Career Advice From the Canceled for Tucker Carlson

Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs

By Mark Judge Published on April 26, 2023

In early 2014, I published a story that left me sure what I was going to be doing for the next several years. I would be going to Hollywood and reporting on the entertainment industry, including the problem of sexual abuse. The story I broke was for The Daily Caller, which at the time was run by Tucker Carlson.

Now Carlson has been unceremoniously fired by Fox News. He’s a huge figure nevertheless, the only mainstream spokesman for tens of millions of Americans. He’s already a household name. Maybe he should leave the TV hamster wheel and return to his roots — long-form magazine journalism and Daily Caller style reporting. What if Tucker founded a new media group?

Hear me out. Such an enterprise could support conservative journalists the way The New Yorker and The Washington Post support liberal ones. Tucker’s history is in magazine journalism, including profiles and investigative reporting for the old Weekly Standard. The long-term payoff of such a news outlet to conservatives would be massive.

Real Investigative Journalism

To illustrate why this matters, it’s worth recounting the 2014 story of mine The Daily Caller published. It involved the alleged sexual abuse of Lucien Carr, who had been a friend and contemporary of Jack Kerouac and the other Beat Generation writers of 20th century America. According to many witnesses, including the Carr family, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, the latter two of whom wrote a book about the incident, Lucien Carr was the victim of prolonged sexual abuse and stalking by a gay man named David Kammerer. As a result of the abuse, Carr would murder Kammerer.

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Following family policy, no member of Carr’s family had spoken publicly about what had happened between the two men. This despite the fact that in 2013 Hollywood produced a film about the incident called Kill Your Darlings and starring Daniel Radcliffe — Harry Potter himself — as famous poet Allen Ginsberg and Dane DeHaan as Carr.

Kammerer was 26 and Carr 12 in the 1930s when the two men met — a difference of 14 years. This was not depicted in the film. Kammerer was Carr’s Boy Scout Troop leader, and followed Carr wherever the younger man went, even changing cities whenever Carr would move.

In the early 1940s Kammerer followed Carr, now in his twenties, to New York and Columbia University. On August 13, 1944, Carr killed Kammerer in a late-night altercation. The murder weapon was a Boy Scout knife, a weapon charged with obvious symbolism considering the relationship between the two men. Carr spent two years in jail, the judge giving him a light sentence when the extent of Kammerer’s obsession was revealed.

A Whitewash of History

Kill Your Darlings completely flips this script. In the film Carr is a charismatic artist and provocateur who while at Columbia attracts a group of writers who would gain fame as the Beat Generation. Carr is a conflicted homosexual, mentored (not stalked) by David Kammerer, who’s painted a bright professor who thanklessly writes Carr’s papers for him. Carr is also attracted to poet Allen Ginsberg, played by Radcliffe. In one scene, the two men kiss.

I suspected that Hollywood was presenting a propagandistic version of events. I contacted Caleb Carr, Lucien Carr’s son and author of the bestselling book The Alienist. After days and then weeks of cajoling, Carr validated what I suspected: Kill Your Darlings, he said, is a complete whitewash of history. The Carr family was never contacted by the film’s director or the actors. The movie is a defense of Lucien Carr’s stalker and the glorification of Allen Ginsberg, who defended pedophilia.

In the film, Ginsberg is seen as the brave rebel who won’t let Columbia’s administration lie about the gay love between Kammerer and Carr. In fact, Lucien Carr was a victim who was repulsed by his stalker, preferring the company of the more manly and heterosexual Jack Kerouac. Caleb Carr wrote a lengthy account of what he feels the real facts about his father are, an account that The Daily Caller published in full as part of my larger piece.

We Need Dispatches From Sodom and Gomorrah

After my investigation appeared, I tried to contact Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan, and Kill Your Darlings director John Krokidas. I asked them to respond to Caleb Carr’s account and to more general questions about Hollywood and child abuse. I did not hear back. Still, the story caused a splash, and I found the subject interesting enough that I set my sights on going West to report from Hollywood.

Problem: There was not a single conservative outlet that wanted dispatches from the Sodom and Gomorrah of Southern California. Had there been, I could have been way ahead on the Harvey Weinstein story, transgenderism, and the child abuse that happens in Hollywood. I could even report on the good guys there, the Kirk Camerons who are decent and provide good entertainment for Christians and families.

The left has given conservatives a lot to shout and be outraged about, so we do need champions on cable TV and Twitter. Yet we also need journalists who can work a beat for months and come up with stories, as I did, that challenge liberal narratives and maybe even historic perceptions.

Tucker can make that happen.

 

Mark Judge is a writer and filmmaker in Washington, D.C. His new book is The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi.

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