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Tucker Carlson
So I feel like the Trump administration is finally figuring out that aligning yourself with Benjamin Netanyahu, while there's definitely some overlap in interests, and I don't think any of this is personal, but when you form an unbreakable alliance with any foreign country, you're likely to get hurt and American interests are likely to get hurt. And I think it's dawning on them that if another country, I don't know, decides to move 2 million people by force in the biggest internment mass migration since the Second World War, you don't want to have to take credit for that. Are you surprised?
Curtis Yarvin
Not really. Obviously this is a terrible situation in the Middle east and you can sit around and say, oh, you know, Israel should have been formed one way Palestine should look.
Tucker Carlson
Right, right, exactly.
Curtis Yarvin
But the truth is, at the end of the day, these two peoples are completely incompatible and one of them is going to try to remove the other. That's a really ugly thing. Nobody should ultimately think that's positive. But if you look throughout history, the solution most nations have to this issue is, is ethnic cleansing. That's just what happens throughout history. Again, you don't have to judge it one way or another. You just have to look at history and know that's how these things tend to get resolved and it's ugly business for anyone. And why should we involve ourselves on either side of that? Right. I just don't understand how that would ever serve America.
Tucker Carlson
Well, that's exactly right. That's, that's exactly right is of course this is going to happen. And it's dawn on me slowly, it's like, wait, but what about the 2 million or however many are still alive people in Palestinians in Gaza, like what? Well, we'll just move them somewhere else. What? No one's tried that in 80 years. It didn't work then. Now everyone's an iPhone. It's going to be on video. It's totally immoral and disgusting, but it's also, as you just pointed out, inevitable.
Curtis Yarvin
Again, it's messy, but it's a historical reality. And if we deny that, then we're going to end up getting caught in this never ending cycle. The only reason this really hasn't happened again, one direction or the other. It's not that I think the Palestinians probably wouldn't have a similar solution if they were in the Israelis shoes, but the only reason this hasn't happened is there has kind of been this international consensus to involve ourselves in, in what otherwise would be a natural process throughout history. And so that's why we find ourselves stuck here over and over again. This is never gonna get solved through diplomacy. You're never gonna work out the ways in which you find it. No, it's going to end with one group displacing the other. That's just going to happen. And it's just not our problems. There's no reason we should have our money, our treasure, our people, or more importantly, our moral worth tied up to any of this.
Tucker Carlson
But that's kind of the American way, is that, isn't it? I mean, historically, and you've taught history that the United States forms unbreakable alliances with countries that share its values. That's what we're told. Is that true?
Curtis Yarvin
No. And that's the most hilarious thing is, like, over and over again, we hear this, oh, don't you care about America? Don't you care about American values? Actually, if we look at what the founders said about foreign policy, it's radically different. George Washington, in his farewell address, was very clear about the way we should approach foreign alliances. He said, basically, you shouldn't have them. You can have commercial relationships. You should trade with other nations, be friendly as possible. But he says very explicitly, never ever have a favored nation or a nation that you hate, because either way, it makes you a slave to that nation, and a free nation should be free of foreign influence. He very clearly says that foreign influence is the death of any given republic. And so he says, be very careful about making some nation your favorite nation, because the natural dynamic that will happen, and I promise I'm not making any of this up. I'm not, like, you know, tailoring this in some way to the current environment.
Tucker Carlson
So this, to be clear, this is. This is Washington's farewell address, right? Which is, quote, there's one line from it. Don't make foreign alliances or something that, you know, everyone's kind of familiar with. But just. He goes on about it, oh, for.
Curtis Yarvin
Several pages, and he explains exactly the dynamic that's going to happen. He says, you're going to associate this favored nation with your own nation. You're going to conflate its interests with its own interests. And not only will that happen, the different leaders of political factions inside your nation will start vying for favorability with the favored nation, you know, showing themselves to be the true ally, while you're the one who is deceiving everyone and you are actually betraying our true ally. And he says it's even going to get worse because the real patriots that point out that you are favoring that nation instead of the interests of the real country you live in, those people will be now denounced as traitors. And they'll way it says very clearly. And so he's warned us about everything that we.
Tucker Carlson
Washington wrote that. Yeah, 100% Washington said the people who stand up and say, wait a second, nothing against that other country, but our country's interest should be the main focus of the US Government. That guy will be denounced as a Katul of Qatar.
Curtis Yarvin
Right. And this, this is a document. This is a document that every school child used to have to learn. This is what every, in every history class you would go, this is one of our core documents, along with the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address. But we never go over this anymore. And I don't think that's any kind of strange coincidence. It very clearly contradicts everything about our current foreign policy. And that's what the founders actually believed.
Tucker Carlson
That's so prescient, it's almost spooky.
Curtis Yarvin
It's absolutely amazing. When you go back and read the words, you would think he's speaking exactly to the situation we're in now. And of course, you can see this with many places, you can see this Israel, but you can also see it with Ukraine.
Tucker Carlson
Oh, for sure.
Curtis Yarvin
And it's so strange that the right learned this lesson with Ukraine. Right. We all learned that actually this deep state will send us to war. And they don't care about the boys in Appalachia or Texas. And it's not about defending America. We all recognize that when the Biden administration was calling us, you know, Putin puppets because we didn't want to send blood and treasure to Ukraine. But all of a sudden we have a similar situation where Israel, where we might need to involve ourselves, and we forget all of the lessons we learned. We forget all of the foreign policy that we were actually supposed to be following. If we're following the American tradition, that's amazing.
Tucker Carlson
When did that fall out of the curriculum, do you think?
Curtis Yarvin
It's a great question. I have never had it as something. When I was a history teacher that was required reading. I went through it because I thought it was something important for students to understand. But as a necessary part or mandatory part of the curriculum, it was never there. Maybe a short excerpt, I mean, it's only a 30 page thing, but we're not allowed to have students actually look at any kind of primary sources anymore. Because one of the nasty things that happens when you look at old books that were written before, say 1945, is you determine that the world is actually very different and that there's something very radical and modern that's happened. That's why we don't read primary sources, because then we might actually know some history.
Tucker Carlson
Anything written pre Second World War has a completely different tone that you can feel even if they're not saying, even if the document itself doesn't say anything that is particularly radical to the modern sensibility, the way that it's written, the sort of freedom of expression. You realize how much censorship and self censorship exists post war when you read it. I mean, it's like read a lothrop Stoddard book, for example. It's amazing that people wrote stuff like that.
Curtis Yarvin
It's also the amount of historical context. Everyone knew the language of the old world. They understood that they were connected to a chain of tradition. And everything that they spoke about was deeply seated in that context. If you go back and read Hobbes Leviathan, even though he's making an argument for secular government, 9, 10 of it is couched in biblical language. It's nothing but biblical references. And he makes casual references to very complex theological issues that he assumes everyone is familiar with. And this is the exact same thing you see with the founders, whether it be in the Federalist Papers or Washington's Farewell Address. These are men who are deeply built into a very specific tradition and understand everything about the world inside of that. And we just don't see that anymore. Now when we look at history, it's all these little blocks of carefully managed narrative. It has no connection to the actual lives lived by our ancestors.
Tucker Carlson
Well, I don't think we have ancestors as a nation. Right. I mean, what percentage of the population has an ancestor fought in the Civil War?
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah, increasingly, Very few. And that's actually a huge problem as we face these issues coming with deportations. A lot of people are asking, okay, we understand mass deportations for illegals, we get that, but what about legal immigrants? How does that work? Who is an American ultimately? Right. And that's really going to be the question of our age. We're transitioning from a moment where identity globally was very ideological. Right. You're either communist or you're capitalist. You're one for with one empire or another, your first world or second world. That was shattered. Right. That paradigm was shattered after the end of the Cold War. And instead we all had to turn back inward and stop having this global ideological struggle and ask, okay, now that that's gone, who are we as peoples again? And that struggle to understand national identity, I think is seeping through everything, including our ability to understand our own traditions and understand how our constitution work and what our values actually are, not just what's being handed to us by the news media or an educational system.
Tucker Carlson
So we're understanding ourselves in a very different way. And where does that shake out? Like what is identity post ideology?
Curtis Yarvin
Well, the most traditional understanding of identity is a collection of many different factors, including language, religion, people, place, heritage, tradition, folkways, history. These things were all the different aspects that made up human society until we needed to create these supernational organizations run by managerial elites that didn't have any connection to these individual places. And that's why we see over and over again our different world government governments desperately trying to erode the particular nature of peoples. If you look at the UK right now, they're completely destroying any free speech tradition, they're completely destroying any Anglo understanding of rights. And they're all doing in the name of creating this multicultural society that England never had in the first place. And so you see these elites who are destroying the nature and quality of their people, they're actively replacing the people in their nation because if they do that, then those barriers to the power that previously existed, that were tied to the tradition will be gone.
Tucker Carlson
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Curtis Yarvin
Well, this is, I think, a real problem with our really modern and vulgar use of race. Race is a macro category. Ethnos is a more organic micro category. Right. And so when we think about different ethnicities in Europe, there are many, right. The difference between an Italian and a Swede is rather large. However, there's this vast, right. It's huge vast, right? But. But there's this macro core, you know, category of white or European, and that means something, but it really only means things in a highly racialized society. So it used to be that in America we had black Americans and they had a specific ethnic identity because they had basically been shorn of their previous ethnic identity. They didn't have a connection to their tribe, to their peoples, to their history. And so they had an ethnogenesis, they formed an ethnos in the States. But the white population, the European descendants, were ones that had different European ethnos backgrounds. They had Germanic backgrounds, they had English backgrounds, Irish, Irish, all these. Right? And so, you know, those different identities were distinct. And we even had different neighborhoods, entire states that were settled by very different peoples, even though they're of European descent. But as we have racialized, as we have become only interested in those macro categories, all of those separate white ethnosis that once existed have been pulled into. Or separate, for that matter.
Tucker Carlson
Right?
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah. The ones that existed previously.
Tucker Carlson
Yeah. Washington, D.C. is the, I think, the largest population of Ethiopians and Eritreans who are black. Ask them what they think of local black people. Right, right. They've. I don't know that they have anything in common. They don't seem to. Right. So. But why would you want to erase all of those very real differences? Like why. Why pretend that Swedes are the same as Sicilians?
Curtis Yarvin
Because eventually each one of those particular cultures creates a high level of resistance to both standardization and scale of managerial power, but most importantly, to government power. Because peoples with particular traditions and identities aren't going to just go along with whatever the government says. They have real organic, deeply seated understandings of who they are. We can just look at Covid, right? Who are all the people that actually resisted during COVID Orthodox Jews, the Amish, the religious, high people with high degrees of individual transcendent identities. Right. This is my group, my practice of my religion. The people I go to church with, the people in my community. They are more important than whatever the state believes. And the only thing that can push back against that, it's not abstract principle, it's not words in a constitution. The words in the constitution only restrict the government if they reflect particular understandings of peoples and the way that they live their lives. And that's why those communities were more resilient. Because even if there was no paper constitution to protect them, their real beliefs, their real identity actually resisted the state.
Tucker Carlson
So your thesis is we see the world becoming homogenized. And there's something in us normal people, I think, that find that very distressing. Very distressing. And that's why we seek out places that are different. Because we understand that the actual diversity of peoples is somehow important. We can feel that, and it's certainly interesting. But there are huge forces pushing against it, leveling forces. Everyone's the same. Same attitude, same sports, same food. And your thesis is that's on purpose, that's not natural, and it's a power grab by governments.
Curtis Yarvin
Well, I think the better way to understand this is by a managerial class. They're certainly part of the government. But a big change has happened, especially after the Industrial Revolution. We used to have statesmen, right? And these were people who had to make very real and decisive decisions. They had to use a lot of wisdom. You had to be very prudent. They had to use discernment. We were very reliant on their ability to lead. What has happened over time is that we've found that that is a very inconsistent way to prod results. And so the best way is to remove human agency from decision making. And when we do that, we can increase the level of scale at which we can produce results in government and business and weapons manufacturing and everything else. And so ultimately, if we can go ahead and abstract the human condition, if we can create a set of parameters by which people always have to act, then that allows us to create a situation in which we're producing bigger and better results without needing any to understand any particular culture or people or rely on any type of human prudence or decision making. This is what everyone gets very angry about when they call any kind of bureaucracy, right? They're stuck in a phone tree, and there's no one who can make a decision. There's no one who can overrule the machine. Every even real person they're talking to is kind of talking like a robot. And that allows the, the call center to handle more calls than they would if each individual person was actually making decisions and helping people. But in the end, it actually destroys the whole purpose of the call center. It only exists to serve itself. And that's what's happened with our managerial elite. They now only exist to serve their power. They now only exist to serve their global network. It involves, of course, governments, but involves NGOs and banks and educational institutions and media institutions. This is an entire class of people with the same interest set that are all working constantly to ensure that their power grows and the agency of individual people in their actual homelands is reduced.
Tucker Carlson
One of the core beliefs about economics, I think that most people have, because it's just intuitive, is that in order to receive a reward, you have to provide a service, like doing something useful, moving the ball forward, feeding people, giving them shelter, educating their children, allowing them to go to heaven or whatever. But you have to be adding something in order to take something. And what I'm struck by with the group you're describing is how little they add. And I wonder if that, I wonder if there's like kind of any precedent for that in human history.
Curtis Yarvin
Well, there is quite a bit. Right. So pretty much every government is at some level a thief, right? That's how kind of all governments start. At some level, they're, they're, they're taking some percentage of what people make, what they do, and they're gathering it to themselves and hoarding it for themselves. But as you say, there used to be some kind of service provided. They're protecting your livelihood, they're ensuring no one invades you, they protect you from criminals. Right. Like there, there is kind of transaction that is occurring here. But over time, the more you control the market, the more you don't have to offer the product. Right. This is why we hate monopolies, because they create scenarios in which you don't have to be reactive to the needs of the people. You don't have to keep providing because you're the only game in town. And more and more people understand that the only way they can interact, not just in their country, but globally, is with, with these managerial apparatuses. You have to work inside that framework. And so they continue to run in this race thinking that it's going to get them somewhere, but it's really the anything available to them at this point. And so we are seeing in many different places around the world people are pushing back against the managerial elite. You hear People like J.D. vance or Vivek Ramaswamy talking about the administrative state and the need to dismantle the deep state, all of these things. We see people in the UK understanding that ultimately their government and not some foreign enemy is actually the most hostile thing to them. So there is pushback coming. We are seeing this to rise up. But the system is vast and powerful and extremely wealthy. And all of this is very difficult for people to do, especially because they've been trained for the most part to not even recognize that they are ruled, that there is a ruling class. Right. It's all popular sovereignty, it's all democracy. The people have chosen this. You voted for it somewhere. And so it's actually not the leader's fault, it's not the guy making billions of dollars fault. It's not the guy who's, you know, buying his fifth home's fault. No, it's your neighbor. It's the guy who runs the plumbing with a MAGA hat. It's his fault he voted wrong and he's the reason you're poor.
Tucker Carlson
I mean, that's such a perfect description of what's happening. An organization at a certain scale always exists for its own self perpetuation. Is that true, do you think that's right?
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah. There's a historian, Robert Conquest, and he has three laws of power. Yeah, absolutely. And his third law is that at the end a an organization, a bureaucratic organization is just going to look like it's operated by a cabal of its enemies because it eventually turns into an organization that only serves the members of the organization and not the actual purpose it was stated for. And so every one of these managers, everyone who is disassociated from both the people you're serving and the original organization itself, is just going to turn every piece of the organization into their own little power grab, their own little fiefdom where they can secure more. And that's why we see the managers exploding in every form of business, whether it's consulting. If you look at public education, where my experience came from, you know you have a thousand more administrators than you do teachers, because the incentive is not to actually educate students or actually serve the public that you were created to serve. It's to perpetuate your existence inside that system.
Tucker Carlson
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Curtis Yarvin
Not forever. But it's a classic power strategy. So we need to understand that one of the things that power always wants to do is centralize and expand its reach. I think that's pretty obvious to a lot of people. But this guy, Bertrand de Juvenile, came up with this metaphysics of power, and his understanding was that what we would think of as the middle class, right, the kulaks, they're entrenched in society because they own a piece of the tradition, they own a piece of the land. They have actual communities, they have resilience, they have the ability to push back against the government. And so if you have this middle class, they're in the way of your power as a leader. And so what do you do? Well, you take your high, your high, your ruling class, and you pair them with a low class from outside of society. And that high and low versus the middle is the way that you break apart society because you promise the new voters or the new participants that you will give them whatever the kulaks have. It's all their fault. The middle class, they're the ones who are keeping you back. They're the racists, they're the sexist. And if you just defeat them, we'll just give you all their stuff. And this is the wedge that is continuously used. The large amount of our government right now is just a wealth transfer between heritage Americans and the new political class that's being moved into rule society. That's just the dynamic we're seeing. And this happened in Rome. This has happened many, many times over. You can see many historical examples.
Tucker Carlson
So the H1B thing is just. So the enemy is what you call heritage Americans. What are those?
Curtis Yarvin
Heritage Americans are those that are actually tied. You could find their last names in the Civil War registry. Like, they have a tie to the history and to the land. And Samuel Huntington is a guy who I really like. He wrote the Clash of Civilizations and who Are We? And I think won his debate with Francis Fukuyama pretty decisively. But he said in who Are We? His book about American identity, the core of American identity is the Anglo Protestant spirit. And he's a man of the center left. You know, as a Harvard professor, this is a guy who's not, you know, he's not, oh, you can only be an Anglo or a Protestant to be part of America. But he says even the Catholics and Jews in America take on this Anglo Protestant affect in some way. And so you have to have this majority culture for people to assimilate to. And so when we're talking about A heritage American. We're either talking about someone who is tied specifically that tradition, or someone who has come here and has been here for generations, but understands that they are conforming to that way of being, that that's the core of society.
Tucker Carlson
And what is that way. Can you describe the Anglo Protestant worldview?
Curtis Yarvin
I mean, obviously we could spend entire books on that. And. And they had. That has been done.
Tucker Carlson
Well, it's almost never mentioned.
Curtis Yarvin
It's true. Yeah.
Tucker Carlson
And which I think is interesting because those are the people who founded the country and set up every system that we're benefiting from now from, you know, our economic and political systems or have been benefiting from. Maybe not anymore, but those are the founders. Who's 100 Anglo Protestant, like 100%.
Curtis Yarvin
Right.
Tucker Carlson
So I don't. Why don't we ever mention that culture?
Curtis Yarvin
Because we're very terrified of the idea that ideas are particular to cultures and peoples. That sounds very scary and old world.
Tucker Carlson
It's true.
Curtis Yarvin
Of course it's true. It's obviously true. And we know that because now we laugh whenever we try to export democracy to Afghanistan or something. Right.
Tucker Carlson
I know it from traveling a lot. I go to different countries and I don't hate their cultures or ideas at all. I don't have to live under them. I'm just visiting. I think they're really interesting, but they're very different because the people are different. Inherently different.
Curtis Yarvin
Yes. And when you change the people, you change the culture, which is why our Western governments are so busy trying to replace those populations.
Tucker Carlson
Yeah. When you change the population, you change.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah. You change the country and you change the principles that it's going to be founded on. You know, we look at the Declaration of Independence and it says we hold these truths to be self evident. If you go to Afghanistan, are the truths of the Constitution self evident to them? No, of course not. Because when they said self evident, they meant to people in our tradition, to us, to the people who descended us, who share our values, who speak our language, who speak the type of heritage that we understand, that's where that comes from. Again, it doesn't mean that other people can't be grafted into that and absorb that. But the idea of a purely propositional nation that is in no way tied to a culture or a people, but is entirely a collection of abstract things agreed to in some social contract before society even begins is just ridiculous. And it's not the way the Constitution was even understood when it was written. Our founder said very famously that the Constitution is for immoral and Religious people, they had a particular understanding of how we would have to live our lives and what that would look like if we were going to be able to live under the republic that they erected.
Tucker Carlson
All true. I interrupted you with my outburst of rage when I asked you what exactly are you the presupposition, what, you know, what's, what's the nature of this Anglo Protestant culture that founded this country?
Curtis Yarvin
I think this is where people get a lot of the ideas of a decent amount of individualism. This has always been a key part of it. Also restrained government. The idea that government would be limited as something tied to the Magna Carta.
Tucker Carlson
Right.
Curtis Yarvin
Like, yes, they had a, you know, became a constitutional monarchy. But, you know, we can see a direct line from what the English were doing with their set of government in the way that we understand, you know, our, our society. The idea that free speech is something sacred, that the individual conscience and the practice of religion is something that needs to be maintained. These are all core values that when you actually look in other societies, they don't look the same. Free speech in Germany does not look the same.
Tucker Carlson
There's no, there's no Slavic society. And I love Slavic societies. Just being honest. They're great. But they don't see free speech as a foundational, God given right. They just don't.
Curtis Yarvin
Right.
Tucker Carlson
And they're whiter than I am. So it's not. It is like it's much. That is, to your very smart point about lumping all these different, very distinct cultures into the white group eliminates differences that we should be thinking about, right?
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah, absolutely. Even inside European cultures, vastly different traditions, closer perhaps than say someone in Eastern Asia, but still very, very different from place to place. And the fact that we've just melted that all down into this, you know, binary or between a couple few races, as if that's like the complete understanding of who peoples are and how they live their lives is just silly. And again, I think that serves the purpose of really just melting down culture in general. Right. Like it looks like race is very divisive identity politics. Right. Which to some degree it is. But the reason it feels so divisive, the reason it feels so unnatural is it's thoroughly unrooted from actual organic ways of being. It's completely removed from the things that make your life better when you have a holistic identity. It's just this rough collection of hatred for people who happen to have a different skin color, which doesn't get you anywhere. Good.
Tucker Carlson
Smart. So smart. Can you have a continent sized country with Hundreds of millions of people in it, with completely distinct cultures, with totally different assumptions about things like natural rights.
Curtis Yarvin
To some extent, if you want to operate as an empire. And I think this is the crossroads that America is at. We, if you talk to Americans, you know, the democrat side will say, well, we're a democracy. And then Republicans will say, well no, of course not, we're a republic. That's very different. If you ask them what the difference is, they won't be able to really explain it.
Tucker Carlson
No, no, they never care.
Curtis Yarvin
There's a representative, they get all huffy.
Tucker Carlson
But they have no idea what they're doing.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah. And the real difference is that republics have self government because the body politic sees itself as being a necessary participant on a regular basis, that the individual seems himself as needing to cultivate a certain amount of virtue and individuality that allows for a level of self governance that otherwise doesn't exist. And so the fact that the republican type of government requires this type of virtue means it has to stay relatively small. And this isn't something I just made up. You can see this in Aristotle or Machiavelli or you know, the founding fathers, they understood that scale was a very dangerous component of government forms and that if you created this vast empire, even a continent size empire, much less a world empire, that was going to radically change the way that you had to govern. And we have continued to expand our imperial ambitions as the United States, but have never addressed the impact it's been having on our governance. And this is why so many people feel like the people they elect don't run the government. It, of course they don't, because you don't live in a republic anymore. You live in an empire. And the empire has a large amount of machinery that hums right under the surface and it's constantly serving its own interests on a regular basis. Some people will call this the deep state. I wrote a book called the Total State because I think that really encapsulates a far wider understanding of the manager elite and the power they hold. They're not just in the unelected bureaucracy, but they're in the media, they're in financial institutions, they're in education, all of these different things that manipulate our public opinion. And really the ability to manipulate public opinion has become the one skill necessary to govern at this point. Because we switch from this idea that we have a people, a specific people, ruled in a particular way through virtue in a republic, and instead have understood that just the mass will is the only thing that matters. And what's great at manipulating the mass will mass media.
Tucker Carlson
You may have noticed this is a great country with bad food. Our food supply is rotten. It didn't used to be this way. Take chips for example. You may recall a time when crushing a bag of chips didn't make you feel hungover, like you couldn't get out of bed the next day. And the change of course is chemicals. There's all kinds of crap they're putting in this food that should not be in your body. Seed oils, for example. Now even one serving of your standard American chip brand can make you feel bloated, fat, totally passive and out of it. But there is a better way. It's called masa chips. They're delicious. Got a whole garage full of them. They're healthy, they taste great, and they have three simple ingredients. Corn, salt and 100% grass fed beef tallow. No garbage, no seed oils. What a relief. And you feel the difference when you eat them, as we often do. Snacking on masa chips is not like eating the garbage that you buy at convenience stores. You feel satisfied, light, energetic, not sluggish. Tens of thousands of happy people eat masa chips. It's endorsed by people who understand health. It's well worth a try. Go to Masa M a s a chips.com Tucker use the code tucker for 25% off your first order. That's masachips.com Tucker code tucker for 25% off YOUR first order. Highly recommended. So the idea that media would be a bulwark against government overreach, that it would be a sort of watch dog acting on behalf of the population. They're too busy knowing what their government's doing. The media is going to do it for them. That whole notion is like absurd. The media is a participant in this system.
Curtis Yarvin
And what's funny is again, if you look at the American tradition, if you just look at the people writing inside of the American tradition, they describe exactly this process and how it's going to take place. John C. Calhoun, Vice President of the United States, you know, served in multiple cabinets. This is a guy who laid out in one of his treaties that ultimately the American media would not serve as any kind of check, some kind of, you know, fourth estate, and instead would be used by political parties to manipulate the opinion of people, creating a winner take all situation. In any given election, you have a situation where all political parties are suddenly incentivized to basically burn down the country, take as much as they can for themselves and imprison or otherwise deny their opponents access to the ballot box, because otherwise they'll lose this giant leviathan they built. And again, he's. I think he wrote this in the 1850s, the 1840s. You know, it's really released after his death. But again, we can just look at the people who were part of the American tradition, and they recognize that this is the function media was going to play from the beginning.
Tucker Carlson
It does seem like we're moving toward dictatorship. And I'm not pointing at any one political leader or party even. I think the Democrats are much more eager for dictatorship than the Republicans generally. But I'm not even making that point. I'm just saying people's faith in democracy, whatever that is, has been badly shaken. And I just don't think you can govern in the way that our government currently governs forever. Do you think that's inevitable?
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah, I do. I think Caesarism is a natural life cycle of any. Any civilization. You. When you get to the oligarchic stage, Caesarism is it.
Tucker Carlson
That's so smart.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah. This is. You know, Oswald Spangler talked about the, the life cycles of civilizations. And after the age of money power, after the age of oligarchy, the only thing that can cut through the Gordian knot of this vast, sprawling bureaucracy built on money is a strong man. That's what he predicts in. In any given age. Obviously, that's not the Anglo understanding. Right? No, it's definitely not the way that you want to.
Tucker Carlson
Let me speak for all Anglos when I say we're very opposed to that. Right.
Curtis Yarvin
But. But if you aren't careful, if you don't understand how and why money powers come to dominate your society and created this rule of the oligarchs, people will cry out for that.
Tucker Carlson
The only thing more powerful than money is violence.
Curtis Yarvin
Right.
Tucker Carlson
So that just kind of. That simple.
Curtis Yarvin
Yes.
Tucker Carlson
So if you reach a stage where money determines everything, which is where we definitely are now. We are in the. In the age of oligarchs. And the people want some say, there's kind of like no other option, is there?
Curtis Yarvin
No. And that, that's why you see them fall behind, you know, leaders like this very, very easily. Right. And so you have a very precarious situation right now. We're at a very important crossroads in the United States. It's very rare that a nation decides to scale back its empire voluntarily. It doesn't happen very often. And we have to consider whether we think that's worth avoiding the current track we're on. Because there is a cost to scaling down empire to be Clear. You know, being the world hegemon has amazing benefits for you. In theory, it has more benefits for your ruling class, and eventually it's going to destroy your population. But in the short term, the benefits.
Tucker Carlson
Is that always true? The empire always destroys the population.
Curtis Yarvin
I believe that to be the case. It can be longer, it can be shorter, but over time, we see the this over and over again. Again, we can look at the classic example of Rome. It continues to expand its borders. A guy like Hadrian tries to pin it back inside, but eventually they end up just giving citizenship to everyone. Caracal expands it to the entire empire in the hopes that this will eventually bring the identity of the empire back and get people to fight for it. And instead what happens is they just keep importing Gauls until GS more or less just take over the empire. Yeah, they take over every important aspect of it. So again, a pattern that we see over and over again. It's very hard for.
Tucker Carlson
Why did the Gauls, why were they so successful within the empire?
Curtis Yarvin
Well, they were the only people who weren't tamed anymore, I was about to say.
Tucker Carlson
So it was a testosterone thing.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah, it really is. We need to import our own barbarians to fight off the barbarians because the people themselves are no longer willing to fight. And this is a key aspect of republics. Again, no, just like it's all.
Tucker Carlson
It just, it's. This record is on repeat. It's crazy.
Curtis Yarvin
If you go back to the Federalist Papers, you can see Hamilton telling people, look, I know you're scared about standing armies because we all know that standing armies are a detriment to free republics. So if you want us to not have a standing army, you need to turn over control of all of your different militias to us so that we can, you know, protect the. The United States without it. It was understood that being part of republic meant being a soldier. Service actually did guarantee citizenship. It was the idea that your willingness to stand and defend what was yours was what made you a citizen worthy of contributing and voting and being part of the body politic again. Aristotle said, the citizen is he who is armed. Machiavelli said you should never have mercenaries, you should never have paid standing armies. Instead, you should always have a militia. This is a core part of your identity as a republic. And the minute the people are no longer willing to fight and have to contract their fighting out somewhere else, you know, the republic is done.
Tucker Carlson
So the republic is done. The country's not done. The republic just becomes an empire. Right, what you're saying. So then what's and, and we're there. So what's the life cycle of empire typically?
Curtis Yarvin
A lot of people think it's very short. Some people will cite the 250 year mark. But the one thing that is for sure is that these complex systems always reach a point of marginal utility that is just collapsing. They can no longer squeeze enough power, enough wealth, enough influence out of increasing one more rank, of, of the complexity of their societies, conquering one more area, adding one more complex system. And so you're just waiting for the Tower of Babel to fall. I. I think this is honestly a very deeply biblical pattern that repeats itself over and over again. We try to unite all of humanity under these imperial ambitions, and in our hubris, we're scattered back to our natural state as peoples. But the process is always brutal.
Tucker Carlson
So there's no happy ending for empire.
Curtis Yarvin
There's those that, you know, can walk away to some extent. But you look at what the British have done, yes, they in some extent pass their empire on to us. But what does that cost them? Almost everything.
Tucker Carlson
Right, well, everything.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah, yeah, it looks like they lost a war.
Tucker Carlson
The most degraded people in the world. Right.
Curtis Yarvin
And so, you know, the question is, is there a happy escape? And I'm not sure what the answer to that question is. I think to some degree the answer is a return to a localism that can actually reinvigorate the communities that cultivate virtue and create republican governance in the first place. But do we have the will to do that voluntarily? Do we have the will to walk away from the centralization of power? I don't think that we do. Okay.
Tucker Carlson
So you said this is the moment which is without many precedents in history, where we're at. We are voluntarily trying to scale back the empire. Clearly, that's what Trump's election was about.
Curtis Yarvin
Right.
Tucker Carlson
And there are costs to that. What are the costs?
Curtis Yarvin
Well, a large amount of that is going to be global influence. Right. We, if we're not in charge of an area, someone else might be. And that also means that we're not imposing our standards and our understanding on the way that global commerce and all of these things should be affected. We're not controlling the diplomatic situation or the military deployment of foreign nations through our, through our influence. And that can have large economic impacts. I mean, our entire dollar is based on being the global reserve currency. Withdrawing away from something like that is devastating. We are deeply dependent on this global system. We are as dependent on it as the system is on us at this point. And so untangling it is Very messy business. A lot of of the things that we'd have to sacrifice, cheap labor, the global hegemony, the idea that we don't constantly have the ability to reach in and affect every international situation and dictate its outcome. Those are things our elites are unwilling to do. And we've already seen that in a place like Ukraine, right, where we just came off of COVID it's very clear that the ruling class had spent a large amount of their capital deceiving the world, and yet they immediately went right back into another conflict because we. Well, Russia's not allowed to conduct any business without the United States being involved in it. Now, if I was Ukrainian, I'd hate Russia. I have no particular love for what's happening there. But the idea that we would immediately jump in and try to dictate the terms of that conflict is a hubris that can only be tied to the idea that as the global empire, we have the right to tell you somewhere in the middle of Eastern Europe, how we should actually be conducting a war like this.
Tucker Carlson
So what's the model for a society? So clearly, this isn't working. It's chilling your description of this historical pattern, which clearly we're reliving yet again. But if you could start from scratch, what is the ideal form of government? What is the ideal nation? Can you have a nation this big? Can it stay sovereign? Can it stay focused on its own people? I mean, is that possible?
Curtis Yarvin
Well, the key, I think, is really understanding that this shouldn't be ideological. One of my favorite thinkers, Joseph Demistra, said that every people gets the government that they deserve, that ultimately there is a correct form of governance, but it is different for different peoples. And so we can't look at one exact abstract idea of how government should run and say, we'll just force that down on everybody. Again, we've seen the failure of that with liberal democracy across the world. And so the key is really the organic cultivation of the way that your people live. Again, the, you know, Anglo Protestant understanding of authority is very radically different than, say, the Chinese want, you know, one throughout history. And so what would be the correct way for us to live is very different from the Chinese. And that's okay. They don't have to.
Tucker Carlson
And that's okay, right?
Curtis Yarvin
We don't have to live in their system, and they don't have to live in ours. We don't have to impose that.
Tucker Carlson
That artificially, but we definitely don't have that view in this country. So in Arkansas, I was reading, because I know one of the people involved. The Attorney General of Arkansas, Tim Griffin, is a perfectly nice guy, but he's like considering bringing charges against some group building, some like housing development, and it's all white. And that's like a threat somehow to everyone else. There's no allegation they've done anything against anyone. Just yet another indicator that our like, core beliefs as a country circa 2025 anyway are that, you know, everyone has to live in exactly the same way whether they want to or not.
Curtis Yarvin
Well, this is a huge part of the Civil Rights act, right. The Civil Rights act itself is the end of freedom of association, which was a basic understanding of are you a racist? Oh, of course. You can't have, have, you can't hold in any of the opinions of our founders without being racist. We all know that. But, but you know, one of the key understandings is that people had the right to associate as they please. Now I would never frequent a place that's, you know, refusing to serve a black American. No, like that's not in my principles. But I should have the choice whether or not I should do that. A business owner should have the right to decide whether I should do that. And let's be honest, this 2025America, we're not getting Jim Crow back. That's. Yeah. Unless, and this is the funniest thing about conservatives, they'll say, oh, of course America isn't racist. And they say, well, we can get rid of the Civil Rights act then, right? Because we don't need a giant government bureaucracy that intervenes in every aspect of society, giving it a blank check for large government power. You're conservative, you'd want to get rid of that. And they say, oh no, no, of course not. What if someone somewhere is racist? Right? So we have to keep this giant Soviet level mind control bureau that, you know, that works across our entire society and warps every incentive from housing to employment to education. And we have to maintain that. Why? Well, because if we're honest, most conservative politicians actually believe what liberals believe, that it's somewhere in the heart of America is just this giant pile of KKK members waiting to conquer the United States.
Tucker Carlson
And not just conservative or Republican lawmakers, but a lot of the opinion merchants out there on the so called right turn out to have none of the core assumptions that I have of it. Maybe I'm like super liberal. I always think of myself as the most right wing person in the world.
Curtis Yarvin
Old.
Tucker Carlson
But I don't seem to have anything in common with them at all. I didn't I didn't know that until the second Trump term. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Curtis Yarvin
Oh, yeah. And it's, it's been rather hilarious. Yeah, I'm pretty new to this. You've been doing this for a long.
Tucker Carlson
Time, but just 35 years too long. But no, you were like teaching school five years ago, right?
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah, yeah. I've only been doing this for like three years. And so, yeah, it's been very eye opening to interact with different personalities. Don't get me wrong, there are very sincere people. I want to, I want to warn people because everyone runs out there and just says, oh, this, this person's a grifter. He's a grifter. They're all selling their opinion. But, you know, there, there are very principled people, are very passionate people, but there are also a large amount of people who are in no way conservative, no way Republican, no way right wing, and make their living operating inside of these organizations, even some famous ones.
Tucker Carlson
It's interesting. Who is, I mean, I think we can say the majority of people in general are afraid. Just, they're afraid all the time. Time. You know, secular people are all afraid all the time. So I'm not attacking anyone. I feel sorry for everyone involved, but I think the majority of people on the Internet giving their opinions are kind of fake on some level. But there are some real ones. Who are the real ones?
Curtis Yarvin
Who are the real ones? That's, you know, I, I, I guess personally, I spend a lot more time in spheres that are off the beaten path.
Tucker Carlson
Yeah.
Curtis Yarvin
And so I think that there are some, you know, people out there that maybe don't have massive fan bases or big voices in influential halls of power, but are speaking some of the most important truths out there today.
Tucker Carlson
Well, I think you're one of them. And that's one of the reasons, that's the main reason I wanted to meet you and have this conversation. Because as much as I hate technology and electricity and all that stuff, and I'm like, I'm pretty Kaczynski'd on all that modernity business. I do think the best thing about the modern world is the Internet and the fact that people who, you know, don't have any connections to anything can succeed on the basis of the strength of their wisdom and of their opinions. And I just think you're a perfect example. So you were, you work for the Blaze and, but you're very widely read on the Internet. How did you get here? Like, how did you do that? Was this something that you planned?
Curtis Yarvin
Not at All. I mean, I've always been very interested in politics. I got a political science degree in college, and I worked on a few campaigns, but there just wasn't much going on there. And so I ended up falling into being a local reporter For a while. I covered news and crime or politics and crime. And then I worked as a teacher, you know, for. For a long time. But when Covid struck.
Tucker Carlson
High school teacher.
Curtis Yarvin
A high school teacher. Public school.
Tucker Carlson
School.
Curtis Yarvin
Republic School. Yeah. And. And when Covid hit, you know, I had all the opinions you'd expect from a talk radio conservative listening to Dennis Prager and Sean Hannity and these guys. And then when I watch, you know, the. The churches were closed and the strip clubs were open, and you. You couldn't go see a dying loved one in the hospital, but Democrats could riot in the streets and burn down your neighborhood, and nobody did anything. Right. Like, this is. I. I've been told my whole life by conservatives, this is what the Second Amendment's for. Right? Like, they. The. The government has closed the churches, guys that. That. We are across the Rubicon. And I thought I was going crazy because all of the people who had been spouting all of this my whole life were like, well, no, you're probably fine. We got to figure out how to work in the. And I just realized, okay, the Constitution is not stopping any of this, so I need to understand why. And so I started reading a lot of political theory outside of the mainstream. I read that. Read this guy, Curtis Yarvin. He. He. He just started writing under his real name, used to be Menches Mulba Doug. And he had a bunch of other, you know, authors that I needed to understand. And the more I read that, the more I wanted to share what was going on. And so just in your spare time? Yeah, yeah. And so that's. That's kind of how I started tweeting and, you know, putting out material and writing.
Tucker Carlson
So it's just pure citizen. Like, you don't. You don't really know anybody. You're just reading this stuff and coming to your own conclusions, and then you start tweeting them out, and the next thing you know, you're doing it full time and you have a big following.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah. I think it's a situation where there are a lot of really important thinkers. And to be clear, I'm just standing on the shoulder of giants. Guys like Samuel Francis and Joe Sobrin and Pat Buchanan and Paul Gottfried who were sitting in the wilderness for decades and decades. And that's why I think the Conservative movement was so intellectually impoverished for so long, we forced all of our brightest minds into the wilderness because they kept saying things that didn't jive with kind of a neocon agenda and they had to be driven from polite society and nobody said anything.
Tucker Carlson
And at the center of so much of that was William F. Buckley Jr. Who, you know, I think had good qualities for sure. I'm not, you know, it was awfully nice to me, I will say so. I'm not, I don't hate the guy or anything, but it in retrospect, I mean, he really served one meaningful role in his life, which was to keep a certain variety of nationalism out of the conservative canon.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah, I think we can see this over and over again. I mean, even think of guy like Russell Kirk, right, wrote the Conservative Mind, one of the intellectual giants defining the movement and more or less got canceled because he kept. Made one too many jokes about the capital, United States, being in Tel Aviv, you know, like that. That's all it took for you to get shoved off. You can have this monumental career and this critical position and you can, you know, no longer be allowed in polite society, get no longer get invited to the right dinners if you have, you know, the wrong opinions.
Tucker Carlson
It feels like things are changing fast. Do you feel that?
Curtis Yarvin
Absolutely.
Tucker Carlson
Where are they going? Going?
Curtis Yarvin
They're going to go to a lot of interesting places. As you pointed out, the, you know, the news sphere and more importantly the narrative sphere has disintermediated. Right. There's. We're no longer completely reliant on a couple news channels and a couple big newspapers. And you know, at first the right really like this because it meant that they could get around, you know, the left wing control of all of these critical centers. But now people on the right are getting panicked because their narratives are also breaking down. They can no longer. You can't use the National Review and a couple of, a couple of things to kind of dictate how people understand.
Tucker Carlson
I don't even criticize National Review. I feel, you know, it's like. So I don't think people even know what it is, do they?
Curtis Yarvin
No one my age at this point. No.
Tucker Carlson
No. So they're panicked. Like Megan McCain's all upset that people are saying things are just. She's never heard before. But I feel like people like that are irrelevant now. Or maybe I'm just hoping that's true. True.
Curtis Yarvin
No, I think that's increasingly the case. Again. I can't think of anyone who isn't paid in the Beltway, who is under 50. Who cares what any of those people think, right? And so I think we're really going through a generational switch. I think the end, the tail end of the boomer generation is still very much tied to the conservative institutions. They've had that, you know, cultural foxhole mentality for a long time, and they see those people as their champions. But I think everyone behind them recognizes that, hey, I followed these, you know, platitudes for decades and they never did anything for me. And you know what? I want to conserve the ability of my family to have children.
Tucker Carlson
Ah, Amen. Amen. I completely agree. I've reduced my whole life down to that. That's it. That, that's my worldview. Can my kids have kids and live in this beautiful place called America? Will it still be beautiful? You know, will it be all low income housing? No. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Curtis Yarvin
I think more and more the message that we don't live in an economic zone but an actual nation is really resonating with, yes, we successfully somehow turned the right wing into the party of just disposable culture, disposable identities, disposable people. Who cares if, you know, the trade policy revolutionizes your town and gets rid of all the jobs and everyone gets hooked on drugs, at least the free market one, right? No, I don't care. I care about my neighbor. I care about my family. I care about the community that we've built for generations. I shouldn't have to pick up my entire life and the many, many generations of social fabric that exist there to go move somewhere else every time you decide it's slightly cheaper to make something in China. That's not the way, that's not a conservative way to understand our society. And I think that's why you're seeing all of these institutions lose their power. Because ultimately what people really care about preserving is the American people, people, the American way of life, the tradition and existence of the people around them. And I don't think you can sell them the idea that like infinite foreign label labor is worth taking a bunch of cruises at the end of your life and then making sure your kids can own a home. Like those things are no longer something that actually sells to, I think, the coming generations.
Tucker Carlson
No, I think they're rejecting it with real hostility.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah.
Tucker Carlson
Do they believe in democracy? Do they believe the current system can ever improve the country?
Curtis Yarvin
I think at this point democracy is just a shibboleth. I don't think it really means a whole lot to people. It's what is our democracy. It's throwing the major candidate of the Republican Party in jail. That's democracy. That's how we protect our democracy. Right. What does that phrase even mean at this point? I think people are ready for a government that cares about them, elites that care about them, elites who know that they're ruling and know that they have an obligation to a specific group and are no longer just. Just, you know, using these people as pieces of exchange.
Tucker Carlson
So it sounds like what you think. Not to put words in your mouth, but what you think is being rejected or going away is a fundamentally theoretical understanding of politics in the world that is just not satisfying. In the end, it doesn't serve anybody except for the people peddling the lie. What we're going to be staring down, living through is an understanding of the world that's, like, much more practical and real. Like, are you improving my life? If you're not, not leave.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah. Again, this is where we understand that the core, the foundation of politics is really patronage. What can you. The. The. The ruling class, those in charge, what kind of life can you provide for us? What can you protect? What are you doing? A very direct relationship. Not abstractly. Are you signing a piece of paper, a treaty somewhere, you know, in. In. In Western Europe that will theoretically secure my right to. No.
Tucker Carlson
What.
Curtis Yarvin
Can the person next to me have children? Can. Can the guy down the street take his kids to church, send them to school without worrying about whether they'll be shot? Is that an option? Because that matters to me way more than the idea that you're defending democracy in Ukraine.
Tucker Carlson
Exactly. But it was. I remember watching Biden, who obviously was, you know, an elderly man who was. Didn't have his full faculties and all that, but I. I still detected, like, sincerity on his face when he talked about Zelensky and his heroism and how he was Churchill and this is the fight of our lives. You know, democracy once again triumphs over darkness. Like, he really seemed to mean it. I thought that was real, like the emotion coming out. Do you remember any of these pressers? I still like the boomer brain always reverts to the most tired cliche. Why is that?
Curtis Yarvin
Well, I think they came into the world at a time where America more or less conquered the world. And when America conquered the world, we received all the benefits of empire. And so they think of themselves. And we started as a country, rejected empire. Right. That's our entire foundation. We led a revolution against an empire because we had the right to be governed by our peers, by those elites that are part of our society and not across an ocean. And so it's a very hard story to tell yourself that you conquered the world. World in the name of freedom. Right. And so, and so I think for. There's a lot of cognitive dissonance there, and that requires a very cartoon, you know, Marvel movie esque understanding of the world. We're Captain America. We fought for freedom. Exactly. And, and, but that's, that's going, that's going away with, with that generation.
Tucker Carlson
It is going. I mean, I do think there's something about. And I always beat up on the boomers. There are a lot of great ones, wonderful people. People. But, you know, broad strokes here. This really was the first generation in history to have basically every part of their life dictated by popular culture. I mean, it's the television generation, really. Right. And, and regional differences just went away during those years, 1946, 1964, and they kind of lost the capacity to think critically or something. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Curtis Yarvin
Again, I think it's because it's disembodied, as you say, the radio and then the television, the train and then the automobile, these things collapsed. The space inside of America that used to be regional had specific understandings and ways of life. And when that happened, like you said, the only way to have a singular culture was through this kind of mass media projection. And so, yeah, I think people make the joke, but the old person screaming at their television with the news is, you know, it's a stereotype for a reason, because that's the only way they understood how to absorb the wider culture.
Tucker Carlson
Yes, no, it's right. And I, I saw it with Republicans, with Reagan. I'm not against Reagan or anything. Don't agree with everything, but don't hate Reagan. But I mean, they get so, and there are, you know, former colleagues of mine at TV channels who were like, they talk about him and they just Repeat the same eight phrases, Mr. Gorbachev, tread on this wall or whatever. And they're kind of carried away in a sincere way. Like they seem to experience life in the shallowest possible way. Does this. Do you feel what I'm saying?
Curtis Yarvin
Sure. And, and, you know, a lot of that is the medium itself. There's, there's statesmanship. Doesn't sell in sound bites. Right. That, that, yeah, that, that's not really how that works. To be thoughtful, to be deliberate, to have that level of prudence requires deliberation and time. And you can't sell that, you know, in between ads. And so that's Harder and harder for political voices to really show. It's easier to just repeat the slogans and we can hate people for that, but I don't think we should because I think ultimately that's human nature.
Tucker Carlson
Oh, I agree. I, I don't hate them. I just don't want them in power at all. And I just want people to remember that so much of what they hear is misleading. But what they experience is the truth. That is the truth. Truth. And if your children are addicted to drugs or your nephew dies of an OD and your kids can't get married and the best they can hope for is to work at some freaking bank, like, that's not, that's not the life that you want for your family. Like, that's reality. And it's nothing to do with bombing Iran or democracy or some nonsense like that. Like, how are your kids doing? I just think it's important to notice the world around you.
Curtis Yarvin
Well, it's so amazing because so many people got angry with the, with the Zoran Mamdani in New York. Yeah, yeah, right. You know, they. Oh, the socialist is winning. How could a socialist win? It's like, I don't know, guys, have you looked at the fact that the average first time home buyer thing is now 38 years old? Have you understood the fact that no one, you know, can get a decent job without going $100,000 in debt for a degree that objectively taught them nothing? And they're actually just doing any learning they actually do on the job anyway? If you've built a society that shows people your system doesn't work, now, I think there is a much better way than communism. But you.
Tucker Carlson
Oh, I agree.
Curtis Yarvin
But you have to show them you can't just sit there and obstinately say, no, we're, we're the system. Ride or die. We don't care if, you know, if you're homeless, we don't care if you can't have children. We don't care if you're going to live the rest of your life in your mom's basement. That's your fault. There's nothing wrong with the system ever. There's no reason to look at any of this. And I think again, we're really seeing that shift, right? We're seeing that mentality shift in the younger conservative core they truly understand. Like, if I don't fix this soon, then I'm never having a future. I'm never having children. Like, I, my, my bloodline will end. My, my, my religion will fade because it's no longer practice, my community will collapse. I don't have time to sit around here.
Tucker Carlson
My bloodline will end, my religion will fade, and my community will collapse. Those are the things that you are programmed by nature, in fact, in my view, by God to care about. That's what matters.
Curtis Yarvin
Absolutely. And the idea that we almost never talk about any of this, that any discussion on any of these ideas is completely, deeply forbidden, then what are you trying to do to our society? I think it becomes pretty clear.
Tucker Carlson
Well, of course they're trying to eliminate it. Right. And that would include, like, my whole family. So. No, I. How radical are young people?
Curtis Yarvin
Getting more radical by the day.
Tucker Carlson
Day.
Curtis Yarvin
And, you know, I'll say this. After Covid, my idea that we're going to have some kind of revolution really faded pretty quickly.
Tucker Carlson
Yeah, I know.
Curtis Yarvin
Right. I. I don't think we're going to have some, you know, 1776 revival here. I don't think that's going to be what happens. I think what's going to happen is 1789. I think what's more likely.
Tucker Carlson
I hope not.
Curtis Yarvin
Let's hope not. Yeah. I don't want to go on the guillotine either, But I think more and more what's going to happen is people are going to check out. We're already seeing this, right? We hear people, men walking away from the workforce, walking away from, forming families. We're gonna keep eating out the center of what actually holds our society up. We think it's abstract ideas. What it actually is is young men going out, working, forming families, finding worthy women, creating families, building societies together. That's what actually holds these things up. And it's all going to haul out from the center. And you can't import foreigners fast enough to solve this problem for you. And so what we're going to end up with is if we don't. You don't take radical action. I don't think it's some kind of armed rebellion. What we're going to see is a society that falls apart from the inside because it loses its capacity. It loses its ability to do complex tasks, to coordinate all the things that require this vast empire to function. And when those things start dropping out, then we're really going to be up a creek.
Tucker Carlson
Well, we're there.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah. Where it's already started.
Tucker Carlson
You can't fly across the country right now with a single stop and get there on time. It's not, you know, or the whole. I know. Nobody seems to care. But like. Like, our air traffic system has, like, collapsed. Have you flown on a plane that's been on time recently.
Curtis Yarvin
Getting here is probably the first time in a long time anything with a connecting flight is impossible. And this is just the competency crisis because we're specifically checking out all the capable people from our society while we're simultaneously importing a bunch of people who have not had that ability and are going to be automated out of existence for most of the jobs we're hiring them for anyway. And in no way are we cultivating a set of people who are read to face the challenges of a complicated world that we're existing in.
Tucker Carlson
Yeah. So I mean I, I do disagree with you on one point when you say that there will be no rebellion, there'll be no violence in response to all of this. I think there already is a lot of violence, but it's, it's self harm. So like, and you see this in formerly England, now the U.K. but you know, people are not fighting the government, they're not killing the tyrants, they're killing themselves.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah, well that's the beauty of importing factionalism into your society. The factions can fight each other. Not you again.
Tucker Carlson
Right, but I'm saying the native population, the indigenous population of that island has decided to just kill itself.
Curtis Yarvin
Yes. And then that's been the horrible tragedy is it either resigns itself to something terrible or like you said, they just turn on each other. They never blame the people in church. But again that's the beauty of democracy. There's always another level at which there's another voter, there's someone else, there's or some other faction. You just didn't, you know, select the correct people. That's never actually the people who are benefiting, making money, you know, off of your misery.
Tucker Carlson
So democracy is like a perfect way to dodge responsibility for your crimes is what you're saying.
Curtis Yarvin
It's an incredible pressure release valve when done. And again I do think that small scale republican government can work. We have seen that work. I think that was initially the intention of the United States and how it arrived operated. But mass democracy, the idea that, I mean look what they're doing in the UK they just unilaterally expanded the franchise to 16 year olds. Why? What's the, what's the purpose for doing that?
Tucker Carlson
Pakistanis?
Curtis Yarvin
Well, yes, the younger population coming through also they know they can control those people easier. These are, this is, a younger population is going to be more susceptible to mass media and manipulation and it's going to increase their control over that country. It's not, it's not a democracy, a Republican, or more properly labeled a republic in the sense of a smaller group of people, all who have a serious investment in society and have a proven track record of taking care of their community. Instead, it's just literally anyone with a telephone or a television. That's all that matters.
Tucker Carlson
So democracies come to the end, is what you're saying.
Curtis Yarvin
We will continue to have elections, you know, that we'll continue to go through it, but it's increasingly a ghost answer dance. It's increasingly a dead form of something that actually doesn't impact our society. Are you familiar with the ghost dance?
Tucker Carlson
Yes, I am. Okay, so one of the saddest stories in American history.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah. This is how you got the mask.
Tucker Carlson
Can you tell it?
Curtis Yarvin
Sure, of course. So the. So there was this idea, of course, for many Indian tribes that they were communing with spirits when they went through a particular dance, that this was going to bring the power of their ancestors and there was going to help them to reclaim claim their land.
Tucker Carlson
And this, this was at the end of the Indian war. This is after they lost.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah, this. This is after the Indians had lost the majority of been forced on reservations and, you know, continually over and over again. But the idea is they could reconnect with the spirit of their society by going through this ritual and their. Their ancestors would protect them. And they actually all gathered together, mainly the Lakota tribe. And when the U.S. army was sent to respond to this gathering, this is, you know, they performed the ghost dance, thinking that this would protect them from. From the bullets of the soldiers. And instead you got the massacre and wounded knee. And this is in many ways what we are doing with liberal democracy now. We keep going through the motions. Oh, well, you know, there is a democracy. We vote, we do this, and this will change society. This will fundamentally change the way things work. But over and over, we just keep running into these halo bullets because the thing we're using the power that we're trying to leverage, the power of the republic that existed at the founding. It's no longer connected to the actual rules here. We're people turning a steering wheel or mashing a gas pedal on a car without an engine. And at this point, the question of the Trump administration is, can you make America work like a Republican? Is that even possible anymore? I think they're trying. I think they're actually trying by stripping away much of the bureaucracy, attempting to take direct action whenever possible to improve the lives of Americans. But they're running into every possible barrier you could imagine. Legal, cultural, everything. And so I think that they're going to have to overcome a massive barrier if they want to attempt to return us to that system. And I'm not sure that they can.
Tucker Carlson
So if democracy is as kind of desiccated and useless and fake as you described, then nothing that fake can last. It's going to be replaced by a new system. What will that system be and what will we call it?
Curtis Yarvin
There's a lot of people, and I think there's probably some truth to this, who think that we're all converging on the church, Chinese system. That ultimately the thing that allows for hegemons to operate globe spanning or at least large regional powers to operate at the scale we're looking at. An advanced society like our own is a kind of soft totalitarianism requires it.
Tucker Carlson
Is what you're saying. You can't actually run a country this big unless you're totalitarian.
Curtis Yarvin
This is a systems issue. And again we, we like to. Some things are virtue issues, some things are principle issues, but some things are just system issues.
Tucker Carlson
Can you describe what that means when.
Curtis Yarvin
We'Re looking at different political form? They have limitations. And like we said with the republic in the republican tradition, everyone from Aristotle to our founding fathers recognized that scale is an issue. And that if you try to run your large empire as a republic, you're going to run into issues very quickly. It's going to start to come apart. The same is true when we get to these vast empires. They have to be run in a specific way. If you want to control the opinions of people, if you want to leverage popular opinion and a particular understanding, if you want to use the economies of scale that you need in those type of societies, there's only so many ways you can operate. And one of them is the Chinese system. And that seems to be one of the most successful ones at this time. Again, I wouldn't want to live under it. It's not our way of being. But it is one that our global elites seem to be settling on as.
Tucker Carlson
The model, of course, where your prison is invisible but no less real.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah, you don't have to take anyone to the gulag. They just can't get a job or a house or a wife. We don't need to put people in concentration caps anymore. You still might, but you don't need to do that anymore to be tyrannical. We can debank you. We can ensure that no one can ever hear your voice again, that you're never allowed in polite society, that there's a camera watching you 247 that will destroy your life if you step off the reservation. We don't need the trains anymore.
Tucker Carlson
What's interesting is that everybody seems on board with this in our leadership class like you imagine the Republicans get in power and they'll make it absolutely impossible for digital currency to become real central bank digital currency. They're already taking steps, Republicans in Congress laying the found work, you know, the, the basis for that now. So is there any escape from it?
Curtis Yarvin
Not for a while. And I think this is also why we see all of our governments rushing towards artificial intelligence as well. Right. Because this is another way to manage populations in a, in a vast society. Algorithms that can constantly screen everything you're doing and everything, everything you're saying and every opinion that you have and every piece of media you consume. And what library books, if you're even checking out a library book at this point, if that even exists. These are things that are all critical. And AI can do these tasks at scale, at a high level of rapidity. And so I think that all of our technology is increasingly. A lot of people have said that American technological revolution will free us from this, but honestly, every piece of technology that as we understand it right now, now is most usefully deployed by the regime as a way to control people, as a way to exert their power.
Tucker Carlson
Well, I don't think anyone's pretending otherwise. For all the talk of how, you know, AI is going to change the future, which clearly it will. There's almost no description of the upside for the average person. Like no one even bothers to tell the guy making a hundred grand a year how this is going to make his life better.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah, and it's even worse because it starts abstracting away people's understanding of reality. Your epistemology is fundamentally broken when you rely on an AI search engine to bring you the truth. And as somebody who was teaching high school not that long ago, I've already seen it with just the dumber versions of Google. No children have any context for any decision they're making. They don't, again, as we talked about, they don't have a link to history, they don't have a link to tradition, they don't have religion that informs anything. All the knowledge they have is what's delivered to them digitally in that search. That's what they believe to be authoritative in every area. Area. And so when you see that over and over again, you realize the individual is going to have no decision making power because they don't even have organic experiences in real Life to draw knowledge from. All they have is the digital world that's been served to them through AI.
Tucker Carlson
So if you're older like me, you imagine censorship as the threat to speech, right? So there are all kinds of things that are true that are being said now on the Internet right now that are like an actual threat to the way things are. So they have to be shut down. Shut down. I mean, that's. I'm just operating in that assumption. And they will be shut down, but they won't be censored. They'll be overwhelmed by AI. That's my guess.
Curtis Yarvin
One of the things you can do is just flood the zone. You can. You can flood the signal so that there's. There's no way to pick out the truth from the vast amount of information that's flowing over you. Or you can curate the environment properly through AI on a consistent basis to where people don't even realize that the environment's being curated in the first place. Either way, as you say, you don't have to do hard censorship. The information's out there somewhere. If you're one of those radical extremists who is thinking for yourself and looking into any of this stuff, but for the vast majority of people who are never going to put that kind of effort into it, that's not the way they're going to see the world. That's not how they're going to receive information.
Tucker Carlson
So to the form of government we're getting, you believe it's most likely we wind up with some kind of Chinese form of government where there's a president and a legislative body, but underneath it all, the regime maintains power through technology. A social credit system of some sort where you, you know, you do the welder regime, where you just can't live, you don't get executed, but you just. No one would choose that. Only a tenth of 1% of the population really rebels against you. And then the, you know, the really bad ones you kill, but the rest you just, like, let live in obscurity.
Curtis Yarvin
I mean, I don't think that's coming. I think that's here.
Tucker Carlson
Here, right.
Curtis Yarvin
How does that not describe the society we have currently, where people are regularly debanked, where they do have their entire lives destroyed by the social credit system on a regular basis? We haven't formalized many of these things in the United States yet, but we've been building this type of soft power for generations. It's very clear that this is how our oligarchy intends to rule us and does rule us On a regular basis. Again, I don't think it's as severe as it is in China. I think we're. We have more time before we get past the point of no return. But I think we're well into our era of being ruled by this kind of technocratic, omnipresent state, then I don't.
Tucker Carlson
So here's the contradiction at the heart of your description. If you're saying that the ruling bureaucratic class maintains power by sowing chaos and division in the society and our anarcho tyranny. But if they have so much control, why do they need to do that? Why not have an orderly. I mean, the upside of a totalitarian society is order. I mean, it's not worth it. It's always bad. Right. Or it's a violation of my principles. But at least there was no crime in the Soviet Union or less. Right.
Curtis Yarvin
Well, I think the reason that they create the chaos is that this allows them ultimately to avoid the formation and any of the bombs, bonds that would push back against them.
Tucker Carlson
Of course.
Curtis Yarvin
Right.
Tucker Carlson
But if their technological superiority is so profound, if you can't buy a plane ticket, if you disagree with them, and we're clearly moving toward that, then tsa, you know, George W. Bush does not get as much as he's reviled. And he is.
Curtis Yarvin
He.
Tucker Carlson
He's not reviled enough. Create tsa. Sorry, I'm a prisoner to my outrage. But if they have, they already have all this power, which they do, the tyrants, why not have an orderly society too?
Curtis Yarvin
Well, they're still, as you point out, not entirely in control of the scenario. We're not quite there yet. Right. There's still a good amount. I mean, Americans, whether they deployed them or not during COVID are still in control of a vast amount of guns. There's still a ghost of federalism in our system. There is a level of obstruction that can be brought by, you know, localities and states and these kind of things. There's. There is still a narrative factor involved also in our political formula. A political formula is the way in which your rulers justify their power. In China, their political narrative is very different. But the United States, it is built on this idea of we are a free society. We are a society that at the very least allows you every libertine desire that you have. Right.
Tucker Carlson
And so as much sodomy as you want. Right?
Curtis Yarvin
Exactly. Yeah. Not the right to live where you want, next to the people you want to. No right to form a religious community, but lots. The freedom of sodomy for sure.
Tucker Carlson
Yeah.
Curtis Yarvin
Freedom to purchase a small child if you'd like. However, you know that.
Tucker Carlson
And some are availing themselves of the opportunity.
Curtis Yarvin
Some conservatives, however, if that's what you think.
Tucker Carlson
Dave Rubin's conservative. Like what is conservative about Dave Rubin?
Curtis Yarvin
He left the left. Right, which is kind of the classic.
Tucker Carlson
The left seems squarely there to me.
Curtis Yarvin
I mean, it's, this is the line we hear over and over again that, well, I jumped away from the identity politics stuff, except, you know, when it attacks any of my identities, you know, that, that kind of thing.
Tucker Carlson
Dave Rubin seems, and Barry Weiss too seem like the main purveyors of identity politics in the world that I live in. There is they left the left.
Curtis Yarvin
There is one type of identity politics that is resoundingly celebrated on the right.
Tucker Carlson
Not by me, I don't like identity politics.
Curtis Yarvin
I don't either, but that is, but there is one that is safe, sacred.
Tucker Carlson
Tough, you know, I'm against it. So all identity politics. So I mean, when I start lecturing about how you're not allowed to, you know, criticize Northern Europeans or something, Episcopalians, then you'll know that I'm every bit as bad as Dave Rubin. But I'm not there yet. Anyway, at some point when the regime decides actually we're against crime and we do have to have real borders and like, I don't know, we care about drugs and we don't want the society to like collapse completely. That's when you'll know they have complete.
Curtis Yarvin
Totalitarian control or they recognize that the utility of destroying the country is coming to an end.
Tucker Carlson
That's what I'm saying, that's what I'm saying. Because at that point they'll feel like, okay, we own this completely, so why wreck it? It's our house. House now.
Curtis Yarvin
Yes. And, and this is how you, you know, again, this is the classic principle of actually how you get a king. Right? Because they're generally generationally invested in the well being of the land they're ruling, the people they're ruling and they have the power to control the outcomes there. So if you actually care about that, if you're actually going to benefit, why not invest your control in actually producing a better population?
Tucker Carlson
I completely agree. I mean, feudalism is so much better than what we have now because at least in feudalism, the leader is vested in, in the prosperity of the people he rules.
Curtis Yarvin
Right.
Tucker Carlson
You know, if all your serfs die, you starve.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah, there's a, there's a true incentive to care for those people. Now again, there is also that also exists in a republic if properly managed. But as we've noted, we're well beyond the requirements that even our founders laid out for a functional republican government. And so what options are left? As we said, at this scale, empire is more or less the only option. And then the question is, you know, do you want, want some kind of autocracy? Do you want some kind of disembodied ruling council? You know, those, those really quickly become your options when you're entering into that kind of society.
Tucker Carlson
Can I ask what. So you've said that the options are the empire continues to expand or we pull back the empire, Right. What about status quo? Which is always my preferred option anyway, just in life. Why, why does the empire need to keep acquiring and controlling? Why isn't it enough to say, we're this awesome empire, we're great, great, we're awesome, and we don't need to manage every little thing, but we're, you know, we're in control of our hemisphere and like Japan and South Korea, and that's just great. Why do we need to control Yemen too?
Curtis Yarvin
It's the natural hubris, I think, of, of any elites. Again, I think there are large incentives of scale when it comes to the managerial elite. But then again, as we've discussed, there's also, I think, a lot of people who, when you're the global hegemon, they want to influence the United States and use it for their own purpose. And so if you've got this thousand pound gorilla in the room, you end up fighting your enemies, right? And so there's a high degree of investment by different powers and peoples in wielding the United States as a weapon. Not for the interests of our people or, you know, what would benefit us or even our empire, but what would benefit those individuals and the nations that they're associated with. And again, this is why Washington warns so much about the factionalism, because this is what's going to create those, this is different incentives inside your elites to stop serving the people and start serving the favored nation or the outside.
Tucker Carlson
Huh? When will we know that our old system is completely gone?
Curtis Yarvin
I don't think we will for a long time. If you think about the way that Rome transitioned, of course it started as a kingdom, it became a republic. If this sounds familiar, it's because it's the same cycle we were on. And then it became an empire. And when it became an empire, no one started calling Octavian or Augustus the Emperor. He just assembled the different powers of the Principate. And the Senate stuck around for many generations, they still had influence. There are many Roman emperors who had to listen to the Senate and the men who were there. They didn't disappear. But over time, we slowly say the way that Rome operated shifted. More and more power got moved into the emperor's hands less and less sat with the people and even with the aristocracy. Eventually, and I think you'll see something very similar with the United States. You're not. No one's going to come by and hit a gong and declare that, you know, the United States has fallen, the empire is over. We'll probably just see a similar change over time.
Tucker Carlson
But in Rome, one of the hallmarks of this evolution was the declining power of the legislative branch. Was that. I mean, no, we definitely see that here for sure.
Curtis Yarvin
And, and again, you know, the, the, the Senate existed, it had influence. But yes, more and more it was very clear that, that that's not where decisions were made. And this is, again, very common in complex societies. Larger bureaucratic societies come with it. Because to manage all of this area, to all these peoples, all this scale, you need a high degree of expertise, and the people in the legislative branch simply don't have it. So what happens is all of the legislative decisions get moved into the executive side, which is, again, what we've seen in the United States, because it contains all of these different organizations with all these experts that can operate all the mechanisms of SC scale that the congressmen simply don't understand. Right. And so it turns out that all of our legislation is just written by a bunch of legislative aides and a bunch of lobbyists and foreign influence, while the actual stuff gets done inside of the executive branch. But even then, in our system, we've seen that the executive has trouble even controlling his own branch. The entire first Trump presidency was defined by his inability to wrangle the executive branch and bring it to heel. And that was obviously their intention this time when they went in, which is why. Why guys like JD Vance were talking about the importance of dismantling the administrative state. They knew that at the end, that was the biggest barrier to running the country for the will of the people.
Tucker Carlson
Is there any hope of reform?
Curtis Yarvin
I am skeptical, and I hate saying that, because I love my country. It's the only place I've ever lived. I'm never going anywhere else. I'm never running away. This is my home. These are my people, and I'm never abandoning it. I'm. But I always say I'm short on the American regime, but I'm long on the American people. Will we have exactly the United States as we understand it in 20, 50, 100 years? I'm doubtful. But will the American people still be strong? Will they still be resilient? Will their way of life live on? That's what we're fighting for at this.
Tucker Carlson
Point, and that's achievable.
Curtis Yarvin
I think that is.
Tucker Carlson
Could you imagine a country where people were allowed to kind of live according to their own customs in different regions?
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah. And we've seen this again, this is a classic model of, you know, even the American understanding originally was federalist. Right. This is how we overcame so many of our different cultures or understandings, even when we were simply a few colonies, because we knew that actually those states had their own way of doing things and we didn't need to reach in and manipulate them at every given time. But unfortunately, the story of the United States is the story of the erosion of. Of those rights. Right. We've. We destroyed the 10th amendment, the 14th amendment completely, and incorporation doctrine radically changed the way that we understand the different rights of our states. Obviously, the Civil War and the inability of a state to leave had its own implications for how a region can be governed. So there are, you know, even in our own history, real examples of how we can have individual customs and individual ways of being even inside our society. But, you know, we're much more like each other as Americans than we are different people. So there's still overlap there. You don't have to have radically different ways of life, but, you know, you are allowed a certain amount of freedom. You don't have to have the central government constantly dictating everything.
Tucker Carlson
But technology makes it easier for the central government. I mean. Yeah, 1956, Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Central High School in Little Rock to enforce Brown versus Board. And that wouldn't have happened, you know, 50 years before, because how would you get the 101st Airborne to Little Rock? You couldn't just put them on a plane.
Curtis Yarvin
Right.
Tucker Carlson
And. But now, you know, almost anything is possible from Washington with technology. So, I mean, do you think there will be places if you have, like, a different view of things or you want to live near people like you, will that be allowed?
Curtis Yarvin
Again, it's going to depend on how powerful the central government is able to. Or how long a powerful central government is able to maintain control. I think that all of the things we're talking about, all the technology, all the logistics they require, competence, managing, complexity. Right, yeah. The very thing we're losing.
Tucker Carlson
No, that's right.
Curtis Yarvin
And so all of These impositions by the central government on our way of life require them to be able to coordinate these actions. And even though the technology is going to get more advanced, will we be able to regularly apply it? Will we be able to maintain it? Will you actually be able to deliver that power and control on a consistent basis? That's going to be the question. I think that determines not.
Tucker Carlson
I mean, I. I lived in a tyrannical city most of my life, but the people running at Washington D.C. at the local level were so stupid that you could kind of do whatever you wanted and corrupt and some nice, by the way, but just dumb. So like, you know, everything was against the law, but you could do whatever you wanted to do. And that was kind of great.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah. There is a certain level at which a third world kleptocracy is freer than the society we're in right now. That's the argument.
Tucker Carlson
I used to make a dinner in D.C. to my neighbors and they really hated it. But I always say you can do whatever you want here. Like whatever you want, except I guess be Donald Trump. But short of that, you could do whatever you want. Interesting.
Curtis Yarvin
Do you.
Tucker Carlson
I noticed that there is this still to this moment, this desire to kill the whites. I think it's so weird. I think it's almost like the official policy or it's certainly the mindset of so many in power across the world, and I don't really understand what that is. It's. It's majority white countries that are being targeted for mass migration, and it's only those countries. And I'm not saying this as some sort of crazy white partisan. I am white, but I'm not like obsessed with being white or anything, but I just notice it and I think it's really evil. But I don't really know where that comes from. Where does that come from?
Curtis Yarvin
Well, a large amount of it comes from the narrative that we tell ourselves. So. So post the World War II, and especially post the civil rights revolution, the purpose of the United States is to remove any differences between outcomes for different races. And any differences that show themselves, that manifest between races can only be de facto evidence of racism. Right. This is literally the law of the land. Most people don't understand that After Griggs versus Duke Power, we have this idea called disparate impact. And this disparate impact doctrine says that if there are any. Any outcomes that are different between groups, even if you didn't intend to be racist, you must be racist. That's the only explanation. So the like for instance, the Sheets gas station chain started running background checks, criminal background checks on their employees, which makes perfect sense. You don't want someone who's a felon running your gas station. Right. But they lost a case against the federal government and had to settle this massive fine because more minorities were being selected by the background checks and removed because they had more criminal records. And even though that's just an objective fact uncovered by the Sheets gas station using that standard, it's still racist. It's still their intention. Whether they had it or not. Whether or not they had the intention, they are still guilty of racism. And so therefore they have to get rid of this policy. This is the way we see our entire society. You have to in some way assume that whites have held down other groups inside your society. That's the only explanation for why they might be in one position and those other minorities might be in another. And so you have to destroy those people. You have to. All your hatred is justifiable because at the end of the day, those people probably, you know, they have some sympathy with Nazis or they're somehow related to mid century Germans. Like that's the conclusion we seem to draw over and over again. And that gives a blank check to people to treat many people in America and other European nations as less than human.
Tucker Carlson
And boy, are they. There's this kind of amazing case in Cincinnati recently where this white collar couple. There's video of it. We're at some jazz festival and got surrounded by a group of black people who just. Who beat them unconscious. I don't know the context of it. I'm sure there's a lot I don't understand. But from the video, looks like what happens a lot in this country was they were beaten up because they were white. Very common. And the stats prove it. But it's the fact that fact is suppressed. Every single person knows it happens in prisons, it happens in schools, it happens in parks works, it happens at jazz festivals. But what's so. And it's obviously awful as it would be, you know, that all that violence is awful, racial discrimination is awful, whatever. But what I find interesting is that the authorities are like angry when you point it out. And there's this video of this kind of fat, middle aged police chief person posing as a police chief. In Cincinnati, we don't have any police chiefs who seem like they could actually be beat cops. I noticed they're all like pathetic. And this woman is. She's angry and she's, you know, lecturing. You know, when you talk about this it's disinformation. And like, there's no mention at all that these people seem to be targeted for the race, even if they weren't, even as a colorblind crime, they're lying unconscious on the ground. She's not mad about that. She's mad that someone might be talking about white people getting hurt. What is that?
Curtis Yarvin
So there's a lot of reasons behind that, but the most shocking one to your audience will be the Community relations services. So if they're not familiar with this organization, it's statutory. Statutory required by the Civil Rights Act. And its job, in theory, is to go out and smooth over race relations in the United States, whether there's going to be a hotspot. You deploy the Community Relations Service, the crs, to that hotspot, and you try to calm the tensions between different communities. In reality, what the CRS actually does is goes in and tells white victim families that they need to put out specific statements. They coach them through particular narratives. They are often provided with written statements to go out and talk to the media about it. And you'll see this pattern over and over again. Right. The. Usually it's an elderly father figure. If the father isn't available.
Tucker Carlson
Yes.
Curtis Yarvin
They come out, they tell a story about how their child was great, the one that was killed, and that ultimately we should be focusing on the greatness of that child and that person who was killed and not the violence that occurred. We don't want to create division by focusing on the crime itself. And please respect my family at this time by focusing on the mourning victim and not on why this happened, what actually took place. Let's not focus any of those details. None of that is an accident. That was a department created by the government. They walked the entire. They, they stage managed the entire Trayvon Martin incident. These people have been involved in a lot of different.
Tucker Carlson
But they're targeting a specific group, and that group is whites.
Curtis Yarvin
Yes.
Tucker Carlson
And I just think it's bonkers that that could happen in our country. And no one mentions it. And it's just so, so sinister. Again, if it was happening to Malaysians, I'd be like, come on, what are we doing?
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah.
Tucker Carlson
And again, it's happening to the majority, the quickly disappearing majority in this country.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah. And again, I think it's. They're. They're given this blank check because ultimately whiteness is this inherent evil, that it's. That any, that any, again, any disparity can only exist because white people did it to you. And you're constantly a victim of It. And so any violence you bring against, against them is allowed. And this is what creates that anarcho tyranny dynamic. Because especially the Democratic Party, but to some extent even the Republican Party has created a blank check for certain groups inside our society to wield violence as they see fit. And the, the police in the, you know, for instance, that police chief, she's not there to prevent the violence against that white couple.
Tucker Carlson
Of course not.
Curtis Yarvin
She's there to prevent you from preventing violence against that white couple. That's the actual purpose she serves.
Tucker Carlson
On whose behalf?
Curtis Yarvin
Well, again, I think it's not a mistake.
Tucker Carlson
I think this is something definitely not a mistake. It's everywhere and it's in every country. It's in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, uk, us. Every one of those countries is exactly the same policy or a species of it and exactly the same attitudes. And all of them are enforced by force.
Curtis Yarvin
And I think it is that these ruling elites find that it generates a wedge inside their societies that allows them main maintain power. It creates this disruptive effect that keeps effective communities from forming that would push back against totalitarian control. It allows them to raid these people and take their wealth and transfer it to new constituents who are easier to control. I think it's, it serves both narrative and ideological interests, but also just raw power and financial interests as well.
Tucker Carlson
Man, that's dark. What are the signs of hope that you see in the United States?
Curtis Yarvin
I think that there are many signs of hope that I actually see. It's a lot. I know we talked about a lot of bad stuff here today, but I think there are several big ones. First is that more and more people who describe themselves as conservative or right wing care more about their families and care more about their family, their communities than they care about ideology. And that that is starting to sink in. I think we're also seeing a big shift, especially on the right when it comes to the idea of perpetual war and foreign policy. That we don't constantly need to be at war, that we don't constantly need to be the world's policeman. We certainly don't need to need to be doing that on the behest of any foreign nation. That the purpose of the United States government and any of its institutions, including the military, should only be the well being of our people. I think we're also seeing a willingness to adjust and look at the economy used to be that the right would never look at, you know, something like tariffs or any kind of economic policy that would violate the Bible of Milton Friedman. But actually when we See the results of it, they're harming our communities. And more and more people are willing to say, no, conservatism is conserving my community, not some abstract commitment to a policy that is harming my neighbor. And I see more and more young people looking at religion as a way forward, which to me is the most important thing.
Tucker Carlson
You do see, see that?
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah. I don't think it's everyone.
Tucker Carlson
It's never gonna be.
Curtis Yarvin
No, but, but, but those people who create intentional communities, religious communities, they're the people who are going to make it through the other side of this. They're the people who are going to be passing down their values. They're the people who are going to draw strength from a tradition and a transcendent truth that others don't have. And so I see more and more young people yearning for the. For that. And I think that that is a huge spark of hope.
Tucker Carlson
So you see people forming, young people having grown up in this, Not. Not just people from subcultures, not just the Amish or the Orthodox or other highly committed religious communities, but you see people who just sort of grew up in America deciding, I'm going to join an intentional religious community.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah, I do. And, and. And I see more people forming, you know, know, realizing they need to move near people who have shared values with them. I know certain people, you know, living in the Ridge Runner community in Tennessee and other examples, where they recognize that not only am I, you know, need to be more serious about my religion and forming these communities, it's no longer sufficient for me to talk about them abstractly online. I need to actually physically live in a community with people who share these ideas. Again, it's small amounts of people right now. It's still. Still forming. It's still at its genesis, but I think it is expanding, and I think it increasingly will be the successful societies in the United States.
Tucker Carlson
Amazing. Would you consider joining one?
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah, I. I think I would. And they're. One of the main reasons I have not done something like this is I have lived where I've lived for a very long time. And I think that you have a certain duty when you have that history and you've already built that community to work to save your community. First. First, eventually, there is probably a panic button where, okay, I've got to get my family out of here because things are too bad or too difficult. Luckily, I live in a community that's nowhere near that. That issue. And because I've lived there for so long, I would rather build that up and Invest in that rather than shred that and try to build it somewhere else. But for many people, they don't even have that already. And so for them, the moving is the easy decision.
Tucker Carlson
But what if you got a job in private equity and would said would you go?
Curtis Yarvin
Well, the beauty now is that even if you have one of these jobs, it's all remote. Right. There's no reason for us to have to live like this anymore. We don't have to cram ourselves into these like horrific urban areas to pursue certain career options at this point. That's one of the few upsides of the technological downside we've been talking about. You can actually just puck up and move across the country and live somewhere else and work in a different field. You, you don't have to be geographically locked, locked into your particular industry.
Tucker Carlson
Of people under 30, how many do you know who have like liberal, like circa 2020 liberal attitudes?
Curtis Yarvin
No, they're radicalizing in one direction or the other. Right. That's what we're seeing is the, the mass polarization. Either they're getting very right wing or very left wing.
Tucker Carlson
And what is. I know what right wing looks like and I approve in general. General. But what does left wing look like?
Curtis Yarvin
You're seeing a lot more people deeply invest in kind of the trans or poly amorous relationships. They, they completely throw off old social structures. They detach from any form of religion. That's, you know, they're going to try to tie them to any tradition. You see them get economically radical again. This is why mom, Donnie is, is more more successful than he would be otherwise wise. And you see them really getting aggressively attacking the idea of any kind of classic American or European connected identity that becomes a very passionate part of who they are really.
Tucker Carlson
So what is. So it's a South Asian identity. Like what is the identity if it's not tied to a specific.
Curtis Yarvin
It's this really abstract progressivism. It's this really. They'll, they'll pull out maybe tribal culture. You know, they'll, you know, do some land acknowledgement or talk about the ancient peoples of some African tribe. But ultimately it really is this hyper modern, progressive, completely deracinated existence where your identity is highly malleable. It can be changed from day to day. Maybe today a male, I'm female, I'm married to you. No. Now I've got three other girlfriends that we're all involved together. Our children don't really belong to anybody. You know, it's all the nightmare stuff.
Tucker Carlson
That the Ravens been tried so much yeah, yeah. That's a very old path, actually. That's the Aleister Crowley path. Who did not die happy. I will say it seems like if we're going to have violence, and unfortunately, I suspect that we might. We've gone so long with no violence, really, 160 years, which is amazing for any society. France can't say that. UK can't say that. We can say that. But that may change. And if there is violence, it seems like it's going to come from that group, too. Me.
Curtis Yarvin
Well, it will come from that group for a couple reasons. One, you know, up to this point, they basically had a free hand to do so. Right. What is Antifa except a group of state shock troops deployed against.
Tucker Carlson
It's the youth wing of the Democratic Party, of course.
Curtis Yarvin
Yeah. It's. It's their brown shirts. Right. And so that, that. That's exactly what we see over and over again. And it's only going to get worse because not only do these people feel morally justified, they also thought that they would never face any consequences. Consequences very.
Tucker Carlson
They were right.
Curtis Yarvin
And they were right. And so they. Yeah. If violence is going to come from anywhere, it's going to come from the people who have a blank check to do it.
Tucker Carlson
How will you respond to that?
Curtis Yarvin
I mean, direct to violence against, you know, family or. Probably I will end it immediately. Of course. That. That's our duty. And that's, I think, intentionally why people are forming communities where they are moving to places where they know they can trust their neighbor to stand by them when a mob comes. Do I live in an area where my sheriff is going to arrest me, me for stopping a mob from attacking my family? Those are the decisions that people are making right now. I live in Florida where a lot of people moved after Covid and in no small part because they wanted to live in a state with where they were next to people who would stand against government tyranny in one way or another when it came. And that's just as true of violence. You never stop violence just by yourself. If that kind of thing comes, you're going to need a community to stand with you.
Tucker Carlson
On that hopeful note, thank you.
Curtis Yarvin
Thank you.
Tucker Carlson
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Guest: Auron MacIntyre
Episode Theme: The American Empire’s Impending Collapse and Possible Paths Forward
Tucker Carlson hosts political commentator and former teacher Auron MacIntyre (with some opening context and contributions briefly from Curtis Yarvin), to diagnose the root causes of America’s looming decline. The discussion is sweeping: from foreign alliances and the perils of empire, to the erasure of tradition, managerial bureaucracy, demographic change, national identity, and the fate of republican government. Together, they scrutinize whether a collapse is avoidable, and what it would take to restore true self-governance and flourishing communities. The tone is somber but not fatalistic, and the discussion is densely packed with history, political theory, and critiques of modern governance.
Main Idea: Blind alliances with foreign powers—most notably Israel and previously Ukraine—undercut American interests and distort internal politics.
Notable Quote:
"Washington said... never ever have a favored nation... either way, it makes you a slave to that nation, and a free nation should be free of foreign influence." (03:08 – Curtis Yarvin)
Main Idea: America has lost touch with its founding philosophy and tradition, replaced by homogenizing, postwar managerial narratives.
Main Idea: Post-Cold War, ideological identity (capitalist/communist, first/second world) vanished, forcing societies to ask anew: “Who are we?”
Main Idea: The rise of bureaucratic "managers," both in the state and in the private sector, strips agency from individuals and communities and serves organizational self-interest above all.
Notable Quote:
"At the end, a bureaucratic organization is just going to look like it's operated by a cabal of its enemies because it eventually turns into an organization that only serves the members of the organization and not the actual purpose it was stated for." (21:51 – Curtis Yarvin)
Main Idea: Elites manufacture social division (especially along racial lines) to weaken the middle class and cement the power of the managerial/ruling class.
Main Idea: Genuine national identity is rooted in particularities—language, religion, heritage, and tradition—not abstract ideological tenets or “macro” racial categories.
Main Idea: America has outgrown the possibility of being a republic; the necessities of empire demand a larger, more centralized, and ultimately authoritarian government.
Notable Quote:
"You don't live in a republic anymore. You live in an empire. And the empire has a large amount of machinery that hums right under the surface and it's constantly serving its own interests on a regular basis." (32:13 – Curtis Yarvin)
Main Idea: The American Empire is following a predictable pattern: repub—> empire —> oligarchy —> Caesarism/strongman.
Main Idea: Large-scale societies naturally demand totalitarian methods to maintain order. America’s contemporary direction mirrors China’s soft-totalitarian model, driven by technology and AI.
Main Idea: American democracy is becoming a hollow ritual, disconnected from actual power or substance—like the “ghost dance” of vanquished Native Americans.
On the universality of cultural particularity:
“The idea of a purely propositional nation that is in no way tied to a culture or a people... is just ridiculous.” (28:16 – Yarvin)
On the system’s defensive tactics:
“It's not the leader's fault... No, it's your neighbor. It's the guy who runs the plumbing with a MAGA hat. It's his fault. He voted wrong and he's the reason you're poor.” (20:33 – Yarvin)
On identity and virtue:
"The words in the Constitution only restrict the government if they reflect particular understandings of peoples and the way that they live their lives." (16:07 – Yarvin)
On the futility of current democracy:
“I think at this point democracy is just a shibboleth. I don't think it really means a whole lot to people." (57:29 – Yarvin)
On signs of hope:
“More and more people who describe themselves as conservative care more about their families and communities than they care about ideology... more young people looking at religion as a way forward.” (98:07–99:54 – Yarvin)
Despite the scale of the crisis described—the corrosive legacy of empire, the rise of a dehumanizing, oligarchic apparatus, and the loss of both virtue and communal life—Auron MacIntyre asserts that the true hope lies in intentional, local communities, renewed traditions, and spiritual life. Radically decentralizing power, reconnecting with historical roots, and rebuilding from the bottom up are the only plausible answers to the American crisis.
Final Notable Quote:
“I'm short on the American regime, but I'm long on the American people. Will we have exactly the United States as we understand it in 20, 50, 100 years? I'm doubtful. But will the American people still be strong, will they still be resilient, will their way of life live on? That's what we're fighting for.” (86:40 – Curtis Yarvin)
Summary by Segment with Timestamps (Select):
Tone & Language:
The conversation is candid, historically oriented, sometimes darkly humorous, and frequently critical of official narratives. Both Carlson and MacIntyre use plain, evocative language, citing political philosophers and historical analogies without academic detachment.
For Listeners New to the Episode:
This is a deeply critical, long-form discussion about America’s internal decay—social, political, spiritual—and the historic patterns it mirrors, with a grim diagnosis but glimmers of hope through intentional community and revival of tradition. The conversation bridges political philosophy and practical prescription, making it relevant for anyone questioning the future viability of the American experiment.