Tucker Carlson interviews CJ Hopkins about his banned book on COVID-era authoritarianism
Tucker Carlson interviews playwright and author CJ Hopkins about his book The Rise of the New Normal Reich.
Summary
Tucker Carlson interviews CJ Hopkins, an American playwright and political satirist who has lived in Berlin for nearly 25 years, about his book The Rise of the New Normal Reich — a collection of essays documenting what Hopkins describes as the authoritarian transformation of Western societies during the COVID era. Hopkins recounts how he was criminally prosecuted by German authorities for publishing the book and posting tweets that used its cover art — a swastika obscured by a COVID mask — as political commentary. He was initially acquitted, then convicted on appeal in a trial held under anti-terrorist security procedures. In November 2025, German police conducted a dawn raid on his home and launched a new criminal investigation, this time targeting the book itself. Hopkins argues that the COVID lockdowns were not merely a public health response but a deliberate message to populations that had rebelled against the global system through Brexit and the election of Donald Trump — a demonstration that democratic rights can be suspended at will. He situates this within a broader argument that global capitalism is evolving into a new, unprecedented form of totalitarianism that cannot announce itself as such, and that the criminalization of dissent is a core feature of that evolution.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Tucker Carlson: Now, if there's one hallmark of totalitarianism of the 1930s, it's banning books. Book burning. Remember that? We're against it. That couldn't possibly happen now. Oh, it happens a lot. More than it happened in the 1930s. In fact, we're going to talk to a man whose book became a bestseller and then was banned by the government. His crime: he accurately described what once-free western societies have become.
Western freedom is only the semblance of the real thing. Sure, you're free to watch Netflix and smoke weed and doom scroll and order DoorDash and live alone, racking up credit card debt in your apartment that you don't own. But if you step out of line and notice what's happening around you, your freedom evaporates instantly and you could find yourself in handcuffs. We watched that happen in 2020. People who challenged the official story, refused to comply, were censored, treated like a despised, hated minority group, ostracized, punished.
CJ Hopkins documented all of that as it happened in a series of essays collected in his book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich. We are proud to bring this book back because it was banned. It was kicked off Amazon, was banned in multiple countries in Europe. And so we're publishing a new edition of it. I wrote the foreword to it, available now on TuckerCarlsonBooks.com. We operate on the assumption — because it's true — that authorities only censor the truth, and they only censor it when it threatens their power. We specialize in bringing back banned books. We're proud to do that. CJ Hopkins's observations really resonate now six years later. He joins us for a conversation about the book and what led him to write it. CJ Hopkins, thank you very much for doing this.
CJ Hopkins: Thanks so much.
Background: From Brooklyn Playwright to Berlin Dissident
Tucker Carlson: You have an amazing life trajectory, which our viewers can read about, but just to summarize it: you begin life in America, in Miami. You wind up in New York as a playwright, very much a figure of the left, I think, culturally and politically. Then you wind up in Berlin — almost 25 years you've lived in Europe, really since the Iraq War — but on the left. And then COVID happens, and then the next thing you know we're reading about you getting arrested by the German anti-racist authorities for something, even though you're not a racist. So what happened? What was the pivot point that got you from your previous life to wherever you are now?
CJ Hopkins: I think it's COVID. Yeah, that's the one. I mean, my life was just going along as it had been until the COVID measures got rolled out in March and April of 2020.
Tucker Carlson: So early.
CJ Hopkins: Yeah. And I had been writing my satirical columns. I had been at that for about four years, covering the whole first Trump administration and the establishment's reaction to that. When the COVID stuff started, I at first didn't take it very seriously. I wrote a few humorous columns. I just thought it was a massive overreaction and that it would pass. And then it started getting really serious. One of the first things that I did — I think I was still in shock at the time — I compiled a 257-tweet thread on Twitter. It was still Twitter then. Just collecting the mainstream media news stories and headlines that were being pumped out. This is when they rolled out the "new normal" — which is what I call it. People may remember that phrase. A lot of people think I made it up, and I didn't. It was put out by the establishment. That thread still exists. People can look at it. I think a lot of people have forgotten how authoritarian it was, how immediately authoritarian it was.
By the end of April I was quite alarmed by what was happening.
Tucker Carlson: You were alarmed, but for some reason the people you'd been living and working with, and thought you shared a common worldview with — a lot of them were not alarmed. Was that weird?
CJ Hopkins: Well, they were alarmed, but they were alarmed differently. They were alarmed about what they were being told was an apocalyptic plague, basically. Again, people forget — in the early days, I think it was the World Health Organization that actually came out and said this virus has a 3.4% death rate, which was complete nonsense, of course, but that's a really scary number. And the way the official propaganda was all rolled out in the beginning was aimed at terrifying people. And so people were terrified.
Tucker Carlson: Why were you not terrified?
CJ Hopkins: Because I was actually looking at the data and the numbers that were coming out, and paying attention to the propaganda. It's what I do. When this messaging started, I couldn't help but look at it and say, "Okay, does it line up with what we're learning about this supposedly novel virus? Does it make any sense?" And it really didn't.
The Cult Atmosphere and Social Pressure to Conform
Tucker Carlson: So you start to say this publicly in your column and on Twitter. You're trying to apply the standards of science to what you're seeing in the media, and there's a huge disconnect between those two. And so you start to say this — what do the people around you respond with?
CJ Hopkins: Well, one of the first things that happened — I think it was actually one of my writing students who went kind of nuts on social media and was referring to people who were questioning and criticizing the narrative that was being rolled out. She started referring to them as Nazis, neo-Nazis, and so on. And I kind of took her to task, and immediately she responded by calling me an anti-semite and a far-right extremist.
Tucker Carlson: Were you?
CJ Hopkins: Yes, of course — no, I was not. This is an example of something that was happening on a much broader level in society, at the same time that the official propaganda was being rolled out. What was also being rolled out as part of the narrative was that anyone who is questioning the official propaganda is some kind of far-right extremist. There's no valid reason to do this. Back at the time, there were those two doctors — I forget where they were in the States — and Jay Bhattacharya was coming out, and respectable people, people with credentials, were coming out and challenging and questioning the official propaganda, and they were being delegitimized and demonized and in some cases already censored.
Tucker Carlson: What was the experience — if you spent a lot of your life as a playwright in Brooklyn — what's it like to be called a far-right extremist?
CJ Hopkins: It was kind — I don't know how to describe it. One of the first pieces that got a lot of attention that I wrote — it's in the book — is called "The Covidian Cult." My experience of it really felt like I, and those of us who were criticizing or asking questions, were suddenly in a cult, surrounded by cult members who were pressuring us to conform to the official narrative of the cult, which obviously blatantly didn't make any sense.
I don't know if you've ever spent any time around people who are in a cult —
Tucker Carlson: Oh, yes.
CJ Hopkins: I remember back in Florida, before I left Florida, I went to a big gathering. My girlfriend's mother at the time was hooked up with some Maharishi or something, and I went to one of their big gatherings and I had to run from the room because of the energy in the room. I explained it to people. I said, "You've got to understand — in that room, the reality being generated by all these people is that they believe that little guy up on stage is God." And so that's the actual reality being generated in that room.
Tucker Carlson: When you say you had to run from the energy, can you describe that?
CJ Hopkins: It just felt overwhelming. And dark. To me, dark. An authoritarian energy. But it was more that — I don't know how philosophical we want to get — in a sense, there's physical material reality, and then there's a reality which is something that is a collective and communal consensus that we all participate in. And we don't notice our reality. When you get into a cult, there's a separate reality. And that reality is no longer in line with the reality that we take for granted all the time. So you can become much more aware of it if you're not a part of it.
You can feel the energy of this alternate reality that's being created by belief. In the early days of COVID, I was very much aware of that. Suddenly everyone was walking around with medical-looking masks on their faces. People in Berlin were following orders. They were observing the social distancing and all of this. And to me, as someone who did not believe the official narrative that they were all following, it felt like I was surrounded by cult members who were performing all of these ritualistic behaviors that really only made sense in their fictional reality. Does that make sense?
Tucker Carlson: It certainly does.
Life in Berlin Under COVID Measures
Tucker Carlson: For those who weren't living in Berlin during COVID and can't really remember what happened, just paint a word picture quickly of what life in Berlin was like during COVID.
CJ Hopkins: Oh God, it's even hard to remember at all. It's all in the book. The measures went into effect pretty quickly. The government actually passed legislation — it was called the Infektionsschutzgesetz, the Infection Protection Act — and Tucker, essentially it's a new enabling act. If people will remember the Enabling Act of 1933, which is a large part of how the Nazis took over power — they passed legislation and said, "We have a state of emergency, with all of these communists running around in the streets and the society is coming apart, and we need to pass this emergency legislation which will allow us to suspend the constitution and rule by decree." This is 1933.
And in 2020, the German Bundestag passed legislation that said, "We have a state of emergency. There's a virus that is attacking society. And so we need to be able to suspend the constitution and rule by decree." And they did this.
There were huge protests. There was a gigantic protest in Berlin in August of 2020. People may remember Bobby Kennedy was there and gave a big speech — just I don't know how many people, a million people in the street, hundreds of thousands —
Tucker Carlson: He was attacked as an anti-semite for this.
CJ Hopkins: Of course, immediately. And people may remember the storming of the Reichstag. This was actually a dress rehearsal for January 6th.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah.
CJ Hopkins: And a lot of people don't know this. The main protest was on the big street — the Straße des 17. Juni in Berlin, that runs from the Brandenburg Gate back to the Siegessäule, the victory tower. This is the huge street and this is where all of the demonstrators, the protesters were — the main body of it. Apart from that, detached from that, was the Reichstag building, which is over to the side. A separate protest took place there. This protest was permitted by the German authorities. They granted the permit to an ex-member of the NPD, which was the neo-Nazi party, the now-banned neo-Nazi party. So they granted a protest permit to this ex-neo-Nazi, and there was a small gathering there outside of the Reichstag. And the German police, which normally guards the Reichstag pretty well, they all pulled back hundreds of yards behind the protest and left the Reichstag unguarded. And so this group of wackos in front of the Reichstag says, "There's nobody guarding the Reichstag." And they go up the steps.
Tucker Carlson: Are you serious?
CJ Hopkins: I am absolutely serious. This is documented. It's in the book. And the mainstream German media happened to be right there at the Reichstag. And so when these people came running up the steps, the whole narrative, the entire news report was: the crazy COVID deniers have attacked the Reichstag, trying to overthrow — well, since everything is World War II, a lot of people are aware that this is not the first totalitarian movement that's used attacks on the Reichstag to seize power.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah.
CJ Hopkins: You would think that would be like, "Okay, let's leave the Reichstag out of this." I don't mean to insult the Germans or anything, but they're not big on subtlety.
Tucker Carlson: It's like, we'll do the Reichstag fire again. But seriously — this is documented — and I had no idea that even happened.
CJ Hopkins: I wrote it up as, to me, quite obviously a dress rehearsal for January 6th. When January 6th happened, I was like, "There it is again. It's the same thing."
Tucker Carlson: They did it in Brazil. The same thing.
CJ Hopkins: Yeah. But in any event, Tucker, they passed this new enabling act. And from then on — I mean, it was the most horrifying, heartbreaking thing that I've been through in my life. Berlin, you know, people think of Berlin as this bohemian, wild city —
Tucker Carlson: Beautiful city.
CJ Hopkins: And it transformed virtually overnight into this pathologized, fascistic society where literally everyone was wearing masks everywhere. They were robotically following all the social distancing directions. There were police guarding the outdoor markets to make sure that no one was going to the outdoor market without a mask on.
I was pulled out of a grocery store pretty early over a mask protest, because I thought it was ridiculous. We already knew it was an airborne respiratory virus and everybody's going to get it whatever it is. I was rebelling. I actually made a mask out of a paper bag. I took a paper bag and I cut eye holes and a little mouth thing, and I wrote a protest message on the paper bag: Befehl ist Befehl. It's German for "orders are orders." It's the famous Nuremberg defense — we're just following orders. And so I went into the grocery store with this paper bag on my head, and the grocery store clerks completely freaked out. "What are you doing? You can't do this. You need to wear a mask." I said, "I'm wearing a mask." "No, no, this is a paper bag. You have to wear a mask." I said, "My mask is just as good as your mask." "You have to leave or we're going to call the police." They called the police. I think it was two or three armed police who pulled me out of the grocery store. That's when I realized how serious it was going to be.
COVID as a Response to the Populist Uprising
Tucker Carlson: Can I ask you to pause there and put this in the context that you explained this morning at breakfast, which I thought was fascinating. Just to summarize your views as you explained them to me in one sentence: you lived in New York, you knew Trump, you were never bedazzled by Trump, you always thought he was buffoonish, but you had sympathy for Trump's voters because they were the working class that you'd spent your life as a leftist thinking about and hoping to represent. So you saw COVID as kind of part of the response to what was in effect a populist rebellion. Can you flesh that out a tiny bit?
CJ Hopkins: Sure. I started writing political satire back in 2016 because I became interested in this rising populist pushback against what I see as the global system that we all live under and have been living under since the end of the Cold War. As you said, I come from the left. But I became interested in this populist pushback that led to Brexit and led to Trump. And then for years I wrote satirical columns. It was so easy — just the hysterical overreaction, and the establishment trying to demonize not just Trump. I mean, Trump is much less interesting to me than the people who were voting for him and who voted for Brexit and who were forming right-populist parties all over Europe as a reaction to what this evolving system was doing to their societies.
So I watched for four years, from 2016 to 2020, the system, the establishment responding to this populist uprising, trying to put it down, trying to demonize everyone who was involved in it. And trying to suppress it. And it didn't work. It was still there. It was still going. And then it rolled right into COVID.
A point that I made over and over during the COVID years: people talk about lockdowns. A lockdown — where does that term come from? It comes from prison. A lockdown. You lock everyone down when the prisoners are having a riot, when they're rebelling. And the point of it is to remind them, "Hey, you're in a prison." To me, that's the way — and I'm not trying to reduce the whole COVID event to this — but broadly, this was the message. It was like, "Hey, those democratic rights that you think that you have — you can exercise your democratic rights, you've got free speech, you can do all this, go to the mall, watch Netflix and everything — but if you step out of line a little too far and do crazy things like leave the European Union or elect Donald Trump president, well, we can take those rights away from you in a heartbeat and remind you exactly who is in charge and who has the power."
That's the way I started reading the COVID event very early, and I read it that way all the way through.
Tucker Carlson: And if you're running a federal government that's got millions of employees — the largest institution in the world — and you want to eliminate from its ranks anyone who may cause you problems, who's thinking independently or has a disobedient cast of mind, then requiring a COVID shot that doesn't actually prevent COVID is a pretty easy way to identify them. So everyone who turns it down, you get rid of them immediately. It's like the perfect purge. Kind of brilliant.
CJ Hopkins: You asked me about Berlin, and there's so much that happened. They literally imposed a social segregation system based on people's compliance with vaccination. By the end of it, they called it a lockdown of the unvaccinated. I don't think that happened in the US, but it happened in Germany and other places in Europe. In Germany, I literally — the only place I was allowed to go in society was to the grocery store to buy food, and I had to do that with a mask on my face. People who were not vaccinated, who didn't have vaccination papers — we couldn't go to restaurants, we couldn't go out to any films or museums or any type of public building. We couldn't go into stores. We were completely segregated from society.
Tucker Carlson: Did you have to wear a badge?
CJ Hopkins: I joked about this in my columns. No, it was the reverse. They were wearing the badges on their faces. Those of us without the badges were shut out. One of my favorite cafes, right on the corner — they had big signs out front that you had to show either proof of vaccination or proof that you had recently had the virus and recovered from it within a given period of time.
Tucker Carlson: You had to show your papers.
CJ Hopkins: You had to show your papers. Absolutely. Everywhere. They literally implemented a social segregation system based on vaccination status.
Tucker Carlson: I'm not big on Nazi analogies. I always try and stay away from them. But if you're living in Berlin and there's a fake attack on the Reichstag, there's a suspension of civil liberties because there's a state of emergency, you have to show your papers, people are going around wearing badges on their faces, and then one tiny group of non-compliant people is segregated from public life — it's kind of an inescapable comparison.
CJ Hopkins: Yes. I've never had that hesitancy to go for the Nazi analogies. Obviously —
Tucker Carlson: I'm trying to be polite, but I mean, come on.
CJ Hopkins: But it's Berlin, for God's sakes. There are little plaques in the streets with the names of the families that got pulled out of those buildings and sent to concentration camps. It's Berlin.
I joked about this, but it's actually very serious. Part of the reason I ended up in Berlin when I did is — naively, I feel like an idiot now — but naively I thought to myself, "Okay, given the Germans' history, first with the Nazis and then with the GDR, this is the last place on earth that is ever going to flirt with any kind of fascism or totalitarianism."
Tucker Carlson: I'm sorry to laugh at you, but the process of getting older is the process of discovering you're an idiot. That really is aging.
CJ Hopkins: Exactly. I felt like such an ass. And they went totalitarian in a heartbeat.
Tucker Carlson: A lot of people did, but the Germans have a well-deserved reputation for efficiency. A systematic approach to everything that they do, which is great if you're building Audis, not so great if you're trying to destroy the lives of a hated minority.
The Prosecution: Tweets, Trials, and a Dawn Raid
Tucker Carlson: So at what point did you just say out loud what was obvious?
CJ Hopkins: Early on. I wrote a couple of mostly funny columns in the very beginning, but I think it was still in March and definitely in April of 2020 I was going at it hard. I was saying, look, this is a new form of totalitarianism. And I didn't mean just what was happening during COVID. I meant it as an extension of what had been happening for the four previous years. I just felt like the COVID phase was the lockdown phase — this was the phase where we all get reminded that our rights can be stripped away from us in a heartbeat.
Tucker Carlson: When did you start to get in trouble — not including your grocery store episode?
CJ Hopkins: I don't think I really got in trouble until the first criminal investigation began. I published the book — the second edition of which you just wrote the foreword to — in May of 2022. And what got me in trouble originally was in August of that year. Everything was still in effect in Germany at that time. The Germans that summer were starting to question and ask themselves whether it would be all right to stop with the mask mandates. And most people were saying, "No, no, no. We need to continue to wear the masks forever." And I thought that was insane.
So I put out a couple of tweets and I used the cover art of the book on the tweets. One of the tweets I wrote in German, and it basically said, "Look, these masks are just ideological conformity symbols, and that's all they are. Come to terms with that or get used to wearing them forever." And the second tweet I literally just quoted the health minister of Germany, Karl Lauterbach. He had been quoted in the press saying, "The masks always send out a signal." And I said, "Yes, Karl, that's exactly right. That's what they're for — to send out a signal. It's theater, basically."
Tucker Carlson: As a playwright, you're qualified to make that observation.
CJ Hopkins: Absolutely. So I put these two tweets out and I used the cover artwork from the book. If people don't know — Americans may be more familiar with William Shirer's classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. One of the covers is all black, it's got the red lettering for the title, and there's a little white circle at the bottom with a swastika in it. It's the history of Nazi Germany.
And so my brilliant cover artist Anthony Freda and I said, "Okay, let's steal Shirer's cover. And what we'll do is we'll just stretch a COVID mask over the top of the swastika, so that you have to look at it and say, 'There's a COVID mask — and oh, what's that behind it?'"
Tucker Carlson: Right. Yeah.
CJ Hopkins: So that's the cover art from the book. And I included that in the tweets, and the next thing I know I get a notice from Twitter that says, "Okay, we're censoring your tweets in Germany because they violate Germany's hate speech laws." And so I challenged that and it didn't go anywhere. And then before I knew it, I get a notice from Amazon that says, "We're removing your book from distribution. We're banning your book in Germany." So I wrote back to Amazon. I said, "What are you doing?" And I quoted the law. A lot of people don't understand this — they think there's a Nazi symbol ban in Germany where you're not allowed to use swastikas, and you're not, if you're a Nazi. The whole point of the law is to not have neo-Nazis running around waving swastikas. But of course, Tucker, there are exceptions written into this law. You can teach a history class or show a film or make an artwork. So I quoted this law back to Amazon and said, "It's not violating the law. You can't pull my book from distribution in Germany." And they said, "Oh, that's fine, because now we're going to ban it in Austria and the Netherlands also."
What had happened — and I didn't realize it at the time — was that an element of the whole German censorship network had found the tweets. They had contacted Twitter, contacted Amazon, had the book banned and the tweets censored. They had also contacted Germany's Federal Domestic Intelligence Agency about this, and the Federal Domestic Intelligence Agency passed the case on to the Berlin district prosecutor. And the Berlin prosecutor launched a criminal investigation of me, which eventually — they notified me of it about eight months later — and said, "You're under criminal investigation for disseminating pro-Nazi propaganda."
Tucker Carlson: Okay. And you say, "No, no, I'm sorry. There's been a mistake. I'm actually against Nazis. That's the whole point."
CJ Hopkins: I'm not for Nazis. That's what I'm saying. I went and got a German lawyer, and that's the first thing I suggested. I said, "Could we just write to them and say it's obviously clear that I'm against Nazis? I'm comparing all of this stuff that I don't like and that I think is dangerous to the Nazis. So it couldn't be more obvious."
I went and got a German lawyer. The next thing I know, I get an order of punishment sent to me. So I've already been found guilty and I'm being sentenced to — I forget how many days in jail. And the alternative was a fine of €3,600. It's Germany, so they have a formula: however many days equals however much money in a fine. Anyway, I told my lawyer, "We have to challenge this. I'm not paying this fine. This is completely ridiculous." That is the beginning of my numerous legal troubles.
I mean, for one thing — because everything is irony — you're likening the government of Germany to the Nazis, and they respond by calling you a Nazi and then behaving like Nazis.
Tucker Carlson: Yes. Stop hitting me, they say, as they punch you in the face.
CJ Hopkins: Yeah. We go to trial. The trial was January 2024, I think. I go to trial in district court in Berlin, like a criminal. And the judge hates me, thinks I'm a COVID-denying conspiracy-theorizing COVID denier. I totally forgot that phrase existed. That was the ugliest of all phrases.
Tucker Carlson: And it was not by accident. You talk about people being "deniers" in Germany, and of course it's evoking Holocaust denial, which is the worst thing you can be in Germany.
CJ Hopkins: We go to trial, the judge can't stand me, but I am acquitted because she follows the law. And the law — she says very clearly, "Look, Mr. Hopkins, you're an asshole for doing this, but what you did is not illegal because it falls under — you were protesting what you saw as anti-constitutional activity on the part of the German authorities, and that is allowed." And so I'm acquitted of the charges. I think, "Fantastic. The system works in Germany. I still live in a democratic country under the rule of law. Everything's fine."
And my lawyer stops me afterwards and says, "Oh no. What you don't realize is the prosecutor can appeal your acquittal." I said, "Are you kidding me? That's double jeopardy." He said, "No, in Germany the prosecutor can appeal." And of course they did.
Tucker Carlson: Because there's no other crime in Germany at this point.
CJ Hopkins: Absolutely none. No rapes in the parks, no stabbings, nothing else going on. So they hauled me into superior court about a year later. And I've got to tell you this: they scheduled the new trial in superior court after the prosecutor appealed my acquittal, and we were informed that this trial would be held under strict anti-terrorist security procedures.
I am not making this up. This is documented. People can look this up. We all had to be body-scanned, empty our pockets, like at the airport. No one was allowed to bring anything in. No writing instruments. The press was not allowed to bring in computers or notebooks or any writing instruments. They handed out little stubby pencils and sheets of paper so that the German press could scrawl on a piece of paper on their knees. The observers were put behind a bulletproof glass barrier. It was this whole humiliating, bullying show of force at my second trial.
From the moment we walked in — I mean, it was a fait accompli. There was a panel of three judges and they were staring down at me with just absolute hatred. And so, boom, summarily, my acquittal was overturned and I was convicted. So I'm a convicted hate criminal.
Tucker Carlson: That is one of the crazier stories. And I specialize in hearing crazy stories. That is really beyond. And it's also amazing that you didn't become a cause célèbre to civil libertarians anywhere that I noticed.
CJ Hopkins: I got some action in the US. Matt Taibbi was one of the first ones to write about the case way back in the beginning. Jamie Kirchick wrote a piece that was in the Atlantic, of all places — it was a good piece about the case. FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — they did a couple of features on it. And other people in the States. It's mostly Americans who covered it for the longest time. I was just stunned at the German press's utter refusal to even address it at all.
Finally, at my second trial, when my acquittal was overturned, a bunch of German press came and they wrote it up, and unfortunately most of it was, "Yes, good, the order has been restored, swastikas remain illegal, and this COVID-denying American author who lives here has been sentenced for his crime." One exception — I have to mention a journalist called Eva Sudholt, who wrote a big piece for Zeit site, which is a big mainstream paper, and it was an absolutely fair piece. And a lot of the independent German press covered it.
Tucker Carlson: So you're what used to be called an intellectual — you make your living writing, thinking, creating art — and so presumably you live in a world of people with similar jobs. How did they — your friends in Germany, in the US — how did they respond?
CJ Hopkins: I lost them all. Yeah. I had a very small group of close German friends who had been my dear friends for whatever it was, 16 years, for many many years in Germany. And I think we corresponded once or twice at the very beginning, and I said, "What are you doing? What's going on? What's happening?" And they wrote back and said, "What are you doing? Why are you questioning and making trouble?" And then nothing — radio silence.
Tucker Carlson: And I assume if they were your friends, they were on the more freethinking edge of Berlin society, right?
CJ Hopkins: Well, it depends on what you mean by freethinking. This is the problem. This is the dilemma of people who are — I hate to use the term — on the left, liberals, whatever you want to call it, on that side of the spectrum. The side that I come from. For the most part, they fell in line and started marching in lockstep right from the very beginning.
Tucker Carlson: I don't understand that. I noticed that. I don't have any liberal friends, but I have some friends on the left — what we used to call the left. The traditional left that cares about economics. There are some serious people there. Not many, but there are some, and I know them. And they — the ones I know in the US — had exactly the same experience. All these people who you thought were on the side of the man against the machine, the individual against the group, the working class against the overlords — all of them joined the machine. And I don't get that at all. What is that?
Why People Complied — and Why Some Didn't
CJ Hopkins: Well, one way to answer it is very complicated. There's also a simpler aspect of it. When the initial propaganda was rolled out, one key component was the demonization of anyone who was questioning or challenging the official narrative. And people forget this, but from the very beginning this was part of the messaging: if someone is questioning our official narrative, that person is a far-right extremist, conspiracy theorist, basically a dangerous person.
Tucker Carlson: These are the same people who spent 70 years warning us about the lessons we should have learned from McCarthyism, and then 20 years saying the same thing about the war on terror.
CJ Hopkins: And they were certainly right about the war on terror, at very least. So how could they fall for it? I don't see it as them falling for it as much as — and this is a point I've argued with a lot of people about. Do you remember there's a professor named Mattias Desmet?
Tucker Carlson: I know him.
CJ Hopkins: Amazing person. He's one of the amazing people in this world.
Tucker Carlson: I completely disagree with his thesis. He's got the mass formation psychosis thesis.
CJ Hopkins: His thesis basically is that society is ill to a certain degree and thus becomes susceptible to totalitarianism. And I disagree completely. I think that any society can be transformed into a totalitarian configuration if the powers that be in that society have the will and the technology to do it. And it happens just like it happened during COVID — the message is put out, and it is put out very clearly: "Hey, all of your democratic rights and all that democracy stuff that you thought was in effect — that's off now. That's suspended. That's cancelled. We're going authoritarian. And if you challenge us, we're going to hurt you."
And most people — I'm an exception. I don't have any kids, I don't have a job, I'm a writer. Most people have families and mortgages and kids and they have things to lose. And the message that was put out very clearly in the beginning was: challenge us, create a problem for us, challenge our official narrative, become a COVID denier — we're going to demonize you and we're going to hurt you and your family. You won't be able to work. You won't be able to earn a living. You're going to lose your house after you can't pay your bills anymore. Your kids aren't going to be able to go to school. So on. Is it worth it to you to challenge this new authoritarianism that we're rolling out? Or wouldn't it be easier to just put on the mask?
And I don't mean to condemn people by saying this. I don't mean to say they're sheep or they're cowards. I've written numerous times — who's smarter? It's the idiots like me who stand up and shout and challenge the authorities. We're the ones that get put up against the wall.
Tucker Carlson: Or dragged into the — the occupying army shows up. You don't want them to rape your wife. On the other hand, what can you actually do about it?
CJ Hopkins: Absolutely. And I think the vast majority of people, consciously or unconsciously, made the choice that the price for challenging this is too high and I'm not willing to pay it. It's going to hurt me. It's going to hurt.
Tucker Carlson: People instinctively join the winning team. You're seeing this in the United States now. I think you see it with China. Everyone knows China's going to run the world. And so a lot of American authorities are like, "Yeah, I don't really want that, but I can't stop it. Therefore, I'm on China's side."
CJ Hopkins: I think that, and I have this argument all the time with a lot of people. We are amazing creatures. Having consciously or unconsciously made that decision — I'm not going to challenge this, I'm not going to risk my family or everything that I have in the world to challenge this — having made that choice, we humans are able to tell ourselves: "Okay, I've made that choice. Therefore the virus really is kind of an apocalyptic plague. Therefore it really does make sense for me to wear a mask while I'm sitting at my table in the restaurant — take off my mask while I'm sitting here eating dinner and put it on when I need to walk to the bathroom and then come back." We can convince ourselves of anything when we have to.
So when you were talking about people falling for it, I don't see it that way. I see people operating on their survival instincts and then performing whatever mental and psychological procedures they had to perform on themselves in order to reconcile it.
Tucker Carlson: I think that's a really deep analysis. I don't judge a lot of what you said, but when it crosses over into hurting other people — "Hey, let's demonize the apostates, let's hurt people who don't go along with it" — that's when it's like —
CJ Hopkins: So all of this analysis about how it happened — this came later. During the COVID years I was fighting. I felt like I was at war for two and a half years, and I was in people's faces, calling them out and telling them, "You are behaving like Nazis." That was the whole point of the book. And it was a kind of war. It was certainly an ideological war. It was a war of will.
Tucker Carlson: But what's very revealing is that they have not abided by an armistice and they're still going after you.
CJ Hopkins: They are grudge-holders. The German authorities are.
Tucker Carlson: Correct.
The Second Indictment: Prosecuted for the Book Itself
CJ Hopkins: The reason that this new second edition of the book is coming out — the one you wrote the foreword for — is because I had to pull my first edition, which I self-published. I had to pull this book out of worldwide distribution. This is a book that did extremely well — it was a Barnes & Noble bestseller, a bestseller on various Amazon lists, a very successful book. I had to pull it.
The reason I had to pull it: we talked about the tweets — that was one prosecution. The appeals court, the superior court, overturned my acquittal. And so now I have to go back to district court where I was originally acquitted, to be sentenced for this crime that I didn't commit. That's one case.
Last year, in November 2025, I get home from an extensive road trip I took in the US for another book project. I fly back home to Berlin. I've just started recovering from seven weeks on the road in a convertible and I'm starting to feel human again, and bang bang bang — the police show up, a dawn raid at the door of my apartment, with a search warrant. They come in, terrorize my wife and our cats, confiscate my computer. And this house raid is in conjunction with a new investigation, a new criminal investigation, which has since led to a new indictment.
And this time I'm not indicted for the tweets. That's the first case. This time the indictment is: I'm being charged with writing, publishing, and distributing the book itself. Now, this book has been banned in Germany since 2022. So now I'm being indicted for publishing and distributing this book. And the second charge in the indictment is that I reported on my trial in the superior court and used the book cover. Again, the book cover is always the pretext for these things. So the police were actually in my home searching for evidence that I published this book, searching for copies of the book.
Tucker Carlson: Because they're not Nazis. Correct. And if you want to prove you're not a Nazi, a dawn raid on an author's house to find a book is a good way to do it.
CJ Hopkins: This is absolutely the point I'm trying to make. It's not even "oh, he wrote some tweets" anymore. They're directly going after the fact that I published this.
Tucker Carlson: I was just saying to one of my nephews — we all lack self-awareness. I can talk about my dogs endlessly. It's very boorish. And I lack the self-awareness to know that I'm boring people when I talk about my dogs. But even trying to be charitable, I have never seen a lack of self-awareness this profound. Ever. In history.
CJ Hopkins: I've come to believe it's really not a lack of self-awareness. On the one hand, they don't care. Germany has become — I don't know if laughingstock is the right word — but it's common knowledge. They arrest people for insulting politicians. Somebody puts on social media, "This person is a dumb" — and they come and arrest that person. They arrest people for insulting politicians now. This is how far it's gone. And my case is one of many, Tucker. This is not an exception. There's an artist somewhere in the south of Germany who created some COVID artworks like this, and they prosecuted him as well.
Tucker Carlson: For degenerate art.
CJ Hopkins: Exactly.
Tucker Carlson: Did they burn it?
CJ Hopkins: I mean, are you freaking kidding? No. And this is what I've been trying to get across to people. I've referred to it in a couple of my essays as the criminalization of dissent. That is what is happening. And it is so over-the-top in Germany that I have to believe — yes, they're a bit dense, but part of it is this is the message that they are sending out.
Tucker Carlson: That's exactly it. They want this message sent out.
CJ Hopkins: And it's not restricted to Germany. There's a new report that came out — I think it's Big Brother Watch, Silkie Carlo's organization in the UK. I think over the last five years, over 60,000 people in the UK have been arrested for communications offenses.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. More than in Russia, which has a larger population.
CJ Hopkins: It's not a defense of the Russian system to say the British system is more authoritarian than the Russian system. That's just a fact based on those numbers.
And what I've been trying to direct people's attention to is that this is part of the evolution of the system that we're living in in the West. A lot of the reaction to the populist uprising that started back in 2015, 2016 is the system going authoritarian on us and sending this message out very clearly: "Oh no, you can still have those democratic rights and everything, as long as you don't cross this line. And if you cross this line, democracy's over. We're going to arrest you for a communications offense."
The Red Lines of Permissible Dissent
Tucker Carlson: So this is, I think, the deep value in your story and your analysis of it — this perspective. It's not just one man. You're not making this all about you. A lot of people under attack as you are make it about themselves. But you see this as part of a change in a mode of government, a change in society, a change in the relationship between the governed and the people in charge. And I think you're exactly right to see that. So what are those lines? How do we know what we can't do, since no one will spell it out?
CJ Hopkins: We don't, to begin with. Because this is really the most effective message that they send out. In my case in Germany, for example, I tweeted something with a swastika on it. So has Lauterbach. So have prominent German celebrity figures. They've compared the Russians to the Nazis and put out tweets with swastikas on them. Obviously, that's fine because that's in line with the official narrative of the authorities. But when I do it, no — because you don't compare the authorities to the Nazis. You compare the official enemies. And other people have also put things out aimed at the authorities and they don't get prosecuted. And you don't know why. And that's the effectiveness of the tactic — maybe you're okay, but at any moment, and you never know when, they could come down on you.
Tucker Carlson: It's like living with an alcoholic father.
CJ Hopkins: Exactly. You never know which husband is coming home tonight. Because sometimes it's caring and nurturing and kind, and other moments it's explosive. But it's arbitrary.
Tucker Carlson: And you never know what you're going to get. So the point is: be afraid.
CJ Hopkins: Exactly. They inculcate fear as a way to control.
Tucker Carlson: So here are the lines that I personally have noticed. Israel is the topic that people are mad about in the United States right now. I've done a million shows on Israel. My views are pretty conventional really — we shouldn't be controlled by Israel. That's it. But there's actually a pretty robust debate about that in the United States. That's supposedly a red line, but you go on Twitter, people are saying whatever they want about Israel. So that's probably not actually a red line. Criticizing the war in Ukraine is a red line. Anything related to January 6th — that's a real red line. Demographic change — absolute red line. What do those things have in common?
CJ Hopkins: Those are big things. Demographic change is big. It's enduring. It lasts for a thousand years. The war in Ukraine somehow is the key to a lot — I can just tell by the reactions to it. January 6th — I'm still not exactly sure, but they're dead serious about shutting down that conversation. Way more than Israel.
Tucker Carlson: What do we learn from that?
CJ Hopkins: I think maybe I've got a bit of a different perspective because I'm looking at it from Berlin, where criticizing Israel is absolutely fair game.
Tucker Carlson: Is it really?
CJ Hopkins: Oh yeah, absolutely. When the pro-Palestinian protests started, the police goon squads came down on them as heavily, if not heavier, than they came down on the COVID dissidents. They've been absolutely brutal — banning protests, banning meetings.
Tucker Carlson: Same in the UK.
CJ Hopkins: The Germany-Israel connection — unqualified support of Israel is part of Germany's remembrance culture. It's the reason.
Tucker Carlson: So the idea is that we killed innocents, which the Nazis definitely did. Therefore we have to defend the murder of innocents in a foreign country. We have to defend Israel no matter what.
CJ Hopkins: Even if they're doing the things that we hate ourselves for doing.
Tucker Carlson: Layers upon layers of irony.
CJ Hopkins: So I think maybe my perspective is a little different. But where the lines are — what I would say is the lines are wherever someone is actually posing a potential problem. There's a lot of dissent that the system can tolerate —
Tucker Carlson: Or encourages.
CJ Hopkins: And encourages. Yeah.
Tucker Carlson: Race war. They love race war.
CJ Hopkins: Yeah. Well, that's a whole separate thing. But there's a lot of dissent that doesn't really pose a problem. And then there are other areas of dissent that really do.
I think the Israel question is interesting. I come from the left and I'm no fan of the state of Israel. But I think what is allowed is: if you can put all of your focus on Israel and on Zionism and go after and attack Israel, well, that's fine, because then you're an anti-semite and everyone is fighting back and forth. What doesn't surface — and where I was coming from originally after October 7th — is what I was trying to point out to people on my side of the equation: you guys are all focused on Zionism and Israel. Israel is global capitalist headquarters in the Middle East.
Tucker Carlson: Of course. Yes.
CJ Hopkins: This new system that we all live under — we've been living under for almost 35 years now. This system has been destabilizing and restructuring the Middle East for the last 30 years, and the state of Israel is global capitalist headquarters in the Middle East.
Tucker Carlson: For global spying, for terrifying biotech, for every dark technological advance — it's all there.
CJ Hopkins: And I keep trying to say — it's not about the crazy Israelis, the crazy Zionists that control the world. Look at a map of the Middle East and ask yourself which countries are playing ball with the global capitalist system and which countries are not. Saudi Arabia, Israel — Israel has an insane national ideology. So does Saudi Arabia. But they're both playing ball and playing their parts within the global capitalist system.
When I look at the liquidation of Gaza in the aftermath of October 7th, I see the same message again, Tucker — this message that the system has been sending over and over again. There's a line that you don't cross. You don't breach the border fence and come and mass-murder a bunch of Israeli settlers on the other side, because then we'll wipe out, we'll liquidate your entire territory. And we'll ask everyone to watch what happens when you do this.
And let me just harp on this for a second, because it's what I've been trying to get across. I'm a very minor version of this message, and as I said, there are many cases like mine. Julian Assange is a much more major version of this message. And to me, it's the same message.
Tucker Carlson: Yes, it is.
CJ Hopkins: Look — this guy created an actual problem for us. Watch what we're going to do to him. And like COVID, everyone went along with it pretty much. I mean, no one really said anything about it. He was an Australian citizen. The Australian government went along with it. He was held in Britain for seven years — in the embassy and in maximum security prison — and never charged. He was never charged in Britain with anything.
Tucker Carlson: That was really shocking to me and radicalizing to me to watch that. And to know him, and to know that he's one of the most decent, one of the smartest people I've ever met. Top three smartest people I've ever known.
CJ Hopkins: His crime was just telling the truth. And I've been trying to get this across — this message is part of the evolution of the system that we all live under. If you go back and look at Russiagate and all of the mass hysteria during Trump's first term — the message was: "Okay, you populists are actually presenting a problem for us. You crazy idiots left the European Union in Brexit, you elected Donald Trump president."
Tucker Carlson: We're going to punish you for that.
CJ Hopkins: We're going to punish you. And we want everyone to watch us punish you. In very simplistic terms, it's heads on spikes. It's one of the oldest tactics in the world.
Tucker Carlson: How has rural America done in the last ten years since it voted for Trump in 2016? Life expectancy's gone down. Rural hospitals are closed. Massive third-world migration into rural America. It's all been a punishment for doing that, I think.
So then the question becomes: this is literally a dynamic, it's changing as we watch. The system that we grew up with is played out obviously, and the people administering it don't believe in its stated precepts. They don't believe it's a liberal democracy. Who knows if they ever did, but they definitely don't now. So then the question is: what is it becoming? Any guesses?
The New Global Totalitarianism
CJ Hopkins: Yeah. Well, this is actually what I've got in front of me and what I've been stating. What I've been saying over and over again is: we are at the beginning — the very beginning — of a new system that none of us really can get our heads around yet.
Tucker Carlson: Yes.
CJ Hopkins: And it's a global system. I refer to it as global capitalism, because that's what it is. A lot of my conservative readers — and I have a lot of conservative readers — they get upset when I refer to it as global capitalism. So call it crony capitalism or whatever you want to call it, but it's global capitalism. We live in a one-system world. And that system doesn't really have anything else to do except evolve in a more totalitarian direction.
There's a military term called "clear and hold." When you occupy a territory, when you have conquered whatever territory it is and you occupy that territory, what you have left to do at that point is clear and hold. What you're trying to do is consolidate your new ideology in the territory and wipe out little pockets of internal resistance.
The system that we all live under — that all nations are a part of to one degree or another, including Russia, including China — I mean, of course there's still competition between nation states, just like there's competition between corporations, but none of them are trying to change the system. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and Marxism and all of this, it's a one-ideology world. One system. And that system doesn't have any outside adversaries. So the only thing it really has left to do is to try to strengthen and consolidate its ideology and wipe out these little pockets of internal resistance.
Now, if you want me to go on about this, I will. It's where it gets a bit theoretical and philosophical, and people should understand that I'm not a communist. I'm not trying to overthrow capitalism. I like private property. I'd like to have some more private property if someone wants to give me some. But what I'm talking about is what this global capitalist system has done and is doing: trying to basically create one big global marketplace. And the way that works is you go into territories that are still dominated by traditional, or if I can use the word, despotic values — religious values, traditional values, family values. That is the problem with the working class. They're not on board with the cultural stuff. Some of them are bigoted, some of them are racist. These values create impediments to transforming all of these territories into sectors of this one big global marketplace.
Iran is a problem. They want to actually run their society according to religious values. The Christian fundamentalists out here in the woods — this is a problem. These people actually want to live according to their values, not just give them lip service on Sunday and then go back to the marketplace for the rest of the week. They actually want to have communities, or in some cases nation states, that are constructed according to these values — values that are not the values of the marketplace.
And so what the system, as it has been evolving, is doing is wiping away these values. Dissolving borders, because it's one big global marketplace. Dissolving cultures, because we need to have the same corporate stores in every territory on the face of the earth. And this is what the system is doing. People have been responding to that by saying, "Wait, I don't want to live in one big valueless marketplace. I want to hang on to my values."
Tucker Carlson: No, they don't. People don't want to live in the parking lot of Best Buy.
CJ Hopkins: No, they don't. Why would they? Years ago when I first started, I wrote that the fundamental conflict of our times is neoliberalism — and this is what I mean by the global capitalist system that is expanding — versus nationalism. And I'm an old lefty, so when people hear that, they think I'm being pejorative. I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. I mean it in a purely objective sense — people trying to hold on to the structure of their nation states, their national cultures, their languages —
Tucker Carlson: Their languages.
CJ Hopkins: Right. Their beliefs, their values, regardless of what I think of them.
Tucker Carlson: The memories of their ancestors. Not everyone cremates their dead and throws them into the wind. People still care about their ancestors.
CJ Hopkins: And the evolving system is trying to dissolve all of that. I think that's the broad context of everything that is going on these days.
Tucker Carlson: I don't think I've heard it summarized better, more crisply than you just did. I agree with every word that you said. And I think one of the challenges of our time is to see our own lives in the context of what you just described. And there are so many distractions — and I do think social media makes them more tempting and certainly ubiquitous. There's always some scandal of the moment that can be revealing and interesting and inherently important maybe, but that obscures where we are on history's timeline. The old system is going away and it's being replaced — as we watch, with the predictable birth pangs — by something totally different. And no one will admit it. That's the other thing. Like, why not just be open about it?
CJ Hopkins: Because it doesn't work. It's a point that I've made — I talk about this system that we live under, this new global system evolving in a totalitarian direction. And then of course it's natural when people hear the word totalitarianism to think of the 20th-century forms of totalitarianism — Nazis and communists, Stalinism — because that's what we know. Boots marching on cobblestones.
Tucker Carlson: That's right. This isn't that.
CJ Hopkins: Of course. There are components of that — sure, the truncheons and the cops and all those components are there. But I think the form of totalitarianism that this system is evolving into is a form — when I say we can't get our heads around it yet, it's because it isn't 20th-century totalitarianism. It isn't something that we've already experienced. It is new and it is different.
And it cannot come out and announce itself as totalitarian. It can't put up the big banners and send the guys out with the jackboots — or not for very long anyway. We can send the jackbooted squads out for a little while, but then we have to pull them back. Because if I'm right, this is a global capitalist form of totalitarianism. And capitalism doesn't do totalitarianism. Capitalism has to say to us, "You are a consumer. There's a marketplace. You are free. You can choose." It has to continue to present this veneer — if you want to call it that — of choice. It's the same reason that the German authorities can't just call me an enemy of the state and lock me up. They have to pretend that I have actually violated some law. They have to pretend that they are still operating under the rule of law.
Tucker Carlson: So that pretense exists forever? Or just during the transition into the new thing?
CJ Hopkins: I don't know.
Living with Joy in the Face of Doom
Tucker Carlson: What does happen to people like you? Are you winning?
CJ Hopkins: Not so far.
Tucker Carlson: So do you live with a sense of doom?
CJ Hopkins: I don't know. Maybe I read too much Nietzsche, but I actually live with a sense of joy. I have a strange outlook. You and I talked a little bit over breakfast about life and death and people's perspective. We are here for such a short period of time. I know that more and more the older I get. It's just this short moment. And I kind of see it like theater — like we've all been cast in our parts. You've been cast as Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson: Strange to wake up and realize that.
CJ Hopkins: I've been cast as myself. And so what I try to think is: how can I play my part to the best of my ability today? This is what God has given me. This is what has been put in front of me. So how can I do this? How can I play my part? And at the end of it, I'm going to be gone anyway.
There was a strange phrase that I heard a lot when I was growing up in the South, and I never really knew what it meant. People said, "They can kill me, but they can't eat me." I've never heard that. But I think it has something to do with this. You know, there's Sophie Scholl — one of the teenagers who stood up to the Nazis in the beginning.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah.
CJ Hopkins: They put her in the guillotine and cut her head off. And if I remember correctly, the day of her execution she went out thinking, "It was a beautiful day. And what does it matter if I'm gone? Because people will stand up." She saw herself — her individual life was not the main thing. She had played her part. She had done what was there for her to do and she had no regrets. Well, in some sense she was right. We're talking about her now, 80 years later.
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. And even if we weren't — she played her part. I don't know that I can improve on that. CJ Hopkins, what an amazing, extraordinary conversation. We're really proud to get behind your book, and I hope it sells as many copies as it deserves.
CJ Hopkins: Thanks so much. It's been a pleasure.
Tucker Carlson: Thank you.