(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Two of the most consequential events in modern American political history were set in motion in the third week of August, 1991.
The first of these was the collapse of the Soviet Union following an unsuccessful Aug. 18 coup attempt against then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
The second was that 22-year-old Tucker Carlson finally got a job.
Carlson recounted the experience on Friday while addressing the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala, capping off its two-day leadership summit that featured a speech earlier in the day from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“I was leaving college without a degree or a job and attempting to marry my girlfriend… and ran into this giant roadblock in the form of her Episcopal priest father who said, ‘No, job first,'” Carlson began.
“And not only did I not have a job, I had no idea what I wanted to do,” he continued. “And so, I applied to a couple different places—the CIA, if you can imagine; some boarding school in Rabat because I thought, ‘You know, Morocco. Lower standards. Maybe they’ll hire me.’ No. And I wound at Heritage as a fact-checker/copy-editor at Policy Review, the quarterly magazine at the Heritage Foundation, and that job absolutely changed my life.”
Although he made only $14,000 annually, plus a $100 Christmas bonus, it sealed Carlson’s decision to become a journalist, and helped him get the girl as well. The rest is history.
Of course, nearly 32 years later, America is still fighting a de-facto cold war with Russia—only this time, the Marxists forces of the Evil Empire are on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
To many conservatives, Carlson is now the last, best hope in holding the line, using his nightly prime-time slot on Fox News to expose absurdity and corruption while validating viewpoints that were once normal but are now under vicious attack.
“It’s just so obvious—it’s completely obvious,” he said of the rational but unpopular opinions he and many of his guests share—some of which the federal government is now punishing, in spite of the First Amendment.
Carlson blamed the current situation, in part, on the loss of American identity that came with winning the Cold War, which had long helped to define our values as being the opposite of the anti-market, anti-Christian USSR.
But he also blamed the internet age for creating a society in which there is simultaneously an unprecedented access to information and a public so overwhelmed by the information glut that it now lacks the critical-thinking skills needed to process it.
“Polling suggests a lot of Americans—hundreds of millions of Americans—they don’t know the facts about things,” Carlson said, noting that the absence of an informed populus posed a fundamental challenge to democracy—perhaps greater than any threat the Soviets might have devised.
And the national intelligence apparatus that Carlson once aspired to join, the CIA, has played a role in controlling and manipulating the flow of information, making his pursuit of truth that much more complicated.
In the era of rampant gaslighting and mass formation psychosis—via the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter riots, Ukraine conflict and more—Carlson said those who maintained their common-sense convictions and stood up for what they knew to be true had become unlikely heroes.
“The second you decide to tell the truth about something, you are filled with this power,” Carlson said. “… And, of course, the opposite is true: The more you lie, the weaker and more terrified you become.”
While we are primed from early on in life to value spontaneous acts of heroism, he said, such as rushing into a burning building to save a crying baby, and to reflect on whether we might have the fortitude to act when confronted in the moment, this new sort of heroism can be even more elusive.
“No one is trained to stand up in the middle of a DEI meeting at Citibank and say, ‘This is nonsense,'” Carlson mused.
However, the courage to do so is necessary, he added, because the stakes are far greater than they have ever been—theological, in fact.
“When the Treasury secretary stands up and says, ‘You know what you can do to help the economy? Get an abortion’—That’s like an Aztec principle basically,” Carlson said, making reference to the child-sacrifice rituals of ancient civilizations.
“… What you’re watching is not a political movement,” he continued. “It’s evil.”
In the same manner familiar to his 3.5 million nightly viewers, Carlson tempered his deep philosophical musings with self-effacing humor—including jokes about his Scandanavian roots and his upbringing in the Episcopal church—as well as sharing the wisdom gained from his time interviewing some of the world’s most brilliant luminaries.
One word of advice Carlson had was to hang onto one’s physical book collection, as well as anything tangible in a world dominated by digital ephemera.
“I’m not gonna tell you to go buy gold and ammo—although you should think about it,” Carlson noted. But constantly prepping for some future catastrophe risked missing out on the present joys—and olifactory experiences—that life has to offer.
“I’ve really gotten to the point where, if I can’t smell it, I’m not dealing with it,” he said.
Finally, Carlson—despite his Episcopalian upbringing—offered a Zen-like observation that the key to happiness was to recognize the impermanence of everything, and to value it accordingly.
“That’s the one thing that unites every single person is the certainty of death,” he said. “And reminding yourself of that every single day, paradoxically, brings you joy.”
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
