Read the full transcript of columnist and author Auron MacIntyre’s interview on The Tucker Carlson Show episode titled “The American Empire Is Racing Towards Collapse. Here’s How to Prevent It”, premiered on August 18, 2025.
America’s Foreign Policy Entanglements
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 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?
AURON MACINTYRE: Not really. Obviously this is a terrible situation in the Middle East and you can sit around and say, “Oh, Israel should have been formed one way, Palestine should look another way.”
TUCKER CARLSON: Right, exactly.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 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? I just don’t understand how that would ever serve America.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s exactly right. Of course this is going to happen.
The Historical Reality of Ethnic Conflicts
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 in 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 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 going to get solved through diplomacy. You’re never going to 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 problem. 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.
Washington’s Warning About Foreign Alliances
TUCKER CARLSON: But that’s kind of the American way, 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?
AURON MACINTYRE: No. And that’s the most hilarious thing. 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 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 tailoring this in some way to the current environment.
TUCKER CARLSON: So this, to be clear, this is Washington’s farewell address, right? Which is – there’s one line from it, “don’t make foreign alliances” or something that everyone’s kind of familiar with, but he goes on about it.
AURON MACINTYRE: Oh, for 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 your 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, 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 he says it very clearly. And so he’s warned us about everything that we’re experiencing.
TUCKER CARLSON: Washington wrote that. 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 tool of Qatar.
AURON MACINTYRE: Right. And this is a document that every school child used to have to learn. This is what every history class would go over – 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.
The Pattern Repeats with Ukraine
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 with Israel. But you can also see it with Ukraine.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, for sure.
AURON MACINTYRE: And it’s so strange that the right learned this lesson with Ukraine. 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 Putin puppets because we didn’t want to send blood and treasure to Ukraine.
But all of a sudden we have a similar situation with Israel, where we might need to involve ourselves, and we forget all of the lessons we learned. We forget all the foreign policy that we were actually supposed to be following if we’re following the American tradition. That’s amazing.
The Disappearance of Historical Education
TUCKER CARLSON: When did that fall out of the curriculum, do you think?
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
The Lost Language of Tradition
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, read a Lothrop Stoddard book, for example. It’s amazing that people wrote stuff like that.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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, nine-tenths 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.
The Question of National Identity
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I don’t think we have ancestors as a nation. What percentage of the population has an ancestor who fought in the Civil War?
AURON MACINTYRE: 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?”
And that’s really going to be the question of our age. We’re transitioning from a moment where identity globally was very ideological. You’re either communist or you’re a capitalist. You’re with one empire or another. You’re first world or second world. That was shattered. 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 works and what our values actually are, not just what’s being handed to us by the news media or an educational system.
Identity Beyond Ideology
TUCKER CARLSON: So we’re understanding ourselves in a very different way. And where does that shake out? Like what is identity post-ideology?
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 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 doing it all 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 power that previously existed, that were tied to the tradition, will be gone.
The Managerial Elite’s Power Grab
TUCKER CARLSON: We did an interview with a woman called Casey Means. She’s a Stanford educated surgeon and really one of the most remarkable people I have ever met. In the interview she explained how the food that we eat, produced by huge food companies, big Food in conjunction with pharma, is destroying our health, making this a weak and sick country. The levels of chronic disease are beyond belief.
What Casey Means, who we’ve not stopped thinking about ever since, is the co-founder of a healthcare technology company called Levels. And we are proud to announce today that we are partnering with Levels. And by proud I mean sincerely proud. Levels is a really interesting company and a great product. It gives you insight into what’s going on inside your body or outside metabolic health. It helps you understand how the food that you’re eating, the things that you’re doing every single day, are affecting your body in real time.
And you don’t think about it. You have no idea what you’re putting in your mouth and you have no idea what it’s doing to your body. But over time you feel weak and tired and spacey and over an even longer period of time, you can get really sick. So it’s worth knowing what the food you eat is doing to you.
The Levels app works with something called a continuous glucose monitor, a CGM. You can get one as part of the plan or you can bring your own, it doesn’t matter. But the bottom line is big tech, big pharma and big food combine together to form an incredibly malevolent force pumping you full of garbage, unhealthy food with artificial sugars and hurting you and hurting the entire country.
So with levels, you’ll be able to see immediately what all this is doing to you. You get access to real time personalized data, and that’s a critical step to changing your behavior. Those of us who like Oreos can tell you firsthand, this isn’t talking to your doctor in an annual physical, looking backwards about things you did in the past. This is up to the second information on how your body is responding to different foods and activities, the things that give you stress, your sleep, et cetera.
It’s easy to use. It gives you powerful personalized health data. And then you can make much better choices about how you feel. And over time, it’ll have a huge effect. Right now you can get an additional two free months when you go to levels.link/tucker. That’s levels.link/tucker. This is the beginning of what we hope will be a long and happy partnership with levels. And Dr. Casey Means so many questions.
I can imagine a multi-racial society. I certainly want to. I don’t understand what a multicultural society is. How can you have a multicultural society? Because society is culture. So like, how can many exist in one society?
The Destruction of Ethnic Identity
AURON MACINTYRE: 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. And so when we think about different ethnicities in Europe, there are many. The difference between an Italian and a Swede is rather large. It’s vast. But there’s this macro core 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 United 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, all these. And so 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 ethnoses that once existed have been pulled into, or separate for that matter, 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. They don’t seem to have anything in common. So why would you want to erase all of those very real differences? Why pretend that Swedes are the same as Sicilians?
Cultural Resistance to Government Power
AURON MACINTYRE: 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. Who are all the people that actually resisted during COVID? Orthodox Jews, the Amish, the religious people with high degrees of individual transcendent identities.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AURON MACINTYRE: “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.
The Homogenization Agenda
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.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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, 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 produce 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 anyone 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. 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 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.
The Parasitic Nature of the Managerial Class
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 there has to be, 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 there’s any precedent for that in human history.
AURON MACINTYRE: Well, there is quite a bit. Pretty much every government is at some level a thief. That’s how all governments start. At some level, 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. There is some 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. 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 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 thing 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 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.
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 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.
Organizations Serving Themselves
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, that’s such a perfect description of what’s happening. And an organization at a certain scale always exists for its own self perpetuation. Is that true, do you think that’s right?
AURON MACINTYRE: Yeah. There’s a historian, Robert Conquest, and he has three laws of power. And his third law is that at the end 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 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.
The Divide and Conquer Strategy
TUCKER CARLSON: So the system, as one of its core imperatives has got to divide the population. It feels that way. A lot of the ugliest things that the system does, inspiring race hatred, for example. I never have understood why you’d want to do that. Why would you want to do that? But they’re doing it and have been for 60 years. Can you continue doing that?
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 Jouvenel, came up with this metaphysics of power. 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 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.
Defining Heritage Americans
TUCKER CARLSON: So the H1B thing is just a… So the enemy is what you call heritage Americans. What are those?
AURON MACINTYRE: 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, you know, 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… 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.
The Anglo Protestant Worldview
TUCKER CARLSON: And what is that way. Can you describe the Anglo Protestant worldview?
AURON MACINTYRE: I mean, obviously we could spend entire books on that. And that has been done.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it’s almost never mentioned.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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%.
AURON MACINTYRE: Right.
TUCKER CARLSON: So I don’t… Why don’t we ever mention that culture?
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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…
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 constitution self evident to them? No, no, of course not.
Because when they said self evident, they meant to people in our tradition, to our… to us. To the people who descended us, who share our values, who speak our language, who speak, you know, 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 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.
Core Values of Anglo Protestant Culture
TUCKER CARLSON: All true. I interrupted you with my outburst of rage when I… I asked you what exactly are you… The presupposition, what’s the nature of this Anglo Protestant culture that founded this country?
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 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 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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?
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 kind 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.
From Republic to Empire
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?
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: There’s a representative, they get all huffy.
TUCKER CARLSON: But they have no idea what they’re saying.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 sized 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. 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.
The Media as Government Partner
TUCKER CARLSON: 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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, you know, 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 recognized that this is the function media was going to play from the beginning.
The Inevitable March Toward Caesarism
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?
AURON MACINTYRE: Yeah, I do. I think Caesarism is a natural life cycle of any, any civilization. You, when you get to the oligarchic.
TUCKER CARLSON: Stage, Caesarism is it. That’s so smart.
AURON MACINTYRE: Yeah, this is. You know, Oswald Spengler 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 see.
TUCKER CARLSON: Let me speak for all Anglos when I say we’re very opposed to that. Right.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: Right.
TUCKER CARLSON: So that just kind of. That simple.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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?
The Cost of Empire
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: I believe that to be the case. It can be longer, it can be shorter, but over time, we see that 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. Caracalla 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 Gauls more or less just take over the empire. You know, 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?
AURON MACINTYRE: Well, they were the only people who weren’t tamed anymore, I was about to say.
TUCKER CARLSON: So it was a testosterone thing.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
The Death of Republican Virtue
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 United States without it.”
It was understood that being part of republic meant being a soldier. Culture, 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, 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?
The Tower of Babel Pattern
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 just collapsing. They can no longer squeeze enough power, enough wealth, enough influence out of increasing one more rank 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 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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. Right, well, everything, yeah, yeah, it looks like they lost a war.
TUCKER CARLSON: The most degraded people in the world. Right.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 do.
The Costs of Scaling Back Empire
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: Right.
TUCKER CARLSON: And there are costs to that. What are the costs?
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 understandings 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 the things that we’d have to sacrifice, cheap labor, global, you know, 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 it was we just came off of COVID it was 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, 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, you know, Eastern Europe, how we should actually be conducting a war like this.
The Ideal Form of Government
TUCKER CARLSON: This. 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, like, 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? Possible?
AURON MACINTYRE: Well, the key, I think, is really understanding that this shouldn’t be ideological. One of my favorite thinkers, Joseph de Maistre, 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?
AURON MACINTYRE: We don’t have to live in their system. They don’t have to live in ours. We don’t have to impose that, that.
The Civil Rights Act and Freedom of Association
TUCKER CARLSON: 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 core beliefs as a country circa 2025 anyway are that everyone has to live in exactly the same way whether they want to or not.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: Are you a racist?
AURON MACINTYRE: Oh, of course, you can’t have, have. You can’t hold 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 2025 America, 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 works across our entire society and warps every incentive from housing to employment to education. We have to maintain that. Why? Well, because if we’re honest, most conservative politicians actually believe what liberals believe. That somewhere in the heart of America is just this giant pile of KKK members waiting to conquer the United States.
The Disconnect in Conservative Opinion
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. Maybe I’m like super liberal. I always think of myself as the most right wing person in the world. 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?
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 35 years too long. But no, you were like, teaching school five years ago, right?
AURON MACINTYRE: Yeah, yeah. I’ve only been doing this for, like, three years. And so, you know, 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 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. 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?
AURON MACINTYRE: Who are the real ones? That’s, you know, I. I guess personally, I spend a lot more time in spheres that are off the beaten path.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
From Teacher to Political Commentator
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 pretty Kaczynski’d on all that modernity business, I do think the best thing about. About the modern world is the Internet and the fact that people who 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 work for the Blaze, 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?
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: A high school teacher.
TUCKER CARLSON: School.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: The.
AURON MACINTYRE: The government has closed the churches. Guys 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 just started writing under his real name, used to be mentioned Bug. 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 it’s just in your spare time. Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: Yeah. I think it’s a situation where there are a lot of really important thinkers. And, you know, to be clear, I’m just standing on the shoulder of giants, guys like Samuel Francis and Joe Sobrin and Pat Buchanan and Paul Godfrey, 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.
The Buckley Era and Conservative Gatekeeping
TUCKER CARLSON: From polite society and nobody said anything. 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: Yeah, I think we can see this over and over again. I mean, you even think of a guy like Russell Kirk, right, wrote the Conservative Mind, one of the intellectual actual 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.
The Changing Media Landscape
TUCKER CARLSON: It feels like things are changing fast. Do you feel that?
AURON MACINTYRE: Absolutely. Where they go going, 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. 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. 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?
AURON MACINTYRE: No one my age at this point.
TUCKER CARLSON: No. No. So their panic, 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 in 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 is 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.”
What Really Matters: Family and Community
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?
AURON MACINTYRE: I think more and more the message that we don’t live in an economic zone but an actual nation is really resonating with people. 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. Yeah. Do they believe in democracy? Do they believe the current system can ever improve the country?
The Failure of Democracy as a Concept
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 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 the world that’s much more practical and real. Like, are you improving my life? If you’re not, leave.
AURON MACINTYRE: Yeah. Again, this is where we understand that the core, the foundation of politics is really patronage. What can 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 in Western Europe that will theoretically secure my right to… No.
Can the person next to me have children? 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.
The Boomer Generation’s Worldview
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. But I remember watching Biden, who obviously was an elderly man, didn’t have his full faculties and all that, but I still detected 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?
The boomer brain always reverts to the most tired cliche. Why is that?
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 in the name of freedom. Right. And so there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance there, and that requires a very cartoon, Marvel movie-esque understanding of the world. We’re Captain America. We fought for freedom.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.
AURON MACINTYRE: And that’s going away with that generation.
The Television Generation’s Impact
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. 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 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?
AURON MACINTYRE: Again, I think it’s because it’s disembodied, as you say, the radio and then the television, you know, 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 the people make the joke, but the old person screaming at their television with the news is 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 saw it with Republicans, with Reagan. I’m not against Reagan or anything, don’t agree with everything, but I don’t hate Reagan. But I mean, they get so… and there are former colleagues of mine at TV channels who were like, they talk about him and they just repeat the same eight phrases, “Mr. Gorbachev tear down 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. Do you feel what I’m saying?
AURON MACINTYRE: Sure. And you know, a lot of that is the medium itself. There’s statesmanship doesn’t sell in sound bites. Right. 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 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.
The Reality of Lived Experience
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I agree. 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.
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 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: Well, it’s so amazing because so many people got angry with the Zoran Momdani in New York. 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 is now 38 years old? Have you understood the fact that no one 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: But you, Oh, I agree.
AURON MACINTYRE: But you have to show them you can’t just sit there and obstinately say, “no, we’re the system. Ride or die. We don’t care 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. My bloodline will end. My religion will fade because it’s no longer practice. My community will collapse. I don’t have time to sit around here.
What Really Matters
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.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 my whole family. So. No. How radical are young people?
The Coming Collapse
AURON MACINTYRE: Getting more radical by the day. 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: Right. I don’t think we’re going to have some 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 going to 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 hollow 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 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.
The Competency Crisis
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, we’re there.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 our air traffic system is collapsed. Have you flown on a plane that’s been on time recently?
AURON MACINTYRE: Getting here is probably the first time in a long time.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 ready to face the challenges of a complicated world that we’re existing in.
Violence and Self-Destruction
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. So I mean 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 self harm. So 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 charge. But again, that’s the beauty of democracy. There’s always another level at which there’s another voter, there’s someone else or some other faction. You just didn’t select the correct people. That’s never actually the people who are benefiting, making money off of your misery.
Democracy as a Shield for the Elite
TUCKER CARLSON: So democracy is like a perfect way to dodge responsibility for your crimes is what you’re saying.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 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 purpose for doing that?
TUCKER CARLSON: Pakistanis?
The Manipulation of Younger Populations
AURON MACINTYRE: Well, yes, the younger population coming through also, they know they can control those people easier. This is a younger population that’s going to be more susceptible to mass media and manipulation and it’s going to increase their control over that country.
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 democracy’s come to the end, is what you’re saying.
The Ghost Dance of Democracy
AURON MACINTYRE: We will continue to have elections, we will continue to go through it, but it’s increasingly a ghost 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. One of the saddest stories in American history.
AURON MACINTYRE: Yeah. This is how you got the massacre.
TUCKER CARLSON: Can you tell it?
AURON MACINTYRE: Sure, of course. 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 their land.
TUCKER CARLSON: This was at the end of the Indian war. This is after they lost?
AURON MACINTYRE: Yeah, this is after the Indians had lost. The majority had been forced on reservations 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 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, they performed the ghost dance, thinking that this would protect them from the bullets of the soldiers. And instead you got the massacre at Wounded Knee.
And this is in many ways what we are doing with liberal democracy now. We keep going through the motions. “Oh, well, 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 bullets because the thing we’re using, the power that we’re trying to leverage, the power of the republic that existed, the foundation, grounding, 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 republic? 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 a system. And I’m not sure that they can.
The Coming System
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?
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: This is a systems issue. And again we like to. Some things are virtue issues, some things are principle issues, but some things are just system issues.
TUCKER CARLSON: What can you describe what that means.
AURON MACINTYRE: When we’re looking at different political forms? 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 the model, of course.
The Invisible Prison
TUCKER CARLSON: Where your prison is invisible but no less real.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 camps 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 24/7 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 foundation, the basis for that now. So is there any escape from it?
The Role of Artificial Intelligence
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 vast society. Algorithms that can constantly screen everything you’re doing and 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 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 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 AI is going to change the future, which clearly it will, there’s almost no description of the upside for the average person. No one even bothers to tell the guy making a hundred grand a year how this is going to make his life better.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
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.
Information Warfare and Control
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 up, 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: One of the things you can do is just flood the zone. You can flood the signal so that 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.
The Current State of Control
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 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 really bad ones you kill, but the rest you just like let live in obscure security.
AURON MACINTYRE: I mean, I don’t think that’s coming. I think that’s here, right? 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 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.
The Paradox of Chaos and Control
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.
AURON MACINTYRE: Well, I think the reason that they create the chaos is that this allows them ultimately to avoid the formation of any of the bonds that would push back against them.
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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. 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 do the tyrants, why not have an orderly society too?
AURON MACINTYRE: Well, there’s 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 localities and states and these kind of things.
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 much sodomy as you want.
AURON MACINTYRE: Right, 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: Freedom to purchase a small child if you’d like. However, you know that.
TUCKER CARLSON: And some are availing themselves of the opportunity.
AURON MACINTYRE: Some conservatives, however, if that’s what you think.
TUCKER CARLSON: Dave Rubin’s conservative. Like, what is conservative about Dave Rubin?
AURON MACINTYRE: He left the left, right, which is kind of the classic “leave the left.”
TUCKER CARLSON: Seems squarely there to me.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 when it attacks any of my identities, 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. Yeah, there is, they left the left.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: I don’t either, but that is, but there is one that is sacred.
TUCKER CARLSON: Tough shit. 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 now.
The Case for Monarchy Over Democracy
AURON MACINTYRE: Yes. 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 the prosperity of the people he rules.
AURON MACINTYRE: Right.
TUCKER CARLSON: You know, if all your serfs die, you starve.
AURON MACINTYRE: Yeah. 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 some kind of autocracy? Do you want some kind of disembodied ruling council? You know, those really quickly become your options when you’re entering into that kind of society.
Why Empires Must Expand
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 does the empire need to keep acquiring and controlling? Why isn’t it enough to say we’re this awesome empire, we’re creating 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?
AURON MACINTYRE: It’s the natural hubris, I think, 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 purposes.
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 warned so much about the factionalism, because this is what’s going to create those different incentives inside your elites to stop serving the people and start serving the favored nation, the outside.
The Gradual Death of the Republic
TUCKER CARLSON: When will we know that our old system is completely gone?
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 prince a bit. 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 said 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: And again, you know, the Senate existed, it had influence. But yes, more and more it was very clear 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 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 guys like JD Vance were talking about the importance of dismantling the administration state. They knew that at the end that was the biggest barrier to running the country for the will of the people.
Hope for Reform and the American People
TUCKER CARLSON: Is there any hope of reform?
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
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 point.
TUCKER CARLSON: And that’s achievable.
AURON MACINTYRE: I think that is.
Federalism and Regional Autonomy
TUCKER CARLSON: Could you imagine a country where people were allowed to kind of live according to their own customs in different regions?
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 those rights. Right. We’ve destroyed the 10th amendment, the 14th amendment completely. 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, but technology makes.
TUCKER CARLSON: 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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?
The Limits of Central Control
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
AURON MACINTYRE: The very thing we’re losing.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, that’s right.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 in a consistent basis? That’s going to be the question. I think that determines not.
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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 know, 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 wanted. Interesting.
The Anti-White Agenda
TUCKER CARLSON: I noticed that there is this, 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 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?
The Disparate Impact Doctrine and Its Consequences
AURON MACINTYRE: Well, a large amount of it comes from the narrative that we tell ourselves. So post 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. 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 outcomes that are different between groups, even if you didn’t intend to be racist, you must be racist. That’s the only explanation.
For instance, the Sheetz 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. 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 Sheetz gas station using that standard, it’s still racist. Whether they had the intention or not, 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. Your hatred is justifiable because at the end of the day those people probably 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.
Racial Violence and Media Suppression
TUCKER CARLSON: And boy are they. There was this kind of amazing case in Cincinnati recently where this white couple, there’s video of it, were at some jazz festival and got surrounded by a group of black people 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 it looks like what happens a lot in this country – they were beaten up because they were white. Very common. And the stats prove it. But that fact is suppressed. Every single person knows it. It happens in prisons, it happens in schools, it happens in parks, it happens at jazz festivals.
But what I find interesting is that the authorities are 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 pathetic. And this woman is angry and she’s lecturing, “You know, when you talk about this, it’s disinformation,” and there’s no mention at all that these people seem to be targeted for their race. Even if they weren’t, even if it was 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?
The Community Relations Service
AURON MACINTYRE: So there’s a lot of reasons behind that, but the most shocking one to your audience will be the Community Relations Service. If they’re not familiar with this organization, it’s statutorily required by the Civil Rights Act. And its job in theory is to go out and smooth over race relations in the United States. When 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. Usually it’s an elderly father figure. If the father isn’t available, 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 mourning the victim and not on why this happened, what actually took place. Let’s not focus on any of those details.”
None of that is an accident. That was a department created by the government. They stage-managed the entire Trayvon Martin incident. These people have been involved in a lot of different cases.
TUCKER CARLSON: But they’re targeting a specific group. And that group is whites. And I just think it’s bonkers that that could happen in our country. And no one mentions it. And it’s just so sinister. Again, if it was happening to Malaysians, I’d be like, “Come on, what are we doing?” And again, it’s happening to the majority, the quickly disappearing majority in this country.
AURON MACINTYRE: Yeah. And again, I think they’re given this blank check because ultimately whiteness is this inherent evil. Any disparity can only exist because white people did it to you and you’re constantly a victim. And so any violence you bring 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 police, for instance, that police chief, she’s not there to prevent the violence against that white couple.
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course not.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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?
AURON MACINTYRE: Well, again, I think it’s not a mistake. I think this is something…
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s 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 has exactly the same policy or a species of it and exactly the same attitude. And all of them are enforced by force.
AURON MACINTYRE: And I think it is that these ruling elites find that it generates a wedge inside their societies that allows them to 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 serves both narrative and ideological interests, but also just raw power and financial interests as well.
Signs of Hope in America
TUCKER CARLSON: Man, that’s dark. What are the signs of hope that you see in the United States?
AURON MACINTYRE: I think that there are many signs of hope that I actually see. 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 communities than they care about ideologies. And 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 be doing that on behalf 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. It used to be that the right would never look at 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 that?
AURON MACINTYRE: Yeah, I don’t think it’s everyone.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s never going to be.
AURON MACINTYRE: No, 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 that, and I think that that is a huge spark of hope.
Intentional Religious Communities
TUCKER CARLSON: So you see people forming, young people having grown up in this, 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”?
AURON MACINTYRE: Yeah, I do. And I see more people forming, realizing they need to move near people who have shared values with them. I know certain people living in the Ridge Runner community in Tennessee and other examples, where they recognize that not only do I 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 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?
AURON MACINTYRE: Yeah, I think I would. 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. 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 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 in Woodside? Would you go?
AURON MACINTYRE: Well, the beauty now is that even if you have one of these jobs, it’s all remote. There’s no reason for us to have to live like this anymore. We don’t have to cram ourselves into these horrific urban areas to pursue certain career options at this point. That’s one of the few upsides of the technological downsides we’ve been talking about. You can actually just pick up and move across the country and live somewhere else and work in a different field. You don’t have to be geographically locked into your particular industry.
Political Polarization Among Young People
TUCKER CARLSON: Of people under 30, how many do you know who have liberal, like circa 2020 liberal attitudes?
AURON MACINTYRE: No, they’re radicalizing in one direction or the other. That’s what we’re seeing is 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. But what does left wing look like?
AURON MACINTYRE: You’re seeing a lot more people deeply invested in kind of the trans or polyamorous relationships. They completely throw off old social structures. They detach from any form of religion that’s going to tie them to any tradition. You see them get economically radical again. This is why Mao Zedong is more successful than he would be otherwise. 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.
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…
The Reality of Progressive Identity Politics
AURON MACINTYRE: It’s this really abstract progressivism. They’ll pull out maybe tribal culture, you know, they’ll 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 I’m male and 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 that the right.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s 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.
The Threat of State-Sanctioned Violence
AURON MACINTYRE: Well, it will come from that group for a couple of 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: Yeah. It’s their brown shirts. Right. And so 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 kind of consequences.
TUCKER CARLSON: They were right.
AURON MACINTYRE: 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.
Building Communities for Defense
TUCKER CARLSON: How will you respond to that?
AURON MACINTYRE: I mean, direct violence against, you know, family or. Probably I will end it immediately. Of course, 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 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 where they were next to the 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.
AURON MACINTYRE: Thank you.
Related Posts
- Transcript: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Intelligence: Sam Harris
- Transcript: Producer Dan Farah on Joe Rogan Podcast #2416
- Transcript: 9/11 Widow Kristen Breitweiser on Tucker Carlson Show
- Transcript: Ryan Montgomery on Roblox, Minecraft, Discord & the Darkest Online Cult – Shawn Ryan Show (SRS #255)
- Transcript: Ryan Montgomery – #1 Ethical Hacker on Shawn Ryan Show (SRS #56)
