Tucker Carlson came to Alberta because, he says, he wants to liberate us. Timothy Caulfield writes:
RIGHT BEFORE he was fired from Fox News last spring, the prime-time host Tucker Carlson was set to release a documentary called O, Canada! The trailer seemed to unironically suggest that the country needs to be liberated (read: invaded by the United States) to save it from the authoritarian rule of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. This move would, Tucker implied, accord with the US “official policy” of opposing oppressive dictatorships. The marketing for the documentary included Soviet-style graphics of Trudeau. “What if tyranny arrived right next door?” Tucker asked in the trailer. “And what would our government do in response?”
It wouldn’t have taken Tucker, or his team, much digging to uncover the fact that Trudeau is the leader of a politically centrist minority government within a parliamentary system. For all his many faults and political missteps, Trudeau isn’t a communist dictator worthy of a ground offensive by the US military. (And, by the way, Canada fares better than the US on human and economic freedom scales in rankings by think tanks like the Freedom House and the conservative-leaning Cato and Fraser institutes. The US doesn’t even crack the top twenty! Hmmm, should Canada do the liberating?)
Yesterday, Tucker decided to invade Canada himself, an assault that primarily involved two Alberta speaking events: the one in Calgary headlined a discussion with Premier Danielle Smith in front of an audience of more than 4,000 people, and an Edmonton event, which reportedly had twice as many people. The second show, which I attended, had Premier Smith provide a glowing introduction of Tucker. The premier started with a few anti–renewable energy jokes (which got a big laugh from the nearly full stadium) and rants about the evils of cancel culture (big cheers) and woke politics (big cheers). Shortly after, enter Tucker (standing ovation).
His speech, which was followed by a discussion with Conrad Black and Jordan Peterson, was little more than a string of Trudeau jokes, misleading assertions about Canada’s medical assistance in dying policy, and attacks on trans identity as a movement to “ritually humiliate you.” Throughout the event, there were frequent references to the importance of truth: “These are the stakes, this is the truth, I’m going to stand on the truth.” Coming from a person who has built a career on twisting reality, it felt like satire.
Truth. That's what Carlson said was at stake. The truth is that Carlson is telling what Mark Twain called "damn'd lies." These are manufactured for fools. What is surprising is how many fools there are -- particularly the number who know exactly what they are doing.
Image: Brian Cahn / ZUMA Press Wire / Alamy
