Tucker Carlson is the Steve Bannon of Joe Rogans. Tucker surpasses Rogan’s massive reach at times, but his curated guest list drives a deliberate agenda: normalizing neo-fascist political discourse. He does it all with an affable, friendly, just-asking-questions, I’m-not-as-smart-as-my-guests attitude that may disguise what he’s doing—like interviewing a Holocaust-denier Nazi apologist, or framing modern-day dictatorships as admirable, or promoting the anti-semitic Great Replacement Theory, or globe-trotting to flatteringly interviewing brutal enemies of democracy like Viktor Orban or Vladimir Putin.
In the wake of recent controversy about WWII revisionism on Carlson’s show, Julian breaks down the accelerationist contours of Tucker’s far-right influence and agenda. Being fired from FOX News and going “independent” has only made it worse.
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But I told him, maybe trying to provoke him a little bit, that I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War.
He didn't kill the most people.
He didn't commit the most atrocities.
But I believe, and I don't really think, I think when you really get into it and tell the story right and don't leave anything out, you see that he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.
He starts firing off peace proposals.
He says, let's not do this.
Like, we can't do this.
And of course, you know, a year goes by, 1940 comes around and they're still at war.
And so he launches his invasion to the West, takes over France, takes over Western and Northern Europe.
Once that's done, the British have, you know, escaped at Dunkirk.
There's no British force left on the continent.
There's no opposing force left on the continent.
In other words, the war is over and the Germans won.
That's amateur historian Darrell Cooper explaining his alternative view of World War II to Tucker Carlson.
You see, if Britain had left well enough alone, Hitler had already taken over Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France.
The war was basically over and there could have been peace.
So Churchill was apparently at fault for what happened after 1940.
He's got an odd rationale for the Holocaust, too, but we'll get there.
Let's start with Tucker.
Welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Julian Walker, and today's episode is a brief.
Tucker Carlson's Friendly Fascism.
Go back far enough and you'll find that a fresh-faced and puffy-haired Tucker Carlson used to always wear bow ties and posture as a quirky intellectual, kind of true to his elite roots.
His stepmother is heiress to the Swanson Frozen Foods fortune.
He grew up overlooking the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club and went to small private schools all the way through university.
But today, Tucker's YouTube channel brands him as a flannel and blue jean-wearing man of the people, broadcasting from a log cabin somewhere in middle America.
Its banner is a panoramic view of him fly fishing in splendid solitude.
The opening title montage of his videos do more of that same branding, but they also feature the photo of a zany-looking young Tucker posing with the members of hippie jam band Royalty, the Grateful Dead.
So the crossover is clear.
You may know him for his trademark quizzical squint with mouth hanging open or his forced seeming loud and high-pitched giggle.
Both of these are disarming tools of his interview style.
But I'm going to argue that in his current incarnation, he has replaced Alex Jones as the most dangerous online media personality of our time.
This past week saw one of the nexus points that appear sometimes in which our specific beat here at Conspirituality overlapped perfectly with headline news.
This is never a good sign.
As you probably know, Tucker Carlson was all over CNN, MSNBC, and digital print media because of an interview he published on September 3rd with this independent historian named Daryl Cooper.
Cooper is the creator of something called the Martyr Made podcast.
He's also a co-host with decorated military veteran and Manosphere celebrity Jocko Willink of a podcast called The Unraveling, which purports to make sense of the world by disentangling history, politics, and culture.
Cooper positions himself as the guy whose extensive reading can take you deeper than the headlines, and when solo, he creates extremely long and in-depth historical series about topics like the founding of the State of Israel, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Jones' People's Temple, and as it turns out, a forthcoming series on World War II.
Now, as a do-your-own-research kind of guy, Cooper explains to Tucker that there's a rule.
You're not allowed to look at this subject and wonder how the Germans perceived it.
How they might have genuinely and legitimately believed that they were the ones under attack.
They were the ones being victimized.
But being the fearless truth seeker that he is, Daryl breaks the rule.
You see, Winston Churchill was a drunken and childish psychopath, and the chief villain of World War II, who may have been influenced by Zionist financiers who had bailed him out of bankruptcy.
If he had just left Hitler alone after he had invaded multiple countries and started concentration camps, the war need not have escalated.
He says more outrageous things, all while Carlson stares at him like a confused dog, wondering where the treats have been hidden.
No pushback, no real follow-ups, or citations requested.
Look, they put themselves into a position, and Adolf Hitler is chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the East in 1941, They launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth that they were going to have to handle.
They went in with no plan for that.
And they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there.
You know, you have a You have like letters as early as July, August 1941 from commandants of these makeshift camps that they're setting up for these millions of people who are surrendering or people they're rounding up.
And they're, so it's two months after, a month or two after Barbarosha was launched.
And they're writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, we can't feed these people.
We don't have the food to feed these people.
And one of them actually says, rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn't it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?
Of course, this leaves out how meticulously planned the Holocaust actually was, as well as the entire very well-developed underlying crypto-religious philosophical basis for the Third Reich.
But this was just on a podcast, right?
Well, in today's media ecosystem, some podcasters command audiences that dominate cable news channels.
The data is a little disputed and hard to track down, but if Joe Rogan, for example, really does 11 million downloads per episode, that absolutely dwarfs Fox News' current 2.2 million in primetime and embarrasses CNN's primetime number of 690,000 viewers.
As an independent content creator, Rogan also earns significantly more than marquee millionaire salaried anchors.
The question then arises, what do these categories of mainstream versus alternative or independent really even mean?
For conspiracy theorists and far-right propagandists, the distinction turns mostly on what they cynically frame as free speech versus censorship.
The hijacked energy of that distinction drives highly monetizable and deeply disorienting disinformation from the fringes into everyday public discourse.
Since Tucker was ousted from Fox News, he is now not only the ascendant figure in this new media dynamic, he's a more explicitly political actor on that stage, platforming or singing the praises of the dictator strongman that Donald Trump admires and whom his former advisor and trollish chaos agent Steve Bannon sees as allies in establishing a new global far-right order.
When YouTube first emerged back in 2005, it seemed, like other internet innovations, to be this democratizing force that might eliminate the middleman and give the best talent, the most original ideas, the people who really deserved it unprecedented opportunities for exposure and success.
A launchpad into being on TV or the radio.
YouTube videos could be shared on blogs.
And once Facebook became more widely used, posted to Facebook.
Next level, grassroots digital printing press rollover Gutenberg.
Rogan starts on YouTube before podcasting becomes wildly popular and his stoned Gonzo Bigfoot UFO conspiracy rambling grew popular enough to become an avenue for all manner of higher profile and higher brow guests to come on and promote their books to a new audience.
And as things have unfolded in the last five years, so-called mainstream figures have also found that independent alternative media was a place to rehabilitate a career derailed by scandal, firing, or stigmatized opinions that legacy organizations can't risk tolerating.
Such a figure is one Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson.
At his peak, he had 5.3 million viewers watching Tucker Carlson tonight on Fox News.
Even in those days, he was promoting outrageous far-right ideas, but being suddenly and unceremoniously fired in the midst of the Dominion voting machine defamation lawsuit that cost Fox in excess of $770 million, they settled out of court for that amount, for promoting Trump's big lie, has only added fuel to his fire.
So let's go back to Nazi apologist Cooper now and how his patently false revisionist history relates to Tucker's political views of today's world.
The blowback on this has been strong in the legacy media, though I see zero evidence of it being criticized on Fox News.
But here's the thing.
Not only does the condemnation not matter, It's beneficial.
As of Friday, four days after the Carlson episode and at the peak of the legacy media criticism, Martyr Made Podcast, which is Daryl Cooper's operation, had jumped six places in the Spotify rankings, leapfrogging the Tucker Carlson show to nestle in at number two, beneath only the mighty Joe Rogan.
On Apple, Apple Podcasts, on their charts, Martyr Made actually held top spot, with Tucker second and Rogan down to a lowly fourth.
By Monday of this week, that show had also reached number one on Spotify.
Much of what I've said so far, with the exception of these statistics, has been widely covered in the news.
What I haven't seen flagged is that the underlying point of this conversation is that the supposedly dominant false narrative of World War II is used as a founding myth for liberal society and for NATO.
And it defines how we react to events on the global stage, like Putin invading Ukraine.
And Tucker says that really, this founding myth, rooted in a World War II narrative that he's skeptical of, has led to the destruction of Western civilization.
Cooper and Carlson lament how everything west of Hungary has fallen prey to the worst thing in terms of how countries like the UK, Germany, and Spain are increasingly becoming non-European.
So what, at this point, you describe what's happening to Europe as the worst thing, not just the UK, but maybe especially the UK.
But also Germany, Spain, Ireland, as you noticed, really everything west of Central Europe of Hungary is increasingly not European.
So what does that trend continue or stop or what happens?
I mean, that's going to be up to the Europeans.
When Viktor Orban says stuff like, well, you know, I just don't want to admit like a million non-Hungarians into my country.
And they go, they go crazy.
Yeah.
I mean, you look at how they respond to somebody like Orban and like they would color revolution that dude in a second if they thought they could get away with it.
If they didn't think Orban, well, he's hardly like a right wing crazy.
He's like very moderate and kind of like liberal in an 80s way.
I think that's probably the only reason.
As it continues, they praise Viktor Orban's anti-immigration policies.
And Cooper tells Tucker that having interviewed Mr. Putin because Tucker has interviewed Putin and he calls him Mr. Putin.
This may have prepared Tucker for the wide-ranging conversation he was going to have with Cooper.
And Tucker then ranks Trump and Orban and Putin as being a sincere trio of nationalists with fairly neutral ideologies that would have classified them as moderate Democrats in 1981.
Because they're not especially right-wing.
Cooper agrees.
And then he goes on to decry how since Nuremberg it has been illegal to be openly right-wing.
The mask-off quality here is really offhand and I don't even think they realize the extent to which they're doing it.
They both put Trump, Orban, and Putin in the same category.
And then they say that they're not really right-wing.
But then the conversation turns to how you're not allowed to be really right-wing anymore because of how the Nazi war criminals were prosecuted.
None of this is really new for Tucker.
He's flown to Moscow to interview Putin and to Budapest to interview Orban.
While at Fox News, he narrated footage from a helicopter overlooking the Hungarian border.
Listen.
Earlier this week, we traveled to the southern tip of Hungary, along the Serbian border.
It was at that spot six years ago that hundreds of thousands of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East showed up, all hoping to reach the famously generous welfare states of Western Europe.
And yet by the time we arrived at that same border on Wednesday, all was quiet and peaceful.
There was no suffering mass of humanity, no crying children, no graffiti or trash or violence.
In fact, there was just a simple chain-link fence separating the two countries and nobody in sight, just birds and trees.
So how did this happen?
It happened because Hungary is a serious and modern country that cares about its own citizens.
Hungary has no desire to destroy itself, no desire to encourage crime and misery and unemployment in its cities, or for that matter, no desire to contribute to the human trafficking of people fleeing from Syria.
When illegal aliens arrive at the Hungarian border now, they are photographed and then they're politely escorted back across the line.
The whole process takes about half an hour.
It is the most civilized thing we have seen in years.
And as we watched it, we thought to ourselves, why can't we have this in America?
The answer is, you know, is because our leaders don't want to have it.
They benefit from the chaos and the pain of illegal immigration.
When the rule of law collapses, they become more powerful.
That's why we have opened borders.
And then before interviewing Viktor Orban, Tucker framed a comparison between Hungary and America like this.
In fact, if you live in the United States, it is bitter to see the contrast between, say, Budapest and New York City.
Let's say you lived in a big American city and you decided to loudly and publicly attack Joe Biden's policies.
His policies on immigration or COVID or transgender athletes.
If you kept talking like that, you would likely be silenced by Joe Biden's allies in Silicon Valley.
If you kept it up, you might very well have to hire armed bodyguards.
That's common in the U.S.
Ask around.
But it's unknown in Hungary.
Opposition figures here don't worry that they will be hurt for their opinions.
Neither, by the way, is the prime minister.
Orban regularly drives himself with no security.
So who's freer?
In what country are you more likely to lose your job for disagreeing with the ruling class's orthodoxy?
The answer is pretty obvious, though if you're an American, it is painful to admit it, as we have discovered.
More free and safe for critics of the government than Biden's America,
where you might have to hire armed guards if you attacked Biden's policies on immigration, COVID, or transgender
athletes, he says.
We'll see you next time.
Which is outrageous, because Orban has actually curtailed freedom of speech and is assessed by critics as an authoritarian strongman with anti-gay and trans policies similar to Putin's.
He's described his own ideology as illiberal and favoring Christian democracy, national identity, and family values.
Like Tucker, Orban has also promoted the anti-Semitic Great Replacement Theory.
How do you hack an election?
So, you know, people will be like, oh, you go into the voting machines, or you print up, you know, spare ballots in China, or whatever.
No, you know, these are rookie numbers.
Like, this is not how you hack an election.
The way you hack an election is by changing the meaning of the election.
And the way you hack an election is not by changing, eliminating your ability to vote for a certain candidate, but by simply taking away the power from the politicians you elect.
In other words, turning them from Elizabeth I Who actually could say off of your head, to Elizabeth II.
And so, when you look at the legal positions that Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II occupied, they're exactly the same position.
She's the queen.
Like, you know, she has, you know, technically in the English constitutional system, it's called reserve powers.
She could declare martial law.
Tomorrow.
And actually, I think it would work.
That's a separate conversation.
And she has all of these powers on paper, and in practice, she's a classy Kardashian.
And so the question, you know, of how do you hack an election is very, very simple.
Instead of turning the queen into a classy Kardashian, turn the electorate into a classy Kardashian.
So if you basically say you're electing these politicians and you're behaving in this election as though these politicians you elected were actually in control of the government, When they're actually about 0.001% in control of the government, and the government is just this permanent deep state thing that just sits there and kind of rots and gets worse every decade, then, and you can't change this with elections at all, sorry haha, it's actually pretty funny that you tried when it's not scary, it's like scary funny like one of those Halloween movies,
This is the attitude of the lib, right?
And it sort of goes from, like, look at these yokels with pitchforks to, like, ah, they're going to pitchfork us to, like, look at these funny yokels with pitchforks, right?
You grew up with this mentality.
So did I. That's how you felt toward the people that you ruled over.
You're like, these people are funny and dangerous.
Now that's neoreactionary movement philosopher Curtis Yarvin.
You may remember he's one of GOP vice presidential pick J.D.
Vance's friends and intellectual influences.
He's famously been quoted by Vance on a podcast.
His 2021 appearance is the last Tucker interview I want to look at.
Jarvan is not only openly anti-democratic, he thinks the US should be ruled over by some kind of startup CEO monarch.
He's also the almost verbatim architect of a policy quoted by JD Vance on a podcast in 2021 and then outlined in Project 2025 that would fire non-partisan government employees so as to stack all the government agencies with Trump loyalists. Now here
he is, Yarvin, talking about another Project 2025 initiative already being enabled by our
Supreme Court.
How much power does Donald Trump personally have over this executive branch? That's a hard thing
to measure, but one way to measure this is to know that it has two endpoints.
So he could have no power or he could have complete power.
He could have zero or one.
So where is he in his power over the executive branch, which constitutionally is under his complete control?
Where is he in terms of his power over this organization?
Is he closer to zero or closer to one?
So one way to ask that question is to say, well, Could we increase his power by 10 times?
Could we make the White House 10 times as powerful over the executive branch?
Very easily.
Could we make the White House 100 times as powerful over the executive branch?
So, you know, people think when they vote for Donald Trump that they're voting for the same job that FDR had.
They're actually voting for, like, 0.01% of that job.
Which is a really serious misinterpretation of reality.
And foisting that level of misinterpretation of reality on people is actually a really serious offense.
It's really not good.
Why is it not good?
It's not good because you're gaslighting people.
They're basically looking at this simulated world.
He kept going.
And afterward teased Tucker about doing his trademark quizzical scowl, to which Tucker gave one of his classic high-pitched laughs and marveled out loud at how original and brilliant Curtis Yarvin's ideas were.
So given that Carlson has a top three podcast these days, after being let go from Fox News, it's important to underline That this alternative media figure really is the mainstream.
And he's the doorway, as the data I shared from Spotify and Apple illustrates, for millions of people into a deliberately curated ultra-nationalist far-right ideology.
In terms of reach, he's the new Joe Rogan.
But where Rogan has an eclectic guest list that has trended right-wing due to bro-culture ignorance and a fetish for the conspiratorial, Tucker has a deliberate focus on making literal fascism great again.
We could say Tucker Carlson is the Steve Bannon of Joe Rogan's.
I'll leave you with this though.
Here's Tucker, and you may have seen this at the time but it's worth listening to again because it's pretty incredible.
Here's Tucker when visiting Russia after Putin had invaded Ukraine while Putin was holding two American journalists on trumped-up chargers as prisoners in his country.
Here's Tucker Visiting a Russian supermarket and musing about what his experience there means.
We were just putting in the cart what we would actually eat over a week.
And we all came in around 400 bucks, about 400 bucks.
It was $104 US here.
And that's when you start to realize that ideology maybe doesn't matter as much as you thought.
Corruption.
If you take people's standard of living and you tank it through filth and crime and inflation, and they literally can't buy the groceries they want, At that point, maybe it matters less what you say or whether you're a good person or a bad person.
You're wrecking people's lives in their country.
And that's what our leaders have done to us.
And coming to a Russian grocery store, the heart of evil, and seeing what things cost and how people live, it will radicalize you against our leaders.
That's how I feel anyway.
Radicalized.
Thank you so much for listening.
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