Something's happening here. Last month Tucker Carlson made the case for the CIA's direct involvement in President Kennedy's assassination. This month he has made the case for the CIA's direct involvement in President Nixon's forced resignation. Tying the two events together, Carlson outlines a chief motive for the Agency's alleged actions against Nixon by highlighting a recorded conversation between Nixon and then-CIA Director Richard Helms in which Nixon told Helms to his face that he knew "who shot John," an accusation from the president that the director answered with telling silence.
In publicly prosecuting the Intelligence Community for taking down Nixon, Carlson notes that four of the five Watergate burglars worked for the CIA, that young metro reporter Bob Woodward had been a naval officer at the Pentagon who "worked regularly with the intel agencies" and "had a top-secret clearance," and that Woodward's infamous Deep Throat source for his Watergate news stories, FBI Associate Director Mark Felt, had run the FBI's illicit counterintelligence program specifically designed to discredit and disrupt American political organizations.
Furthermore, Carlson points out that Nixon's replacement, Gerald Ford, the only unelected president in American history, had no achievements to justify his rapid rise from forgettable congressman to White House occupant in the space of eight months, aside from his service on the Warren Commission, which had "absolved the CIA of responsibility for President Kennedy's murder." When unelected federal bureaucrats forced Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, to resign in late '73 for tax evasion, Democrats in Congress "gave Nixon no choice but Ford." The next summer, the Intelligence Community replaced an adversarial Nixon, arguably the most popularly elected president in U.S. history, with a rubber-stamp for the CIA.
Carlson's pull-no-punches attacks on the CIA implicating America's spies in both Kennedy's assassination and Nixon's forced resignation are part of a larger campaign he has been waging for some time against the unelected yet permanent federal bureaucracy and its coercive national security Deep State. Night after night, Carlson chooses a target within the Washington Leviathan — regulatory agencies acting without legal authority, the Department of (in)Justice's selective prosecutions and political persecution, the Intelligence Community's dissemination of lies and propaganda meant to manipulate public opinion — and articulates how untethered America's acting government has become from the U.S. Constitution, statutory law, and the will of legal American voters.
Even though he is not claiming his opinionated commentary as rote recitation of indisputable facts, his arguments are grounded in research and reason. Often, his conclusions are not entirely new. Many like-minded Americans tune in to his show precisely because he reflects much of what they already believe. What is most interesting, then, is not necessarily Tucker Carlson's increasingly incisive rhetorical dismantling of the federal government but rather his timing.
Kennedy's assassination and Nixon's forced resignation occurred a half-century ago, and plenty of people have disputed the American government's official telling of those events since they first occurred. Only now, however, is one of the most popular hosts in the small world of news commentary dedicating his time (and reputation) to throwing down the gauntlet against America's Deep State. Why? Well, that relatively new and disparaging epithet — Deep State — tells a big part of the tale by reflecting an "awakening" American cynicism and a sizable collapse in Americans' trust in their own government. It should be a big deal for someone of Carlson's stature to accuse the Intelligence Community of multiple coups d'état; that he does so suggests that he feels the American people have begun to fundamentally shift in their understanding of and relationship to the federal government.
It is easy for his detractors to impugn his speech as conspiratorial, vulgarly incentivized by the pursuit of ratings, or needlessly inflammatory, but, in truth, Tucker Carlson's editorial monologues should scare the bejesus out of the Establishment as ominous harbingers of things to come. He clearly sees the rumblings of an emerging social consciousness in America grounded in disgust with government institutions, a rejection of the official "narratives" promulgated by national leaders, and a "widening gyre" separating the powerful from the powerless.
If Americans increasingly doubt the legitimacy of the very institutions that claim to have increasingly absolute power over every detail of their lives, then Tucker Carlson is urging them to question just how long the federal government's criminal enterprise has been operating. It didn't just start with the suspicious election outcomes in '20 and '22, did it? Surely it goes beyond American courts scribbling through the meaning of the Constitution, multinational corporations buying up politicians for pennies, and central bank currency manipulation that has only made the wealthiest wealthier while secretly taxing everyone else into poverty. Surely it goes beyond Americans' new understanding that the World Economic Forum and other international oligarchies of "elites" have for decades vetoed Americans' own self-determination.
The government's illegitimate exercise of power goes to the heart of the question: who really runs America? For most of American history, Americans proud of their nation's history and its dedication to individual rights, liberty, republican virtue, and respect for democracy would have answered, "The people." Now, however, they are beginning to wonder whether something much darker and more nefarious has been in charge all along.
If that "something" is actually "the Intelligence Community," then that revelation drastically changes the picture of America's post-WWII history, does it not? Think about the presidents who came after Truman. There was Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower; an assassinated Kennedy; a crass and calculating President Johnson often accused of having been complicit in his predecessor's murder; an obstinate Nixon forced into resignation; the Warren Commission's "go along to get along" man Gerald Ford; a peanut farmer apologist for Hugo Chávez; a true "outsider" President Reagan; followed immediately by former CIA Director George Bush; serial philanderer, credibly-accused rapist (and therefore "manageable"), China-backed Bill Clinton; the CIA director's oldest son; a "hope and change" puppet for American communists whose background history was covered up and rewritten repeatedly; another true "outsider" President Trump; followed immediately by a Deep State stooge with a half-century of public corruption under his belt. Now that same Deep State seems intent on taking out pudding-for-brains China Joe Biden, so that it can install Kamala Harris or some other fool entirely susceptible to the unelected Intelligence Community's control.
From that perspective, American leadership since the end of the last Great War has been dominated by men from the Intelligence Community, men who benefited directly from their efforts, men whose pasts made them easy to control, and a couple aberration presidencies where true "outsiders" Reagan and Trump still climbed to power. In Reagan's case, the former director of the CIA stood directly behind him. In Trump's case, the man was genuinely so free from political obligation to pursue his own path that the FBI, national security surveillance State, and D.C. Uniparty literally framed him as a Russian spy, wrongly accused him of abuse of power for revealing Biden's financial quid-pro-quo arrangements in Ukraine, and ultimately defamed him as a "terrorist" and "insurrectionist" for objecting to the massive mail-in ballot fraud and other election irregularities that rendered him the only sitting president to win substantially more votes during his re-election campaign only to come up short of victory.
In fact, given the lengths the Deep State went to remove President Trump from office in any way necessary, it would be fair to say that what the American government truly fears most is any elected representative of the people not entirely beholden to the permanent bureaucratic State. That speaks volumes about how the U.S. government really feels about "democracy."
If American elections mean so little because the Deep State's power is so great, then things must change.