The Real Reason U.S Is Going to War With Iran | Tucker Carlson Interview — SF706
Tucker Carlson argues the U.S. war with Iran stems from a system where shareholders, not voters, control outcomes, pushing leaders like Trump into conflict despite their reluctance. He posits that this concentration of power creates an "acceleration ladder" toward assassination or impeachment when figures become too risky, driven by a desire for godhood and immortality akin to Jesus or Rupert Murdoch. Carlson contends that secularism masks religious biases, leading to an anti-life system evidenced by pandemic health crises, which he believes will ultimately self-destruct like the Tower of Babel due to inherent evil and divine intervention. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Tucker's Critical Shift on Trump00:04:43
Russell Brand.
Russell Brand.
Trying to bring real journalism to the American people.
Hello there, you awakening wonders.
Thanks for joining us today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Today I'm talking with Tucker Carlson, one of the most influential and controversial voices in modern media, a man who spent decades at the heart of American political journalism and now finds himself questioning the very system he once helped interpret.
I recently joined Tucker on his show.
There's a link in the description if you want to see that conversation.
And now he's here with me continuing what has become a much deeper and more urgent dialogue.
In this conversation, Tucker lays out why he believes the political system is no longer responding to voters, how power may sit beyond elected leaders, and why recent events from war to culture point to something far bigger than conventional politics.
We talk about Trump, influence, foreign policy, faith, and whether what we're witnessing is the unraveling of the model itself or the revealing of what was always there beneath it.
Tucker, Russell, you're right at the middle of the culture again.
Indeed, watching you move through what seemed to be vocal, and one might have imagined from the state that your country was in at the point and what appeared like a crisis, vociferous and meaningful support of President Trump to skepticism, now to the point where it seems that your criticism of him, and in particular his actions or announcements around, of course, war, which you've always been anti war, strongly anti war in all contexts.
So I know that's not personal.
But also with some of the announcements or posts that he's made regarding religion, have led you to as close to condemnation as I can imagine you being of him and his presidency.
It seems like it's a really significant moment, I think, for him, let alone you.
And I wonder how you feel at the middle of it, whether you feel like you're participating in some significant moment, indeed, whether or not your support is so pivotal and important that its denial could cost Trump.
Presidency in, well, it's not the free.
I mean, it's not going to run again.
But, like, I wonder how you have moved from a position of support to a position of condemnation and how critical you imagine it might be for him.
In reverse order, I don't think it's critical at all.
It's probably meaningless.
I have no power at all.
I don't think I've moved much.
I think I've stood pretty much standing still and that the time, the situation has changed a lot.
It's not about Trump.
I'm not condemning Trump.
I feel sorry for Trump.
My affection for Trump remains.
Probably forever.
I'll always have affection for Trump.
I think Trump has much less agency than we imagine he does.
I think the president of the United States has less than most Americans know, much less.
I feel great pity for Trump.
I think he's made bad decisions, but so have I. I'm not much of a judger of people, never have been.
I'm not in a place to be.
I'm in no place to judge anybody.
I mean that.
I'm not just saying that.
But what I've said is that certain decisions he's made or statements he's made are repugnant to me, and I can't.
Not say something about it.
Again, it's not personal in the slightest, but I felt that the war in Iran was not only a mistake, but it was a mistake that revealed the problem, the core problem of the United States, which is the system produces these really evil results against the will of the population or without reference to it.
In any case, it doesn't matter what people think.
We get what we get no matter what we vote for.
That's often said.
It turns out to be entirely true.
There are all kinds of distractions thrown up to convince us that it's not true, that there are massive differences between the parties.
Questions of economic policy and foreign policy, which are the core questions of government, there's no real difference.
That's just demonstrable.
That's not my opinion.
I mean, you could chart it out.
So I argued passionately my position on the war with Iran, which is it's not in America's interest at all.
And Trump agreed with me for 10 years.
I mean, I've been talking with him about this topic for 10 years since 2016 and a bunch of different points in the first term.
And now in this term, which has been dominated by it, you know, there, there, there's been real press on Trump to commit the United States to some sort of war with Iran.
And so I've been there and talked to him about it.
And I think I spoke to him, you know, not long before this war started and I never detected any enthusiasm from him.
Why Rumble Built Its Wallet00:02:52
For this at all.
I don't think he wanted to do it.
And I'm convinced of that.
Could be wrong, can't know a man's heart, but I mean, I talked to him a lot and I never thought he wanted to do it.
And I think he fully understood the potential consequences.
I think he's got a reckless streak, as I do too.
So I'm not judging, but I think he's a dice roller and the kind of guy who could say, as he did say to me, no matter what happens, it's going to be okay because it always is.
That's what he said to me.
Is that an expression of recklessness or is it resignation?
Are those the words?
Of someone who knows he can't control the outcome.
So he's just decided to accept it, I think the latter.
But the facts are that he was under enormous pressure from the prime minister of Israel to do this and from advocates for Israel in the United States and around him, not really in the White House, but among donors and advisors and friends.
And they pushed him into it.
Now, how did they get the power to do that?
I don't know the answer to that.
But I knew then, before it happened, and it's obvious now, that this was very bad for the United States.
And I live here.
It's our country.
And so I was upset about it.
That's all I said.
You know why people are moving to crypto because the world's going crazy and everything's collapsing.
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When Barack Obama in 2008 elected to bail out the banks, it was as if there's some inevitable machinery that moves beyond and behind the office of the president.
Faith vs Mechanics of Democracy00:15:06
And in a way, it marred perhaps irrevocably the presidency of Obama, even in the eyes of those that.
Exactly.
I adore him.
And I suppose similarly, it's an indication of a machine that operates beyond the purview of what we consider to be democracy.
Like, so when you say, I don't know anything like as much about politics as you do, but when I felt that the moment of, I thought that going to a war, going to war with Iran maybe represented the obvious assertion that geopolitics is not influenced and maybe even domestic politics in the ways that are super significant.
By whoever is the incumbent or occupant of that office.
And that's really frightening, I suppose, in the instance of Trump, because in a way, he was an anti political candidate from the get go and the truth teller and the person that was going to drain the swamp.
And so, do you think that that war is the end of that populist moment?
And where does America first go if Trump is a captive to political maneuvers that transcend what most people regard as the.
The normal mechanic of politics.
Well, I think it's the end of politics.
If you define politics as the debate over how best to represent the voters, which is what I thought it meant, then at this point it's very, very clear that the view of voters is just immaterial.
It doesn't matter at all who you vote for or what you think.
Many times over the past 35 years, covering politics and being mostly around mainstream people, but occasionally you cover some third party campaign and you hear people say that.
It doesn't matter who you vote for, you get the same result every time.
And you're like, that's too glib.
There's a very complex and old system with its rituals and rules, and it unfolds, and elections are real.
I've covered them.
I know this.
And you'd be like, that is just simplifying a very complicated phenomenon.
And now, in my age, I'm about to turn 57, I'm like, no, that's right.
That's just right.
And I know it's right because look at what happens every single time.
So tell me how it's not right.
And so that means now that I think at this point is undeniable.
And we can debate, like, why is that?
In other words, what are the mechanisms by which forces outside of our political system seize control of that system?
And I'm not exactly sure.
I have a lot of theories on it, but I don't know.
But I know that it happens because I've seen it, and now we've all seen it.
So then you have to ask like, you know, there will be a time during which, if the current system remains in place, that we go through the motions in the way that the Roman Senate went through the motions and continue to be a Senate and convene and issue proclamations and da But once it became an empire, like it didn't matter.
I think something like that you could imagine happening here where the mechanics of democracy are still in place, but people by and large don't believe that they're real and for good reason.
You know, a reformation of the system, which is what I personally would like to see someone who was kind of pleased with the system, as imperfect as it was.
You know, and I don't know which one's going to happen, but I don't think we will in the near term find ourselves in a place where anybody believes that electing candidate X over candidate Y is going to solve the problems that led to our current decline.
I don't think anyone believes, you know, is Keir Starmer better than Rishi Sunak?
You know, like what does that even mean?
No, neither one of them ran anything.
They're just employees, they're dutiful servants of some other power, obviously.
The UK is so much smaller than the United States, less than a third.
So it's like the US in miniature, kind of.
And you can sort of see social pathologies and management crises and clear relief just because it's much smaller.
It's like an ant form.
But the.
Excuse me.
That's my beloved country where there's just a single tier.
No, I say that as someone whose ancestors are from there and whose system comes from there.
And everything good in the United States ultimately derives from the British system.
Not everything good, but our core institutions are English.
And so I say that as someone who was looking in the same way Americans look at California to find out what's coming next.
We look at Britain to find out what's coming next, or I do anyway.
And I know that the United States is exactly that.
It's just easier to cloak in a continent full of 350 million people.
So, but I, this system is done.
Yes.
Because it's been revealed to be the opposite of what they told us it was.
Now, you can imagine a kind of humane, decent country run by.
Non democratically, they do exist.
I don't want one because that's way too much power to vest in a person.
But the truth is, there are monarchies and certainly have been historically that are pretty free and open and humane and decent.
Like democracy is not the only system that gets you to freedom, by the way.
It's just not true.
It's the one that I trust most and would prefer to continue.
But what we have now is not a democracy.
And I think we can just say that without shame.
I'm not the one who subverted it, by the way.
I've got nothing to be embarrassed about.
I'm not attacking democracy.
I'm trying to defend it, but we don't have it.
And I would like it.
And so, how do you go about restoring it?
I really don't know.
My sense is that Trump is making it easier for the rest of us to understand what's at stake and what the potential solution is by framing the current war in religious terms.
I think that's actually a good thing.
Now, obviously, it's grotesque and scary because the last thing you want is a religious war.
Do you really want to be at war with 2 billion Muslims?
Why?
But that's what they're trying to convince us this is.
I don't want it to be that.
But I am glad that they're using the language of the supernatural because it is a.
In a secular society like ours, it's a much needed reminder that everything we see is the product of supernatural conflict of spiritual war, that we live in a supernatural world.
And by supernatural, I mean specifically, we live in a world in which things happen due to forces that can't be sensed or measured.
So it's outside of science, it's supernatural or supranatural, really.
So it's good to know that.
It's so good for all of us to know that.
So when the president posts a picture of himself as Jesus, And then intentionally puts a demon over his own head, which he did last night, Sunday night, Sunday night, and then denies he did it or whatever, whatever, but he did it.
It's just a fact.
It causes the rest of us to pause and ask, like, what is this?
It's not exactly clear what it is, but what it's not is a continuation of the mirage that we've lived with my entire lifetime, which is this is like a conflict between left and right, Republicans and Democrats, and they're trying to, you know, Come to some consensus on the best way to govern the country or the world.
Like that, that's not that.
It's something totally different.
And it's only by keeping that in mind that we can get closer to the truth of what it actually is.
But everything, and the last thing I'll say is I know a lot of people who run countries because that's my job is to interview people.
And a lot of people with power, I'm not one of them, but I've been around them a lot.
And they're, to a man, to a person, religious people.
Every single one of them, every single one of them, and almost every single one of them, with very few exceptions, poses as a secular person.
They are observant religious people.
Now, they are not serving the Christian God.
None of them that I've ever met.
But they are serving gods.
And they know it.
There's no question about it, however, they conceive that.
But they are not rationalist.
Not a single one of them.
They think in terms of supernatural power.
They all believe correctly, in my opinion, that they are being guided by and strengthened by, given authority by supernatural powers, and they appease those powers.
Not accusing them of what we'd call witchcraft, but it is, in fact, witchcraft, is what it really is.
They're all participating in it.
And all rulers, just in general, through history, participate in it.
But we should know that.
And we shouldn't fall for the biggest lie ever told about leaders is that they're just like technocrats.
Oh, no.
Every one of them believes, I've got a destiny.
I'm here for a reason.
Well, that right there is an admission of faith.
Every single one of them and every single one of them has, you know, things they will do and things they won't do, things they feel compelled to do because of a higher calling.
These are all expressions of religious faith.
And all of them have red lines in their minds and we can call that they're superstitious.
It's not superstitious.
There's no such thing as superstitious religious faith.
Now it could be faith in demons, which it typically is, but it doesn't make it any less religious.
So I think we should know that there's a sense in what you've just described that the model has exhausted itself, that the model has expired.
That there was something about Trump always that was, you could put it that he's vivid, lurid, a self caricature, a person who's very aware of his own mythology while it's unfolding.
His mythology draws from the lexicon and values of the immediate culture.
I mean, it's things like his own name at the top of buildings and Coca Cola and a fetish from McDonald's and all of these things and an amplification of male values.
So many things that are kind of recognizable from the period of time he's been alive, the 1980s.
And it's an extraordinary thing.
Thing to see the implosion of that because it's difficult to imagine that can't be accompanied by an implosion of the system itself, in so much as how can the next natural step be the ascent of another Republican figure or the vicissitude delivering Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom or AOC?
Like you say, it's like the system is spent, wrung out through this sort of last peculiarly postmodern.
And yet, aged political figure, someone that was both simultaneously nostalgic and progressive in a way that's unimaginable.
I mean, just through his means of communication and his expertise with new media, and the fact that he was a person primed in the world of television before entering into politics.
Well, just a point about what you said about the UK.
Firstly, how dare you?
And secondly, for a while, because it's a sort of like an old, arcane, deep culture, I've got the sense that true British power has even migrated to institutions and agencies that are beyond the way we regard national power and.
Institutional power, and that for a time it's been subterranean, real British power is invisible.
That there are peculiar anomalies in British power, like the city of London being its own sort of tax exile in the middle of a capital city, the sort of lingering monarchy, the peculiarly technocratic politicians, actually, like Keir Starmer, who one finds it hard to imagine donning a robe and worshipping Moloch just because I would almost improve my view of him if I thought that.
And so, in a way, are we saying that, you know, in this kind of post Epstein, Middle Eastern, seemingly apocalyptic moment, that all leaders are in some way compromised?
Are we saying that real power is supranational as well as supranatural, that real power is concentrated elsewhere?
And what gave you the courage to start talking about Israel's agenda?
Israel's war, Israel's expansion into Lebanon.
And do you see occultism as being part of that facet of this conflict and this moment of revelation and decline, which you've described in a way as the end of democracy?
And it's difficult to argue with that aspect, certainly.
Yeah.
I mean, I, well, to again answer your last question first on the question of Israel, I mean, I have felt for a long time, decades, you know, having lived in Washington, son of a federal employee, and just watching the system most of my life since for 40 years, since the mid 80s.
I felt very strongly that the relationship between the United States and Israel was not healthy and that it would, in the end, probably gravely harm the United States.
I have just felt that.
I felt that not because I hate Jews, which I don't and never have and never will, not because I hate Israel, because I don't, but because Israel is a lot less like the United States than Americans understand.
Okay, so I would say that.
And also just because it's unequally yoked.
You can't, it's just an.
Got one large resource dense global power and one tiny, kind of irrelevant country with a lot of ancient monuments on the shores of the Mediterranean.
Like, one should not be in the little ones, should not be in charge of the big ones.
I just always felt that was unnatural, but I didn't say anything about it because it wasn't worth it.
And I had lots of other things going on, and I also had small children, and like, and I understood the penalties very, very clearly for doing that.
How?
Honestly?
Yeah.
I don't even want to say it, but I had, I mean, there was something in my, you know, because by marriage, I'm related to a United States senator who was, you know, who I didn't admire as a senator, but whose career was destroyed because he said something about the influence.
He was not an anti Semite or an Israel hater, but he was like, hey, why is Israel calling the shots here?
And he was a very, very famous senator.
And I watched him get taken out for saying that.
And it was obvious living in Washington, like, that's the one thing you can't say.
Is that maybe this relationship is unhealthy?
There's undue influence in the next.
So I just did, I was like, you know what?
And I would always tell my staff at various networks I worked at, I don't do the Israel stories.
I'm not against Israel.
I actually really like it as a place.
I still feel that, but we're not doing that.
Then the war in Iran really changed it.
And what really changed it, two things one, the persecution of Christians by Israel, which is widespread and longstanding and ignored, started to drive me crazy.
Killed by the state of Israel with my tax dollars, and I'm not allowed to say anything about it.
I don't have a ton of self respect, but enough that I had to say something.
Then, two, and most pressingly, really, was this acceleration of the effort to get the US into war.
I think the Israelis understood that this was really their last chance.
Right after the inauguration, Netanyahu showed up at the White House, was there more than half a dozen times pushing for this.
Of course, I knew a lot of people who worked there, including the president, and so I knew this was happening and I knew the details of it.
And I just pushed back as hard as I could.
And then, of course, they just attacked me in public and my family.
And you're an anti-Semite.
And you hate the Jews.
You're a Nazi.
Okay.
Now, none of that's true.
But it hardened my resolve.
You know, like, no, I'm from here.
This is, I live here.
Fear of Persecution Ahead00:15:35
This is my country.
Like, what do you, you can't use the US military to genocide people and get us into wars that are going to destroy the US dollar and double gas prices and get Americans killed.
Like, no.
Like, how much do you have to put up with?
Like, I'm, Totally happy to ignore, I don't know, Jonathan Pollard.
You know, you steal our secrets and then you give them to the Soviets at the height of the Cold War.
Okay, I'll be quiet.
You try and sink a US naval vessel, you get the president of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, on board, and we all have to ignore the USS Liberty.
And, and other things, and other things too.
Um, bigger things.
And so, but I, hey, I'm happy.
I don't even have to say everything you think.
You're not required to give every opinion.
Jesus didn't say everything he thought, you know?
But when the war in Iran, when I could see that it was actually moving toward a war with Iran, I thought, I don't even care what the effect on me is.
I cared about my family.
Well, that's been very frustrating.
But, um, but anyway, so yeah, that's, that's why I did that.
And of course it didn't work in the end.
And the opposite happened, and it was worse even than I had predicted it was going to be.
Sad, sad.
Has there already been consequences for you?
Well, there have been no consequences.
I mean, I've already stated my advanced age.
I don't have any debt.
All my kids are thriving.
I don't work for anybody.
I don't have any business investors.
I don't have a mortgage.
Like, I don't know what you can do to me exactly kill me, I guess.
I'm not afraid of that at all.
So there are no consequences to me whatsoever.
I can't see what they would be.
And I'm not inspired by hate.
I don't hate anybody.
I won't allow myself to hate anybody.
It's against my religion, so I'm not going to do that.
But I definitely think it's important to tell the truth, and I am even more convinced of that.
And no, I have no idea what's going to happen other than what I strongly sense, which is that there will be persecution of Christians.
I strongly sense that.
I strongly feel that.
That was the first thing I thought when I saw the tweet that Donald Trump sent out last night of himself as Jesus.
I thought this is I don't know why I thought that.
I certainly hope I'm wrong.
But I think that's likely.
The people that have always hated Trump will say that this is exactly what they were warning us against.
Similarly, they will say that Trump has been using Christianity, a kind of Margaret Atwood dystopic version of Christianity, to legitimize patriarchy and misogyny and all of the things that Trump has said.
You know, like, for example, the famous crotch grabbing speech were indications that Trump's a degenerate.
And then some will say, About you significantly and me, less so, hugely less so.
Oh, you were you lot.
You all advocated for Trump one way or another.
You went to Mar a Lago, you're friends with him.
You're the reason we've got Trump, and certainly this version of Trump that's so emboldened and empowered.
Totally fair.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I noticed that a lot of people say from the liberal left whose affiliations and associations are so strongly focused on.
Israel and Palestine, and what many people regard as a genocide in Gaza.
It's difficult to think of a better word than that.
I'm talking about British journalists like, say, Owen Jones, very much over the left, or Mehdi Hussein, who's worked in your country, but it's very much over the left.
Those people, I know you don't look at social media, but like are very much using your position to legitimize their own positions.
Now, truth is truth and right is right.
But do you wonder?
There's two things, there's loads of things, as you know, you know how I ask questions now.
It's like, Just a heap of language that you're going to have to just pick through like seagulls in a dump, like in landfill.
But here is the final portions of verbal refuse that I want to fling you away.
One is that, like people say, but Christianity is part of the problem of Trump.
He's been using Christianity.
That's one thing I want to say.
Don't you think that this is going to lead to, you know, in the midterms, more Democrats and that, you know, do you have any concerns about the impact of it?
Do you feel that it is in any way?
A kind of a hypocrisy.
How could you not know about Trump in 20, you know, whenever the last election was, 23, what you know now?
What's the revelation?
The war?
And what do you think about the potential consequences of however you see your influence as an outside person?
It's significant and it's far reaching.
Well, let me just say, since you mentioned patriarchy, that I strongly support patriarchy.
It's the only system that works.
And I really mean that.
I believe that.
That's not an excuse to belittle women.
I love women more than men.
But the patriarchal structure is the only structure that works.
And one of the reasons the West is.
Collapsing is because we've attacked the patriarchy.
So, to the extent that Trump was a force for patriarchy, I'm strongly for Trump.
Uh, how did I get it wrong?
Well, I've gotten a lot of things wrong.
I supported the Iraq war.
Right.
Um, I would also argue that, and I'm get many future things wrong.
I know that I will, but I would also say that it was a process, um, of understanding for me.
But I think, you know, there were changes along the way and I don't into Trump and to his intent and his worldview.
And I don't fully understand all of them.
Now, Joe Kent, who was one of the top intel officials in the United States, suggested the Butler shooting and the murder of Charlie Kirk were related in some way to those changes.
I don't know if that's true.
I don't know the answer.
I really don't.
Clearly, I did ignore certain things.
For example, I was sitting directly across from him when he didn't put his hand on the Bible and it was a refusal to put his hand on the Bible at his inauguration.
That bothered me a lot, a lot.
Why wouldn't you?
If you didn't believe in the Bible, you wouldn't care.
Only if you believed in the Bible and didn't want to be bound by it, would you do that.
And I thought that at the time.
But I sublimated it, and that's my fault.
And I would say I'm sorry for doing that.
So, but I'm not sure it's about me or my faults.
I mean, if what I'm saying is dependent on my own personal virtue or foresight or wisdom, then you should ignore everything I say because I lack all of those things from time to time.
I'm sad about it.
It hasn't helped me to say any of the things I'm saying.
Here's what makes me hopeful, however, is I think because politicians, and I can't speak to Mehdi Hassan or whoever that is or the other guy who's now I've never even heard of, to their criticism, but I can say that.
I think normal, most people watching this, I shouldn't say normal people, but just most people like trying to figure out what is this and what does it mean, will come away probably with a conclusion that I'm reaching, which is that politics doesn't solve the core problems here.
And that maybe one of the most basic problems is you can't, there's never been a secular society in history.
Never.
We don't have one now, but we pretend to be.
But at no other time in all of human history that we know about, that's been recorded.
Has there ever been a society that was based on the idea that there is no God or the state?
It just has never happened.
So, I would say from 1917 until present has been the only example of that in the history of humanity.
So, that doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
And a country full of people who don't believe in God is going to, by definition, collapse.
And I think that the civilization will collapse.
It is collapsing.
Of course, that's why it's collapsing.
And by the way, I travel a lot internationally.
And one of the things you notice is that the Islamic world, which I've been going to for 25 years since 9 11 because of my job, the Islamic world is booming.
And it's not because there's no more oil and gas there today than there were 25 years ago.
It's because those societies got the religious extremism under control, but they are not secular societies.
And Europe, which is more secular now than it was 25 years ago, is that much more degraded and sad and kind of coming apart on every level.
So it's just another reminder that that just doesn't work.
And I, there's a Christian religious revival underway in the United States.
It's measurable by church attendance, by conversions at Easter in the Catholic Church, for example, the growth in the Orthodox Church.
That to me is the, A is the only answer.
And B is like the sign of hope in all of this and Trump framing everything or Pete Hegseth calling this a crusade, which, you know, obviously I find grotesque and, an offense against the gospel.
I'm still grateful that they're saying it because it gets all of us thinking like, what is this?
What could possibly be the motive, not just of the United States, but of Israel too, which is risking its own destruction?
What could possibly be the motive for attacking Iran in a regime change where like no normal person thought, no smart person thought that could work?
It's not working.
Why would you do it anyway?
There must be something bigger going on.
What was the point of the COVID vaccine, which didn't work?
They knew it didn't work and wasn't going to work.
Didn't save anybody.
It killed tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people.
We know that.
Why did they do that?
There's no obvious profit motive in any of this.
It's beyond profit.
It's beyond money.
It's not just money.
Yeah.
Okay.
Pfizer, Majority got rich from the, but is that really the reason?
I don't think so.
There's something bigger going on.
People are reaching that conclusion.
There's something bigger going on.
And I think that's an essential conclusion to reach.
And I can just say the last thing I'll say is in my own life, I've been a Christian my whole life.
I mean, I was baptized in the Episcopal church by my uncle, the bishop, but I, it wasn't, it didn't occupy the place in my daily life that it does now.
And what changed was the realization watching the politics around 2021, the height of COVID, and concluding that whatever was going on here wasn't political.
It wasn't part of the recognizable struggle between political parties or between nations or anything like that.
There was something way bigger and very hard for me as a man to understand.
But it was clearly there.
There was a force, an unseen force, a spiritual force, I concluded, that had at its core aim the destruction of people, of humanity.
That hated people because they're created in the image of God.
Well, that is the definition of evil, of the evil one, as described in the Lord's Prayer.
So, that understanding, which came to me slowly because my job every day was to think of what was going on in the world and write a script about it.
Over about six months, I began to really think, wow, the spiritual war is real.
We're watching this.
And that realization set off a revival in my own heart, totally changed my life completely.
And I think that's happening for a lot of people.
It's by watching evil that we understand God.
I guess that's what I'm saying.
Yes.
Do you feel that?
Yeah, I do.
I feel that the model has exhausted itself, that the performance is over, that the claim of secularism, I thought that was really profound, is important because secularism is, yes, the separation of religious ideals from the matter of politics, almost as if we can go with operations and management without any kind of divine inspiration.
But there is no neutrality.
In fact, just recently, someone explained to me that one of the Greek words for sin, one of the etymological Roots is a kind of formlessness, this claim of neutrality.
Now, when you sort of like, that's one of the claims of secularism.
We'll just get all religion out of it.
Then we've got this thing called neutrality.
Wait, wait, what do you mean?
It's almost like the establishment of this field that's so open to bias.
And one would have to exclude the possibility that there are nefarious biases being continually introduced, masked, occultist, nefarious intent.
Continually veiled.
Sometimes the worst motives hidden beneath a good one.
We just want to protect you all and help you.
I mean, that's what's become sort of impossible to participate in.
The idea that this war against Iran is because otherwise Iran are going to become super powerful and develop a nuclear weapon.
And to protect you, the people of America, we better go to war now.
Well, that sounds really similar to weapons of mass destruction, seems really similar to American foreign misadventure in the period ever since the.
Second World War.
And one can't help but be struck by your observation that the advent of secularism coincides with this goriest period of industrialized warfare in our history, where we have the facility to conduct these kind of destructive and brutal experiments near continually.
So the fact that it is primarily supernatural and only plays out materially and rationally, I think, is the dialectic that we're going to have to become well versed in describing and explaining because otherwise.
I'm starting to look at the instruments, ornaments, and participants in this peculiar moment.
Cause when I'm like, when say being English, British, like, and looking at my country and a lot of people are deeply concerned about the, what they would call the Islamification of Britain and migrants and people praying and like doing fighting age males and things.
Remember, Tucker, the ideas that a lot of people will have learned about through watching your content, like what people call population replacement theory, stuff like that.
Like when I envisage the forces that likely control the world and it is just a vision, I've got nothing to corroborate it.
I don't see, uh, the weaponry of Sharia law.
And some kind of Islamic might masquerading behind all of these instruments and implementing the Muslim lobby doing this.
I just feel like their communication skills have been sort of off key and like they've been, if anything, too authentic and too overt with some of their feelings.
Um, and But I do see that in my country, say, it seems that from the top, the imposition of bureaucracy that seems to be outside of British political will is certainly not democratic.
But from the top down, British people feel they're being controlled.
And from the bottom up, people feel like they're experiencing excessive migration, deterioration of their culture and their values.
And migration, it seems like from watching British culture and British media, seems to be a significant portion of many people's concern.
But really, what sort of struck me in this moment is when the Iran war started, and I've been, as you know, somewhat sort of stymied and hobbled by my own personal challenges for the last year or so.
It felt what hit me was this would have happened in ways in no meaningfully different way had Kamala Harris been president right now.
You would have that war with Iran.
It's kind of Kissinger level politics.
It's that there's a sort of a trajectory that can bypass all of these participants and players on the political stage, and therefore, Before the whole thing's a kind of mirage, we're content to quarrel about ridiculous details, and real power is transcendent of even international power.
And one eventually arrives at a point where you start to think, is it sort of an occultist power?
Is it esoteric power?
And indeed, to your point, I don't think that the motivation is resources and finances.
I think it's both subtler and more powerful than that.
Avoiding Fear in Global Conflict00:03:31
And that's kind of both frightening and encouraging because it seems like the solution is surrender to Christ.
But again, How do you imagine and do you feel like it's your job to even imagine?
We conduct this conversation as participants in media, and do you feel like part of this conversation will ultimately mean systemic disruption and becoming an advocate for and participant in systemic disruption?
And also, by the way, Mehdi Hussain and Owen Jones, these kind of people are posting your stuff favorably, saying, Look, Tucker Carlson's putting this stuff better.
You know, when you, that woman, when you said Israel interest, you said, What do you mean by Israel interest and all that kind of thing?
You're on someone else's show.
He did a great job of that.
And a lot of people were watching that.
And a lot of people are watching, obviously, many of the things, even prior to the more overt condemnation of Trump for some of his irreligious statements, people were observing what you were talking about with regard to the benefits of America's involvement in the Iran conflict and what the motivation might be and who the true beneficiary of this conflict is.
So, just to clarify that.
So, how do we ensure that people understand that what they're participating in is something that's kind of supernatural, therefore religious?
And what do you think is Your role, and I don't mean in a sort of grandiose and personal way, what is our role?
What needs to be done to ensure that we don't just, like, if the result of this is, and then a Democrat candidate wins in 28, and then, like, you know, do you feel that the real trajectory is to centralize power, bureaucratic, globally, and imperially, while creating sort of disarray and despair?
So that's been the gig for a while.
So, how do we communicate that without generating fear and conflict?
Well, I mean, I don't think I don't seek to generate fear and conflict.
I've certainly done both.
Most of the time, it's been just a byproduct of what I think is true.
Sometimes I'm sure I've done it intentionally, and I'm sorry when I have because I don't want to do that.
My role in it is, I hope, you know, God willing, going to remain exactly the same.
I'm not capable of running anything.
I have no interest in exerting power over people at all.
And I don't think I'm suited for it.
So I am suited for, you know, being paid to think about what's happening, talking to a million people constantly, traveling constantly, just trying to understand what's going on and then explaining it to the extent of my ability, which is sometimes limited.
That's it.
Just telling the truth in public.
That's it.
And I think that that is my contribution.
It's obviously not a decisive contribution.
I couldn't stop that.
I was single minded in my effort to convince the president not to participate in this war and not to start it.
And I failed.
So, like, and my wife actually laughed at me in the kitchen in a good hearted way that the next morning.
She's like, well, I guess that didn't work.
And I said, well, I guess it did because I was constantly flying to Washington and talking to Trump on the phone and all this stuff.
And I was like, she's like, what are you doing?
And I said, I don't want a war with Iran.
Well, now we have a war with Iran.
So, obviously, That was a great reminder to me of the limits of my own powers, which I never overstated really anyway.
But it's easy when you're talking to powerful people to think that you're a powerful person, but I'm not a powerful person.
I'm what do we call it now?
Podcaster.
Podcaster!
But I'm going to continue doing that because I think it's what I can do.
As to what happens next, I don't really know, but I would say one of the great lies we've been told, and I have fallen for it up until very recently, is that.
The US as a Company00:04:29
Geopolitics is a contest between sovereign states.
You know, that the way to think of the world is 190 or whatever, I can't even remember the number of like countries.
And they all go to the UN or most go to the UN except for those outlaw states like North Korea or whatever.
But generally, the world meets on the east side of New York to like hammer out agreements on the basis of the relative power and their separate interests.
And a lot of that's fake.
In a globalized economy, you don't really have sovereignty.
How can you?
No country.
Can provide for itself the necessities of life anymore.
There's not one country.
I mean, many could, but none do.
Not one.
So in that kind of economic system, you don't have sovereign states.
You have interdependent states, and that system by its nature, a globalized economy, is susceptible to control.
So do you have one world government?
Well, no, not officially.
You don't.
Do you have it in effect?
Of course you do.
Or at least you've got spheres of government, right?
You've got the West.
Is, is it controlled by the United States?
Who are these powers who are pulling the strings?
Well, this is the way I think of it.
And I think it's the best way to think of it.
It's not just, you know, Israel is BB, who's like not a genius.
Is he running the United States?
Not really.
Was Epstein running whatever he was doing?
No, of course not.
We're looking at employees.
Who's in charge?
Think of the United States as a company.
Who's in charge?
You've got the employees who are making the product.
You have the management team that is running the employees.
At the top of that, you have the CEO and the CFO and the CTO and all the C's, the C suite, as we say.
But above them, you have what?
The board of directors who represent who?
The shareholders.
That's who runs a publicly traded company, the shareholders.
And their influence is exerted with precision or not, depending.
But when it really comes down to it, the shareholders are in control.
So, a country like the United States, up until recently, the world's largest economy, is controlled by its shareholders.
And that is true for the world.
So, the larger stake you have in the enterprise, the bigger say you get.
So, the idea that some election in New Hampshire is going to turn control over the world's biggest corporation to one guy is like a fiction, always has been.
But the idea that those shareholders don't like to make the big decisions in the meantime, that's absurd.
Of course they do.
And most of the time, the mechanics of this are just not visible because there's no crisis that rises them to the surface.
It's only when you have someone like Trump, who's like 90% compliant, 10% uncontrollable, that makes the people and the shareholders so nervous that they just can't deal with this guy.
Like, yeah, we can basically trust him.
He puts Jared Kushner in charge of the White House.
Okay, we know we're fine.
But then occasionally he says stuff that's just like not on script at all at too big a risk.
We got to butler him or whatever.
We have to impeach him or do whatever.
I mean, it's an acceleration ladder that goes from impeachment to assassination.
You can't take the risk.
Too much is at stake.
That's the way I see it now.
And I think it's a much more accurate way to see it.
So, who are the big shareholders?
Well, they're literally the biggest shareholders.
They're the people with the biggest economic stake in the country.
Why would they not be those?
So, now I am less surprised and less freaked out.
I'm as offended, but I'm not shocked by the idea that there are.
Forces that make the big decisions because there always were going to be that.
There's too much at stake.
People risk their lives to rob liquor stores for 300 bucks.
They'll risk their lives.
What wouldn't you do to assure control over the world?
There's nothing you wouldn't do.
And there's nothing they haven't done.
And then the last thing I'll say is that the second you have dense concentrations of power, you have evil.
And this is the message of Jesus' very famous observation that it's more difficult to get into heaven than for a camel to get through the eye of a needle, not simply because wealth is inherently bad.
It doesn't say that, but because it presents the temptation of evil, because it creates the illusion that you can rely on your own power, that you're in charge.
And I do think leaders get tripped up every time in exactly the same way.
They're searching for the same thing the rest of us are searching for, which is the illusion of control, power, and immortality.
Rupert Murdoch's Endless Time00:07:29
And so, if you go to a leader who is about to turn 80 in June and say to him, if you, I mean, you can threaten him and you can shoot him in the ear, you can do whatever, a bunch of different things, you can threaten his family.
But in the end, if you say to him, you want to live forever, you want to be Jesus on earth, you want to be king of the world, you don't fulfill the prophecy in order to be fully in charge and to be enshrined both in statue and in memory for the rest of time, then you do this.
And I think having seen his tweet in which he, Compared himself to Jesus or made himself Jesus, made himself God.
I don't think that's a crazy explanation.
I mean, having spent a lot of time at the White House in the last few months or in the last year, really, and seen the physical changes to it, I'm a big believer in architecture as an expression of values and desires and hopes.
It's more than just aesthetics, it's more than just aesthetics, right?
It's a religious expression.
And watching the physical transformation of the West Wing, which I visited pretty regularly since I was a teenager, so I know the layout.
I see expressed, and I'm not, this is not criticism because I feel bad about it, but I see an older man hoping to live forever, hoping to be remembered, hoping to be seen as significant, having lived a life worth remembering.
I see someone building a memorial to himself on the edge of eternity.
It's beautiful and tragic.
But it's always the same.
I mean, we all feel that way.
We all feel that way.
And the healthy expressions are I want to raise decent children.
I want to.
A widow who weeps sincere tears when I die.
I want, you know, I want friends who toast me.
I want, I don't know, I want to build a beautiful house and my grandkids can spend the summer in or whatever.
You know, there are, this is a very natural way to feel, but the more grandiose the personality, the greater the ambitions.
When we know him, we know that we are dealing in eternity.
By knowing him, we can be in eternity.
We step outside of time.
If you don't know him, you're vulnerable, I suppose, to the accuser and the counterfeit versions, emulations and imitations.
Mimetic desire.
The evil one creates false alternatives of the divine.
Exactly.
Exactly.
One time, one of the movies I'd done, a guy that was running the show.
He had previously worked for Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch of News International, Fox, the great oligarch and media operator.
And I suppose, in the sort of relatively recent incarnation of world power, Rupert Murdoch seemed to have the kind of maneuver, the ability to maneuver that one might now accredit to the powerful figures of big tech, say, those that seem to have a kind of ability that transcends nation, incredible financial control, influence, power, ability to manipulate and control reality.
I said, Tell me, could it be like, I was pretty young then, still at.
And all that kind of thing.
I said, can you tell me something about Rupert Murdoch that, like, that you know from working near him?
And this guy said, yeah, he acts as if he's going to live forever.
He has a kind of, this guy didn't say Mephistelian, Mephistelian kind of quality of like, if he doesn't, if a deal don't work out for him, he acts as if he has endless time to resolve it.
This idea of entering into eternity in the body, in form, of denying that eternity can only be achieved through resurrection, that you might know eternity by your own terms.
Seems to me to be kind of almost the apex of the fallen one's promise.
The idea that you could grasp and hold on to time.
Now, like Rupert Murdoch, he's still alive.
He's 93, 94, 95, whatever, four, five, six wives in, getting divorced in his 90s.
And I wonder what this is.
I wonder what's playing out here those old and aged desert fathers, those fallen prophets, those broken people.
As I get more familiar with scripture, I see that, of course, obviously, it's a supernatural proposition.
And secularism in itself, you can't divorce.
You can't run an operating system without an ideal.
Even the claims that are being made by AI look, we've got access to this endless intelligence, but of course, one sees the imprature, the fingerprint, the signature, the image of its creator.
ChatGPT has a different image to Grok.
You can see that the intelligence has an imposition within it, it's bearing some kind of fruit.
And what it seems to me is happening now is that the technology could be utilized to create entirely different systems where something closer to a church could be at the center of a community as opposed to governance.
That we could run with consent and real eternal principle rather than the continual imposition of fake compassion.
Like wokeness is a kind of fake.
Compassion.
Identity politics is a kind of fakeness of your individual beauty.
And I suppose that in this late empire moment, Tucker, it really does seem to be we, you know, who knows how long it takes?
Because if it's finished by Christ on the cross, then all of this is some sort of denouement.
The whole of history since the resurrection has just been the unfolding and unfurling.
But I wonder if we might see and might advocate for the introduction and implication of different systems that allow.
For true freedom, a different kind of democracy, absolute and real democracy, because I don't see how we can do anything other than remain in continual tension by accepting that, well, the answer to this problem is that Trump is replaced by Gavin Newsom or even JD Vance.
So, from the position that you're now in, like as a Christian commentator, do you think that, you know, there's going to be an election in 2028?
Do you envisage yourself advocating for one party or one candidate?
I know you have friendships, you know, you've been in Washington, D.C., you've been around power all your life.
How are you proposing that you're going to even personally navigate that?
How do you feel when someone that you know is like rude about you and sort of puts you in this sort of almost a sort of a basket of deplorables point O with Alex Jones and Candace, et cetera?
I, I wonder how you remain like, because what it seems like from the outside watching you is you've advanced into a new territory now.
You've advanced into a territory of you saying to people in the same way you said it was relevant that I was on YouTube during COVID because I still had some of the allure of like, oh, this person was in Hollywood and married to Katy Perry.
Well, now you have all your own constituency and your own magnetism and charisma.
And so when you start saying, Hey, my real concern is that Trump's a puppet, that Israel are pulling the strings that like that.
That's going to, I think, is somewhat epochal.
And it really fascinates me because if you keep going, there's going to be resistance, there's going to be challenges, there's going to be consequences, there's going to be results.
And, you know, and I'm.
It's hard to see where it goes.
I didn't want to say any of that.
I didn't want to think any of that.
I certainly don't.
I hate betrayal.
I hate betrayal above all else.
I loathe Judas more than any figure in the Bible.
Betrayal and Violent Catharsis00:05:32
And so I.
I don't like breaking with people either.
I've ended one friendship in my life in all these years.
I just don't like any of it.
I just felt like I was forced into it.
As for where the country - so my role in it, I don't know.
i mean i've certainly lost a lot of friendships most lately or just since in the last two years i would say i've lost uh acquaintanceships i mean i i don't read about myself ever but i do hear about it you know people People I really liked or helped, more precisely, people I've helped.
Denouncing me and calling me names and whatever.
It doesn't have as much effect on me as it would on most people just because of the weirdness of my childhood.
I'm pretty insulated from that stuff.
I know whose opinions I care about and I'm very focused on those people, and that's kind of it.
So I'm fine, but it is amazing.
The changes, where does it go?
You know, of course, I don't know.
My strong instinct is, however, that as in foreplay, the tension is building to an unmanageable point and that humanity kind of almost demands or expects catharsis at a certain point.
And that catharsis, uh, is likely to be violent as it so often has been.
And I, boy, I sure hope I'm wrong, but I don't, I don't actually believe that we're going to live In a world controlled by AI for very long.
I don't think we will.
Now, I mean, I'm hardly an apocalyptic character.
I mean, I'm originally from Southern California.
I have a pretty sunny disposition.
I'm always in a good mood.
You know what I mean?
I love dogs.
Like, I'm not a dark figure at all.
I'm the opposite of a dark figure.
I'm a very kind of shallow, cheerful figure.
But I do strongly feel that, strongly, strongly feel that.
And I should also say, in the interest of transparency, that I hate technology.
And I've always really admired as much as I dislike the murders.
Ted Kaczynski's analysis of this.
For many years, I've recommended his first book and his second, by the way, that he wrote from prison, but to people as much as I, you know, obviously sending mail bombs is terrible, you know, in no sense.
No, I mean it.
I'm totally opposed to that in every way.
But his analysis, I think, can be understood apart from that, those crimes.
And his analysis of technology is basically right, and that the machine winds up controlling you.
And that's never been truer with AI.
And you know that really.
And I know a lot of people developing AI.
In fact, I know all the people, the big AI developers personally, because I've spent a lot of time trying to learn about it.
And I'm really struck by how rarely, if ever, you hear them explain how this will help people.
So typically, in the advancement of technology, people say, We're going to have flying cars.
We're going to have, you know, here's a dishwasher.
You don't have to wash your own dishes.
It's incredible.
You have more time to have sex with your wife or make money or watch TV or whatever.
There's very little of that.
Yeah, it's going to help, you know, diagnose your cancer more accurately.
Great.
Good.
I'm all for that.
But there's really not a lot of energy spent trying to convince you that this is good for you or ever.
Could be good for you, and the downsides are obvious.
And in that way, it's very much like the war with Iran.
The difference between George W. Bush and Donald Trump is that George W. Bush spent, and I participated in this, so I know better than most, a year and a half trying to convince people that we needed to do this and constructing this whole architecture of lies about how actually, though no Iraqis flew the planes in the World Trade Center, Saddam was really behind 9 11.
It was all fake, but there was a kind of respect that he gave to the population by bothering to construct these lies and spending so many months doing it.
This current administration decided outside of public view, most people didn't even know this was like on the verge of happening.
Most people had no idea we're about to go to war with Iran.
Now, I did, and I was like on fire about it, but most people weren't interested because they didn't really believe it was going to happen because this administration didn't bother to make the case.
And you sort of have to ask why.
Now, clearly, they didn't care what people thought.
They didn't need congressional approval to do it.
But there's more than that.
It's almost like they were telling us, as the AI developers are telling us, but we're not listening.
This is bad for you.
I'm not even bothering to tell you how AI is going to make you happier.
At best, it's going to leave you unemployed.
Maybe you'll get UBI, but you'll definitely shoot yourself because you'll have no purpose.
They're basically telling you that.
And they're doing it anyway.
Same with the Iran war.
I consider that a really good thing.
I like to know.
I think the purpose of this is the result.
The result is the destruction of people, the end of human autonomy, the killing of children.
The result is evil.
Therefore, the intent is evil.
Therefore, it's not going to last.
It's not going to last, both because God won't allow it and because schemes built purely on evil tend to destroy themselves.
So, I really believe I mean, I have no evidence for this whatsoever.
Zero.
I'm not privy to any inside information, but the Tower of Babel principle never changes.
And this is a Tower of Babel.
And I do not believe my great grandchildren, God willing, if they exist, are going to have to live in a world governed by AI because I think the whole system will blow itself up.
You know, sometimes we talk about stuff.
Right.
Do you feel me here?
Yeah, I do.
I do.
Like, because sometimes we talk about stuff, like, why don't we make a movie studio and things like that?
Like, we start to talk about things like, why don't we start like a movie studio and things like that?
And I go, we're not going to have time.
We're not going to have time.
We're not going to have time to develop ideas like that.
When I see that Sam Altman on your show, I felt like, who are these people?
Shamanic Encounters with Truth00:01:50
Where are they finding them?
How are they coming up with this stuff?
Why do they have this kind of like this peculiar neutrality, this lack of personality?
Who are these people?
And like, I'm starting to feel the lie, the scales are falling.
Like, where did Zuckerberg come from?
Who are these people?
Why did Serge Brin and Larry Page have CIA carve out sponsorship while they're still getting educated at Stanford or wherever they were?
And it's like you're saying, it's falling apart, and we're peculiarly continuing to continue.
To consent to it.
Once the Epstein files were out, it was a kind of a giddy, nauseating, and some of the things that just seemed like, you know, that piece of gay thing, that can't be real.
And then, oh God, no.
And it's all moving so quickly, like this weird carousel that you can't even hold on to the like 2019 COVID hold on.
They were lying to us there.
All you can do really, if you've got the tenacity, is look at the result and go, well, what happened as a result of that?
Loads of people have got turbo cancers, it seems.
Loads of people have got heart disease.
Loads of people lost their babies.
Loads of people are infertile now.
It's anti life.
It's anti life, it's anti Christ, it's the destruction of the most holy and divine principles that we have beauty, good faith, it's all being annihilated.
And what I see that brilliant Whitney Webb, she goes, You know, one time I was hitting her with, but what I've been struck by is because before being like in movies and all that, I was like a drug addict.
So I was like going around doing acid and tripping out and reading the crazy books of these folks like David Icke and interested in extraterrestrials.
You know, and having weird and not defined shamanic encounters with drugs.
And what's been extraordinary is to, as a person that had a kind of a very visceral dislike of systems, like these things are corrupt, they're disgusting and they're wrong.
And then, like, oh, maybe they're all right now that I'm in them.