By Steve Sailer
06/12/2024
From my new column in Taki’s Magazine, a book review of Tucker Carlson’s anthology of his magazine articles, The Long Slide: Thirty Years in American Journalism.
Steve Sailer
June 12, 2024… Like so many future journalists, Tucker obsessed as an adolescent over the most perfect pages of comic rhetoric penned by a 20th-century American, the opening to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
The book made me want to drop everything (specifically, the sixth grade) and take up journalism. It made me want to travel the world with a pen and notebook…. But, mostly, it made me want to do drugs.
The adolescent Tucker resolved to try the entire contents of the Great Red Shark’s trunk. As Thompson famously wrote:
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls…. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.
Tucker recounts:
I resolved to try it all, down to the ether, which I finally located midway through tenth grade in a head shop on the West Side of Manhattan. (It gave me double vision and a headache.) …
For me, the whole experience was interesting and fun. I had a great time. On the other hand, I grew out of it. By the time I got to college, mind expansion had lost its appeal. I switched to beer.
Read the whole thing there.
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