"My cousin raises all the cows we eat. My mama makes all the bread we eat. My wife grows all the vegetables we eat. We get all our water right out of the ground from a spring."
Obituary for my father.
Richard Warner Carlson died at 84 on March 24, 2025 at home in Boca Grande, Florida after six weeks of illness. He refused all painkillers to the end and left this world with dignity and clarity, holding the hands of his children with his dogs at his feet.
He was born February 10, 1941 at Massachusetts General Hospital to a 15-year-old Swedish-speaking girl and placed in the Home for Little Wanderers in Boston, where he developed rickets from malnutrition. His legs were bent for the rest of his life. After years in foster homes, he was placed with the Carlson family in Norwood, Mass. His adoptive father, a tannery manager, died when he was 12 and he stopped attending school regularly. At 17, he was jailed for car theft, thrown out of high school for the second time, and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps.
In 1962, in search of adventure, he drove to California. He spent a year as a merchant seaman on the SS Washington Bear, transporting cargo to ports in the Orient, and then became a reporter. Over the next decade, he was a copy boy at the LA Times, a wire service reporter for UPI and an investigative reporter and anchor for ABC News, covering the upheaval of the period. He knew virtually every compelling figure of the time, including Jim Jones, Patty Hearst, Eric Hoffer, Jerry Garcia, as well as Mafia leaders and members of the Manson Family. In 1965, he was badly injured reporting from the Watts riots in Los Angeles.
By 1975, he was married with two small boys, when his wife departed for Europe and didn’t return. He threw himself into raising his boys, whom he often brought with him on reporting trips. At home, he educated them during three-hour dinners on topics that ranged from the French Revolution to Bolshevik Russia, PG Wodehouse, the history of the American Indian and, always, the eternal and unchanging nature of people. He was a free thinker and a compulsive book reader, including at red lights. He left a library of thousands of books, most dog-eared and filled with marginalia. His reading and life experiences convinced him that God is real. He had an outlaw spirit tempered by decency.
In 1979, he married the love of his life, Patricia Swanson. They were together for 44 years, all of them happy. She died sixteen months before he did and he mourned her every day.
In 1985, he moved to Washington to work for the Reagan Administration. He spent five years as the director of the Voice of America, and then moved to the Seychelles as the US ambassador. In 1992, he became the CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and later ran a division of King World television.
The last 25 years of his life were spent in work whose details were never completely clear to his family, but that was clearly interesting. He worked in dozens of countries and breakaway republics around the world, and was involved in countless intrigues. He knew a number of colorful national leaders, including Rafic Hariri of Lebanon, Aslan Abashidze of Adjara, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, and whomever runs Somaliland. He was a fundamentally nonjudgmental person who was impossible to shock, and he described them all with amused affection.
He spoke to his sons every day and had lunch with them once a week for thirty years at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, always prefaced by a dice game. Throughout his life he fervently loved dogs.
Richard W. Carlson is survived by his sons, Tucker and Buckley, his beloved daughter-in-law Susie, and five grandchildren. He was the toughest human being anyone in his family ever knew, and also the kindest and most loyal. RIP.
🚨 BREAKING: If Edward Snowden went on the Joe Rogan podcast to EXPOSE corruption, shady backroom deals, and even reveal the infamous EPSTEIN LIST?
WOULD YOU WATCH IT?
YES or NO?
🚨JOE ROGAN: "People are worried that Elon is going to steal everyone's money. He has $400B. Elon's not going to steal your money. That's not what he's doing. He's a super genius that has been f**ked with. When you've been f**ked with by these nitwits that hide behind 3-letter agencies, and you're dealing with one of the smartest people alive helping Donald Trump get into office and find out what corruption is really going on, you f**ked up.
You f**ked up and picked the wrong psychopath on the spectrum. He's going to hunt you down and find out what's going on, and that's good for everybody. That's how you should be looking at this, like 'Wow, we have a brilliant mind examining these really corrupt and goofy systems and bringing in a bunch of psychopath wizards."
🔥🔥🔥
BREAKING: Second Border Patrol Agent BLOWS WHISTLE on Border Crisis: ‘My Conscience Will Be Clean, That’s Way More Important Than My Pension’
"The cartels run the border down here,” says Aaron Veckey, a United States Border Patrol agent with 19 years of service, stepping forward to expose the horrific conditions at the U.S.-Mexico border. Inspired by fellow whistleblower Zachary Apotheker (@ZachApotheker), featured in “Line in the Sand,” Veckey brings OMG onsite to his Customs and Border Protection patrol station in Ajo, Arizona, to reveal the disturbing truth.
“Where I first saw it [human rights violations] was here, underneath that canopy there,” Veckey shares. “It was just men, women, and children… They were freezing. It was at least 40 degrees.” He describes another instance of extreme conditions, adding, “You got 50 Muslims, 50 Sikhs, 50 Christians, 50 whatever, and they're fighting over shade.”
“If they have a thousand bodies for us, as fast as they can bring us bodies, we pick them up as fast and we push them all into this parking lot.” He adds, “They have pushed us around through fear, through browbeating us. They've ordered us to do stuff,” highlighting how U.S. Border Patrol agents are often forced between cartel operations and bureaucratic pressure to keep quiet.
Bringing these atrocities to the attention of the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), Veckey filed reports detailing the violations, only to be met with a cease and desist letter, ordering him to stay silent. Despite being ordered to remain silent, Veckey is sacrificing his future for justice.
Watch “Line in the Sand,” releasing October 10th, only at https://t.co/0VsgpLQbIi.
@elonmusk@alexandre “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”