At a recent lecture for Turning Point USA, Tucker Carlson returned to a favorite theme—American decline. Forget foreign wars and transgenderism, he preached: Can we create an economy where people can make a decent wage and survive? Carlson: “Can my children have a roughly approximate life that I had? How about just a middle-class life? Can they get married young and have four kids like I did? Can they do that? Or is that such a remote possibility that you need to tell me Iran is the real threat and you took all the money and screwed up my country beyond recognition?”
This sounds good. Yet when Carlson had a chance to pay me a decent wage for work, he didn’t. He paid me nothing.
It was in 2010. The Daily Caller, a website owned and operated by Carlson, was being launched. I was 45, an experienced and award-winning journalist whose politics had gone from left to right in the early-1990s. I’d also survived a cancer scare in 2008. My girlfriend, a beautiful and smart woman from India, was talking about getting married.
Carlson knew who I was and we arranged a meeting. I was excited when I arrived at the new Daily Caller office in D.C., not far from my father’s old digs at National Geographic. The office was staffed with young people, and there was a cool and friendly dog roaming around. I met Carlson in his office. He was friendly and we talked for a long time, mostly about how we both hated the liberal media.
Carlson told me he’d love to have me write for him. However, in the beginning it wouldn’t pay. I couldn’t help but notice all the salaried young employees buzzing around the office, but I got it. It was 2010 and the digital revolution was underway. Journalism wasn’t going to make you rich.
Still, I was well-trained and had great ideas. I knew that if I worked it’d eventually turn into a job offer—that, or as I drove huge traffic and broke stories Carlson’s conscience would bother him and he’d eventually pay for individual articles. I attended the Daily Caller launch party in DC, where Carlson gave a speech about being the conservative alternative to The New York Times. That week, my first piece, about why I love illegal fireworks, posted.
From there I did a couple of stories a week, on topics ranging from the Catholic Church and sexual abuse to baseball to David Plotz to Wino to J. Crew to the ridiculous liberal media to angry feminist to Christopher Hitchens and Whittaker Chambers.
In 2012, the Daily Caller announced it had achieved profitability. Carlson and his business partner Neil Patel, both wealthy men, crowed about the news. They expanded hiring. I waited for a job offer, or even an offer of any pay whatsoever. It didn’t come. From a guy like Carlson who’d go on to champion Americans and start agonizing over his kids being able to live a middle-class life, it was hypocritical.
Then in February 2014, I broke a major story. From the Daily Caller:
“On August 13, 1944, a college student named Lucien Carr murdered a man named David Kammerer at Riverside Park in New York City. Carr stabbed Kammerer with a Boy Scout pocket knife, then dumped his body into the Hudson River. Carr was 21 and Kammerer 35—14 years older. Two days later Carr confessed to the crime. He spent two years in jail, and upon release got married and got a job at UPI, where he worked for four decades. He died in 2005.
“The murder of David Kammerer became known as ‘the crime that united the Beats.’ While a student at Columbia Lucien Carr, who was called ‘angelically handsome,’ had introduced Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs to each other. The later three men became lights of the famous ‘Beat Generation’ of countercultural writers. It is often thought that the murder was a pivotal moment in cementing these friendships.
“Why did Carr kill Kammerer? According to the new film Kill Your Darlings, Carr was a conflicted homosexual who couldn’t come to terms with it. Kammerer was his lover, and the shame of this in conservative 1940s America led him to commit a crime of passion. When the authorities at Columbia and elsewhere tried to cover this up, poet Allen Ginsberg, played by Daniel Radcliffe, refuses to go along. It’s a favored Hollywood trope: that brave young outsider facing off against the homophobic old guard.
“The truth, in my view, is far different. I’ve always felt that David Kammerer was a homosexual pedophile stalker, and that Lucien Carr plunged a knife in his chest because he was the victim of years of physical and psychological abuse at the hands of Kammerer—abuse that had started when Lucien Carr was a pre-teen boy.
“Caleb Carr, the son of Lucien Carr, agrees with me. Carr the younger is the bestselling author of The Alienist and other books. He was not consulted by the makers of Kill Your Darlings.
“When I contacted Caleb Carr about the Beatnik murder, and openly stated what I thought had driven it, he replied with an account that is long, absolutely riveting, and, in my mind, the truth. Carr details the abuse his father endured at the hands of Kammerer (remember, David Kammerer was 14 years older than Lucien Carr). Kammerer was effectively Carr’s father figure since the time he was twelve, after his father had abandoned the family. Every time Lucien Carr moved, and it was several times, Kammerer followed. Several accounts by Beatniks and friends of Beatniks called Kammerer a ‘pest.’”
It was a major story that would alter the course of a piece of American history. The story was picked up by AP and other outlets. No kudos, no pay.
I stopped writing for the Daily Caller soon after that. I heard from Carlson again in the fall of 2018, when I became briefly famous during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination circus. Carlson, like everyone else, wanted me to go on his show. Again, I’d be boosting his audience for no pay. I declined. To survive the Kavanaugh nightmare I set up a GoFundMe, which I still use to support my writing. Maybe Tucker Carlson, champion of the American working man, can chip in.