You’d never know it from the coverage by mainstream media and even left-leaning pundits, but Tucker Carlson’s rally at Calgary’s Convention Centre on January 24, 2024, began like a Monster Truck Jam or a WWE SmackDown, then quickly devolved into something darker than a George Romero horror movie.
It started with a couple of Tucker fanboys whose companies sponsored the event, one of whom was the president of the Bow Valley Credit Union, paying homage to the ostracized Fox News host by assuring him that “We’re here because, just like you [i.e., the Crowd], we share your values. And we care about what’s going on in our province.”
Then a giant screen lit up the dark conference room, and a larger than life virtual Tucker imparted some timeless wisdom: “The second you decide to tell the truth about something, you are filled with this supernatural, this power from somewhere else” that “makes you stronger.”
Down on the stage itself, the actual Tucker strode confidently out of the shadows, engulfed in the deafening rhymes of “American Badass” by “his friend” Kid Rock, whose songs contain a litany of dog whistles and catcalls for the titillation of the alt-right: “No Rogaine in the propane flow / The chosen one, I’m the living proof / With the gift of gab from the city of truth / I jabbed and stabbed and knocked critics back / And I did not stutter when I said that”…
The Crowd of roughly 4,000 stood in unison and showered the honoured guest with adulation. I had committed to myself that I would not stand for this man, but my neighbours’ glances at my seated position and the growing fervour of the Crowd, along with my trepidation at being outed as a MAGA-opposed journalist, weakened my resolve, though I did manage to refrain from clapping.
Tucker Carlson’s attestations are some combination of stupid, spurious and unfair. They’re also dangerous.
“Thank you, truly, for having me,” Tucker said with a cackle and a smile. “That was the wildest intro I’ve had, ever.”
As a professional propagandist, Tucker centred his message on “Truth,” but his first order of business was to butter up the crowd. He started by confessing something he had “never” shared publicly: that he was, in fact, part Canadian. This, he said, explained his long fascination with and concern for Canada, and the reason he had come to “liberate Canada” from the clutches of our dictatorial prime minister.
“I’ve been everywhere in your country, and I think it’s a remarkable place.” That includes Calgary, a city he apparently has visited many times, “because of your mountains, which I found just beyond belief, really the prettiest places I’ve ever been. This is the prettiest country I’ve ever been in.” The Crowd, sufficiently flattered and fawning, despite the backhanded compliments about Canada and Canadians, were now ready to hear the gospel according to Tucker.
The most impressive thing about Tucker’s “Liberating Canada” rant was just how many right-wing talking points, massaged for a Canadian audience, he was able to cram into such a short speech. He relentlessly attacked Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who he said was a “weird little cross-dresser” and the audience’s “enemy,” and whose government should be opposed to the “maximum extent of your ability.” (Rousing cheers!)
He complained about the federal government’s alleged erosion of our civil liberties, “not the ones granted to you by the Crown, but the ones granted to you by God.” (Nodding heads, a smattering of applause.) These included not only freedom of speech, but also freedom to own guns to protect ourselves from rising crime rates. (Big applause!) He claimed that all media in Canada was state media, and therefore biased toward the left. “I can tune in any hour of the day to learn that I’m racist for driving an SUV and not being trans.” (Knee-slapping and hoots of laughter.)
Such attestations, of course, are some combination of stupid, spurious and unfair; they’re also dangerous because of the context in which Tucker embeds them. Tucker made it very clear in his introduction that afternoon how divisive the meta-message was going to be. “The main thing that I want to say in the short time I’m allotted today is that you should recognize what is happening to you. This is not a political debate to which you’ve been invited to participate. This is a destruction of you and your culture and your beliefs and your children and your future as a country.”
The appropriate response to such utter BS might have been silence punctuated with the odd hoot of “You’re nuts!” Instead, the Crowd lurched to its feet, thousands of hands clapping in a collective appreciation of a man who, it would seem, expressed their “shared values.”
This is when the darkness became darker. Tucker turned the opportunity to critique BC’s safe injection sites policy into a tale of the government giving fentanyl to your kids. And “if they are giving your children fentanyl without telling you, they’re trying to kill your children, which are your inheritance, so the only meaningful thing you will ever produce on earth.”
He then moved on to the federal government’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program, which, he maintained, is encouraging Canadians that are not actually terminally ill “to submit to being killed by the government, who won’t release the statistics. Like, what is that? What is that!?”
“Murder!” yells a voice from the crowd.
“Yeah, it’s genocide, that’s exactly what it is. It’s killing large groups of people.”
At this point, my friend Jim and I turned to look at each other with total disbelief. I had invited Jim to accompany me to Tucker’s Calgary stop on his “Sworn Enemies Tour” for a little companionship and moral support in what I knew would be a challenging environment. Jim lives in Canmore and is a retired American environmentalist who cut his teeth as a young activist in Utah by standing in front of ultraconservative John Birch Society meetings and explaining why the Vietnam War was wrong. Later, he would tell me he had felt more afraid in the Convention Centre that night than he ever had at a John Birch meeting.
“I felt like a Jewish tailor at a Hitler rally,” Jim said.
“And who are those people [being killed by the government], by the way?” Tucker asked. “Again, we don’t really know, because the government hasn’t released the stats. What percentage of those were born in Canada? I bet right around 100 per cent.”
Where is he going with this?
“How many people who arrived in Canada in the last 10 years have opted into the MAID program? I don’t know, but I bet it’s right around zero.”
The Crowd is very silent now, in that you-can-hear-a-pin-drop sense of the word. Can you hear the dog whistle?
“I bet there is zero conversation about that in this country, because I know this country, I know what it’s like. It’s too horrible. No one wants to talk about it. You should talk about it. But more than anything, you should internalize the message of that, which is: They hate me. They hate me to the point they are willing to kill me, which they are.”
Welcome to the great replacement theory, reimagined for the Canadian mind.
We had to stand in line for an hour and a half to get into the rally, which gave me ample time to observe those who would become the Crowd, and they appeared to be a totally normal gathering of Calgarians, the kind of people you might encounter on a late Friday afternoon stroll down Stephen Avenue Mall. A few attendees wore their hearts on their sleeves: three “Proud Member of a Small Fringe Minority” sweatshirts, some Christian private-school T-shirts, and the usual “I Heart Alberta Oil” swag, but mostly it was fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and couples, mostly older men paired up with (much) younger women. The overwhelming majority of the audience were white men, of course, typically macho guys in upscale ersatz cowboy outfits, as well as numerous snappily dressed business casuals on long lunch breaks, decked out in their uniforms of white button-downs, crisp blue blazers and pointy brown shoes.
And now, here they are, cheering as Tucker attacks the CBC as part of the “woke crowd” that “hate[s] you, that’s what they’re saying. They hate you. They are saying, you are bad. That’s exactly what they’re saying, don’t lie to yourself.”
There were many more outrageous claims, ludicrous innuendoes and pernicious dog whistles: about how immigrants were diluting the voting power of (white) Canadians “who are vested in that country, people who were born there, who have lived there long-term, who understand the history of the culture of the country, who are bought in,” and how (white) Christians are similarly being persecuted. All of this persecution is being done, apparently, under the guise of public safety, “a euphemism for hard-edge fascism, actually,” said Tucker. “And frankly, I’m a little more comfortable with the old-fashioned variety, where guys in tight uniforms goose-step through your towns. At least you know who you’re fighting, and you know what it’s going to take to liberate your town.”
When I first heard that our premier had agreed to join Tucker on stage, I, like every Albertan I knew, was appalled.
I remember being dragged by my father to the Billy Graham Crusade at McMahon Stadium in the summer of 1981 as a 13-year-old boy. I don’t remember being affected one way or another, but over seven nights, more than 164,000 people came to listen to what the Calgary Sun called Graham’s much-needed gospel of “belief and hope” during an economic downturn that saw increasing rates of divorce, suicide and crime.
But Tucker is a proselytizer of a very different kind. And the mainstream media in Canada consistently underestimates him. Most coverage of the January 24 rally ignored Tucker’s hateful rhetoric in favour of what Premier Danielle Smith had to say in her interview with him. CBC’s The National framed the story around the political risk to Premier Smith for consorting with what Erin Collins referred to as a “peddler of misinformation,” a rather weak label for someone that Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University and the author of How Fascism Works, has unreservedly branded as the latest in a long line of American fascists.
Like every good storyteller, Tucker constantly circled back to the beginning, where educated elites and leftist ideologues are trying to castrate our children or kill them with fentanyl. “They are not people who are trying to help; they are people who are trying to hurt you. Anyone who goes after your children, anyone who encourages you to have fewer children, is trying to make you extinct. It’s literally that simple.”
And the only appropriate response is violence. “How do you think [“attacks” on children] would fly in Serbia?” he wondered aloud. “You wouldn’t even get to the next sentence before you got shot.” (Laughter.) “Because you’re trying to kill someone’s kids! Your average Serb, whatever you think of them, doesn’t have generations of therapy talk that acts as a logical intermediary [to] seeing what’s actually going on. They’re trying to kill my kids, I’m the father, I won’t allow it, I will lay my life down to prevent it. It’s literally that simple.”
The Crowd stands, wild with applause, while Premier Smith waits in the shadows offstage to join Tucker for an interview.
When I first heard that our premier had agreed to join Tucker on stage, I, like every Albertan I knew, was appalled. But upon reflection, Tucker and Smith do have a lot in common. Indeed, before she entered provincial politics, Smith was the host of a Tucker-inspired radio talk show that, in the words of former Conservative MP Lee Richardson, “stoked division, hate and fear in listeners, with negative rhetoric, culture wars and conspiracy theories. The more provocative, outrageous or extreme the views expressed, the higher the ratings.”
Shortly after she became leader of the UCP, and thus premier, Smith gave an address to the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce and then sat down for a chat with the chamber’s president. She joked that her principal secretary had “a Ph.D. in propaganda” but only “the good kind of propaganda.” She must have been referring to the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars the Alberta government invests in pro-oil, anti-climate and anti-vaccine nonsense.
Since then, Smith has demonstrated a half-hearted commitment to the truth, a tendency to misrepresent history and a propensity to align herself with questionable characters such as David Parker and his Take Back Alberta movement. “Alberta is the heartland of conservatism in this country and the last stand against what we’re up against,” Parker told the CBC before the January 24 show, “which is this totalitarian creep of socialism.”
Today, however, Smith would be on her best behaviour, the genteel Thatcher to Tucker’s chilling Goebbels. She started off by defending her right to sit down with a hate-spewing and divisive propagandist because she doesn’t agree with every word of any of her interviewees, and then batted away any questions about the “human rights” violations represented by the arrest of the Coutts Four for allegedly conspiring to kill RCMP officers. She did use the moment to say what she apparently wanted the world to hear, that “I think we should just double down and double our oil and gas production”—this, less than a month after the end of the hottest year on record.
But what possible benefit did Premier Smith stand to gain by partaking in an interview with a hate-spewing fascist? And why did she volunteer to introduce him again at the Edmonton show that night, a show she wasn’t even scheduled to attend?
The obvious answer is that she and Tucker (and fellow travellers W. Brett Wilson, Jordan Peterson and Conrad Black) are birds of a feather, and that the Alberta leg of Tucker’s “Sworn Enemies Tour” was the perfect trial balloon to test extreme ideas in the hope that they might one day become mainstream, a popular strategy among populists that allows leaders to slowly but surely instill a new vision of what is possible and acceptable.
Three days after the Tucker rallies in Calgary and Edmonton, Premier Smith promised Albertans a new “parental rights” policy that not only discriminates against trans and gender-diverse children and youth but is, in the estimation of two MRU professors published at The Conversation, “the most extensive, draconian and unbalanced proposal of any conservative province to date.”
Coincidence? I think not.
A couple of days after surviving Tucker, I sent a short summary of what I had experienced to a bunch of friends and colleagues. Predictably most were outraged, but a few responses surprised me. A friend from high school in the 1980s who had attended the Calgary rally suggested “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinions.”
Another long-time friend from Calgary, while acknowledging that it’s “chilling that guys I think I share values with are falling under that spell,” also admitted, “I’m angry about some things too… and the radical left can be just as repulsive in a less obvious way.”
On the way out of the event I asked a few folks what they thought about the rally. The response was unanimous: “Great!”
Who might he align with? When pressed, Friend B reminded me that “Canada has all the extremes. A normal dude like me feels somewhat separated from reality with some of the things being pushed down my throat. This is a minor example… but there is now a basket of menstrual products on the counter in the men’s room at work… I won’t be rioting, but it’s a minor aggravation that seems unnecessary to me and it’s the pushback against the ‘wokeness’ of it all that appeals to the Tucker crowd.”
Perhaps the most informative response was from Ruben Nelson, who grew up in Calgary and became an internationally recognized futurist who has spent the better part of his adult life trying to understand the forces that are now reshaping our lives, our world and our future. “I now conclude that what we are seeing is not simply an example of extremists having a night on the town. Rather, we are caught up in a long-term, stealthy effort by committed folks to ‘groom’ Albertans (and any others who will play) so that, voluntarily, more and more of us come to tolerate these folks as ‘somewhat offensive, but within what is now normal.’ Once Albertans accept these folks as part of the normal, and therefore legitimate, discourse, these folks own us.
“They’ve been at it for decades, and to date there is not enough in sight, let alone public outrage, to create an effective defence against them.”
On the way out of the Convention Centre I asked a few folks what they thought about the rally. The response was unanimous: “Great!” One young business casual, wearing the standard-issue pointy brown shoes and white button-down, this time under a tortoise-shell jacket instead of a blue blazer, gushed “I could have sat there for another two hours!”
Outside, in the disinfecting sunlight and fresh air, Jim and I ran into a lone protester in a well-worn red hoodie. He refused to provide his name, and as we chatted for a bit he confided to me that he was going to college and hoped to become a journalist. His sign explained why: “PREMIER SMITH’S MENTOR TUCKER CARLSON IS A LIAR.”
Two older men, well dressed and silver haired, overheard us and scoffed, “Enjoy the pedophilia.”
Journalists scoured the milling attendees for quotes. Two older women, who also withheld their names, told the Toronto Star that everyone needed to listen to Tucker because he wasn’t afraid to tell the truth. One of them paraphrased part of Tucker’s conclusion that “your timidity needs to be replaced by bravery…. [Cheers and applause.] The first thing that you need to do, before changing anything in your country, is to change everything about your heart. You have to be—right?!—ready for a contest where the stakes are existential.”
A light came on in her eyes and she said, “If I can make a difference with one person and that one person tells another person, it’ll just do this.” And then she spread her arms wide and twinkled her fingers, suggesting how Tucker’s fascistic ideas could travel by word of mouth until they consumed the entire world.
Jeff Gailus grew up in Calgary and now lives in Montana. He is the author of Little Black Lies (RMB, 2012).
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