Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Seven Days in March

Seven Days in March

Tucker Carlson speaks during 2022 FOX Nation Patriot Awards at Hard Rock Live at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood on November 17, 2022 in Hollywood, Florida.

Photo by Jason Koerner/Getty Images

Goldstone is the author of the forthcoming "Not White Enough: The Long Shameful Road to Japanese American Internment."

In 1961, shortly after John F. Kennedy had been sworn in as president, two journalists, Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey, set to writing a political thriller. It was inspired by the unsettling behavior of two generals, Edwin Walker and Curtis LeMay, both of whom had a history of using their positions to spout dangerous right-wing rhetoric that threatened to provoke nuclear war. In Knebel and Bailey’s version, a highly decorated Air Force general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff plots with other senior military officers to seize power from the president to prevent a disarmament treaty with Russia from going into effect.


And so, the nation got Seven Days in May, which shot to the top of the New York Times best sellers list and remained on the list for months. When Kirk Douglas and director John Frankenheimer decided to adapt the book to the screen, Kennedy, who had read the novel and thought it frighteningly plausible, encouraged the project and even helped in the production. The film, as the book, enjoyed enormous success.

The two leads were Burt Lancaster, who played the general, and Douglas, as a marine colonel who helped foil the plot. But it is with two other members of the cabal that current interest lies. One is a California senator, played by ubiquitous character actor Whit Bissell, and the other is an overly ambitious right-wing media celebrity, played by Hugh Marlowe, who had once been the lead in Earth vs the Flying Saucers. Without those two, representatives of the civilian government and the media, the plan would fail.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

That of course brings us to another, more recent, unholy alliance between government and the media, this one involving Speaker of the House and third in line for the presidency, Kevin McCarthy, and overly ambitious right-wing media celebrity Tucker Carlson. McCarthy, on the ludicrous grounds of “transparency,” gave Carlson, who is only transparent in his smug cynicism and duplicity, exclusive access to 40,000 hours of security tapes of the January 6 insurrection. Carlson, to the surprise of no one, selected a few carefully edited, out of context clips to support his contention that the vast majority of those who illegally entered the Capitol were merely “sightseers.” (One must wonder if Carlson would have been so sanguine if some left-wingers used the same justification to break into his home, stroll about, and then walk off with keepsakes.)

Although Carlson’s attempt to sanitize the invasion of Congress and minimize the violence was widely condemned, even by a number of Republican senators, it was also likely to reinforce the far-right narrative that the insurrectionists were merely patriots trying to save the country from an illegally anointed president-elect. It is a small step from there to conclude that the invaders were justified in their actions, and would be equally so in the future, the sort of political role reversal worthy of George Orwell.

That recently released emails and texts in the Dominion voting machine lawsuit demonstrate that Carlson is none too wedded to the incendiary rhetoric he brays out nightly in no way minimizes the danger from his distortions and outright lies. In fact, that his only motivations appear to be wealth and celebrity, that he may have no real core beliefs at all, actually enhances the risks from his broadcasts.

But the real danger emanates from the political side. Kevin McCarthy may not be the brightest person in Congress—Nancy Pelosi didn’t call him a moron for nothing—but even he must have some awareness of the perils of encouraging a segment of the nation that has already made it quite clear that they have no interest in democratic norms and have convinced themselves that they should rule by divine right. If he doesn’t, he should, since he was in the Capitol, afraid for his life, during the very insurrection he is now downplaying.

As individuals, Carlson and McCarthy are hardly unique and the United States is no stranger to either scurrilous media coverage or political opportunism. Just months after the presidential election of 1828, for example, Andrew Jackson’s wife Rachel, who had been unfairly portrayed in the press as an adulteress, died of a heart attack after falling into depression because of the attacks. In 1864, famed political cartoonist Thomas Nast portrayed Abraham Lincoln as an ape, this just seven years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. (In a bit of irony, Lincoln and Darwin were born on the same day, February 12, 1809.)

In the first decades of the twentieth century, newspaper magnates V. S. McClatchy and William Randolph Hearst shamelessly published article after bigoted article vilifying Asian Americans and helped create and perpetuate the poisonous atmosphere used as the justification for the illegal imprisonment of more than 100,000 totally innocent Americans of Japanese descent in 1942. Hearst, who admired all things German, including Adolph Hitler, was a ferocious crusader against communists, real and imagined…mostly the latter. The number of articles demonizing African Americans in newspapers and magazines across America are too numerous to count.

In conjunction with these media campaigns, there are invariably conniving politicians slipstreaming along, eager to advance their careers by latching on to popular prejudice. Urbane, erudite James Duval Phelan happily exploited anti-Asian prejudice to be elected mayor of San Francisco and United States Senator. Theodore Bilbo spewed the vilest slander of Black Americans to become both Mississippi’s governor and then senator. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy saw communists in every corner of America. Each of these and the many, many others of the same ilk were fawned on by media supporters.

With all that, however, the McCarthy-Carlson conspiracy is both different and more dangerous. Here is an actual partnership, a marriage of the unethical and the unscrupulous, aimed at undermining both faith in fundamental institutions and the rule of law. McCarthy has thus initiated the sort of blurring of government and media that one would expect in Putin’s Russia and other dictatorial regimes.

Democracy demands that the press be free of government control. It should also be free of government collaboration.

Read More

Business professional watching stocks go down.
Getty Images, Bartolome Ozonas

The White House Is Booming, the Boardroom Is Panicking

The Confidence Collapse

Consumer confidence is plummeting—and that was before the latest Wall Street selloffs.

Keep ReadingShow less
Drain—More Than Fight—Authoritarianism and Censorship
Getty Images, Mykyta Ivanov

Drain—More Than Fight—Authoritarianism and Censorship

The current approaches to proactively counteracting authoritarianism and censorship fall into two main categories, which we call “fighting” and “Constitution-defending.” While Constitution-defending in particular has some value, this article advocates for a third major method: draining interest in authoritarianism and censorship.

“Draining” refers to sapping interest in these extreme possibilities of authoritarianism and censorship. In practical terms, it comes from reducing an overblown sense of threat of fellow Americans across the political spectrum. When there is less to fear about each other, there is less desire for authoritarianism or censorship.

Keep ReadingShow less
"Vote" pin.
Getty Images, William Whitehurst

Most Americans’ Votes Don’t Matter in Deciding Elections

New research from the Unite America Institute confirms a stark reality: Most ballots cast in American elections don’t matter in deciding the outcome. In 2024, just 14% of eligible voters cast a meaningful vote that actually influenced the outcome of a U.S. House race. For state house races, on average across all 50 states, just 13% cast meaningful votes.

“Too many Americans have no real say in their democracy,” said Unite America Executive Director Nick Troiano. “Every voter deserves a ballot that not only counts, but that truly matters. We should demand better than ‘elections in name only.’”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hands outside of bars.
Getty Images, stevanovicigor

Double Standard: Investing in Animal Redemption While Ignoring Human Rehabilitation

America and countries abroad have mastered the art of taming wild animals—training the most vicious killers, honing killer instincts, and even domesticating animals born for the hunt. Wild animals in this country receive extensive resources to facilitate their reintegration into society.

Americans spent more than $150 billion on their pets in 2024, with an estimated spending projection of $200 million by 2030. Millions of dollars are poured into shelters, rehabilitation programs, and veterinary care, as shown by industry statistics on animal welfare spending. Television ads and commercials plead for their adoption. Stray animal hotlines operate 24/7, ensuring immediate rescue services. Pet parks, relief stations in airports, and pageant shows showcase animals as celebrities.

Keep ReadingShow less