prompts, 200 pages, and it can be published. We don't even have to say it's AI. We can pretend we wrote it.

In the future, more and more of our literary product is gonna be produced that way. But what I say to people is, are you going to wanna read the literature and the novels of an entity that has never had sex? Are you going to want to read stories written by people who have never held baby? Are you gonna want to read stories by people who have never worked hard all their life to get a job and then had the political asshole in the office beat them out at the last minute. AI has no experience. All it can do is constantly remix and perfect the

surfaces of things. It's essentially collage that already existed, but we're gonna need to tell our stories ourselves. So I don't fear AI, but there are things that I think it will do very badly in which I have no interest. And one of them is write novels, write stories, report on life. Why should we fear it though? I mean we're told not to fear anything by our religious sages. I think it's a reflection of us. If we fear it, we're fearing ourselves. And what in ourselves are we fearing if we fear AI? A lot of what people think will happen is that there will be a kind of totalitarian

agreement among the powers that be to constantly hypnotize us, tell us stories, do things like run pandemics and other panics that can almost be administered by a machine, and then generate documents and videos and so on in support of them. And that's the thing they fear. But what are you really fearing there? What you're fearing there is power running amok because it's not going to do it itself until it starts doing it itself.

I love your take on AI. Sort of cautious concern, not panicked. It does seem like everything you just said makes the existence, the possession of physical books, unchanging physical books, not digital things that can't be revised without your knowing more important. Absolutely. I mean, I'm a literary survivalist at this point. You're a book prepper? Well, I am. I buy sets of encyclopedias that I believe represent the perfection of that, particularly encyclopedia like the 80s, say, before they start becoming politically sensitive.

And, you know, I actually carry in my car, some people carry in their car jumper cables, granola, you know, a spare tire. I carry a box of books that if I were to be stranded somewhere, if the road system of America broke down. I'm not kidding. I have a box of them. I selected them carefully. There's the Norton Anthology of English Poetry. Oh, wow.

You know, there are a couple novels by Conrad. There are some other, you know, favorite books. The Collected Sherlock Holmes to entertain myself. Which is amazing. Yes. You can't read The Sign of Four too much. No. A study in Scarlet.

Sherlock Holmes stories were the first literary stories I read. Me too. Edgar Rice Burroughs and then Sherlock Holmes. Yeah. And I got to say, if I'm an Anglophile, it's because of Sherlock Holmes. Because I could imagine no fate more romantic than having a little apartment in London with a roommate, a doctor,

injecting a little cocaine when I got bored. And being called upon by Scotland Yard to solve their, you know, solve their most naughty mysteries. Also, there were ladies flitting around. We don't think of Sherlock Holmes as having much of a love life, but he actually did, it's indicated. Just the discretion, the civilization, you know, the the parlor that he lived in, the simplicity of his life and the aliveness of his mind were an endless curiosity and attention to detail were really my Babe Ruth or my, you know, Elon Musk.

That was my role model. It's so funny. Me too. I got packed off to boarding school in 1983 and my father gave me the collected Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, and that's what I read for that first semester when I was 14 or whatever. And from there, it's like a short hop to Evelyn Waugh or Orwell. I just sort of stayed in that genre of my PG Woodhouse my whole life. I haven't moved beyond that. or well or, you know, and I just sort of stayed in that genre, my PG Woodhouse, my whole life.

I haven't moved beyond that. Well, in the back of my Ram truck, there's a box with the collected Sherlock Holmes, and if a solar flare ever takes out the grid, I will be found next to a fire in the Nevada desert reading those aloud. So the, I think the largest repository of books in the world, larger than the fabled Library of Alexandria is the Library of Congress. It's one of them, yes. It's unclear what the largest library, just like it's unclear what the largest anything is. Right, that's exactly right. But it's got a claim on the title. It's a massive repository of physical book, paper books.

Trump just fired the head of it. I don't know if there kind of is a head of it. I heard someone say the other day that Walter Kern was gonna be the head of it. Are you gonna be the Librarian of Congress? Would you want that job? What is that job? Well, total candor.

I was approached by some people in December asking if I might be interested in the job. I thought about it. I actually grew up when I was a little kid on the outskirts of Washington and I had a next door neighbor. He was a rear admiral. He had been a sergeant in World War I. His name was Robert Knox.

He was a rear admiral in a thing called the Coast and Geodetic Survey, which was a branch of the government founded by Jefferson way back when to chart and map the coastlines of America and the world. It was kind of the nautical equivalent of the Lewis and Clark expedition. And this man, who was in

his 70s, introduced me to the Smithsonian Institute and he was a member of a club called the Cosmo Club in Washington DC and he'd take little me down there and that was a place where kind of explorers, generals, admirals and that type gathered. And he introduced me to a vision of mankind, he used to call it humankind, and our achievements that was, as I say, Jeffersonian. It goes back to the belief that if we can understand each other better, if we travel more, if we learn more, if we read more, we will become more peaceful, productive, and happy people. So when someone said, would you be interested, I leapt back to that experience in that little

garden apartment in Park Fairfax, Virginia with this man who would show me his books, teach me geography, show me his globe, take me to the Smithsonian, introduce me to writers and other intellectuals at his club. And I thought, yes, that's the continuation of that spirit that that man brought into focus for me as a young man. And I thought, it's the only job I would do. In fact, you could come to me and ask, do you want to have this political office

or some kind of other role in governance? And I would say absolutely not. Stuffy, boring, I'm a writer, I'm an artist, I'm a little bit of a freaky guy, I'm an outside-the-box thinker. Librarian of Congress? Yes. And the reason wasn't just because it goes back to Jefferson, you know, the Library of Congress was partly founded by Jefferson selling his library to the United States. The Library of Congress goes back to 1800. In fact, it was proposed even before the Constitution that the U.S. have a National Library, and it didn't fly the first time. So the

idea of a National Library is older than the United States, and it exists in a beautiful building right up there between the Supreme Court and the Capitol. And it represents to me the entire body of what we've done, what we've thought, what we've written. Now it collects the movies we've made, the music we've made. It has done a very good job of making them available to the public, you know, digitally and in other ways. And it is the shrine to American culture, civilization. More than that, it cannot, it can be added to every, every book that's published in America sends two copies to the Library of Congress. That's why it grows.

But it can't be changed and it needs to be protected. What a librarian is to me is a guardian who stands in front of this vast file of our accomplishments and says, you're not gonna change it, you're not gonna harm it, you're not going to change it, you're not going to harm it, you're not going to destroy it. I am between you and it, and we are going to celebrate this because this is a temple. You're not getting into the Vatican to throw bombs, and you're not getting into the Library and Congress

to pull books, to change editions, to retroactively rewrite history, to play that role, not just as guardian, but of champion, would be a privilege to me, beyond measure. And next year is the 250th anniversary of the United States. As I say, we're a little unclear about what our story is as a country, but the Library of Congress sits at the center of that story and is the place we can go to to find it and rediscover it. And I think it's an underappreciated and underutilized And I think it's an underappreciated and underutilized institution in American life that needs to be brought to the fore. You know, sometimes I imagined when this person suggested

I do it, and I took it to various officials. I showed my interest and some of them were encouraging. And they said, you know, you have to be confirmed by the Senate. And you're a weird guy. You've written all kinds of things. There are scenes in your books, you know, opinions have expressed that aren't very political. I said, well, nobody who's a writer grows up to want to be a politician.

I, you know, I was a writer. But I think because I have books in the Library of Congress, I'm probably better qualified than people who don't. I also think that if you want to talk about diversity, look at a bookshelf. The works William Burroughs, drug-addled madman, homosexual visionary, crazed junkie. Wife killer. Wife killer. Sit next to the works of, you know, Robert Frost. Peaceful Vermonter.

Peaceful Vermonter. In other words, if we as a society can hold our differences, I like the word difference better than diversity, can hold our differences in one building, then we can hold them in one country. You know, a book, a great library is a tribute to variety and peaceful coexistence that society could well model itself on. And I'd love to be the face of that. And it has a great history, you know. Franklin Roosevelt appointed a poet, Archibald McCleish. Ford, Gerald Ford appointed a historian,

Daniel Boorstin, who was a great thinker too. We've not had many librarians of Congress because until the office was term limited under Obama to ten years, sometimes people held it for forty. That suggested it might be a job I'd like. If people are willing to spend half their lives in that job, there must be something about it Our books threatened oh Absolutely. Well before I say answer that question I have a joke that I missed inserting and it's not The reason I really want to be librarian of Congress is that I've already Written the desk plate for my desk, which says the book stops here.

Well, then you need a place to put that. Right, and that's the answer to your question. Books are threatened in lots of ways. First of all, they're not physically of quality in the way they used to be. The way books are printed and the paper that they're printed on these days is not designed to last for a hundred years.

It's not designed to last more than a few years. I happen to know this from discussions with publishers that they are now being forced to use paper that is of such low quality that we cannot depend on these volumes staying bound or readable or intact for very long. Books are threatened in all kinds of other ways. There will be artificial books written by AI. One of the big questions is, does every book-length work created by AI belong on a shelf in the Library of Congress? Well, there's going to be zillions of them, and a future Librarian of Congress is going to have to answer that question.

Do we just fill this up with, you know, the endless drac produced by a mechanized form of writing, or does it have to have real authorship, human authorship? Books are threatened also because we don't read at length anymore. We read headlines, we read the paragraph, we read the short take, we read the substack, we read the tweet. But to read a book is a skill that might be lost, almost like sailing or how to raise a garden. It takes not just patience, it takes a certain kind of mind

to follow a complicated story that goes back and forth and doesn't have simple resolutions or simple morals in which the characters are complicated. A novel, for example, you can lose the ability to read it and people are losing that ability. I've noticed. And there's something really important about following a story, a set of ideas unified by a theme, a thesis, a narrative over, you know, a couple hundred pages.

It absolutely. I remember once asking my father about my real mother, who was long gone, and I said, she seems smart. She's a smart, high-acute person. And he goes, yeah, she read magazines. It's like, I guess the most cutting thing you can think of. You're speaking of AI. One feature that AI offers these days is it will interpret a tweet for you.

And I don't know if you've seen this. You're not a big social media guy. No, I'm not. But people are using Grok and other AIs to interpret a tweet. What did that mean? In other words, they're now downloading their literary imagination and their interpretive ability

of two-sentence documents to machines. Reading is not just putting together the words like a child and pronouncing them correctly or knowing what a sentence is. Reading is a set of reactions and echoes created in the mind that form an interpretation and an analysis and an impression and maybe even a moral. And it's just reading itself is just the start of the reading process. Seeing the words is just the start of where a book enters the mind, the soul, the culture and so on. And that process, if it dims down, if it thins away,

if it becomes so uncommon as to not be a regular habit or occasion in our society, will leave us starved in a way that Bobby Kennedy tells us our foods are starving us. You know, we're still going to be eating vast quantities, but the books will be Velveeta cheese pumped up with, you know, a hundred different additives. I look at what is contained in the Library of Congress, the pre-AI Library of the United States, as what they call in the vaccine world, pure blood, a pure blood or a control group of documents from the time when people thought without the intervention of the machine. We're going to need

that. We're going to need to compare the culture that comes after AI with the one that came before, and we're going to need to keep a relationship between them. And it's not just a matter of keeping those books from being altered or deleted. It's a question of keeping that shrine alive so that when we come back from the wilderness of AI to the North star of this library of what we did when it was all done by hand and by a person we can judge what we've lost what we've gained and Be whole as people and be whole as people.

Did you, you were an adult man when the internet was invented? So you remember the hype that surrounded it. Did you ever imagine 30 years ago when it was just starting that the internet would lead to illiteracy? Well, in some ways, okay. In some ways we're more literate than ever in that we communicate by literate than ever in that we communicate by writing more than ever.

People don't even talk on the phone. Text messages and posts and ex-posts and Facebook pages and so on are all written documents. So people are, in a sense, writing more than they ever did. Sometimes they are writing more than they speak. You can go through a whole day and realize you didn't even speak to another person, but you wrote plenty. So literacy, considered in its most basic and literal sense, has not died out. We do a lot of writing and reading still. Its quality has suffered and there are measurements of the vocabularies of Americans and basically the vocabularies of AI programs and so on that show our vocabularies are shrinking. You know, in Orwell, the totalitarian state is actively engaged

in shrinking the language and making it more simplistic, less complex so that people can't think anymore. You know, they have fewer distinctions. The word bad is double plus un-good, because why should you need another word than good for bad? We'll just modify the word good and call it un-good. And the idea there is that they will slowly gain control of the human mind to the point where people won't be able to form ideas because they don't have the words. To some extent that's happening because of the internet,

for various reasons. I mean, we did ourselves the greatest injury culturally that I've ever seen in my lifetime when we shut the schools during COVID. I mean, there are kids who have a window to acquire language and reading skills, and that window was closed for them. And I can't

think of a greater tragedy in American life than that. Literacy as a real living you know complex phenomena is I think endangered, terribly endangered. There are words, but is there sense everywhere? My last question is to somebody we talked about last night at dinner. You just referred to Orwell You are rereading 1984 for the first time in 15 or 20 years. He said It's been 40 for me and I think for a lot of people my age I doubt it by the way, is it still assigned in schools, 1984? Well, let me tell you something, Tucker.

I picked up the 75th anniversary edition of 1984, approved by the Orwell estate. It's got a little seal on the cover. It's the official edition. This happens to be Orwell Month, the celebration of Orwell all across England and the English-speaking world. And there was an introduction that the estate approved for the book, which was one of the most Orwellian things I've

ever seen. It was written by a novelist who said, well, Winston Smith the hero is a misogynist. And that's, she literally used the word problematic. And usually I wouldn't read a book with a character like this, but you know, you should probably, it's still an important book. And then she made other criticisms. That's in the prologue. It is the introduction to the book, okay?

I noted this on a podcast and I said Orwell now has an Orwellian introduction which accuses him of thought crime and warns us that though the book is problematic, we might want to read it anyway. She also notes the lack of racial diversity in- Not really. Oh yeah. Who is... Do you remember her name? I do not remember her name. She's a Harvard trained novelist. But what was so odd about it was that following the introduction, there's another introduction forward written by Thomas Pynchon. Thomas Pynchon who many would argue is

our most mysterious and illustrious serious novelist alive. He wrote... Well, purportedly alive. Purportedly alive. Nobody knows what his face looks like. No, exactly. You know, he's written these magisterial books that are, you know, some believe almost too complex to understand. And he did a forward, but he got second billing. He got bumped out of first place in the introduction world by this ridiculous trigger warning. It's a series of trigger warnings about the book. And it's not ironic. Not ironic at all. So terrifyingly earnest that you can't believe it. She criticizes the book for not reflecting her lived experience. My god, it's a dystopian novel, you know,

written in 1948 about a future totalitarian state, which resembles a combination of Soviet Russia and England, and it doesn't reflect your lived experience. The only books I want to read are ones that don't reflect my lived experience. I don't read Moby Dick to reflect my lived experience. Right. Your lived experience would consist of your diary. Yeah. My lived experience is a drag. It's a limitation. I go to books to go to other

parts of the world, be in other heads, be in other times, other parts of history, and that should be a criticism of 1984. It's just the triumph of narcissism. I mean, that's just basically what that, you know, how is this about me? Enough about you. So anyway, you know, that was the first alarming thing about 1984 and I hadn't even gotten to the book yet.

When I got to the book itself, I have to tell you prophetic isn't the word. Prophetic is overused. It's not that he predicts the society we live in today. He finds the eternal formulas by which power defeats the human mind and individual. It wasn't that he was just extrapolating about historical trends. Yes. He was giving us a worst case scenario for group think over person think. He was giving us a warning about what happens when we lose our memories.

More than anything else, 1984 is a book about time, about a society which doesn't have access to the past, in which the past is constantly rewritten to celebrate the current leaders. Oh, it's Wikipedia. Yeah, kind of, yes. And in which there is no future because no one can plan a life, no one can even expect that they won't go to jail tomorrow for some tiny crime or offense. People in 1984 are stuck brutally and tragically in the present. And the thing that keeps the present their sole preoccupation is the violence of society. You know, the thing about

violence is it happens now. It takes you out of the past, it blocks out the future. Violence is a deep experience of the present only, from which you can't escape. And in 1984, the reason they have a two minute hate where the society gathers every day to throw oranges and, you know, hurl curses at this imaginary enemy, subversive Goldstein, and the reason they have an actual hate week in the summer every year, where they do that for a week is that fear anger and violence are ultimately the weapons of the control class and he does a very good job of showing how eternal and perpetual war with unseen enemies abroad keeps you know keeps the people in their place and keeps them insecure and anxious.

He does another good job of showing how constant fear in the domestic realm, you know, will I be told on, will I be turned in? You remember in 1984, there's a telescreen that watches you, you don't watch it, you know, will I be seen to have some, you know, item I shouldn't have? I'm supposed to have black market cigarettes, but somehow I found some good ones. Will they see those and come to my house and take them, take me? And so the book is a nightmare and it's a thorough nightmare which seems to offer no hope at all. At the end it's not any spoiler to say the hero who manages for a short time to think for himself to have a love affair, to write a diary. His great crime in the book is starting

a diary. Pens and paper are pretty much illegal in the world because they create a record that can't be falsified, you know. And so at the end he's completely crushed, he's tortured, he's brainwashed, and he comes out at the end a thoroughly broken person Saying saying slogans. I love big brother Without spirit without hope It is a hopeless portrait of what happens when an inner circle of people devoted to power

above all take control of the human mind and the individual and I if you want if you want to depress yourself read 1984 that it resembles in so many ways things that are happening now is uncanny but I guess someone used it as a template at some point. I mean you would almost think they did. In so many ways our censorship regime, our surveillance regime, in the book the young people are the enemies of the old. They're spying on them constantly. Children are the most distrustful and zealous backers of party orthodoxy. Yes, especially young women.

And young women in particular, and Orwell has been criticized for that, you know, thus the misogyny charge. Because it bears no resemblance to our current reality whatsoever. I mean, he just made it up out of nothing. No. Oh, sorry. When I read it as a child, the reason they assigned 1984 was to tell us

that there's this place called the Soviet Union that is much like this. And by reading 1984, you can celebrate your freedom to read 1984. Exactly. Which they can't do over there. You can celebrate the superiority of our culture and our value for the individual and our freedom to think, express ourselves without fear. But when you read 1984 now, it's not to feel superior to the old Soviet Union or, you know, Hitler's Germany.

It's to realize we're there. We're so there that in some ways Orwell lacked imagination. He didn't know AI. Though in the world of 1984 1984 novels are written by machines they just take the elements of novels and like a kaleidoscope they crank a wheel and New combinations come out, you know, which is very much like the AI literature. I've been predicting 1984 Machines write novels. Yes. I don't know how I forgot that. Winston's girlfriend, Julia, is in the novel writing department. And it's a funny book.

At one point, she gets injured operating the novel writing machine. And he said, but it was a common injury in the novel writing department. She got her fingers caught in a novel writing machine? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, prophetic doesn't fully describe it if there's a novel-reading machine. I mean... Right.

Exactly. He was limited by the technology of his day and some of the circumstances and how he imagined things. The one thing he gets wrong is that 1984, the society called Oceania, Airstrip One is the new name for England. It's allied with America in an alliance against Eurasia, which is basically Russia and Eastern Europe, and East Asia, which is basically China. And they're perpetually at war with each other, and the war and the sides change constantly. One of the greatest black humor scenes in all of literature is Winston Smith in Trafalgar Square,

some London square, during a big demonstration against the enemy Eurasia and there are posters up of the Eurasian, you know, evil leaders and their atrocities and so on. And in the middle of the protest, the word comes down from Big Brother, from the party, from the government, that we're no longer at war with Eurasia, we're actually at war with East Asia. And the posters against Eurasia are all still up. So how are the people going to reconcile the fact because they're told we've always been at war with East Asia. And they go saboteurs put those posters up, tear them down, Russian agents, tear them down,

you know, and how many times in the last few years have we been through those ridiculous pivots where, you know, only the vaccine can save us next day. no one ever said it stopped transmission of COVID. Joe Biden is just a nice old man with a stutter he's had since childhood. We always knew he was an Alzheimer's patient being hidden by his family and various cunning subordinates. We're going through that every day, that scene where we are suddenly expected to switch enemies. We've switched Elon Musk being the enemy three times

in the last week, I think. About a week ago after his fight with Trump, I saw a Democrat saying, we should really, we should court Elon, we should bring him into our movement. Now he's apologizing and it'll again be, you know, firebomb Teslas. Yeah. It's not just docility that Orwell... It's so depressing.

What you just said, I'm sorry I'm speechless. Yeah, it's not just passivity that Orwell records. It's the ability of thinking people are allegedly thinking people to pretend that's what's happening isn't happening, that what just happened never happened and go on mouthing these utopian slogans about a future that no one actually believes will come. What's so interesting, I've never, I've been an Orwell fan my whole life, read The Collector of Orwell. Orwell was a cheerleader for the Second World War. He was a government propagandist, he worked for BBC. Hate to say it, but it's true. And he wrote 1984 only three years after

the end of the war and points out, you know, it's a militarized society. Yes. The essence of totalitarian control is war. Right. Right. So, I mean, that seems like a big, like he seems to have changed his view. What do you mean? Well, I mean, again, Orwell was... Oh, you mean, you mean...

He spent the war rallying England to war. Right, right. He participated in what he seemed to believe was a just war and then afterward started to see it as a racket for the control of people. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, he does. And he also sees terrorism, a form of terrorism as a control mechanism too.

In Airstrip One, in Ocean Eye, every once in a while a rocket will just fall and wipe out a crowd. And no one knows where they're fired from. They assume they come from the enemy. And one day Winston is with his girlfriend in this little hideout that they have in the middle of the book in their very short and soon to be curtailed love affair. And she says, you know, we're shooting those. I know we shoot those rockets. What? He said, yeah, we shoot those rockets. It's what we call a false flag nowadays. And Winston says,

I never could have imagined that that was possible. Here he lives in this nightmare society, but he still can't believe that they would shoot rockets at their own people in order to keep them fearful. The woman, however, you know, sees it clearly. She's a little bit more cunning. She has a lower estimation of people, but there's not much in Orwell and in 1984 that doesn't have an

equivalent now. And there's not much in there that doesn't explain events these days, you know. As I read it, I read it this morning, there are riots going on in Los Angeles, full of hate, full of anger, full of people brandishing bricks, Molotov cocktails, and so on. And I thought, does it really matter what they're supposedly protesting?

No, it's the rage that matters. And is the rage really something that threatens America, threatens the state, or are these outbreaks of rage and rioting in a way of service to power? Because they keep us distrusting each other. They keep us divided. They keep us distrusting each other. They keep us divided. They keep us rebuilding. One of Orwell's theses is that society has gotten so prosperous that you have to have a war just to keep the economy going. Everybody has everything, so you got to destroy a lot of stuff

in order to rebuild it, abroad and at home. And, and, and seen through the lens of 1984, protest doesn't look like it's about anything but riotous protest, I mean. But keeping the machine going through channeling people's frustration, anger, and anxiety into these orgies that really lead nowhere, but always cause us to need more surveillance, more control, et cetera. It gives me a dour idea of the supposed idealism behind riotous protest. I see those people as tools, frankly. I think they are. Walter Kern, I really hope soon to be the Librarian of Congress. Certainly a beacon

of perspective and erudition in a increasingly stupid world. I appreciate it. Thanks. Great conversation. Thank you. We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it, good people. While you're here, do us a favor, hit follow and tap the bell so you never miss an episode. We have real conversations, news, things that actually matter. Telling the truth always. You will not miss it if you follow us on Spotify and hit the bell. We appreciate it.

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