The Tucker Interview Guide: Part I
Just a heads up that I’d rather get these out sooner rather than later, so I’ll likely go back and edit these guides to have more detailed notes and errors fixed. Feel free to leave a remark in the comments if I missed anything or if you’d like further explanation about something. Some topics I’ll address in separate posts at length.
I’ll be using this transcript website as a guide:
https://podcasts.happyscribe.com/the-tucker-carlson-show/the-occult-kabbalah-the-antichrist-s-newest-manifestation-and-how-to-avoid-the-mark-of-the-beast
And, of course, here is the video
00:00:57
Tucker: “Are there actual occult connections to Hollywood, to political figures, to technological advances, to the leaders of our society? Or are some of them actually practicing a cult religion?”
We’re in deep waters right off the bat. Let’s just start out with a good book recommendation. Gary Lachman’s Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen and a book that was wildly influential for me as a teen—Lachman’s Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius. A key theme for me is that the better one understands the cultural trends, figures and battles of the countercultural 1960s the easier you can understand a lot of strange things today.
00:01:42
“My grandfather was the actor Robert Conrad, if you’ve heard some of your listeners, Wild Wild West, Black Sheep Squadron, he go way back, Hawaiian Eye.”
Ah, yes. The first of my many, many proper nouns and name-drops in this interview. But, you know what? I bring up a lot of names to anchor it all a bit (plus, a lot of people love Gramps and it’ll keep those people watching an episode they’d otherwise think is too wild to understand at the outset.) There’s a lot of material in my interview but it’s not like this is live TV in 1995. You can watch this a second time, or read this commentary later, to see all the references I made. In this house we reward second playthroughs.
Coincidentally, The Wild, Wild West had an episode (The Night of the Skulls iirc) that had the first “goth” cult group to appear on television.
Goth history made!
The show was sixties psychedelic, a Western (so spiritually a bit Californian), and the first steampunk show (so retrochronic). All themes not far from my heart right now.
In a recently unearthed interview with my grandfather and TV’s Conan O’Brien, Conan makes the point of talking about how weird a TV show Wild, Wild, West was. (He literally says it was one of the weirdest shows ever.)
In cutting what has to be the weirdest interview Tucker Carlson has ever done (thus far!), I like to think some strange televisual tradition has carried on…and then it’ll be up to my grandson, also with the first name Conrad (Gramps’ real name was Conrad), to cut a weird episode of whatever passes for television when he is a man.
“My other grandfather, Harry Flynn, was a publicist for decades on the Monkeys, Bewitched, I Dream of Genie. Two occult shows, Bewitched and I Dream of Genie.”
Not just two occult shows: One is a show about a rock band (The Monkees) and then light-comedies about occult subjects (genies and witches). Rock and the Occult! It was surely destiny that that show would occur to me later…or something.
In another post, I’ll show how Aleister Crowley ends up probably inspiring Bewitched! decades later. (Hint: It goes through the legendary comedy-director Preston Sturges, who knew Crowley as a boy because Crowley dated his mother.)
00:04:28
“We’d have occultists. One of my experts on the show was this guy, Mitch Horowitz, who I think you knew. I forget if he was at Salon or- A former editor of mine. Yeah. Very nice guy. Well, he was in a... He’s an expert on the occult. I talked to him, a very nice guy. I think he’s a self-described Satanist.”
Tucker: “That was after I knew him.”
One of the funnier, The Office-style exchanges on the show.
Mitch once wrote a poignant article about his experience working with Tucker Carlson decades ago, and how, later, hearing Tucker on TV talk about how quitting drinking helped Tucker, that advice worked for Mitch. In Mitch’s words: it saved his life. That they’re very different guys with quite different beliefs, makes it all the better. I talked to Tucker about that article at some point, but it didn’t make it into the interview.
The full article is at Mitch’s Medium page:
“How Tucker Carlson Saved My Life”
History book from Mitch.
00:05:22
“We got to clarify that. While doing this show, it’s all a long way to say, while creating this show and taking it around town, another guy that was a big influence, Gary Lachman, this occult historian, a friend of mine. While doing this show and trying to get it created, I would tell people I know in tech because I know a lot of people in different circles. If I want super power, it’s I know a lot of different people and have a lot of strange hobbies and interests that the Venn diagram is very unique to me. So while creating this show, the people in tech and the people, some of you know in Silicon Valley or politics, they go, that’s a great concept for a show. And then they’d say, some of the There’s stuff going on in Silicon Valley. There are some weird Alister Crowley cults there. Or while researching, one of the guys will talk about Nick Land, who’s huge in Silicon Valley. His influences were identical with some of the hard core industrial music, goth music, psychedelic guys in the ‘80s, guys that I was researching because this is hard core occult stuff.”
First of all, Gary Lachman is the man. His aforementioned book Turn Off Your Mind is a great history of the sixties with a focus on the mystic, the weird and the dark side of that era’s culture. The book inspired the Hauntologically-minded record label Ghost Box, which in-turn had a huge fan in Mark Fisher (who was in the CCRU with Nick Land.)
England is, apparently, a tiny island country populated by people who are all friends. (It’s literally just Animal Crossing.)
The most helpful initial book on Land/CCRU for me was this one.
Another exceptionally good book on Land in blog-form is Xenosystems. You can get the nice version at the Passage Press website.
A good key to reading the best of Land’s tweets is this book. Maybe start there.
This excellent article shows the connection between ‘80s industrial music/post-punk zines (Rapid Eye, Vague) and Land’s CCRU. A key find for me.
Another good book here on Land, and it came out this past summer, is by Mikey Downs.
Capital VS Timenergy: A Žižekian Critique of Nick Land
Mr. Downs is re-releasing the book this December, so availability is “limited’ to use Amazon’s evasive phrase there.
From the Downs book, this shows the connection between Land and ‘80s industrial culture:
“The CCRU highlighted the contagion of the technological into the occult and the contagion of the occult into the technological insofar as they viewed cyberspace as an occult space. Computer technologies, especially the internet, open up gates and pathways to the “lemurs”, but this fusion of technology and the occult was inspired by the techno-occult work of Genesis P-Orridge, founding member of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOBY) and lead singer of Psychic TV.”
“Psychic TV was a British experimental video and music group, a techno-art collective, and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth was the collective’s occult origination or magical order. But just as Nick Land was really the lead member of the CCRU, so, too, was Genesis P-Orridge the heart of Psychic TV and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. One can tell that P-Orridge’s work had big influence on the CCRU despite them, to the best of my knowledge, never directly mentioning it. Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, Psychic TV produced numerous works that combined video and music, which were all rooted in the group’s occult philosophy.”
[Fun fact: Jerry Seinfeld learns about Genesis P. Orridge in the Margaret Cho episode of Comedians In Cars at the 4:20 mark here.]
One reason there’s a shared influence without Land+Genesis mentioning each other might be because both are heavily indebted to William S. Burroughs:
“We treat Burroughs as clearly as important a thinker as any notional theorist,” says Nick Land.
Burroughs’ friendship with the late Genesis P. is well-documented, but an excellent book on the subject is The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs
That Bill Burroughs would have an influence on an influential philosopher/AI guy such as Land and also come up with the coinage “heavy metal” is a nice link between the two subjects I talked about on Tucker: A.I. and rock music. Burroughs also came up with “blade runner,” “steely dan,” “the soft machine” and other things that became bands and novel names for other people. Perhaps Nick Land’s niftiest talent, imo, is his similarly great ability to name things (didn’t he recently come up with Beast Pulse?). Burroughs would be jealous of all this.
There’s actually a quote from Burroughs that summarizes my own interest in doing a “rock and the occult” show that interviews pastors, occultists, rabbis, etc. All these different groups that usually talk past each other, or don’t talk at all, but believe that there’s a spiritual realm. Burroughs in the book earlier linked:
“As Burroughs would remark in an interview with his friend from the Lawrence years, David Ohle: Anyone who doesn’t believe in ESP simply hasn’t kept his eyes open. It happens all the time. These dumb scientists. One said, ‘I’ll never believe in ESP, no matter what evidence there is.’ The general tendency of scientific materialism is to deny such phenomena and the fundamentalists admit that it happens - but it’s evil. The word of God says the occult is the enemy. The height of closed-mindedness.375”
“These dumb scientists” is a great line. I’m always fascinated when two people–complete opposites–see the same thing and there’s some sort of roundabout connection. Like in my interview, when we discuss Kenneth Grant (Crowley’s secretary, and a magician in his own right—watch this) saying that he thinks rock music is inherently demonic. There you have someone essentially agreeing, seemingly from the opposite end of the idea arena, with ‘70s Christian pastors about rock music. That’s an interesting potential conversation between two people who wouldn’t talk at the time, per se. That’s the idea. And Burroughs is on something similar there.
Here is the Kenneth Grant quote on rock being demonic. I believe it’s from Outer Gateways (1994).
“There are two ways of achieving this: one is by total surrender to the Spirit of the Hill, i.e. Aruna chala, the other is by dissolving each thought, and thereby slaying each entity, as it arises in the mind. This is achieved by enquiring persistently, relentlessly, to whom the thought appears. The two methods are paralleled by the functions of science and art. Being analytical, science is essentially destructive. Art, on the other hand, is based upon synthesis or union, the union of Siva and Shakti. Analysis and synthesis form a necessary component of the process which carries one beyond both, for both destruction and creation are phenomenal manifestations of the Self, Kia, Brahman. But science may be used creatively, and art may be turned to destruction, in which case each in turn appropriates the formula of the other. That is evident today in the realm of sonic vibrations which emanate destructive patterns. Much of so-called ‘rock music’ is an obvious example. The disordered lives of so many of its exponents, and to a lesser degree of its votaries, demonstrate the fact. The vibrations disintegrate the sensitive astral substance which composes the subtle body. Drug addiction, violence, suicide, etc., are the frequent results of admitting to the system distorted sonic entities that are entirely demonic and destructive. They are destructive not of the ego, which they tend to exacerbate, but of the influence of the ‘Angel’ that forms a tenuous link between man’s terrestrial constitution and his finer, stellar vehicles.4
Not far from what Tucker says later in the interview about the lives of most rock stars. Interesting…agreement.
