Tucker Carlson Discovers Nephilim Theory, Claims Elites Are Demon Hybrids

​On Friday, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson devoted his show to the Nephilim, interviewing pastor Stephen de Young of the Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Louisiana about the biblical beings, which de Young claims are demonic hybrids who have infiltrated the upper echelons of our society. During the interview, Carlson—allegedly a Christian and a promoter of Christianity—claimed he was unaware of Genesis 6 or the Nephilim narrative until four years ago, when “someone mentioned it to me. And in the subsequent years, I must have had 15, 25 conversations about the Nephilim.” 

​De Young’s view of the Nephilim, for all its Christian trappings, is influenced more by medieval legends and modern occult speculation than the actual ancient texts he claims to use. Consider his explanation of the difference between the Biblical Flood story and those of ancient Near Eastern peoples, many of whom had myths about a Flood that destroyed civilization:

One of the key differences in Genesis 6 [that] you already have in those first four verses is Genesis recasts what that civilization was like. So, in the pagan sources that pre-flood world was this Golden Age of (for the time) high technology—right?—and technology in the Ancient Near Eastern mind included magic. Magic was a sort of spiritual technology, and […] losing that world was sort of this great tragedy, but everyone agreed it was a more advanced world than the world they lived in.

No, they did not. For the most part, the ancient peoples did not recognize any significant difference between the antediluvian and postdiluvian worlds. In Mesopotamia, the equivalence is explicit. Berossus tells us that Xisuthrus wrote down all of the world’s knowledge before the Flood, buried in in Sippara, and recovered the tablets after the Flood. Similarly, the Sages who gave Babylon its civilization returned after the Flood and restored it as it was. The Mesopotamian peoples all agreed that life before the Flood was one of hard labor.
 
Similarly, while the Greeks did indeed have a myth of a Golden Age, that Golden Age wasn’t tied to the Flood, which occurred during the Age of Bronze, two ages after the Golden Age. Even the Greek Golden Age wasn’t thought of a period of advanced technology but rather a period when people explicitly did not need technology because the Earth provided in abundance and they lived blissful (and woman-free!) lives of everlasting youth and abundance, as Hesiod wrote. Even Plato didn’t make his Atlantis a super-advanced techno-kingdom; in describing its end in mythic forms borrowed from the Near Eastern Flood myth, he only imagines it as roughly like the Greek city-states of his own day, give or take some orichalcum.  
 
It's difficult to find ancient accounts that imagine the earliest days as being full of high technology. Sanchuniathon the Phoenician describes a primitive world where only the rudiments of culture were gradually being developed. While de Young explicitly excludes Judeo-Christian literature from his argument, the intertestamental apocryphal literature similarly tells that the pre-Flood world was not high-tech but was the time when the first peoples learned the basics of culture and had just begun to use tools and even to play music. You needn’t take my word for it; I’ve collected all of those sources on my page about the Watchers.
 
So where did de Young get the idea that the Flood destroyed an impressive high-tech civilization? It’s obvious that he is drawing on modern ideas, particularly those that folded in medieval legends about Egypt. The closest antecedent is the medieval Arabic-language fantasias about Egypt before the Flood, when the pharaohs built wondrous buildings and filled them with impossible technology and magical devices. But Egypt in ancient times did not have a Flood myth, and the stories in those medieval texts were fantastical exaggerations of Late Antique Hermetic lore married to Christian (and later Islamic) theology.
 
But, more directly, he is apparently riffing on the work of William Ryan, Walter Pitman, and Petko Dimitrov, who developed the idea that the Black Sea flooded and became Noah’s Flood. De Young identifies the Flood as occurring at the end of the last Ice Age, “around 10,000 years ago,” a period with no support in the Biblical text, where most theologians have placed Creation itself as occurring only around 4000 to 6000 BCE, taking the text literally. Instead, de Young rejects the idea that the Bible’s timeline should be understood as one that could be counted in years. “There are people out there who want to like add up the years and the genealogies. That doesn't really work because different textual traditions have different numbers.” They aren’t that different. He rejects, specifically, the lifespans of the patriarchs as unrealistic and therefore sees no reason to view them as successive, despite the Bible saying they were. His proposed numbers, however, exactly match those of Ryan et al. for the Black Sea Flood, and de Young uses the Black Sea Flood claims by name as evidence for Noah’s Flood.
 
It is not clear how de Young can reject most of the Biblical data and still assert that the Flood and the Nephilim must be taken literally.
 
Carlson and De Young next claim that the ancients understood technological advancements as coming from supernatural beings. This is a deceptive way of formulating the history of science. Prometheus gave fire and God or the gods gave plans for the Ark, but ancient people, especially in the Near East and Greece, posited that there were real human inventors for specific technologies, such as Argus as the first builder of ships in Greek mythology or Tubal Cain as the first worker in metals in Jewish myth (Gen. 4:22). It is primarily the Enochian myth of the Watchers that associates technology with the teachings of heavenly beings—and even then, the connection is dubious as the Watchers mostly taught astrology, pharmacology, and make-up.
 
The idea that otherworldly beings gave humans technology is more Ancient Aliens than ancient myth. De Young offers an unusual reading of Genesis where he claims that the Nephilim were born before the descendants of Cain invented metallurgy and were the cause of their sinfully premature invention of technology. While the time relation of Genesis 4:19-23 (the posterity of Cain) and Genesis 6:1-4 is not explicitly specified, the implication in Genesis 6 is that the Nephilim were born relatively soon before the Flood and therefore after the events of Genesis 4. This, as I said, is not explicit, so other readings are possible, but ancient tradition placed Tubal Cain’s metallurgy in the lifetime of Cain himself.
 
The point of all of this is to argue that humans do not actually invent anything themselves—shades again of Ancient Aliens—but that angels and demons reveal technology to its purported inventors. Thus, we hear that unnamed forces “revealed” atomic weapons to humanity and that this was obviously demonic because the bomb was used to destroy Nagasaki, the most Christian city in Japan. (While it is true that Nagasaki was the epicenter of Japanese Catholicism, the Christian population of the city was only 10,000 out of around 200,000 people—about five percent.)
 
Carlson takes this all in with his usual wide-eyed combination of shock and intestinal distress, and he jumps straight to the Graham Hancock / Ancient Aliens end of the spectrum, imagining the antediluvian world (which for him is the Ice Age) as the ideal civilization: “Why does peak civilization, peak technology have to be destroyed?” he asks. Carlson identifies the Nephilim as ancient kings and heroes, the men of renown, following the Hancock / von Däniken school, but de Young disagrees, calling them “fully demonized humans” instead and positing that they contain the hybrid genes of Satan’s minions.
 
No literal reading of Genesis can support this, since their fathers were explicitly identified as the Sons of God, who therefore are not demons. Jewish and Christian tradition would later make them the godly Sons of Seth, but even the Enochian myth that they were Fallen Angels does not diabolize them until after they fathered the Nephilim. They are sinful angels, and therefore their offspring are cursed, but the angels themselves are punished by being bound in Hell. The Nephilim in turn become demons because their souls, half human and half angel, could enter neither Heaven nor Hell and are condemned to corrupt humans for eternity (1 Enoch 15-16). (De Young later cites the version in the noncanonical Book of Jubilees as his source for claiming demons are the souls of Nephilim—an odd claim for pastor.)
 
De Young sidesteps the vexatious question that troubled theologians for centuries—how did the Nephilim survive the Flood if the Flood killed everyone not in the Ark? Rather than address this (previous theologians posited everything from one of Noah’s kids marrying a Nephilim to a Nephilim hanging on to the back of the Ark!), de Young takes it as a given and starts in on the familiar litany of claims about giants. This is especially weird because he started his discussion by claiming that the Nephilim were not physical giants but merely “great men” whom the Greeks termed gigantes. He describes various ancient rituals from around the world where a royal had ritual sex with a stand-in for a divinity and claims this is a reenactment of Genesis 6:4 that allowed demons to enter the royal gene pool, filling Earth’s elites with demon hybrids.
 
Left unexplained is why the Nephilim needed to survive the Flood physically if demons could simply enter humans through orgasm. I lost the thread a bit when he started comparing demon infestation to human gut bacteria, but it seems that the conclusion is that the Nephilim survived as supernatural essences that transferred from person to person through Biblically incorrect sexual practices, producing giants here and there and evil sadists elsewhere.
 
Therefore, de Young says that since all cultures believe that the gods—who are demons—can impregnate women and beget children, Carlson’s audience is not “crazy” if they believe that people they meet are not fully human. Here, of course, the conversation becomes disturbing as Carlson and de Young discuss which humans, particularly professors and politicians, are not truly human and therefore should be seen as inhuman, demonic entities. This way lies dangerous conclusions, since it is a short step from saying some people are not human to arguing that nonhumans should be eliminated.
 
De Young, mercifully, swats away Carlson’s attempt to ask if Victorian newspaper reports about giant bones—and modern conspiracy theories about the Smithsonian destroying them—are proof of Nephilim remains, but the two men then go into a strange tirade about African tribes, royalty, NASA scientists, and the names in the Epstein files all conducting sex rituals and human sacrifices to birth Nephilim hybrids that incarnate the spiritual essence of demonic souls. (I imagine the NASA claim is a reference to Jack Parsons, who did sex magic with L. Ron Hubbard to birth a Moon Child.) “Clearly human sacrifice does bring dark power to the people who commit it,” Carlson opines, with de Young agreeing emphatically. They argue that ancient people performed these rituals because they “worked” and therefore “witchcraft is real.” They agree that human sacrifice today occurs primarily among the Black people of Africa, Haiti, and Louisiana and blame “the West” for covering it up in the name of political correctness. Left unexplained is why, if human sacrifice yields such “spiritual power,” the people performing it are among the poorest and least powerful on earth.
 
From there, the conversation somehow went on for much longer than you would think, but I got bored. The short version is that de Young and Carlson both see technology as a “gift from demons” and are concerned that the evil government has taken over the imagery of the Church to create a blasphemous quasi-faith of Mammon sacrificing humanity on the altar of economics and secularizing to the point that souls are unprepared for heaven, so today is akin to antediluvian times and therefore just as Noah saved humanity from the Flood, Jesus will return momentarily to save us from the apocalypse, which has something to do with technology.
 
The interview finished with some spiritual thoughts on ministering to incels, porn addicts, and other people suffering from the evils of technology, and that about sums up the theme of the show: The fault doesn’t lie with humanity, either individually or collectively, but with some vague demonic force that enters through sex and imposes evil technology on us to … stop us from having sex? Genuine concerns about technology somehow found a spiritual echo in a misreading of ancient history to absolve the individual of responsibility and humanity of guilt for our failure to treat one another with compassion and to manage our technology for the collective benefit. Plus, of course, the usual Christian freak-outs about sex.