Here is the full transcript of political commentator Mike Cernovich’s interview on The Tucker Carlson Show, premiered January 5, 2026.
Brief Notes: In this provocative episode, Tucker Carlson sits down with Mike Cernovich to deconstruct the chaotic start to 2026, from the capture of Nicolás Maduro during “Operation Absolute Resolve” to the deep-seated conspiracies surrounding the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Cernovich explores the “spiritual war” he believes is being waged against the American public, challenging the official narratives provided by intelligence agencies regarding high-profile political violence. The conversation dives into the return of the Monroe Doctrine and the psychological operations used to maintain control in a post-truth era. This unfiltered discussion provides a stark look at the existential power struggles currently reshaping the global and domestic landscape.
The Maduro Operation and Online Backlash
TUCKER CARLSON: Thank you, Mike, for doing this. So what do you think of the apprehension of Nicholas Maduro?
MIKE CERNOVICH: I’m dealing with a lot because I spent a lot of time online, which you don’t. And I think there’s pros and cons to each approach. The pro is that you’re really plugged in. The con is that if you read the comments, which I do, you really take a lashing every day. I just get lashed because by virtue of taking a position, you just get lashed by one side or the other.
So now apparently I’m a neocon again. I’m a neocon, which is bizarre because I was pro the raid on Maduro. And people say, “Well, therefore you’re a neocon.”
TUCKER CARLSON: And the answer is, well, you’re not a neocon, which is why it’s interesting that you were in favor. Of course, but if you’re online…
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah, of course. But if you’re online, you’re whatever the most extreme is. That’s what they call you. And no, I’m not. I’m not an interventionist either. But there’s a… I feel like we’re always stuck between this false dialectic of you either do nothing or boots on the ground. We need full Marine battalions to take the beachheads.
Whereas I’ve always been approached, I’ve always been a fan of the Trump approach, which is use Delta. We have these guys, do targeted strikes, remind the world that the USA is still a world power, even though we might not feel that way, and exercise our might for a good purpose.
So people say, “Well, this is Iraq or Afghanistan again.” And I go, the people of Venezuela are not the same people as Afghanistan. It’s a different people. We’ve had special forces there for three, four decades. We’ve had business interests there for decades. The people of Venezuela voted out Maduro or tried to, and they couldn’t get rid of them. So we went in and we got rid of them.
So obviously I oppose escalation and whatever, but the parade of horrors, especially after so many, just hasn’t happened yet. And that’s because I’ve talked to a lot of Special operations guys during the Trump admin and the way his approach differed. This was covered a little bit in the media, but not enough. Under Obama, they just didn’t let the D boys and them run missions. Everything had to get approval and work up the chain. And by the time it happened, they didn’t have their targets.
And the Trump approach was we have these people, they’re trained. The level of the missions that they can accomplish, which we saw on video, is unbelievable. He lets them do the missions, they do the targeted strikes. I’ve always been supportive of that.
Stability Over Chaos
TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know if… I mean, I’ve got a double stack staccato 9 in my bedside drawer. I’ve never used it. I don’t feel the need to use it. But I mean, just because…
But no, well, I’ll just tell you what I’m grateful for. And I’m grateful for the wisdom of not taking out the entire government. Not because I support the government, but because, you know, we have clear models in Iraq and Libya and a lot of Syria. It can be very hard to put those things back together again.
And the fact that they appear to be backing Delci Rodriguez, not because they love her, but because they’re in favor of stability over chaos and her brother, and they’re kind of keeping the structure in place but making sure it’s pro-American, that seems like a much wiser approach. That makes me calm down a little bit.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah. The problem that everybody, the neoliberal and even some people on the right have is they don’t understand that you needed a strong man like Saddam Hussein to keep all these religious sects together. And it’s obviously, it’s obvious in hindsight. But at the time, people either didn’t know and in my opinion, they didn’t know.
TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s true.
MIKE CERNOVICH: People were just generally clueless. I remember I spent time with my wife in Vietnam and you’d roam around all over the place. And I remember we did the tours of the caves and all I could think of was the tunnels. Not even the tunnels yet, just the caves and the jungle.
And all I could think of was, I can’t even fit in through here. What in the world are we doing sending 18-year-old corn fed boys and black guys into the Vietnam jungles? Because if anybody had done any kind of advanced recon, you would just say our guys are too big for the territory. You would literally just go through. There’s just a lot to be said for looking at the real estate.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
MIKE CERNOVICH: And you would walk through and forget the tunnel rats and all the other ways that they were buried in. You would just say, there’s no way we can send our people out here. This is just a completely different area.
And then Vietnam, people have always tried to conquer them for thousands of years, and they actually take pride not being conquered. And the foreign policy elite, of course, just said, “Well, we’re going to do Vietnam.” And it was the same thing with Iraq and Libya.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
Understanding Cultural Differences
MIKE CERNOVICH: We’ll just remove Saddam Hussein and everything will be fine. Then, of course, you have a mess. But with Venezuela and Latin America, they’re just pretty much like us, a little bit of different culture, but they’ve been influenced by the Europeans, they’ve been influenced by the Catholic Church. They’re running a similar operating system. You can communicate to them in sort of a shared language.
So even though people have doctrinal debates and everybody likes debates, religion and what’s the truth to me is the most boring thing in the world. If somebody’s a Christian and I’m a Christian, you’re going to maybe disagree about, can you drink? Can you do this?
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
MIKE CERNOVICH: What is this? But you’re still in the same language. You’re still able to, you’re still close enough that you can…
TUCKER CARLSON: Bring people, you can understand what someone’s saying.
MIKE CERNOVICH: And we didn’t share framework with the Middle East.
TUCKER CARLSON: No.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Which is a big problem. So in Venezuela, it’s a different situation. And I also like that the air defense was completely disabled. Even the Iran strike that happened a few months ago, we disabled their air system. We sent a message, and I think we need to send a message.
I’m sounding like a neocon. That’s why I hate that neocon. I hate that neocons ruined it for all of us. I hate that neocons ruined the discussion where you can’t just talk about how it’s good to have military might. It’s good to remind the world that we exist and that we can do these things, we being the United States of America. It’s good to remind people that we’re still running the tables. But you talk like that and you sound again like you belong at the Weekly Standard or something.
The Neocon Dilemma
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I mean, you still have a chance to pivot against the neocons because the Bibi people, literally, Bibi’s office is pushing for MCM. This Machado lady, the gay marriage lady, the Klaus Schwab acolyte who is supposed to be the Nobel Prize winner, actually, who’s supposed to be the president in waiting. And Trump has said flat out no, she has no support. We’re not doing that. But the neocons are pushing for her. They don’t want the vice president to ascend to the presidency. So you can say that’s crazy.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Well, I knew when she won the Nobel Peace Prize, I actually posted, “We’re going to go into Venezuela.” Yeah, you can just check the receipt.
TUCKER CARLSON: But not with her.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Well, no, but the point is that’s how the table gets set. You can, by now, by now you can tell the future if you just know that they always set the table a little bit beforehand. And the minute she won the Nobel Peace Prize and then praised Trump, “Oh, no, thank you for this,” but then she’s immediately kind of schmoozing with Trump. I go, “Oh, yeah, we’re going into Venezuela.”
I don’t need any inside. I don’t need any top secret sources. That was all I needed to see. So whoever we send, I don’t know, I just send Rubio. I’m just where we went wrong. And I’ve had this conversation with everybody from line infantry guys to people who did the higher level stuff in Afghanistan.
As they said, we just didn’t want to rule the country. We went in and we won all the military engagements. This is another thing too, why I’m glad the Venezuela mission happened. I was so, I got so triggered, man, the way that even people politically aligned with us would talk about the American fighting man. “Oh, they can’t win a war. They got beat by people who wear flip flops.”
And I say, no, they didn’t. We took almost no casualties in Afghanistan and I think the last year we were there, I’m not even sure if there was a single casualty. It was the occupation that was lost. And these are just completely different things. So I think it’s good to just remind people that was all black pill doomerism because of poor leadership by people like Milley and Biden and the woke generals and that we have a… It’s unreal. We should take great pride in the people that we have. And Delta and SEALs and special operations.
The Quality of American Forces
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course, but I mean, they’re not making the policy decisions. They’re not. They are the instruments of other people’s decisions.
MIKE CERNOVICH: They are, but it’s a two-way street. These guys are not potted plants.
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course not. But I’m merely saying you can’t hold, you know, a man with a gun in his hand responsible for the decision to be there with a gun in his hand. He was told to do that by someone in D.C.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah, yeah. I don’t know. I think that to have retention at these higher levels, these higher level units, I think the D.C. people, they obviously have an opinion, but I think those guys get more of a vote than we might give them credit for. They obviously can’t just say, “Well, I’m not going to go do this.”
But they have, these are strong-willed people. I’ve met enough of these guys. One, they’re extremely impressive. It’s just a different caliber of person. And it’s very humbling because I would say I couldn’t do this. You know, maybe some aspect of it I could, but I couldn’t. I don’t have any delusions that I would have been a squadron commander in Delta Force or whatever. These are unbelievably impressive people.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, they are.
MIKE CERNOVICH: So they’re not just, you know, scribbling down notes while some muppet gives them instructions.
What Victory Looks Like
TUCKER CARLSON: So if the administration pulls this off and the country remains intact, and you know, you don’t have various generals occupying oil fields and claiming them for their own, you don’t have a civil war, you don’t have a migrant crisis that wrecks Colombia or winds up here. If Venezuelans in the United States return to Venezuela immediately, as I think they should be required to do, immediately, Venezuelan nationals, then you know that is amazing. That will be amazing. And I’m praying for that.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah, it’s always good. I mean, it’s always good to look at what victory looks like. And so you think this is victory? No, it’s good to think what victory would look like.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
The First Step Toward Victory
MIKE CERNOVICH: This was the first step. I think it was a good step. But victory looks like we install our person who is aligned. But you can’t have a puppet because in every—because remember, 2028 is not guaranteed. So we have to think longer term too.
And you want to get a person who’s aligned and has their own point of view, but generally is going to do the right thing. The people of Venezuela, dude, they were eating—I mean, you’re in Florida. You talk to anybody in Florida, they’re thrilled that this happened and that Maduro is out of power. A lot of these people, they had their farms taken, their land taken.
TUCKER CARLSON: See, I don’t care about that. Like, you show up in our country, you adopt our concerns, and importing your homeland’s conflicts into my country and making those the basis of my foreign policy should strip you your citizenship immediately. I don’t know. Like, I’m not advocating for anything in Sweden or Great Britain. I mean, do you know what I mean?
MIKE CERNOVICH: They were during World War I, though. That’s what the Anglos who founded the country—so I guess they were allowed to do it. But if you go back and read the debates around World War I, a lot of it was about, well, we should go back, because that’s the homeland and people are naturally going to do that.
Which is why I support immigration moratorium, everything. But I don’t know. I guess I’m more of a pragmatist than an idealist. We live in the world sort of as it is. And Florida used to be a swing state. It’s deep red now. Venezuelans who come over are anti-communists. We need anti-communists.
Miami, anti—like, I’ll give you an example. So if I—if you hold events, I mean, you’re way too famous at this point. God help you. I mean that sincerely. Like, God help you. If you go to Miami and Antifa or somebody showed up, the Cubans would just say, “What do you—get out of here.”
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they did that during BLM.
MIKE CERNOVICH: “We’re going to beat your asses.”
TUCKER CARLSON: Miami had no meaningful riots. Tampa did. Why? Because Tampa is the only majority white city in Florida. That’s why. Right.
MIKE CERNOVICH: So it’s just like pussy whites indulge in that. And the Cubans and Venezuelans who come in and lived under communism—so if I look at the whole picture, sometimes it’s good to get a little injection of people who lived under that, because they’re going to see it not as an abstract, philosophical, gentlemanly debate about, “Oh, should we allow wealth confiscation and for your homelands to be destroyed?” They see it as a fight for survival.
Priorities and Empire
TUCKER CARLSON: So I get it. I just—to take the attention away from our country, which as far as I’m concerned, is not thriving. Doesn’t seem to be from driving around or—there’s some problems that need to be addressed. Big problems, imminent problems.
And I don’t know. To spend all your time worrying about Cuba. Like, I don’t—I love the Cubans here. Love them. But how much money do you want to spend out of your kid’s college fund on regime changing Cuba?
MIKE CERNOVICH: I’m more of an imperialist, I guess, than you. Like where we live in Rome, the empires do what empires do. Like, I just—
TUCKER CARLSON: But look what happened to Rome and London and Venice and every other seat of every other empire.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Rome lasted a long time. It did, till the fall of Constantinople, which was—well, that—no, eastern—the Holy Roman Empire.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, you’re adding a few centuries on there.
MIKE CERNOVICH: I remember—it’s a funny story, actually. I remember I was—because I’m argumentative sometimes.
TUCKER CARLSON: Good.
MIKE CERNOVICH: I remember in my twenties, I would always hear people say, “Oh, this is like the fall of the Roman Empire.” I was like, “I wonder what that means.” Well, this is all pre-Internet too. So you couldn’t just read Twitter all day and have people summarize it. And so I bought Gibbon’s “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
TUCKER CARLSON: All three volumes. The single most boring treatment ever written.
MIKE CERNOVICH: It’s very well written, though. I just kept reading and reading and reading and reading and reading. And I think I got the abridged six volume, whatever. And I made it through three of six. And I go, “There’s a lot to Rome. I don’t know if we could just say there’s a singular point where, oh, this is where it’s just like the decline and fall.”
So I’m more—I’m more Bolshevik-pilled on the time we’re in. I think we’re much more closer to the time of Franco or the time of the czar in Russia and, you know, like, Mystery Grove, when he republished those books. I read all those, and I did, too. I had no real understanding of the White—I remember, actually, it was funny when you said, “Where’s the White Army?” And then all these websites tried to say he was a Nazi army. And I was like, “You historical illiterates. It was the White Army. It was the people fighting the White Army.”
TUCKER CARLSON: Historically, they thought that I meant, like, white, like the David Duke army or something.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah. No, I know. I mean—no, I know. I remember. And I was like, “Wow, these people are just illiterate, historic illiterates.” And no—because you sent the monologue like, “Where’s our White Army?” And immediately it was like, Twitter was lighting up. “Tucker Carlson wants—”
TUCKER CARLSON: This is why I don’t look at it. That’s dispiriting.
Historical Illiteracy and COVID’s Silver Lining
MIKE CERNOVICH: No, but that’s really how illiterate people are. And people who write for a living should know better. Right. Because I didn’t know what the White Army was until I was under lockdown on COVID. COVID, in a way, was the worst thing to happen to regime propaganda.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Because everybody was locked in. And we had all these smart people who are just posting things, and you’d have these long threads. And I go, “I never—General Franco. All I knew about General Franco was, he’s a fascist.”
TUCKER CARLSON: Right?
MIKE CERNOVICH: General Franco was bad. The Republicans were good. And that was my understanding of it. Cortez was bad. The conquistadors were evil men. They were great, wicked people. Okay? That was—that’s what I learned in school. Bolshevik Revolution. I kind of had a sense that it happened and the Communists won and it wasn’t good, but I didn’t realize the full evil. Right?
And then when COVID, you’re like, “Wait a minute.” People just posting books. I’m like, “Well, I guess I’ll just keep reading, you know?” So reading three, four books a week. Right? And you realize, “Oh, no, we’re not living under the fall of Rome. We’re living under the time of the Spanish Civil War, the Bolshevik revolution. That’s what we’re living under.”
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I agree with that. And it’s about—it’s a spiritual war, as both of those were the French Revolution. Same revolutions of 1848. Same. It’s all the same.
MIKE CERNOVICH: So we need—we need the Cubans and the Venezuelans and the people who—
TUCKER CARLSON: I agree, I just want to focus on the United States to keep it from becoming Bolshevik.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah, but it’s tied together. So—
TUCKER CARLSON: So let me—okay, so it does. Since you read Gibbon and bless you for getting through that. It took me almost a year to read that whole thing because it’s so tough.
MIKE CERNOVICH: But it’s a different writing style.
TUCKER CARLSON: It is a different writing style and it’s—but it’s worth it.
MIKE CERNOVICH: So when you read the older books, which is especially good as we get up there in the years they have, you know, because I write short, punchy, boom, boom, boom. But then I have to remind myself, you got to go back and read to where you read a full paragraph and you’re like, “Wait a minute, I need to actually pay attention to what I’m reading.” The flow is a little bit different and it’s a much denser kind of writing.
Republic to Empire
TUCKER CARLSON: And a book-length idea can be fully formed. Right, but okay, but since you’re interested in Rome, there was this—I mean, the pivot really was not the fall of Rome. That was the end. And you’re giving Istanbul credit for being Rome.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Okay.
TUCKER CARLSON: But in the 5th century Rome, the place was invaded by the German tribes and collapsed. So the big pivot though was the move from republic to empire. And it kind of feels like that’s where we are.
MIKE CERNOVICH: But we’re afraid to be an empire. Right.
TUCKER CARLSON: But maybe what we saw two days ago is the beginning of a period where like, okay, we’re an empire, we’re embracing it.
MIKE CERNOVICH: That was—that’s, I mean, that’s my hope is, you know, American imperialism, because I believe we’re a just and moral people. I believe we’re a Christian people. I believe that the Venezuela—I believe in—I believe that the greatest spiritual battle is the—and I don’t mean to sound utopian or sound like a Bolshevik myself, because some of this, that’s why again, the left and the neocons—they took all this, they ruined everything.
Because you end up sounding like a leftist utopian or you sound like a neocon when you say these things. But I just—I believe in my heart that America’s the most righteous country that has ever lived, that Western Europe, if it doesn’t fall, needs to remain upright and that human suffering will be reduced by what was done in Venezuela.
So I think that’s one way that I look at foreign policy is in the Middle East, we created human suffering on a scale that’s catastrophic. And Vietnam especially too—that’s one thing that always annoys me that I think the Cambodian genocide should be taught in our schools because one, it was because of communism and Pol Pot and two, it was our fault because we were using Cambodian airspace and that’s what led to Pol Pot’s rise and propping.
TUCKER CARLSON: Up Prince Sihanouk and the whole thing. No, it was. You’re absolutely right.
MIKE CERNOVICH: So if we have a national guilt, we should actually have a national guilt over the Cambodian genocide. And we never rebuilt it. We just sort of left them to live in squalor.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, you know who did fix it actually was Vietnam. Vietnam invaded in 1978 and kicked him out. Right.
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Accepting Reality
MIKE CERNOVICH: Okay, so I guess I haven’t quite—
TUCKER CARLSON: Figured out what I think. I have a lot of thoughts. Obviously I’m totally opposed and have been since Iraq, since 2003 to anything like this. On the other hand, I’m thinking to myself maybe—well, maybe I’m not in charge of history. Okay, that’s one thing. And maybe it’s just time to accept the reality of it.
So I would like to live in a small agrarian Christian republic where everyone knows everyone else. Like that’s kind of my idea of utopia. That’s not anywhere near what we have. We live on a continent-sized country with 350 million other people and we’ll probably have 500 million by the time we’re old.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Okay.
TUCKER CARLSON: And we run at least half of the world. So maybe what we’re seeing is people just embracing what was already true and not fighting against—I hate the idea of having an empire, but we do, right? So maybe that is what’s happening. I don’t know, I’m trying to figure it out.
MIKE CERNOVICH: No, I mean you’re born into the world, right? That’s the, you know, you got an—
TUCKER CARLSON: Empire, just roll with it, be an empire.
The Spiritual and Material Dimensions of Empire
MIKE CERNOVICH: You’re born into a body, you’re born into like a human being body and these weird things and you have to figure out how to balance being an animal and a spirit. And we didn’t choose it. And we’re born into America at a particular place in time. And here’s the problems that we have, here are the resources that we have. What can we do to reduce as much as possible human suffering and govern justly as an empire?
And we had one. I mean, in a way we don’t have one. That’s the problem. It’s like the worst of all worlds where the “invade the world, invite the world.” I forget who coined that, but that’s—
TUCKER CARLSON: A favorite of Pat Buchanan’s for sure.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah, it might have been Steve Sailer or one of those guys. But we had the worst of it, which is, oh, we’re going to go in and destroy your countries and then we’re going to bring you back up here to do daycare, welfare fraud.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Whereas the righteous thing to do would have said we’re going to invade your countries, but we’re actually going to share in your resources. And that was one of the real, I think, evils of removing Gaddafi was they had education, which again sounds very leftist, but a lot of this is just objectively true. And they had free oil, more or less free petrol, and now they have open air slave markets.
So we did the worst. We didn’t build empires, we destroyed other people’s places and then rather than colonizing them, we brought everybody up here and now we’re $40 trillion in debt, scam after scam. We have, like it or not, we have blood feuds being imported where now you have to have an opinion about Somaliland. My God, you know, in my life, as I get older, I’m trying to have fewer opinions and now I have to know the difference between Somalia and Somaliland.
And then you look at the Minnesota flag, which is obviously tied to Somalia. That again, is the worst of all worlds. So if we’re going to do it, then we should do it as an empire.
The Future of American Imperialism
TUCKER CARLSON: So what does the future look like? What do the next three years look like? So you saw the President saying, this worked. We’re going to do it in a bunch of other countries.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Well, the future generally versus empire building are two different things. Because I think the future, we’re on a pathway with the transhumanism. There’s a fork in the road about humanity and what it even means to be a human. So this is a whole other different discussion. But if you mean geopolitics, for example, I think that we’re going to continue to see these kinds of targeted strikes.
TUCKER CARLSON: Now, the danger is that whose aim is what? To remove the leadership of the country and replace it with a pro-American—
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah, yeah. To put, you know, plop one guy out, put somebody else in. And if you do it in places like Latin America, I actually think you can do it. I mean, Trump’s already talking about Colombia, the Mexican cartel. That’s the strange thing about all this, is that everybody says, well, why don’t we do Mexico? Mexico’s a full narco state. They have controls of border towns in the U.S. It’s a completely—
TUCKER CARLSON: They have control of Arizona, don’t they?
MIKE CERNOVICH: If you talk to the Turning Point guys, then they have some pretty strong opinions about Katie Hobbs and how she got in. So what would a war with the cartel—it’s a different, it’s a whole different Pandora’s box opening there.
But if you can remove Maduro, you can remove a few people, you’re sending a message to people. So here’s where, here’s why I disagree with the neocon model. And I think there’s a right wing worldview that’s coherent. And it goes like this.
Rational Actors vs. Madmen
According to the neocon model, everyone is just a madman. They’re just mad men everywhere.
TUCKER CARLSON: And Pakistan, they hate us for no reason.
MIKE CERNOVICH: They’re just mad men and they’re not rational actors. Putin’s a madman. That’s the whole worldview of just the neocons of the neoliberal establishment. Putin’s a madman. And I went, well, I don’t know. He’s 70. I read a lot about Russian history. The oligarchs had taken over the country after Yeltsin left. You needed a strong man to come in. He brought the oligarchs to heel. The oligarchs were looting the country.
And you look at him and you’re like, this is—you can call him evil, that’s a moral question. But somebody being evil is different from whether somebody’s a rational or an irrational actor. Putin is acting in a way that in my opinion is quite predictable.
TUCKER CARLSON: He’s the most rational actor in the world.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah, of course. Then you look at the mullahs and you just say, they want to have their fiefdoms. They don’t want high IQ people in Iran even. They’re trying to get rid of as many high IQ people as they possibly can. This was funny, actually. I was at a dinner. There’s a Persian diaspora in Orange County and L.A.
TUCKER CARLSON: Huge.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah. And you know, not just Jewish and you know, the secular and the Muslim. And I was talking to this—they’re just like a good looking couple, very well educated, smart. And I go, how did you guys get out of Iran? You know, it was like one of those things where I thought I knew something, but I was revealed my own ignorance. I said, how did you guys get out of Iran?
He goes, oh, he goes, you get—and people on Twitter call me a liar for this too, which is so annoying. But he goes, no, no, you basically, they give you IQ tests and if you’re a high IQ and you’re too high IQ, they let you get educated and they want you out of the country because high IQ people have too much of a revolutionary risk. So that there shows you that—
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s why we legalize marijuana.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Same idea, right? So I see the mullahs under a different model than the neocons do. And I view them as, they want to have their little fiefdoms, they want to govern over the ashes. So yeah, obviously we don’t want them to become a nuclear power or whatnot. But that doesn’t mean you have to go in and go to war with them because, oh no, any day now they might just do something crazy. Right?
And I think that’s the right wing position is you see people, you remove the moralized—which most people can’t do. Most people, they want to say the mullahs are evil. Sure. Nobody hates the mullahs more than the Persian diaspora. Of course nobody hates them.
TUCKER CARLSON: War.
MIKE CERNOVICH: So this whole idea that they’re—it was like, sure, they’re evil. But then the minute you talk about an evil person engaging in rational activity, then they’re like, oh, wow, so you support evil. You know, God help, I’ve lived this. Oh, my God.
The Venezuela Template and Iran
TUCKER CARLSON: Right. Then you’re dealing with someone who shouldn’t be involved in the conversation because they’re not capable of thinking clearly. Here’s my concern. I agree with—I think your analysis is absolutely right. I mean, talk to the Gulf states. You think they like the mullahs? No, they despise them, but they don’t want to see them regime change necessarily, because what comes next?
The only country that wants that is Israel. And not even Israel, it’s Bibi. It’s specifically Netanyahu, and some of his supporters want that, and they’re putting enormous pressure on the administration to do it. And my biggest concern about what just happened in Venezuela is that will be seen as a template for Iran.
Like, let’s just take out, you know, the religious leadership of Iran or the political leadership or the military leadership, and everything will go as well as it did in Venezuela. And, you know, maybe that’s true, but if it’s not true, the stakes are high.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Well, that’s why people have to have a definition of what victory looks like, because victory for the United States looks different than victory from other people. So, and this is where I think people lose the plot a little bit. So it might be in the interest of some countries for there to be chaos, because if there’s chaos and those people, you can kind of go in, you don’t have to worry about it.
It’s in the interest of the United States for there not to be chaos. Of course, that’s what we say. We say, of course. But nobody says it, you know.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I do. Constantly. Chaos is not in our interest.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah, so it’s in our interest that if we do regime change that we don’t have chaos. We do want to have moral leadership, a moral clarity, and we do want to keep things on the right path. And then other people have different interests, and it’s just up to us to keep pushing for orderly—the orderly governance of the world via American imperialism.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it wasn’t that long ago that many Americans thought they were inherently safe from the kinds of disasters you hear about all the time in Third World countries. A total power loss, for example, or people freezing to death in their own homes. That could never happen here. Obviously, it’s America. People are recalculating, unfortunately, because they have no choice. The last few years have taught us that. Remember when the power grid in Texas failed in the dead of winter?
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah. It happened.
TUCKER CARLSON: And it could happen again. So the government is not actually as reliable as you hope they would be. And the truth is the future is unforeseeable and things do seem to be getting a little squirrely. So if the grid does go down, we need power we can trust.
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Serving American Interests
But undergirding all of that is the belief that the point of the U.S. government is to serve the interests of American citizens, correct?
MIKE CERNOVICH: Well, of course.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, not of course, because I—I mean the foreign policy leadership that I’ve grown up with and that I know personally, that’s not even in the top five.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Well, these are people that want to play toy soldiers. That’s a whole—that’s the neoliberal order, the neoconservative, or I think we focus too much maybe on neocons and the neoliberals who have probably done as much or more. If you look at the Biden foreign policy, poking Russia and moving NATO, that was all neoliberalism.
And they’re just too rich, I guess, and bored and want to play checkers and chess with other people’s lives. But the Trump view is that we’re starting from the American position. Gas prices are down, oil from Venezuela, we need it. We have a deficit that we’re never going to pay back.
If you take a step back and you just embrace it all—so people always ask me how I feel and I go, well, I go from optimism to despair in a split second. Because if you look at the national debt, we’re not going to pay that. There’s no way to pay it back. It’s impossible. There’s no way to pay it back.
So then what happens? Do we hyper inflate our currency? Do we default on our debt? Trump is going to try resource extraction. So we get Venezuelan oil, we drive down costs here, we get cheap energy here. Well, apparently it’ll lead to maybe some kind of deflation, who knows? People have their own opinions on that. That’s still being hotly contested.
And in that way imperialism can be a win-win because the Venezuelans can be better off. We extract our share of it. Maybe that’s utopia, maybe that’s pie in the sky. But that—
TUCKER CARLSON: What’s the other table set?
The Alternative to Reform
MIKE CERNOVICH: I mean, the other answer is more. The other answer is like, dude, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Some guy was just at J.D. Vance’s house in Columbus or Cincinnati, banging on the window, maybe shooting at it. All the details aren’t there.
The alternative is it’s like a Bolshevik revolution. The alternative is anarcho-tyranny, which is what we already have under Democrat rule. And that’s really bad. The alternatives, if we don’t fix it, you’re going to have more class resentment.
We do have a neo-Bolshevik movement in the United States. Unabashed Marxists. When the Maduro thing happened, it was interesting. You saw the Brandon Johnson, Chicago’s mayor, Mayor Karen Bass, who was in Africa while the Palestinians was burning. She was taking some kind of vacation, Mandami. And they’re all sort of with Maduro.
So you have this global Marxist movement which is the Red-Green alliance, which gets tossed around. But some of the stuff these guys say in the think tanks have actually, if you read into it enough, I think a lot of that really is accurate. So you have this Red-Green alliance of third world thinking with neo-Bolshevism or Marxism. However people want to characterize it and they do not have a good plan for the U.S.
They want to loot it, they want to destroy it. They have a deep hatred for whatever reason of white people. White people of European descent are just absolutely hated. Hated by all of these forces.
Institutionalized Hate in America
TUCKER CARLSON: And not just by them, by the neocons. We don’t hate Europeans too for some reason. I’m not exactly sure why, but Christians, I feel like kind of everyone. I mean, that is my frustration with all this talk of anti-Semitism which I oppose. Gave a speech saying why I oppose it on Christian grounds.
I am sincerely opposed to anti-Semitism and racism and hating anybody on the basis of his blood. I’m just opposed to it, against my religion. But like the main form of institutionalized hate is not anti-Semitism, it’s anti-white hate in the United States. And like, why does nobody say that?
MIKE CERNOVICH: Well, the Affirmed. I mean, I remember with police and fire hiring, that was in the 80s where if you’re a white male, Adam Carolla had talked about that before where he tried to be a firefighter, of course. And they just said, well, you’re a white man.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, how about J.P. Morgan? Same thing in every part of American society.
MIKE CERNOVICH: So, yeah, the white man has been the white man. That’s a funny way of putting it. But white men have been hated for decades and then they’ve been the world’s punching bag until, of course, you need a Delta Force mission. They post a picture and it’s all jacked white guys with a few Latinos and always has. With tattoos.
And you think, well, these, the whole generation was hollowed out. And you just do not see. And for me, that’s a litmus test for 2028 is anyone who runs for president but won’t specifically condemn anti-white hate by name is not even in the mix.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, J.D. Vance just did that.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Not even. You’re not even in the mix because—
TUCKER CARLSON: If you could, you see Ron DeSantis saying calling out anti-white hate by name?
MIKE CERNOVICH: DeSantis is an interesting. I think he would have three or four years ago.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, I totally agree.
MIKE CERNOVICH: His evolution, his evolution has been. He lost. He needs to listen to people like Christina Pushaw more. And the problem, I noticed a—
The Donor Class Problem
TUCKER CARLSON: Lot of people get sucked into Donor World.
MIKE CERNOVICH: They get into West Palm Beach, they get around the Richies. And I’ve seen that happen to a lot of people is you just, you cannot spend. Whether it’s the tech guys or the finance guys, the West Palm Beach people, Silicon Valley people, can’t spend too much time around the Richies, man.
They’re totally, they’re not living in reality. They have all these weird pet projects that don’t have any kind of connection to downstream reality.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
MIKE CERNOVICH: They’re glib and out of touch and they’re going to steer you aside. You have to just stay with, you have to just stay with the people, man. You got to stay with the people.
TUCKER CARLSON: So Ken Griffin is not a reliable bellwether of American public opinion.
MIKE CERNOVICH: He bought this. I, he bought this, I think Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil or something for $75 million? Yeah. People who are like, I have so much money that I just want a dinosaur fossil or dinosaur skeleton in my atrium. Might not be the people you want to take political advice from.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, probably the last people. So do you think DeSantis is obviously going to run in the primary?
MIKE CERNOVICH: You think DeSantis, Cruz. It’s going to be an open field because there always is because that’s how they get media time and sell books and everything. But the—
TUCKER CARLSON: What do you think it’ll look like?
Looking Ahead to 2028
MIKE CERNOVICH: The table. The table. The table. Well, one is it depends if we get. Depends what happens in the midterms and how many impeachments Trump gets hit with if they can’t keep the midterms. Although Elon’s back in the game. So maybe, maybe Republicans keep the midterms.
TUCKER CARLSON: But keep the House.
MIKE CERNOVICH: I think they. If with Elon you can. With Elon’s money you can. And it’s just, that’s a sad thing to say. But that’s just again, that’s maybe like that’s where it goes back to like I’m a pragmatist, not an idealist. Get money out of politics. Okay, well, that’s nice. No, we need to get, we need to basically, like it’s funny because all my friends are pro-Israel basically, and my advice to them has been like singular.
One, you guys need to just calm down because the anti-Semites are so moronic right now to just let them talk because everything they say is off-putting to anyone with a high IQ. But if you come with rancor, then that’s just, you’re muddying the field.
And I go to us just be like Stephen Miller. Stephen Miller likes Israel a lot, wants Israel to prosper and everything. But when people think of Stephen Miller, all they think about is this guy’s amazing. You know, like Stephen Miller wakes up trying to do things for America and then if you do that, we don’t really care what Israel does. Or at least I don’t, most of us wouldn’t. Or if there would be certainly less rancor around it.
And if they would just fund things, then everybody be better off. So Elon, he just writes huge checks. And if that side wrote bigger checks for Republicans to just be Republicans. That’s what that’s. I’ve been telling him as I go, look, you’re going to get 80, 90% of what you want. If you just keep Republicans in the House, you’re going to get that.
The alternative for you guys is AOC and Mandami and all these other people versus people like me who are just realistic and pragmatic about it. And people like J.D. who’s like, who’s the same thing. He’s just, he’s a pragmatist. You got to accept that. You just got to accept that not everybody is going to be an ideologue about it, but you can still win without people being ideologues. You can win, which is good old, good old fashioned alliances where you help out, you pitch in.
The Trump Coalition
TUCKER CARLSON: So you don’t see the Trump coalition is so broken, so fractured, because I do think the neocons are intentionally breaking it because they want to keep J.D. from becoming—
MIKE CERNOVICH: I don’t think it’s working though. I mean, I’m an old head. You don’t think it’s working? I’m an old head from 2015. This is all a repeat of 2015. It’s a repeat of the DeSantis when he ran in the primary. Same talking points at the same people playing the same kind of games.
So I don’t, I just see it as, this is the third season of 2015, 2022, 2023, and now, now it’s back again. So I don’t see it. And the way the politics lines up on this stuff, especially in like 2028, is you got to look at it as the, there’s just not, there’s the problem.
You know, I always want to be careful. What I say is that not because I’m afraid of being canceled, because I’ve been, I mean, I’ve been through the wringer a thousand times, but the people who really see Israel as a key issue just need to understand that, hey man, you’re going to get most of what you want, but if you take it so that we can’t win in 2028 with a Republican because you create so much acrimony and division and suppress the vote, then you’re going to get a bad Democrat, you’re going to get a bad Democrat and you’re going to get maybe a bad Democrat Congress.
So people need to not behave in this kind of way because it’s not helpful. I just think of things like politics, am I being helpful to the country and am I being helpful for 2026 and 2028? And I think that’s how everybody needs to view the map. Like, are you being helpful? Are you going to get what you want? If you continue to behave this way, you don’t need to be an economist.
TUCKER CARLSON: To see what’s happening. The dollar is in trouble. It’s getting weaker. It’s sad, but we’re not in charge of it. So we have to respond appropriately in ways to protect our families. When paper money dies, it’s going to be replaced by programmable digital currency, or gold. Gold survives.
The same Americans who think they’re protecting themselves with gold are the ones getting ripped off by big gold dealers. After we left corporate media, we got offered tens of millions of dollars to promote gold companies. How do they get the money to spend that much on marketing? Because they’re scamming.
MIKE CERNOVICH: We didn’t want anything to do with—
TUCKER CARLSON: That, so we sought an honest broker. And together we formed a precious metals company that you can actually trust. It’s called Battalion Metals. At battalionmetals.com we publish actual spot prices. We’re totally transparent about the vig, what we take, and we treat everyone with honesty.
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Well, it depends what you want. So if you run around calling people Nazis, the chance that you’re going to convince them to become Nazis is pretty high. I mean, that’s just very obvious if you’re doing that. And so maybe they want more Nazis.
Media Incentives vs. Political Strategy
MIKE CERNOVICH: There’s a segment of people, but it’s much smaller. The—
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s the. It’s the loud segment.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Well, if you want. If you want to. If the incentive structure is different. So if you’re in media and you want to maximize a certain kind of sales funnel where they get as many people as they can, as many eyes on them, that they want to be acrimonious and they want to throw bombs because that’s the business, right?
But if you’re more political, you want to think about, like, how is this going to help us achieve an agenda, right? How is this going to help the country? How is this going to help them get what they want? That’s what I’m trying to see. I’m just trying.
We had this alliance that won in 2024, the popular vote, which I knew Trump was going to win. We have mutual friend, actually. I’ll tell you when we stop filming. But he was so blackpilled about the election, right? And I said, no, he’s going to win. We’ll know that night. He’s going to. Trump’s going to win. We’re going to know that night. He goes crazy. I go, I promise you. Promise you.
And election night, I was like, well, who told everybody? The only thing I didn’t see is I didn’t think we were going to win the, you know, I didn’t think Trump was going to win the popular vote.
So we have this alliance, we have MAHA, you have the OG MAGA people. The other wild energy they brought in, there was always this boisterous male energy. But then they brought a bunch more of that in. Then you had the post-October. I don’t think Trump wins if October 7th doesn’t happen, to be honest.
And I said this at the time because when October 7th happened, they realized, oh, this is what the left really is. Right? And I do think a lot of them weren’t. A lot of the pros, really people were not paying attention to what the left kind of had become. And because I remember I would talk about the Red-Green alliance, and people’s eyes would sort of glaze over. Like, you know, that sounds stupid.
And so you have. They have the post-October 7th people. You have the, they don’t want their kids trans. You have MAHA, you have the nationalists, you have the populace, you get the tech guys, you get the wealth tax guys. So it’s a coalition, and everybody—
TUCKER CARLSON: The rappers, the Salvadorans.
The Venezuelan Coalition and Domestic Priorities
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah, the rappers. You have the Venezuelan, the Cubans. And it’s a political coalition that has to be kept together. And I think every coalition partner needs to look out for others, and some coalition partners can push for themselves more and lose sight of things.
So my opinion, you know, foreign policy and everything else has gotten too much attention. MAHA hasn’t gotten enough attention. RFK Jr. has sort of done what he has. The domestic issues. There’s only so much Trump can do because judges are blocking him. But that’s another concern of mine, is that domestic issues are getting blocked, and then that’s going to create fractures in the coalition. But I do think the—can I ask, though, if you—
A Pivot Point in History
TUCKER CARLSON: The reason I have such, like, a tepid, not interesting response to what happened two days ago is because I think it’s like a pivot point in history, and I don’t fully understand what it means. So I don’t want to get over my skis until I have a better sense of what I think it means.
But it is a totally new way of conducting diplomacy, slash foreign policy, slash military action. This is a new thing because Trump didn’t dress it up with a lot of lying about democracy or human rights. He’s like, “No, we want the oil and this guy’s bad and we’re taking him out and we’re going to run it.” Never. No one alive has seen anything like that before in the United States.
So you wonder, and that’s why I’m saying I think we’re, for good or bad, fully in the empire stage of civilizational development. The republic stage is over. No one cares about Congress. So just like, don’t we care about the Roman Senate? I wonder how long until that same governing style applies to domestic policy. Where we lived it.
MIKE CERNOVICH: We lived it, man. We lived under Biden.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, you’re right. You flesh that out.
Living Under Anarcho-Tyranny
MIKE CERNOVICH: People forget. We lived in—people like me lived in hell. Ricky Vaughn was a—I remember when Douglas Mackey was arrested.
TUCKER CARLSON: What a good man.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Raided in Florida, chased down with guns. I followed all these court cases. The Blacks for Trump guy was chased down by unidentified FBI agents. They just started chasing him down with a gun because they obviously wanted to initiate a shootout and gaslight him into a shootout.
Thousand plus J6ers, people who committed at most misdemeanor trespass around. We lived under anarcho-tyranny. Laken Riley’s murdered. We have murders happening. Louisiana is again anarcho-tyranny. For those who don’t know, because you don’t live on Twitter, thank God, God bless you.
The idea is that if you’re a law-abiding citizen, you live under a state of tyranny where you’re going to need a jaywalking ticket.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.
MIKE CERNOVICH: But there can be a homeless encampment right next to the “Don’t Walk” sign. But you’re the one who’s going to get the ticket while the encampment’s there. And that’s what we lived under—an imperial dictatorship where everybody was just like, “Oh yeah.”
Have you talked to—had you talked to the kids yet? Everybody, Charlie Posobiec, everybody had that conversation with the kids, which is like, “Hey, just so you know, daddy might be taken away for a couple years and you know he’s going to go away and if anybody shows up, don’t do anything, you know, because they might try to shoot you. They might want to put a flashbang grenade in the house. They might want to kill your kids in front of you.”
TUCKER CARLSON: When—
MIKE CERNOVICH: When they raided Michael Cohen’s house, even though, you know, Cohen ended up turning, what they did to him was just disgraceful. They were going through his daughter’s iPads in front of him. This is wicked spicy stuff. And they just didn’t get really any media coverage. I didn’t even know they did that to Cohen.
No, no. That’s one reason I think Cohen sort of broke. They just took all the iPads out of the little kid’s room, and they were just taunting him.
TUCKER CARLSON: They threatened to send Don Jr. to prison for the rest of his life for—he didn’t do anything.
The Systematic Targeting of Conservatives
MIKE CERNOVICH: John Eastman, a respected member of the bar, constitutional law professor, disbarred in California. Jeffrey Clark, great career in law, big law, Kirkland and Ellis, they’re trying to take his law license in D.C. One thing after another. And it got almost no coverage or no attention because the media would cover it, downplay it, or they would lie about it.
And that was the world, dude. I’ve had the conversation with my kids. They’re too young to understand. I remember, because I don’t have any money. I have no money. And people like, “Whoa, you know, once you have any money,” it’s like, my family has all my money. Because I know that I could just be stripped of everything any day, even now. If you’re a target of regime, you could just wake up. You’re like, “Okay, well, I guess I’m f*ed.”
But on the other hand, you’re just like, “My God, how have I been boiled in the pot for this long that I’ve just accepted that as the norm?” And I think that’s something that is a problem with all of us, is we just took it for—oh, Charlie Kirk.
I remember Charlie Kirk get shot. I remember Posobiec calls. He’s like, “Dude, they killed Charlie.” Everybody thought they would just kill somebody else first, but everybody knew they were going to kill somebody. Everybody knew it. This is how we live our life. I live my life knowing I could be killed any day.
Yeah, I live my life under Biden knowing, well, you know, I could—any day, anything, any day, something could happen. I know every day that I wake up just to a s* show of false—it doesn’t matter that that’s the way that you live.
And as f*ed up as it is, and the reason our people I think don’t talk about it is you just—you have a certain ability, a stiff upper lip. You don’t want to sound like a—
TUCKER CARLSON: Victim, but that’s exactly right.
MIKE CERNOVICH: That’s not—it’s not—nor—it’s enraging in a way. No, this is not how it’s supposed to be in America, where you know that any given day you might be taken away from your children because of politics and because of how rotten and corrupt everything is.
Refusing Victimhood While Acknowledging Reality
TUCKER CARLSON: I couldn’t agree more. Obviously, I live a life exactly like the one you described. On the other hand, I think it’s essential to cling to your nobility and refuse to become a victim and refuse to act like Seth Dillon or whoever, constantly talking about, “Oh, the threats against me. People are mean to me.” Come on. You know, you chose to be in this. Just man up.
MIKE CERNOVICH: He did, but he shouldn’t have to.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, I—
MIKE CERNOVICH: Look, I agree.
TUCKER CARLSON: No one should threaten Seth Dillon. I’m totally opposed to threatening him or anyone else. Just saying, talking about yourself is—
MIKE CERNOVICH: That’s our problem. But that’s our problem, though. See, that’s how they got us in this catch-22, which is, well, nobody can complain because we’re mainly men and we’re taking off the chip. We don’t complain. But then they get away with everything.
And people go, “Wait a minute.” You had to say—I think that most people, if you told them, “Oh, yeah, I remember when I was—when Douglas Mackey got wrongfully arrested and charged for a crime he didn’t commit, and it’s been proven now he didn’t commit the crime,” that I remember sitting off my kids, and I go, “Hey, kids, I just, you know, want to let you know.” You know, talk to my wife. “Hey, here’s your money. Here’s where the money is. You know, it’s all in your name. I don’t have anything.”
And tell my kids, “Hey, kids, they might take Daddy away. The bad guys might come and get Daddy and, you know, it’ll be okay and everything.” Dude, if we don’t talk about it, then nobody knows.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right, right. So—
MIKE CERNOVICH: But we’re like, “Well, I don’t want to f*ing cry. I’m a real man. I’m a da, da, da, da.” It’s like, great. And then nobody knows. And then people get—”Wait a minute. John Eastman, a distinguished law professor, wrote a memo that wasn’t even acted on. He just lost his life. Lost his position at Chapman, his standing in the world, even his law license, his ability to earn a living.”
This is what is happening. So we do need to b more, to be honest. That’s our problem. That’s the exploit. And whatever our DNA is, or whatever our operating software is, or whatever our genetics is, that’s our exploit is we just sort of—you just take the hits. You take the hits. You endure the weight of life.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Dad doesn’t complain.
The Pattern of Political Violence
MIKE CERNOVICH: That’s what you do. And then they take our country and then they f* us up one by one. So I remember some guy showed up to Fuentes’ place to kill him and then ended up killing somebody else down the street. Shows up, people are like—well, they didn’t even know. Because you’re not supposed to talk about it.
TUCKER CARLSON: And Fuentes, his credit, I mean, I gave him a chance to talk about it. And whatever you think of Fuentes, but he did not marinate in his victimhood at all.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah, some looney goes up to Katt Turd’s house, tries to get him. They go after Benny Johnson, they go after Seth Dillon. Candace Owens has had threats. Charlie Kirk gets killed.
So I think there’s a way to talk about these. And that’s why the Charlie Kirk thing really was a frustrating thing for me. Because—well, I mean, it was a tragic thing, you know. It sounds so shallow. I just thought that people would realize, they’re hunting us for sport. All of us. Tucker, they’re hunting you. If they could get Shapiro, they would get Shapiro. If they could get Walsh, they could get Walsh. If they could get Candace, they could get Candace.
And it ain’t the Israelis and it ain’t the Jews that are doing it. It’s a violent, feral, terrorist, Bolshevik left. And they would get all of us if they could. So whatever acrimony we have, which is—I’m not a unity guy. I’m a guy who likes the mix, maybe too much, but it’s like, dude, they’re going to kill us. They’re going to kill all of us.
And we need to figure out—we need to figure out some kind of way to coexist with one another, understanding that the threat against us is existential. And they would—the left, if they could kill Seth Dillon, they’d be glad to kill him. If they could kill you, they’d be glad to kill you. To them, that’s just another notch on their belt, a point on the scoreboard.
The Administration’s Response
TUCKER CARLSON: So what’s—I mean, what’s the administration doing with this?
MIKE CERNOVICH: I mean, that was my problem with Trump’s first term is the political violence against Trump supporters, because again, we’re just supposed to deal with it. Just deal with it. Was completely, almost completely ignored during his first term.
TUCKER CARLSON: Is it still being ignored?
MIKE CERNOVICH: Under my definition it is, yeah. They’re arresting some people. There’s more happening than the first term. But the response is not what I would like to see.
TUCKER CARLSON: So the claim when Charlie was murdered was that this was Antifa or some Antifa-adjacent person or organization. I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know anything about it.
MIKE CERNOVICH: I think it’s absolutely true.
TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know that.
MIKE CERNOVICH: But—
TUCKER CARLSON: And I don’t have any other theories. I just—I don’t even understand the story. But if people said it was true, so—okay, where’s the roundup of Antifa?
MIKE CERNOVICH: So there—
TUCKER CARLSON: Sorry, you got a dog sneezing right there.
The Unanswered Questions
MIKE CERNOVICH: That’s good. Good puppy. So the—no, I’m a—I mean, I think it was Tyler Robinson. I think a 22-year-old man on a mission is a very dangerous thing. And I think that there were other people in those Discord servers and there were people tweeting, “Something big is going to happen tomorrow. And after tomorrow, Charlie won’t be around anymore.”
So I’m very frustrated that there doesn’t seem to be much interest in—maybe those people were just guessing or maybe they were trolling, but there doesn’t seem to be much interest in finding out who those other people are. Why do you think that’s—
TUCKER CARLSON: It doesn’t make any sense to me.
The Garland, Texas Skeleton Key
MIKE CERNOVICH: I always go back to the Garland, Texas mass shootings, which is to me, this is like the skeleton key of it all. So Pamela Geller, who’s very much pro-Israel, about as hardcore as you can be on the issue, did a Draw Mohammed contest and there was going to be a bunch of other people also like very pro-Israel and a jihadi was going to shoot the place up. It was Texas. He got taken out.
But by accident of fate, a local law enforcement officer pulled over an FBI agent who was fleeing the scene, got the guy’s phone and the text message to the jihadi. He said, “Tear up Texas.” Sounds unbelievable. It’s 100% true. Senator Grassley has asked for information twice from Ray and Garland, has been stonewalled. I don’t know why Kash Patel won’t release it. I’ve asked everybody up as high up the food chain as you can get why we can’t get it and what’s the answer?
My belief is that MK ULTRA never ended. COINTELPRO. MK ULTRA was of course the mind control experiments they conduct on people where the book Chaos covered this in great detail for people who are curious about that.
TUCKER CARLSON: About the Charles Manson murders.
MIKE CERNOVICH: The Manson murders. And then there was that Air Force guy who was drugged up and killed somebody. And that didn’t even make sense. And I even know about that. That book was completely mind-blowing. And I do think they still have whatever arm of that is, whether that’s within the FBI or some other dark site within the intelligence community. I’m certain that still exists.
So because of that you don’t get, you’re not going to get any information about that. Because I do think there would be some kind of dark op because what a lot of people, again, it’s just the title of the book shows the agenda. It’s just chaos. Get out. Get everybody afraid, get everybody panicked. Usher in more surveillance technology, usher in a surveillance state.
Bring in anarcho-tyranny where if you’re law-abiding, everything you do is monitored by flocks and all these camera traffic cameras, everything you do is monitored. But if you’re a drug addict on the street, you have free reign. You do anything you want. This was the Bolshevik method. There was a Solzhenitsyn quote, Alexander Solzhenitsyn quote where it went. I don’t have the exact quote, but the substance of it was: Your punishment for having a knife was different for the thieves. When you had a knife, it was terrorism. When the thief had it, it was just his way of life. And that’s what we’re living under now with the modern anarcho-tyranny.
TUCKER CARLSON: So what do they have in common? Like why does this same phenomenon reoccur?
Logos Versus Chaos
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah, it’s the battle between people say good and evil, but you would just say like Logos and chaos. Logos, the divine order, the order of God, the unison of people, the fellowship of people versus the chaos and the acrimony and the evil of the dark one. Satan, demons. Every religious tradition has a, even dualistic religions or polytheistic religions have chaos gods.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right?
MIKE CERNOVICH: So even if you’re not monotheistic, which I’m monotheistic obviously, but everybody has had those, the chaos agents. So chaos is destroying the divine order and the divine communion of people.
TUCKER CARLSON: So you don’t see this as political battles, but as manifestations of a spiritual battle.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah, it’s a spiritual. Yeah, the political is what you see. The spiritual is what you talk about. And then people will make fun of you and say you’re crazy. I don’t think they make fun of—
TUCKER CARLSON: You anymore, do they?
MIKE CERNOVICH: Much less so.
TUCKER CARLSON: So you had a tweet about this yesterday, I think. Here’s your tweet: “If you were a demon with dominion over the planet and you wanted to increase the amount of human suffering across the world, you would eliminate the white population.”
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah, yeah, that.
TUCKER CARLSON: So you see, you see what’s happening? The death of whites, their massive contraction as a racial group globally, you see that as a manifestation of the spiritual war.
Ireland as the Rosetta Stone
MIKE CERNOVICH: Ireland really is the Rosetta Stone, I think, in all of this. I agree. Because you can again, even if, right or wrong, you could at least rationalize. Rhodesia was an evil apartheid state and they had to give it over to Mugabe and it became Zimbabwe. But you know what? They did the right thing and had a bad outcome.
TUCKER CARLSON: Or South Africa for that.
MIKE CERNOVICH: I don’t agree with that. But you could. There’s a chain of logic, okay? They did the right thing. That ended apartheid. It led to a bad result. Maybe they could have transitioned it better, but there’s an A to B to C thing there, right?
Ireland, they were colonized by the white Irish were colonized by the white British. They were starved. Their resources were plundered. They had the potato famine.
TUCKER CARLSON: They lived like their churches were desecrated.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Churches were desecrated. They were an enslaved people, but they have to be punished.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I agree.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Why do the Irish? Right. To me, that’s when, if people think that tweet sounds crazy or any of this is crazy, then you have to tell me, why do the Irish have to pay?
TUCKER CARLSON: I totally agree.
MIKE CERNOVICH: And that gives up the whole game. Gives up the whole game.
TUCKER CARLSON: So this is a manifestation of the spiritual war, the destruction of whites. Yeah.
MIKE CERNOVICH: And then why that is, I don’t know yet. I’ll still unravel it. But you can’t deny it. When you look at Ireland and you look what is happening, look what’s happening globally, you look what is happening in the US and has been happening for decades.
But again, that goes back to, well, you don’t want to talk about how you could be killed any day. And that’s just something you live with. And I just live with it, knowing that at any moment I could be gone, removed one way or another.
TUCKER CARLSON: How does that change the way you live? That knowledge?
Living Under the Weight of Consequence
MIKE CERNOVICH: When you know, it’s like memento mori. So the arrogance or whatever, because I pretend to be arrogant on the Internet sometimes, but people who know me sort of find that kind of funny. But there’s one, there’s like a deep weight that you carry. Just a deep weight where you know that what you do has consequences. And you need to really focus on doing the right thing. That’s consequences for yourself in the country.
Because if we do lose, the amount of human suffering is going to be immeasurable in the US and globally. When you read about the Holodomor, you read about the Cambodian genocide, you read about the gulags. It’s just a scale of human suffering beyond human understanding. And we’re the remaining bulwark against it.
So you’re just left with a sense of like, and then you’re like, I have, I have a thing kind of a bit I do online, although it’s really true, is I have like, I have a war on fun. So you don’t get to have fun. Like, I don’t get to have fun. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy my life. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have a cigar and mountain bike and do other things, but I just, I don’t get to have fun. That’s not in the cards to me. I don’t get to have fun.
I have to live like a serious person who knows that I could be killed, that my friends could be killed. In the case of Charlie, a friend will be killed, that even people like Seth and them that I may not see eye to eye with, like, they could get killed, that any of us could be killed on any given day. And so in a way, it’s like being in, it’s not being in a combat zone in a way, but it is a way of, it is a form of warfare. So I just, I don’t get to like, have fun. I know I don’t get to like, goof off or live.
TUCKER CARLSON: So it gives your life meaning in some ways.
MIKE CERNOVICH: It gives your life, yeah. Meaning is a complicated subject, but it gives your life a, you certainly have a purpose. Right. Where you know that and this is true of everybody or how people should live is what you do does have significance and consequence, and you do have to, you do have to make it count.
TUCKER CARLSON: That sounds, I mean, in some ways worse, but in most ways better than living without that knowledge that it could end well, that’s the meaning.
The Meaning Paradox
MIKE CERNOVICH: That’s the meaning kind of paradox. And I think that’s why some people called it the meaning crisis. Then before that, Jonathan Haidt wrote a book, The Happiness Hypothesis. And meaning is this concept where if you chase meaning, you can’t find meaning, but you find meaning by living in a certain way. And then you go, oh, this is so, like, this is meaning. So I’ll give you, I have these weird, it’s like a hyper-reality.
TUCKER CARLSON: You just did a film on this. I should—
MIKE CERNOVICH: We’re working on it. Yeah, we’re in, yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: Explain this through that lens.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Okay. Well, the, you know, you get, when you get older, you want to do things that are interesting and hard. And I think doing a movie on the meaning of life is about as hard as it could get. Right. And there, so you would say, like, what is the meaning of life? Which I’ve asked everybody, and, you know, people have their own answers, but sometimes it’s good to sort of attack it from the inverse, which is what would be a meaningless life.
A meaningless life would be all this suffering of yourself and others, all the human suffering. It was just the way it is. We were just animals and we were bred by some kind of alien species to harvest gold. And if people got harmed or genocided or whatever, that was just, there’s no reckoning at the end that, that to me, gives me nightmares to think there’s no reckoning or no.
So then you would say, well, that would be meaningless. Okay, that’s, I’m chasing whatever that is. So then you start to think of meaning. What is that? Well, meaning is a communion with God. It’s a catharsis. It said that whatever it was, whatever, you know, there’s a saying, like, the only way out is through is like, whatever this is, that you’re going to get through it. And there is a divine evening out of everything. And that everything did have a point and everything did matter and everything happened for a reason.
Not because you’re an actor who doesn’t have agency, but because it was part of, it’s part of the ride. Like, I got chunks taken out of me. There’s no, like, there’s, you have that chunks. Everybody has, you know, again, we’re not supposed to talk about it because we’re so, you know, macho, macho men. But, like, I think I’m like, sometimes I’m just like, dude, I’m tired, man. Like, it is just like having to live like that. Especially under the Biden regime, the censorship regime, where as an adult man, you can’t even say what you believe because your whole livelihood will be destroyed. You might not be able to have a bank account.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right?
MIKE CERNOVICH: That was, like, the way you kind of lived. And you have chunks taken out of you. And to think that that was for nothing, right? Like losing, which is how meaning ties into, I think the political melee is, losing would be the most meaningless thing in the world.
There’s this painting somebody posted, and I’m going to get it reproduced in an oil painting. And it’s when the Bolsheviks took over the palace at the Bolshevik Revolution. And it just shows this, it just fills me with this, like, rage. You’re just staring at evil. And I look at, like, this is what losing looks like. Losing looks like you’re lined up next to your kids and they start shooting you. But the kids don’t die right away. So they bayonet your kids in front of you.
That’s what losing looks like. People used to say, oh, Cernovich, you’re crazy. That sounds crazy. I remember they say that 2015, 2016. Oh, you’re so hyperbole now, everybody. That’s what losing looks like. Losing doesn’t mean, oh, you’re going to have a wealth tax and you’re going to have to pay a little bit more taxes. Losing is, you are lined up in the basement and they are killing your kids in front of you.
TUCKER CARLSON: That.
MIKE CERNOVICH: That is what, like, losing us. Well, to me, that’s meaningless. To me, that’s the antithesis of, like, whatever the meaning of life is. So the connection between really meaning and, what do you mean?
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I don’t know. I mean, the basis of Christianity is this guy who Christians believe was God who came down and then, like, got brought up on false charges and tortured to death.
Divine Communion and the Rejection of Martyrdom
MIKE CERNOVICH: But that he did that so we didn’t have to. He took on the burden. A lot of people take the Christ martyrdom as some kind of message that we should become martyrs. And I always say, there’s been one martyr. Christ died on the cross. I ain’t dying on the cross. I ain’t a martyr.
Christ did that, and he took on the sins of mankind, and he did that for us. I’m not here to be crucified and take on the sins of mankind. That’s not me. If anything, it was almost—it’s almost like, egotistical to think that I should be a martyr and that would be a way to go. So I reject martyrdom theology fully. Interesting.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. So what is the meaning? If the meaning is not getting lined up against the wall with your kids.
MIKE CERNOVICH: The meaning is communion. Divine communion. Meaning it’s divine communion. Everything is divine communion.
TUCKER CARLSON: The interacting with God.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Interacting with God in the downstream. The communion of people. So I’ll have these moments of like hyper reality where I’m like wrapped up in my own bullshit and oh, you know, what if I did this and you know, in your own head. And then I’m on the couch with my kids and there’s just like a moment of like stillness and never lasts. There’s just like moment of like stillness.
TUCKER CARLSON: Not when you have four. It doesn’t last. No.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Well, in my own bullshit. F*ed up brain too. You know, like a lot of, you know, there’s a lot of us, we make prisons of our own mind. Right?
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.
The Battle Against Inner Demons
MIKE CERNOVICH: And the demons steal our joy. You’re just, you’re having a moment and then they’re like, what about this? They’re deep space coming for you. Or, you know, one thing after another. And there’s just these moments of like, stillness. And this is what it’s about.
But that’s because of our primitive brains or whatever our problems are. Probably because we’re not in the Garden of Eden is we just can’t maintain divine connection. The monks can. But it’s a great aesthetic. I always get that word wrong. Asceticism. I always get that bad.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
MIKE CERNOVICH: In bed with my asceticism. But it’s a constant effort. That’s why.
TUCKER CARLSON: But they’re living on a pillar of salt or in a cave.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah, yeah. And it’s like the arrow prayer is like God, you know, Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. I’m a set. You know, you have to constantly be connected with the divine and then lean into your heart more to distract us from the egoism. But you have to have some kind of egoism if you live in the world. You can’t just not participate in the world.
So there’s this tension between divine connection, which means surrendering yourself to the full presence of God. Right. Versus okay, but I have to like, pay my bills, dude. You know, like, I have to. I have to make my way in this world. And those are constantly attention.
Eastern Orthodoxy and the Knowledge of the Heart
But then something. And this is probably why there’s a more of a rise for like Eastern Orthodoxy and older religious traditions. The Christianity is the. And I love Protestants, so no offense to the Protestants, but Protestantism is very. Well, it’s very waspish. It’s like by the book, the Bible says this and like, here’s the Scriptures and it’s very much of the Mind Christian apologetics.
Oh, well, you think this is the Trinity, and it’s like arguing back and forth, but you’re, like, existing in mind. Whereas the Eastern traditions. And by Eastern, I don’t mean Hinduism, but—even though Hinduism has a—but Eastern Orthodoxy and Eastern Christianity is also about the knowledge of the heart and the tension that you feel every day.
Like, every day I’m—I just feel a great spiritual tension where I don’t. Like, if you ask me, are you going to go to heaven or hell? I’d say, I don’t. God help me. I don’t know. I don’t know. Like, are you a good person or bad person? God help me. I don’t know. I don’t. I don’t know. I don’t have a good answer to that.
It makes it weird, too, when, like, people go at you because you’re just like, I don’t even know if I’m going to defend myself. Maybe, you know, maybe I am. You know, like, what am I am? And—but you can find a certain amount of meaning in that. There’s like, a certain amount of meaning and confusion.
Like, maybe that’s how it was supposed to be, that we are spirits and human bodies. Because the—if, you know, if you read your old philosophy, there’s debate on mind body dualism, and there is a sense that we’ve all had that, am I a body? Am I a mind? Well, God, we are both. We are both. We’re a mind and a body.
TUCKER CARLSON: Or.
MIKE CERNOVICH: A spirit and a body. And there’s going to be tension between this. We wrestle against the flesh. And so maybe that’s the right answer. Maybe the right answer is to not be so sure that you’re right and that you’re such a righteous and holy person. And maybe the right answer is, I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.
TUCKER CARLSON: But humility is always the right answer.
The Pride of Humility
MIKE CERNOVICH: You’re not God, but you could be proud of humility. You know, there’s a great—of course. Well, of course, Benjamin Franklin is one of the best favorite writers, and he said he would keep a list of the virtues. And he said I was—I would. He said, “I’ve achieved all virtues, but I found that I myself became proud of my humility.” I realized, like, that was going to get me.
So, yeah, so there is, like, a meaning crisis because that’s why we have the opioid epidemic. Yes, we have people, but even people who are successful, drug overdose or they blow up their family lives because they’re thinking, is this really all there is. Oh, I did the right things. And so even if you end up in a success, you’re still having those nights one day.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, maybe especially. And maybe that describes the politics you were talking about earlier, where a lot of our ruling class is just bored and let’s hurt people just to shake it up a little bit.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah. I think a lot of them are driven by demonic spirits, those people. I think it’s less of a meaning crisis and it’s more of an evil animating force.
Recognizing Evil Spirits
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so how do you recognize that there’s got to be a difference between just being wrong, which I have done many times, probably even today, and being animated by an evil spirit.
MIKE CERNOVICH: The angel and demon on your shoulder. Yeah, I mean, that’s where the—that’s where the discernment that people talk about so often is something that I thought. I think about every—you know, so who do you.
TUCKER CARLSON: Who do you look at from afar and perceive to be controlled by evil spirits.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Most? I mean, when I go to D.C., although it felt a little bit, but it felt like I had exorcism recently, is—I remember you go to D.C. and you just feel—you just. Just like, what is this?
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
MIKE CERNOVICH: What is this demonic place? This place is the playground. Playground of the demons. The whole—the whole place. The whole place. Like, just to name one person would be to not do justice to the demonic forces at work in D.C.
Even recently, if you look in the Department of Justice, have you ever looked at the occult artwork at DOJ?
TUCKER CARLSON: No.
MIKE CERNOVICH: I’ll show you some pictures at DOJ. Next time you’re at DOJ, go get a tour and go look at all the occult artwork.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why is there occult artwork at the Department of Justice? It shows, by the way.
The Religion of the Bad Guys
MIKE CERNOVICH: That’s because they take the religion seriously. We might not take our religion seriously, but they take it seriously. The bad guys take their religion quite seriously. And they have a religion. They have a God. Their God is in our God. Their God’s the anti and the inverse of our God. But they absolutely have a religion.
Their occult artwork is everywhere. It’s mortifying. And when you get the Torah, you can probably find the pictures online. So that’s what we’re up—that’s what we’re up against.
TUCKER CARLSON: What’s on the dollar bill?
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah, well, some of that. Yeah. The occult symbolism is a complicated one because, like, is—we had—Jonathan Peugeot was interviewed for meaning, and I was like—I’m like, ever since with Ayahuasca, I’m, like, obsessed with what does the serpent mean?
Because under the kind of the mainline Protestant understanding the serpent tempted Eve, the serpent is bad, the snakes are evil, serpent’s not good. It’s more complicated than that. And he’s an orthodox Christian, so he—he wrote an article, the Serpents of Orthodoxy, where he goes—because there’s—there was a staff with two serpents moving around there. You know, there’s DNA.
There was—even before the double helix structure of DNA was discovered, there was two serpents wrapped around. That sort of—for sure, was understood. Ayahuasca, the cosmic serpent. A lot of people see serpents and that, you know, that’s a whole other.
The Serpent Experience
TUCKER CARLSON: You’ve seen serpents while doing ayahuasca.
MIKE CERNOVICH: I felt—felt it, like, moving through me, just like flowing through me.
TUCKER CARLSON: Serpents, Snake.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: So that doesn’t—I mean, I’m no shaman, but that doesn’t sound good.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Well, that’s what sent you on these, like, quests. So we wouldn’t be having this conversation if I—because, for one thing, you know, for Christians, ayahuasca is, like, strictly forbidden. So I don’t want to seem like I’m glamorizing it in any way, shape or form, but there was—I—you have gone on multiple ayahuasca journeys over the years.
And for me, it’s been completely transformed. My heart, it’s transformed how I see my children. It’s the way—the way I, like, interact with the world that got me interested. Christianity again. Because—well, so the thing is, God can meet you wherever you are, right? Which is why there is good and evil. So it isn’t to say there’s no such thing as good and evil, but God—God can meet you wherever you are, and God can go anywhere and meet you wherever you are.
So in my case, I was not someone who—I never had any kind of faith because I never felt anything. I would go to church, and I grew up very Christian, and I would, like, try to feel it. I was like, what do these people have? There’s just not—this just isn’t it. What is it that they feel like? Is everybody in on something that I’m not in on? Is everybody faking like I’m faking because I don’t believe anything?
And that was because I had no—whatever—whatever sixth sense people have for God. I didn’t have. I didn’t have the God genie. And then I remember, you know, first time drinking tea and being catapulted to the spirit world. And I was like, okay, the spirit world is real. That’s okay. That’s not even up for debate now to the point where it doesn’t even offend me when people are atheists or don’t believe in it.
I was like, well, I didn’t believe in it either. I had to see it with my own eyes. You know, Paul, he had to be knocked over, blinded. Yeah. So for me, that was like my—my Paul moment where I was like, okay, well, somehow I ended up here drinking tea with no belief at all in God or the spiritual realm at all. And now I absolutely know it’s real and went through a number of things and, you know, if you want to go into all that. But I do.
TUCKER CARLSON: Like, why did you do ayahuasca in the first place?
MIKE CERNOVICH: For the wrong reason, which was for the ride. You know, Hunter Thompson said, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
The Ayahuasca Experience
MIKE CERNOVICH: So many people just sit around ruminating all day or daydreaming all day. Maybe I’ll do this. Maybe I’ll do this. I’ve always been a just buy the ticket, take the ride. What’s it like? Buy the ticket, take the ride.
So I thought, well, I mean, I’d done a lot of things in life before, and I felt like I was pretty sure on myself that I knew how to live and was arrogant in a lot of ways. And I thought, well, you know, I’ve done everything else. Like, might as well just do ayahuasca, you know, by everything else, I don’t mean drugs. I just mean, like, I was so full of myself and my own ego that I just thought I knew so much about life and I was such a wonderful person that obviously I would just do this because that’s what people who are so, you know, so great, so great do. Right?
I’m so great. I’ll just do this, like, other thing. And it, like, broke my heart. Broke my heart over and over again the whole night just, like, broke my heart.
So the way it works is you’re, you know, you drink the tea and you just kind of, like, look around. Okay, I think that’s a mistake. And then you sort of, like, start to fall under and you venture to the spirit world, but you don’t. It’s not like you’re here and I’m walking around. La, la, la. I’m in the spirit world.
You’re taken to a place where you have no free will. You have no power. You are more insignificant than an insect on this world. And you start to journey and, you know, experience those things.
So one I gave you example because it’s kind of hard to explain, but I remember, like, I’m drinking the tea and sometimes you have, like, a little bit of a light show when you go in, you go into the spirit world. You hear, like, a buzzing sound like bees. And then you see, like, a little bit of light, a little vapor on the side. And, like, and then you get the DMT sort of light show that people associate with a psychedelic experience.
That’s the least significant part of the night. But a lot of times you start to get the light show and you think, oh, okay, I’m into somewhere. But there’s a sense of, like, there’s me and I’m into something. And, you know, you go through there, and then you become completely disoriented.
Confronting Death and Ego
You wake up and you look. You know, where am I? At first? Where am I? So I remember I woke up. I go. I look around because, you know, you’re laying down. You can’t walk around. You’re laying down. I look up and I go, where am I? Where am I? Where am I?
I go, oh, yeah. I’m Mike Cernovich, and I’m in this place. I’m on this mat, and I got dropped off, and then I walked in here and I saw this person, and then I came and I drank the tea. Okay, cool. So, like, you’re reassuring yourself. Close my eyes. Wake up.
TUCKER CARLSON: Where am I?
MIKE CERNOVICH: Oh, I’m Mike Cernovich. I’m in this room and I came in. Oh, yeah, I got dropped off. I’m doing ayahuasca. Okay, cool. Okay, cool. Close eyes. Wake up, Mike Cernovich. Where am I? Close my eyes. Wake up. I’m. Where am I? Wake up. What the f*? Dead. Dead. There is no I. Dead. Dead.
And as I’m falling down into, like, wherever I’m falling into, I see, like, my kids surface and my wife surface, and I was, for all purposes, dead. I was overwhelmed with the feeling that I was dead. I was like, I’m dying. I’m dead. There was no I. I’m. There wasn’t even an I who’s experiencing. I’m dead.
And then, like, all I could think of was, like, are my kids going to be okay? Is my wife going to be okay? Are people going to be okay? How is that so foolish? How was I so foolish?
How I was. So I remember, like, when I funded my kids, like, college fund, I was like, okay, like, my kids are set. Like, I can die. You know, like, what do I need to be around for? Like, because I grew up poor. Like, then you learn that your own trauma and everything. I was like, okay. Like, my kids are good. My wife’s good. Like, everybody’s good. You know, everybody’s good. I got. They’re going to be taken care of, whatever happens to me, you know, because part of this is, like, you know, knowing that you could be killed or framed any day.
And I’m like, okay. Everybody be okay. And I remember I’m dying. I just heard a voice say, “You fool. You fool. They’re not okay. They’re not okay because of money, because you set up money. Like, they’re not okay. Where. What is wrong with you?”
And I was just left with this sense of, I just. I’m a fool, and I live my life foolishly, and I can’t believe that I was such a fool. And I’m dead now, and it’s, like, too late.
And then eyes close, and then I wake up, and then I’m, like, puking in a bucket. Like, you know, so they call it, like, a spiritual purge. And I remember being like, oh, God, I’m still alive. I’m still alive. Like, looking around, you know, like, looking at this bucket like I’d never been. You know, everybody’s afraid of throwing up on ayahuasca.
I’m like, oh, you will. That will be the best part of the night. That will be that you will be thanking God that you’re alive. Like, you know, throwing up in a bucket. And I was like, okay, I’m alive. Okay, I’m alive. Alive.
And then. But then that’s just like. That was five minutes. That was just five minutes. And then you, like, go back under. And then it’s like another thing, another catharsis, like another, like, time loop.
The Time Loop and Humility
So I remember, I get up and I look around, and there’s this woman walking around, and she’s carrying the buckets. Because, you know, people are throwing up and everybody’s sick. And so you have kind of the shaman guy or facilitator, and then you have, like, the helper.
There’s this person, you know, she’s walking around, and she’s carrying a bucket. Carrying. I wake up and I look and I go, there she is, carrying the bucket. And then close my eyes. You come back up. Time loop.
So time loop means, like, I’m reliving this moment with you, and I remember reliving this moment with you, but I’m, like, stuck in it, like Groundhog Day time loop. And that’s the first time it happened to me. And that’s a real, like, mind.
So I get up and like, oh, she’s, like, carrying things. Okay. She’s cleaning up after people. And then I thought, you know how nice fall. Fall asleep, wake back up. I go, man, look at. She’s like, so helpful. And I couldn’t do that. Like, I couldn’t clean up after, puke on other people. I just. I don’t know how they do this.
And then I wake up and I’m in the time loop again. I’m like, what? What? Like, why am I in this time loop? You know? And, like, you start to feel like you’re going insane. Like, why am I stuck in this time loop? And I close my. And I open up and he goes, said, “You don’t even know her name. You never introduce yourself to her. You didn’t talk to her. You don’t talk to people. You just look through people. You don’t get to know people. You’re so arrogant.
This person is doing something you could never do because you don’t have the humility. You’re so. You can never clean up after other people. You don’t give a s. You don’t give a s. This. But you’d even, like, look this person in the eyes and just say, like, hey, you know, what’s your name? Like, how’d you. How’d you get here?
You just came in here to drink your tea selfishly, like the arrogant prick that you are, and because you wanted to take the ride, you know, you want to take the ride, and you’re just a bad person.”
I was like, what the f*? You know? And then. So that was more or less my night.
Encountering Demons
TUCKER CARLSON: And you see demons at one point.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Over and over again. Oh, yeah, that was so you can see D. Sorry, you can see demons. I remember being taunted. So that’s what’s weird about it is it’s like. It’s like scenes of a movie with generally, there’s a catharsis. You don’t know. That’s why they just say before you go in, they go, “The only way out’s through.”
You know, like, I go yourself. The only way out through. What kind of. Is that? The only way I’ll throw. What the f* does that mean? You know, again, that was my arrogance and my own delusion.
TUCKER CARLSON: And that’s true in life, though.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah. Yeah. And I was just. And you’re like, what does that mean? Well, it means that no matter how bad it is with ayahuasca, I remember I would. I would, you know, I would do mask, and then I would open up the mask and try to look around and a demon at whatever it is entity says, “Oh, you think you can open your eyes?”
And it just showed me like the most f*ed up things I’d ever seen. People being tortured to death, killed. Like horror movies, like the Road. Have you ever seen the movie the Road?
TUCKER CARLSON: No.
The Spirit Realm and Childhood Trauma
Like a cannibal, like a horror film. And then it said, “Oh, you think you can take your eye mask off? You can’t run. You’re running from yourself. You’re trying to run from yourself and you can never run from yourself.”
What am I running from? Then I’m like, what am I running from? What do you mean? I’m running because if you talk to me at that point in my life, you would be talking to a very cocky person. You’d not be talking to this person. You would be talking to a person who’s like, “Oh, yeah, I got things figured out, man. Like, I got things figured out and I can prove it. I grew up poor. I’ve had some things happen that haven’t been so good in my life. I’ve had to navigate life with a bipolar mom.” Like, I know life.
You talk to me now, I’m like, I mean, I have ideas, you know, things that I think are like the path forward. But that person was just shown, you are in the spirit realm. You’re nothing. You are nothing. And you’re so arrogant. You’re out here, you like, you have no power.
So this is, you’re running from yourself. And I was like, what am I running from? And it goes, all that success you chased and all the, whatever, whatever it is I was trying to do, they go, that was just masking your heart. Your, your, your, the, the, the trauma. The trauma that you have. And that everything you’re doing is just to mask that. Like, that’s bullsh*t. You know, that doesn’t make any sense.
So it’s like, okay, because you’re, because you’re, and by this I mean I’m, you’re talking to a guide. So when I’m saying this, this is not like an internal monologue. This is, you’re talking to something outside of yourself. It’s like Dante’s Inferno. Like the guide and the guide said, “Okay, you know, big mouth, you want to argue. Like, we’ll just vortex you back in the spirit realm.”
So then it’s like you close your eyes. That’s why I’m like, it’s like, end scene. You’re like, oh, you’re like, you’re in, like, a new scene. And then, like, it shows you something from, like, when you were a child. Or maybe in my case, it was like something from when I was, like, a child that was a memory.
The House and the Love
It was like it was showing me, it was showing me the house I grew up in. And I was like, why is it showing me the house? Like, my house. I grew up in this, like, small, shtty house. I hated it. We had holes in the carpet. Like, I was embarrassed to bring people over. I was like, why? Why am I being shown my house? Like, I hate that fing house. I hate this f*ing house. Why are you showing me this house?
And then, and then, like, voice is like, “You had all the love in the world in that house. Your dad loved you. Your mom loved you. They did the best that they could do. And you think that you can just, like, give your kids money because that’s your own thing, you know? Like, well, you grew up poor, so. But it’s like you took the love for granted. You just, like, you had all this love, but you didn’t have money. So then that becomes your hang up. Like, oh, do I have enough? And, like, well, if my kids have enough, what do you need? What do you need me for? You know, like, what’s that for?”
It was, was like, all the love in the world was in the house, and you hated the house and you, like, you didn’t even know it. Oh, f*. You know, so, like, I always loved my dad and had good relationship. I was like, oh, my God. Like, it was like, and what was it like for your dad to be poor? Like, not know how to make a living. What was that like for him? You know?
And you’re just like, oh, you know, like, he was poor too. You guys were just poor. That was like, the town lost the factory and people were jobless. And that’s just, every kid’s dad went through the same thing. You worked at a factory, and then you had to find some other kind of sh*tty job and you kind of find something else. And then eventually my dad figured it out. By then I was like, in high school, so it didn’t really impact my life either way.
And I was like, oh, f*. I have all this. I have all these issues around money just in a way that’s, like, traumatic, you know, not just in a way that, you know, people need money to live and you want to be greedy and. But I, like, I had no idea. And I never would. I never would, like, reach that conclusion emotionally.
And then, then you’re, like, zooming out. And it’s just like, oh. It’s like you’re just like loves, the love of your family, the love that God has for you.
The Gandalf Figure and Divine Frustration
And then, and I was like, okay. So then I close eyes, like, you wake back up and it’s like, look. It was literally like an old grandfather or something. Like something out of Gandalf or something. And it’s like, look. And it goes. It’s like in a very calming, like, masculine voice, it says, “It’s not supposed to be this way.” And it was just like he was like doing this. He’s like, “It’s not supposed to be this way.”
And I look at it like, like I said, I’m laying down and I look and I see this Gandalf-like figure floating. And like, I was like, it’s not supposed to be this way. I was like, what’s not supposed to be this way?
And then he just showed all the, the light. It’s like the lights are all separate now. You’re supposed to be together. It’s supposed to be communion. It’s supposed to be that everyone’s, you know, loving each other and you just want to like, kill each other. He goes, “This is not how it’s supposed to be.” It was like, it was like a frustrated dad who was like, this is like, this is not how it’s supposed to be. This is not how it’s supposed to be. Okay?
You know, this is so above my pay grade, you know, I don’t even know, like. And that’s how I know it’s not coming from me. I’m like, if I could come up with stuff like this, people would think I was a genius. You know, this is not my brain and I’m so smart.
And then I, like, go back under and then I come back up and I hear this, like, scream. And it was like the scream of an enraged mom basically screaming at like, the same situation. So then, you know, it takes years to put all this together and everything. But that was like showing me the masculine, the logos and the way, like, a father governs. And then like the rage of a mom and the children, like, are not getting together and, you know, the tension of, the tension of male and female.
Pachamama and External Entities
And then I saw an old woman’s face on a mountain. I was like, I don’t even know where this is from. I never read any books before this. And that’s Pachamama, so that’s a different kind of entity. So in that case, I saw like, whatever, whatever Pachamama was. The, you know, Mother Earth or whatever in paganism that people describe it as. So I’m just going, you know, back and forth between flashbacks to my life.
TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, so you saw a demon that others identified a woman’s head?
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah, yeah, Pachamama. I had no idea. Yeah, I didn’t, I didn’t do my research before going in, so I’d know, like, I.
TUCKER CARLSON: So what you’re saying is these are definitely not parts of your subconscious that rose to the surface.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah, they’re, unless it’s a parabola to unconscious. You know, there’s a theory that, that, that our unconscious is generating our experience in real time, but it’s not. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t a book I read. It was because I was again, like, atheist. So every rationalistic argument, they could say, “Well, you probably just like,” no, I never studied Aztec culture and Indian culture, but I know what Pachamama was.
And so there was, there are like, they’re external entities. So the older figure, you could say maybe, well, that was the Guardian. And you read Dante’s Inferno in high school.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right?
MIKE CERNOVICH: That was some thing in your unconscious, that surface. But Pachamama and other kind of entities were not so beyond my cultural understanding or my, my knowledge. So, yeah. So then you’re going like, you’re going back into that and like, you go through it really. I mean, it’s not a pleasurable. There aren’t a lot of ayahuasca addicts. Right? Is that true?
TUCKER CARLSON: And it’s not covered by Medicaid.
MIKE CERNOVICH: No, no, they, they’re, which is, which is a good thing because I, I don’t know. A lot of you don’t want some fly by night shaman or you end up with the wrong situation.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s all in Mexico. Right.
MIKE CERNOVICH: A lot, a lot of things can go bad. They’re, they’re, they’re different areas. I, South Africa. I’d done it before.
TUCKER CARLSON: And how many times have you done it?
The Lessons and Vulnerability
MIKE CERNOVICH: Nine, ten times, actually. Yeah, they’re. Oh, yeah, they’re. It, because it’s just, you go in and the, I had a lot of, I had a lot of, I mean, I, I had a, I had a lot of things that I had to beat out of me. I used to, like, just like we’re earlier, we’re talking about how you, you know, a certain amount of stoicism we all have, which, like, I think is good. And I think therapeutic culture goes too far where you don’t want to sit around and like, talk about how bad it was being a kid.
But a lot of us, and I learned this dealing with a lot of veterans that have done plant medicine. I don’t know if you’ve seen In Waves and War yet with Amber and Marcus McConnell. Capone. Amber and Marcus Capone. They’re amazing. So you have all these vets who are suicidal, and then they, a lot of them do ibogaine. They go down to ibogaine clinic. That’s what Vets is, a charity I’ve sponsored or donated to for a number of years. And vet solutions.
And so with me, the, you, you realize that, like, a lot of what we do that we think of as virtuous is trying to, we’re trying to hide something from ourselves. We’re trying to make it so that we can’t be vulnerable. And so with veterans especially, they, you know, they find out a lot of things that happened when they were kids, and that’s why they became the men they were. Because you’re driven by the sense that, like, “I’ll never be weak and powerless again.” Right. “I’ll never be weak and powerless again.”
Which that’s a good thing. You shouldn’t be weak and powerless. But if you have all this other stuff underneath that, then maybe you don’t love your kids the way you’re capable of, or maybe you’re afraid to love your kids and wife the way you are because maybe you’re, you are afraid to be hurt.
And that’s another aspect, I think, where therapy, call therapy, culture has taken things too far where you’re like, “Oh, let’s, like, talk about our trauma, like, all day and relive things.” Whereas, no, like, but maybe for a weekend, you know. Yeah, maybe spend a weekend and talk about it and figure it out then and, and work through it. Don’t, you don’t have to, like, live it. So I just, I had so many lessons on how, how I was just a fool, basically. It’s just a fool.
The Danger of Demons
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that sounds, I mean, I love that. My concern is, if the demons are real, aren’t you afraid they’ll enter you?
MIKE CERNOVICH: That’s, that’s the big debate, right? Seraphim Rose wrote a book, the Soul After Death. So if you talk to Josiah Trenum, he would just say, “Well, this is demonic and this pharmacia,” and absolutely, like, absolutely not.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s kind of my instinct.
MIKE CERNOVICH: That wouldn’t even be a debate. Yeah, there’s, there’s really, like, no debate to be had. And my position is I always warn people away from it because it’s a monumental undertaking. It’s not just something that, “Oh, yeah, we’ll go eat some shrooms and go take a hike in nature.”
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
MIKE CERNOVICH: It’s not in the same world and a lot can go wrong and it can disrupt a person’s life.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I’ve seen that too, with people’s lives being destroyed by heavy duty.
MIKE CERNOVICH: And, like, in what way?
TUCKER CARLSON: A friend who killed himself was from LSD, but, you know.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: Wrecked relationships.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah. LSD is poisonous. They can cause a lot of issues. And the, that’s why it’s more, more or less like, if you’re the, like the guys, especially at Vets and Amber and Marcus that I work with, these are guys that are going to kill themselves and they’re alcoholics, most likely. We’re not, we’re not talking like, “Oh, I’m living like, life is great and I’m living in a state of love. I’m going to go drink ayahuasca this weekend.”
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
The Spiritual Transformation
MIKE CERNOVICH: It’s more like, or in my case, where you’re just being pushed there because I was living in such a state of folly and delusion that there was no other way. So in my belief, I think God pushed me there. I think it was God and he showed me this is the only way that I can show you that you are just not who you think you are, just a delusional fool. And this is the only way that—
TUCKER CARLSON: We’re going to get through to you. Yeah.
MIKE CERNOVICH: And the message got through. And then, you know, I have drank and, you know, had more tea since then, but it’s not something that I do regularly.
TUCKER CARLSON: So what about the threat, though, of the demon entering you? You said you had serpents inside you. I should just say I believe you, but I mean, the consequences of being—I mean, the first missionary trip, Jesus sends the disciples on, all he says is “cast out demons.” The whole New Testament, Jesus casting out demons, the disciples casting out demons. That’s completely real in my opinion.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah. But the consequence of living my—I was probably demon possessed before the ayahuasca, because I was so—I’d been deluded by dark forces into thinking that I was something that I wasn’t.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
MIKE CERNOVICH: So in my view, it isn’t where, oh, I was such a holy person in my mind, I wouldn’t—
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
MIKE CERNOVICH: And you were. Thought I was.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
MIKE CERNOVICH: No, it’s the opposite where whatever I was before that, I’m not that way now. And whatever path I’m on is about God and Christianity and trying, you know, finding more love in the world and divine communion and just knowing that you’re just not—you’re just not a paycheck to your kids, you know.
And I didn’t even treat him like I was just a paycheck, but it was just some—it was, I would just—it was a glibness that I had. So it’s just the ayahuasca has just burned out all the glibness that I had where I can’t even laugh at things sometimes. I’m just—I just—that’s just not funny.
TUCKER CARLSON: I’m—
MIKE CERNOVICH: In a way, I’m too serious. It’s like, why are you laughing?
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a very non-American approach to life.
MIKE CERNOVICH: This is just not funny. Trump is so fun. I don’t care. F* fun. I hate fun. What do you mean, fun? We don’t get to have fun on this world. Fun. You want to have fun? What are you, a little kid? Right? So it’s driven—it’s driven all of that out of me in a way that I couldn’t have reached intellectually.
Confronting Death and Judgment
TUCKER CARLSON: So how does it make you feel about death?
MIKE CERNOVICH: Well, one, I know there’s a judgment. I don’t think there’s a judgment. I know there’s a final judgment for sure. Really? So for me, it’s not even—
TUCKER CARLSON: I think you’re right. But what convinced you of that?
MIKE CERNOVICH: Because I just was in the spirit world. I saw my divine judgment and my divine judgment was hell. You know, that was—that was my divine judgment. And so one is, I just—I know there’s a final judgment to the point where when people say, oh, you’re whatever, crazy, whatever, I don’t even get offended. I’m just like, brother, I was—that was me. I was you. I was you before this.
So how can I be upset with you for thinking this when that was what I thought before then? So I know there’s a final judgment. I know the accounting is in the human heart. It’s not the words. It’s not in what you say. It’s not in how holy you can be and how you can tell everybody else they’re not holy and you’re, you know, you’re Mr. Holier than thou and everybody else is a sinner.
It’s your—the human heart is going to be weighed and measured by God. In my opinion, it’s Jesus Christ. And, you know, in my opinion, it’s Christianity and Jesus Christ. But I’m not a—I’m not into the apologetics where we argue and mind all day about what it is. I think the human heart is going to be weighed. That’s something that God’s going to determine at the judgment.
I know that I’m accountable for everything. And I know having died, for all purposes, I have died. I have died. And I know that when you die, the only thing you’re going to think about is the people you left behind. So all of this materialism and, oh, no, somebody, I’m being picked on today on the Internet, or I’m being canceled again, or this and that—none of that came up.
Actually, one funny thing that came up was during one of my journeys, I was under and I saw some things. I came up and it goes, whatever—it—whatever. That’s what I mean. I don’t know what it is. I still understand it. I said, “You know how blessed you are that you’ve been attacked and everything. They go, you can talk about anything.”
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Doesn’t matter. People are just like, oh, wow, Cernovich talks about ayahuasca. We f*ing knew he was crazy anyway. You know, this is probably the least crazy thing that he’s said all week. Whereas if I were more legitimate and respectable, then I would have to think, well, how’s this going to play? How’s this going to play? Should I talk about this? Should I tell Tucker? Are people going to clip this up and make fun of me? What is this going to impact my standing with the administration and all the serious people in the world? Are they going to—none of that comes up.
All that came up was, is my family going to be okay? That’s the only thing that I could think about. So then you go from there. Well, are they—have you loved them? Do they know you love them? Do you tell them that every day? Are you saying your prayers every night? Because tomorrow’s not promised. I could be in a car right now, flip over and die in a second. People die all the time in a second. We take it for granted.
The Loss of Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk’s dead. Charlie Kirk is dead. And that hurt me, too. That hurt me bad. I haven’t cried so much in the past three months in my whole life. And I don’t care to admit I’ve cried about it. You know, I think that’s a problem people have, is—oh, you know, we don’t—it’s like, I don’t know. Whatever a real man is, I think I’m pretty high up there. And I’ve been crying more in the past few months than I have my whole life combined.
And you realize Charlie just died. He just went and went to work. He’s dead. His kids don’t see him. They’re not with them at Christmas. We’re on the Internet arguing about Tyler Robinson. And was it the Mossad, or was it that—Charlie’s kids, they don’t have a Christmas with them anymore. They don’t have a Christmas with them.
Erica goes home to an empty house, and then she goes on the Internet, and everybody’s just saying the worst things in the world about her. She’s not even my friend, but she’s a mom. There’s the worst things in the world about her. And they had Christmas without their dad. What’s that like? What’s it like to have Christmas without your dad? A lot of people go through that.
So do my—do my kids. Now, this might be our last Christmas together, but I’m going to be here. I’m going to try to make it home. But if I don’t make it home, you know I love you. You know I love you. You know that you’re my world and that I’m obsessed with you. And they never for a minute—they never for a minute have to wonder, what? Does dad love us? Is dad—you know, is dad good to us? No.
Nobody. My life. I text my friends the most dopey sh*t, you know? Love you, man. Just thinking about you. Just thinking about you. I never, never did that before. Just the dopiest, most sentimental stuff that you can imagine. Hope you’re okay.
Think about all your friends you have. All of us have these mad friends. We’re also, you know, mainly me. When’s the last time somebody just like, hey, bro, I hope you’re okay. Just thinking about you. That’s nothing. I’m not—not poetry, but I just—oh, I haven’t talked to this guy in a couple months. I’m sure he’s doing fine. Maybe he’s not doing fine, though. Maybe he’s not. Why do we think everybody’s doing fine?
TUCKER CARLSON: Right?
MIKE CERNOVICH: Why? Why? That’s our delusion. That’s the fault. That’s the fallacy. Everybody—the folly which everybody’s doing fine, and then you don’t reach out and then you go, oh, well, I wish I’d have seen it coming, you know. Maybe you would. Maybe you wouldn’t have. So I meditate on death. I think about every day. Every day I meditate on it, and it gives me a sense of calming. If that makes any sense.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s exactly right. Avoiding death is what makes you neurotic. Facing it makes you calm, gives you peace. Because that’s the root of all fear, obviously, is the fear of dying.
MIKE CERNOVICH: The fear of death, and the fear of status, and the fear of the egoistic attachments that we all to our names.
Transformation in Relationships
TUCKER CARLSON: How did it affect your relationship with your wife?
MIKE CERNOVICH: Just I’m obsessed with my wife. I’m just a simp for my wife. Which, if you—you’d have to ask her, but I don’t know that she would have said that was true, you know, or maybe necessarily early on. All I think about is my wife and kids. If I make money, I don’t even care. I just get rid of it, you know, get it to them. What people are like, aren’t you worried about your wife leaving you or your kids? I’m like, I don’t care. I mean, I really—I don’t care.
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, signing all your money over to your wife.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah. Yeah, you should. Yeah. I mean, I did.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s the right thing.
MIKE CERNOVICH: No, there’s a lot of peace in that, too.
TUCKER CARLSON: Totally.
MIKE CERNOVICH: It’s like you’re getting a blood from a turnip come after me, and I’ve lived it. You’re very, very disappointed when you start tip me upside down, and maybe you get a few quarters out of the pocket. So it’s made me just—it’s completely obsessed with her and the kids. It’s made me—I’ve gotten much nicer, even online, than I used to be, you know, because you just think so much of it is I’m not perfect, you know, because people can—I mean, my God, not even—I’m not even—I wouldn’t say I’m good, let alone perfect.
But you just realize maybe that guy’s just having a bad day, you know? The guy cut you off.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.
MIKE CERNOVICH: I’m mad. I’m honking at him. I’m going to fight. Maybe that guy’s kid’s dead, dude. Maybe his kid is in the hospital. And now I’m just adding. So I’m always about—I don’t want to add to the trauma burden of the world. What? Who knows what other people—and that doesn’t mean I’m going to let people walk all over me and everything, but who knows what people are going through, man, you just—you never know.
So I think—I think about that all the time. I don’t have any doubts that my kids know where we stand, my friends know where we stand, the people who aren’t my friends know where we stand. Because I don’t have time for fake love and fake pleasantries and everything. It’s either—it’s real or it’s not. It’s not real. There’s just no point. Why even—why even go into that middle space?
And I just—my love for my dad, which was always very strong, was even stronger. My empathy for my dad and my mom, you know, because you think about what—you always think about what they did right to you. Because we’re the center of our own story, because you have to be, or you can’t live. I’m not diminishing that.
But then once you start thinking about what happened to them, what happened to them that got them right here, and then suddenly you’re like, yeah, man, whatever. My problems are—my problems are what I went through as I went through. But everybody—everybody has gone through that. Everybody’s going through something.
Divine Communion Through Empathy
And then—and then as that expands, I think that’s meaning, and I think that’s how you connect more with God, because that’s the divine communion. Empathy. You know, empathy is a part of the divine communion. That’s why charity is part of the divine communion. That’s why these are all taught by Christ. Even people who don’t believe in him see the logic in it. It’s just communion with the divine.
And the better we are to each other, the more in touch we are with the divine. And the more that we fight and we bicker and we squabble, and in the case of war, we kill each other, the further away we are from God.
TUCKER CARLSON: You know Scott Adams.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Quite well.
TUCKER CARLSON: He’s facing death, it sounds like.
MIKE CERNOVICH: No, no. That’s why I’ve been crying. I’ve been telling you. I just been crying. You know, I saw some video. Shawna sent me a video, and he’s like, you know, a lot of people don’t know this, but when I was just starting off, Mike Cernovich really helped me out and really boosted me, which is true. But I was like, he’s on his deathbed. He’s thinking about other people, and I’m wrapped up in my own.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, aren’t we all?
Processing Grief and Emotion
MIKE CERNOVICH: Every day. Yeah. So, you know, Charlie’s dead. We’re all getting older. There’s tragedy all around us every day, and you want to start thinking about your own life and not that we don’t already.
So with Scott Adams dying, that’s a huge loss. I was again, I’d leave my house because I was crying. I was like, not that I’m afraid to cry in front of my kids, but they’d be like, “Why are you crying, dad? Who’s…” You know, it’s just like, I just got to take a walk.
And I’m just walking, and I’m like, which is another thing, too, I liked about that. I couldn’t cry before. I hold it in, you know? You hold it in, and once you get good at working with the plant medicine, you learn it’s just a wave, man. It’s just a wave. Let the waves flow.
Why are we so afraid? Like, why are we so afraid to cry by ourselves? Right? Like, why? If you’re in a room by yourself and things are surfacing, whether you’re with the plants or not with the plants, who’s there to look at you other than God? What are you afraid of?
TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know. What are we afraid of? That is scary.
MIKE CERNOVICH: That’s the ego in us that keeps us alive, but also enslaves us. That’s the part that desires the illusion of control. So when you’re letting things go, you have to surrender control for a minute. You do have to lose your sh*t for a minute. And then that part of the egoism wants to fight against that and wants to feel like, “I don’t do this.”
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Be dignified.
MIKE CERNOVICH: We don’t do this. Like, we don’t cry. It’s like, well, I mean, I don’t think it’s healthy to cry around your wife all the time. Right.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s not right.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Not a good idea.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
MIKE CERNOVICH: I’m not saying walk around and, like, we’re…
TUCKER CARLSON: Don’t cry in front of your wife all the time.
MIKE CERNOVICH: We’re weepy. You know, we’re weepy all the time.
TUCKER CARLSON: But that’s a recipe for celibacy.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah. Yeah. That’s not an ideal thing. But, like, when my wife had a miscarriage, I cried the hell out of that. I just, in my office by myself, and I cried. And then, you know what I noticed? I start talking to people, or I wrote about it, they’re like, “Oh, I had a miscarriage.” I was like, why does nobody talk about this?
TUCKER CARLSON: I know.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Can’t talk about it. That felt like a kid died. I was not even pro-life at that point. I was like, yeah, politically, kind of am. And when we had that miscarriage, my kid died. My kid is dead. And from that, I was like, oh, pro-life. You know, I just was an idiot. I didn’t really understand.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s such a common story, though. You hear from people. Yeah, but people don’t talk about it. But you’re right.
Masking Pain and Spiritual Warfare
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah. That’s another thing. And then everybody’s walking around, holding everything in. They’re like, “Why are people getting drunk? Why are people doing opioids? Why are people…” Why do you think? Because they’re just, like, holding on to it, and then they want to mask the feelings as they bubble up.
So they find alcohol or they find drugs or they find pornography or… The devil loves that. That’s the thing, too, where I go back and forth on the demonic thing with ayahuasca.
I was telling a friend about this, actually. I told a friend, and he goes, “What are you doing this weekend?” I was like, “Oh, I got, I’m doing some fasting, and I’m going to do ayahuasca retreat.” He’s like, “Ayahuasca? That sounds dangerous and scary.”
I go, “Where are you going?” He’s like, “I’m going to Vegas.” And I go, “That sounds dangerous and scary to me.” Well, you’re going to be amongst the drunks, and you might get hit by a drunk driver, and you might drink too much and find yourself in a strange bed. That, to me, that’s where the devil wants you.
TUCKER CARLSON: I agree.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Because if you start looking with the ayahuasca thing, even having some experience with it, I’m talking myself out of it. Until the minute that I drink the tea. Up until that very second that I drink the tea, I’m thinking of every excuse in the world to not drink it because I don’t want to drink it. I don’t want to do it.
But if 10 years ago, you said, “Hey, do you want to go take some shots of vodka?” And other things, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, that sounds like a great time.”
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.
MIKE CERNOVICH: So then you have to, that’s where the discernment comes in. And that’s where it becomes a heavier question. Well, why is it that I want to do things that we know are a sin, that we know are damaging? And I want to, I’m excited for that, but I don’t want to do this thing that is, like, demonic with all of my being. I do not.
If the… I do not want to ever drink ayahuasca for the rest of my life. I do not want to. That doesn’t mean I won’t, but I don’t want to. But why though? Why don’t I want to?
Well, it’s because of the spiritual awakening or the spiritual reckoning that happens and the realizations which fundamentally I think have made me more, again, I don’t want to say a good person, but it certainly made me change my life and live differently.
TUCKER CARLSON: Have there been any downsides?
Spiritual Confusion and Transformation
MIKE CERNOVICH: You got to be comfortable with spiritual confusion, which we won. So I have a certain, there’s a certain like weight now that I… You ever hear that expression, like the unbearable lightness of being?
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.
MIKE CERNOVICH: And it’s like very California woo-woo thing. And everybody’s all about, “Lighten up, man, you know, chill out. You should like learn to relax.” And I do.
And a friend of mine who found the medicine after I did, remember we were hanging out, he came out to one cigar and he goes, “Mike,” I was like, “Yeah, what’s up, brother? What’s up?” He goes, “I don’t know how to say this.” He goes, “But since drinking ayahuasca,” and he’s a Christian, he plays in his band, you know, he plays guitar in a band at church every Sunday. He goes, “I don’t know how to say it.”
I go, “Oh, you’re like really spiritually confused, right?” He goes, “Yes.” And I go, “What do you think? I like, know the answer.” He’s like… He goes, “All I’m thinking about is like, am I doing the right thing?”
There’s a confusion, but like in a good way where I think that a lot of people think, “Well, I’m a Christian, I’m saved. I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. Once saved, always saved.” And then I’ll just sort of live my life and maybe go to church and try to be a good person or whatever. But you feel like, “I’m a, you know, I’m a Christian, like I’ve check the box.”
Whereas when you with the medicine, I think it’s the opposite, where you’re just on any moment, you’re just waging against whatever sin, the darkness, and you’re just, I don’t know, man. I believe, but I don’t really know what’s going to happen. I hope I’m doing the right things.
And that level of spiritual confusion, I think is not meant for everyone. So I don’t think most people are. I think almost nobody should drink ayahuasca. I think almost no one should. I think it’s only something that if a person feels like they’re going to do it anyway and no amount of persuasion for me is going to work, then that’s something to talk about.
But I don’t think people should dabble in this kind of stuff really. But if you’re a vet and you’re like looking at the bottom of a bottle of Jack Daniels, you got a gun next to you, we skip you to Mexico, you know, let’s get you to Peru. Like, that’s a whole different…
TUCKER CARLSON: Have you ever known anyone who’s been made worse by it?
The Risks and Rewards
MIKE CERNOVICH: Worse is a hard way of putting it because people go through phases. So I’ve… What happens with some people, unfortunately, is because you are getting, quote unquote, like downloads from the universe. People do kind of chase that download of the universe dragon versus, like the hard work of living in life, right?
So drinking ayahuasca, once you kind of have a hang of it, it’s never easy, but it’s like you put on your spacesuit and you kind of know, you know, you kind of know, like you drink it and you can feel it moving through you. And your hands start to feel like you have carpal tunnel. And right when you feel like you can sort of stretch out, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, the medicine’s about to hit.”
And you can’t direct the experience in an active way, but you sort of know what you’re getting into the first couple times. God help you.
And what people will do then is rather than undertake the hard work of being alive, the hard work is here. The realizations that I had change how I live here, but the hard work is still like, I don’t know. This is a great talk. I’m going to leave here. I’m like, “I think that was a good talk.”
And then I’m going to be like, wrapped up about some business thing, you know, or mad about something that somebody did to me, or wondering about some uncertain thing. And then the demons come in and kind of steal your joy.
So the hard work is here in planet Earth. Why are we here? That again, goes to the meaning of life question. Like take the Garden of Eden story, for example. Even if it’s not real, why was it written?
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, if it’s not real. It was written as a metaphor, I suppose.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Why though?
TUCKER CARLSON: To tell us about the nature of God and man.
MIKE CERNOVICH: That’s one. Yeah, but I think it’s, this is not our home.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, right.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Which is, we know we don’t. We know we don’t belong here. Right? The Garden of Eden is, whatever this is. This is not like we were, whether we were cast out of Eden because we listened to the serpent and we rejected God. Whether that’s literal, that’s a metaphor. The underlying feeling is that we are aliens on this planet.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
MIKE CERNOVICH: However we got here is a different question.
TUCKER CARLSON: The New Testament says that a lot.
MIKE CERNOVICH: And we’re just, like, stuck in these, like, bodies that don’t want to cooperate and that want to lead us to things that we, on a spiritual level, maybe don’t want to do.
So the only real downside that I’ve seen from people who have done the plant medicine, although there are bad stories, like, they’re like, I… After, I had a really big night, and the guy said, “You know, if you’re thinking about leaving your wife, call me first.” And I go, “I love my life more than ever.” I was like, “It actually will be the opposite.”
He goes, “Okay.” He goes, “But you had a big night.” So what happens is, a lot of times people have a big night. The facilitator or shaman guy isn’t good, or he’s fly by night, and you’re just like, “Oh, I realized I’m not living the way I’m supposed to.” And then they just, like, blow up their life.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. I know someone who did that.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah. So that is 100% a risk. And that’s why I’m always hesitant to talk about it, because I don’t want to seem like I’m glamorizing it. I want to, like, when I talk about ayahuasca, I want it to sound kind of like, foreboding.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Maybe you shouldn’t do this. You probably shouldn’t do this. You probably shouldn’t. You might just blow up your whole life. You probably shouldn’t do it to avoid people going in and saying, “It’s like, no, bro, you didn’t want… You were just bored.” Right? You were just bored, and now you, like, destroyed your whole life.
And the real work is the homework. The homework is this. What we got to do here. The downloads in the universe might feel great at the time, or you might feel like you have all this insight and connection to a super intelligence, a superpower, but you’re still back here on planet Earth. So why don’t you spend more time here in this body and planet Earth and figuring out the best way to live your life?
The Spiritual Dimension of Modern Chaos
TUCKER CARLSON: Has the experience made you more aware of the spiritual realm around you day to day?
MIKE CERNOVICH: I see everything as spiritual realm.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
MIKE CERNOVICH: I see everything as being interests, entities trying to act upon humanity in some kind of cosmic war that we don’t really understand. But for whatever reason, humans are a very important part of it.
Now my belief again is the orthodox Christian part, which is like, I accept the orthodox Christianity story as a true one. But I’m just trying not to be like, I’m a priest because God knows, go to Josiah Trenum or someone if you want a priest. Stay far away from me. People ask me religious questions. I’m like, get away from me and find your side, Trenum.
TUCKER CARLSON: I feel the same way.
MIKE CERNOVICH: So far away from me.
TUCKER CARLSON: Please, no standing.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Get away. So I’m just saying, my own belief is that God created man. We have bodies. The demons envy us because they can’t be satiated. They don’t have bodies. They hate us when they attack us. That’s their revenge against God. So the demons are constantly trying to use us.
TUCKER CARLSON: They can’t be satiated. Why do you say that?
MIKE CERNOVICH: Because they’re floating around in a spirit. They’ve been denied bodies so that they are roaming around like in a zombie kind of state.
TUCKER CARLSON: I always thought that one of the hallmarks of hell on earth is the inability to be satiated. Satisfied? Full.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: Whether it’s eating bad food or having the wrong kind of sex, it’s like, it’s never enough. Or drugs or alcohol or insomnia.
The Demonic War Against Humanity
MIKE CERNOVICH: Yeah, imagine. Yeah. So they’re walking around in insomnia and they hate us. They hate humans and they want to hurt us. And they more importantly want us to hurt each other, to harm God. That’s how they see us.
Because the demons think they’re going to win. Remember, if you’re a Christian, we say, well, we know how the story ends. God wins in the end. Right. The demons don’t believe that, though. We believe that they don’t believe it.
So they believe that they can turn us against each other. They can get us to hurt each other. They can, like a lot of demons, enter people through traumatic experiences.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
MIKE CERNOVICH: They believe. They believe they’re going to win. This is not in their minds. They are the winners. In the end, they’re going to win. So they want to use us to get us to harm each other because they see that as harming God more than anything else.
So we’re constantly being acted upon. So I’m constantly praying for discernment. Discernment, discernment, discernment, discernment. Am I being manipulated? Am I being led astray? Because, I mean, on a political level, I’ve been played before by people, by sources not knowing it.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, me too.
MIKE CERNOVICH: And then I find out a lot. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, when people tell me things like, “Oh, here’s the truth about the Venezuela raid,” or “Here’s the truth about Israel,” or “Here’s the truth about Palestine,” it’s like, discernment. Am I just being played?
Because everybody, once you, especially at your level. That’s why I was telling you guys earlier, like, I thank the Lord above that I am not you, that I’m not Russell Brand, that I am not Tim Pool, that I am not any of you guys, because I’m so weak and pathetic. I couldn’t imagine if I had your guys.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, it’s not.
MIKE CERNOVICH: You can say that. You can brush it off, but I.
TUCKER CARLSON: Have so many dogs and children that it’s like I don’t even notice, but I make myself not notice.
MIKE CERNOVICH: But.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, but I think anyone who’s in a position where other people listen to him is under particularly fierce attack.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Constant. No, just imagine the text JD gets.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s unimaginable.
The Pressure of Public Influence
MIKE CERNOVICH: Just unreal. Because even sometimes I’m like, ah, you know, I’ll see something you said, like, I don’t agree with that. And I go, man, I’m not going to be another guy texting Tucker, nagging him about something.
TUCKER CARLSON: Please do.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Nagging him about something. But no. So there is the risk that, as you’ve seen happen, a person is kind of an ayahuasca tourist. They go in, they go, “Oh, my whole life has been a lie,” and therefore, I’m just going to blow up my whole life. Don’t do that.
And if the person you’re with is not, if the shaman or whatever, the facilitator is not telling you, “Don’t do that,” then you’re in the wrong place.
But other than that, and people getting caught in the trap of downloads. I’ve seen the biggest, baddest men on the planet that just want to hug their kids, and they went from PTSD and staring off into the void and drinking and fighting with their wives and riding motorcycles too fast just for a rush and, because frankly, maybe it is a death wish.
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course it is.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Right? And then you take away responsibility because you go, “Oh, I just got in a crash. I didn’t kill myself like some pussy, you know, I just got in a wreck.” But really, they’re trying to kill themselves and just become like, it’s actually pretty, it’s actually changed my view on a lot of this.
“Real men don’t cry.” And you see all this bravado. I’m like, dude, I’ve cried with the Delta Force guy. I’ve cried with the Seal Team 6 guy. You are not more, whatever your definition of manly is, you are not more. If you ever see Marcus Capone is like this. You are not more manly than Marcus Capone or D.J. Shipley or any of these other guys.
So at the very least, I do hope it, I guess, again, I don’t want people to listen to this to go to ayahuasca. It’s an immense, that would be immensely damaging for somebody to do that based on what I’m saying to me. I don’t want him to do it. That wouldn’t be a nice thing to do to me.
But I do hope that people can say, “Yeah, what’s the big deal? I’m by myself in a room and I’m praying and I cry. Why am I holding it in? Who cares?”
TUCKER CARLSON: Right?
MIKE CERNOVICH: And then find that.
TUCKER CARLSON: Find that ego is the reason. I think you’re exactly right.
Understanding Our Chaotic Moment
So, last question. We were in a period of a huge change period, of course, and one of the qualities of it is chaos. It’s just a chaotic moment. It’s hard to understand, especially if you’re, you know, 50 and you’ve been watching this stuff your whole life. It’s like all of a sudden, this is a departure. How much of that chaos is spiritual?
MIKE CERNOVICH: It always has been. I mean, you remember that song, “Sympathy For The Devil,” Rolling Stones?
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.
MIKE CERNOVICH: What if that’s not a song? What if that’s real? Right?
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it is real.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Right. So in my view, the Jacobin Terror.
TUCKER CARLSON: The Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, what’s happening in Ukraine. Yeah, it’s all the same.
MIKE CERNOVICH: It’s all part of the same strain. So I think that we, because, again, you’re born into a certain period of time, and then we tend to overweight the time that we’re in, and we see it maybe in a different color than it should be.
We’re not like, your son isn’t getting drafted in the Vietnam War. We’re not getting drafted in the World War II. We’re not getting drafted into World War I. I think that in terms of, even though he’s kind of a lamester, Steven Pinker is like, “Better Angels.” I think we were on the trend towards a better world, and we’ve seen that that’s been upended, but that we’re still in a good time.
And what we do want to have is our, as our North Star is preserving order, knowing that we’re going to have conflict. But if we can find some kind of allyship or alliance, and that means everybody has to pull their own weight, then we shouldn’t give in to the rancor and the infighting.
And I used to be an infighter and infighting a lot, and I’ve cut down on that by at least half.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a good New Year’s resolution. Mike Cernovich, that didn’t go in the direction I anticipated was much better and more interesting and deeper. Thank you.
MIKE CERNOVICH: Thank you. My pleasure.
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