All Tuckered Out in Edmonton
Tucker Carlson and Company put on a tedious showcase of conservative grievances at Rogers Place.
I arrived early to Tucker Carlson’s speaking engagement at Rogers Place in Edmonton alongside my compadre Danielle Paradis, a fellow journalist and masochist, to do some people watching while taking in the scenery.
The Falun Gong Chinese dissident cult was well represented in the arena’s concourse, with adjacent tables for its Shen Yun: China Before Communism production and Epoch Times propaganda rag, sitting near a display from the Bow Valley Credit Union — the survivalist gold and silver-hoarding bank.
Dani and I surveyed our section before the event commenced. A few seats from us sat a sharply dressed man, who couldn’t have been any older than myself and was probably younger, sitting alone and listening to something on earphones. This is what I envision Carlson’s target audience to be — lonely rich dudes.
Sitting in front of us was a couple who spent their pre-show time watching dog videos on a phone, seemingly disinterested in their surroundings.
The evening’s main event was a panel discussion between Carlson, National Post founder and convicted crook Conrad Black, and a clearly Xanned out Jordan Peterson, who replaced Maritime gargoyle Rex Murphy in the lineup at the last minute.
Murphy dropping out was somewhat disappointing for this writer, who was looking forward to seeing what death itself looks like in the flesh.
The lack of chemistry, let alone any conversational flow, between the three men on stage was palpable.
The only one of them with a shred of charisma was Carlson, whose talents as a broadcaster are undeniable.
As we waited for the show to start, I paid attention to the selection of music playing from the loudspeakers, which I always find interesting at an arena show as an indicator of the main act’s musical tastes.
I counted three Grateful Dead songs in the playlist — New Speedway Boogie, Fire on the Mountain and, after the show ended, China Cat Sunflower.
It would make sense that Tucker is a Deadhead, which he indeed is. The Dead’s music is exceptionally inviting and has no discernible politics. Anyone can make their songs their own, placing whatever values they want in them.
And Tucker’s values, we know from the Dominion Voting Systems court case’s filings, are quite fungible.
The event opened with remarks from True North writer Rachel Emmanuel — Mrs. Take Back Alberta herself — who boasted that there were 10,000 people in attendance.
There were far more people there than I anticipated — the arena’s upper bowl was curtained off while the lower bowl was fairly backed — but I’d venture to guess there were closer to 7,000 people there.
“How many of you are here tonight because of someone else's generosity?” Emmanuel asked the audience, with what seemed like a majority of attendees applauding, explaining the sizable turnout.
Organizers used the same tactics as the producers of the Sound of Freedom — last year’s anti-child trafficking film sensation that was immensely popular among the Christian right — encouraging well-heeled supporters to buy tickets en masse and give them away.
Emmanuel introduced Premier Danielle Smith, who spoke alongside Carlson for exactly 16 minutes earlier that day at a smaller Calgary event and dined with him the evening before.
“As we navigate through this discussion, let's remember the power of respectful disagreement and the shared responsibility we have in creating a society where diverse perspectives are not only welcomed, but celebrated,” Smith said at the Edmonton event, addressing criticisms that she was giving oxygen to Carlson’s most noxious views.
It must have been awkward for Smith when at the outset of the panel discussion Conrad Black proclaimed that “Tucker and Jordan and I agree on almost everything.”
The only thing resembling a point of disagreement between panelists was Carlson’s earlier characterization of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, whom Carlson said he knows from her time as at the Financial Times, as “not very bright at all” and a “fascist midget.”
“You can just imagine her taking great glee as your fourth grade self wets his pants in class, as Mrs. Freeland refuses to let you go to the bathroom,” Carlson said.
Black countered, with characteristic verbosity, that while the Financial Times is a “ludicrous, globalist, socialistic, interventionist regimentation of a paper,” Freeland is actually a “very nice lady.”
Later, as Peterson meandered on about how Christianity provides the answer to the “existence of evil in some transcendent sense,” represented by Auschwitz, which was built by German Protestants, somebody from the audience shouted: “What about Gaza?”
“Pipe down. This isn’t your conference,” Peterson said to uproaring applause.
Immediately after Smith poke of the “power of respectful disagreement,” she instantly pivoted, with no discernible transition, towards offering “acknowledgement and gratitude to the Edmonton Police Service and their amazing Chief Dale McFee.”
She said this the same day Edmonton cops shot and tased a 19-year-old girl who was in a fight with her pre-teen sister.
Smith specifically applaused McFee’s work in shutting down homeless encampments, which she referred to twice as “gang-operated drug camps.”
“Our aspiration is to remove every single one of these gang-operated drug camps and never see them come back, because this city belongs to you,” she said.
She contrasted Alberta’s approach to the drug poisoning crisis of lavishing funds on private abstinence-only recovery clinics while claiming B.C. was prescribing opioids to children. Later in the evening, Carlson repeated this claim as evidence the “government is trying to kill your children.”
The source of this allegation is, unsurprisingly for those who have the misfortune of following his work, an article from Odessa-based National Post hack Adam Zivo, who conflated a recommendation from the B.C. Centre on Substance Use, which is not a governmental body, with official government policy.
The centre’s recommendation makes sense when you account for the reality that the leading cause of death for kids in B.C. aged 10 to 18 in 2022 was drug poisoning.
For Smith, Carlson and their ilk, of course, that just means the government should start forcing children into abstinence.
Perhaps Peterson knows some good clinics in Serbia.
Disbarred Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms lawyer John Carpay followed Smith’s speech with his own introductory remarks.
Not much to report there. Blah blah blah woke totalitarian ideology.
Then Kid Rock’s American Badass played as Carlson took to the stage for a half-hour solo act, in which he shouted out his friend Theo Fleury, who was in attendance, twice and referenced Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s blackface habit three times.
“Your prime minister can put on the costumes of other cultures, but he doesn't really understand them,” said Carlson, who is usually spot on when he skewers the hypocrisies of liberal elites.
The issue is the sinister agenda that these valid criticisms mask.
With the premier in attendance, Carlson endorsed a version of white replacement theory, in which he accused liberal elites in Canada and the U.S. of using immigration to dilute the voting power of existing citizens, likening increased immigration to inflation:
Your citizenship entitles you to choose your leaders. Your vote is valuable, because there's a finite supply of those votes.
It’s pretty much unlike the Canadian dollar or the U.S. dollar, which depends. They can print more and then the Canadian dollars that you have in your pocket are worth less…
The same principle holds for citizenship in a democracy. If you don't like the way that the public votes, import new voters, and that's precisely what they're doing…
There is zero evidence that the Trudeau government loves you, and there's overwhelming evidence that they hate you and your family.
Carlson’s comments on trans rights were equally dark:
I personally feel very sorry for trans people. I'm not angry at them at all.
I think they are victims of bigger forces, but to officially promote what is a humiliation ritual designed to put Christians in an untenable position where they have to either swear allegiance to the new state religion, which is transgenderism, or to their ancestral religion, which is Christianity.
It is a loyalty test, and it's meant to humiliate and destroy them. And let's just be honest about what we're seeing.
Nobody on stage at any point in the evening disagreed with these sentiments. Where was the fulsome debate the premier alluded to?
Carlson complained that “almost all outlets in this wonderful oppressed country are run by the government” before being joined on stage by two employees of the country’s largest newspaper chain, which regards government subsidies as a “key pillar” of its business strategy.
This imagined sense of conservative victimhood was the common thread holding together Black, Peterson and Carlson’s individual, often disconnected panel remarks.
Peterson, wearing a suit that must have cost thousands of dollars, spoke about how elites have the “ability to manipulate or misuse power, but the power that we need to set the world straight is actually at your fingertips.” Whatever that means.
“The war that we're in is psychological or spiritual, if you want to look at it that way, rather than political and everyone has a sense of that now that something is moving. That's deeper than the mere political. The tectonic plates themselves are shifting,” he added.
Black, who is an unbelievably dull orator, referred to a “correlation of forces” who are the “enemy of practically all of us here, unless there are some spies from the CBC or elsewhere.”
“They possess the academy. They possess the media. They possess Wall Street and the equivalent, to an extent, in Canada, Silicon Valley … and they have big entertainment and big sports,” he said, taking particular aim at those who are “tremendously talented at entertainment and athletics but utter morons politically.”
Except for Conspiracy Theory Fleury, presumably.
“Despite that, we’re going to win, and I feel very confident about that,” Black promised.
Here we have a multimillionaire who founded his own national newspaper because he regarded the Globe and Mail as insufficiently right-wing, has whatever he feels like writing published without any apparent editing, and was pardoned for his fraud conviction by his friend who was president.
Perhaps nothing better summed up the spirit of the night than his promise to persevere, even though the odds are so stacked against him.
Such a well written article (although I am compelled to say novel, not due to the length but to the fictional statements of the characters) beginning with the saucy title.
There seem to be a low limit even this type of "political event" not will sink. Rex Murphy would have been that step too far. Thank you for reporting and giving the rest of us the cringe feeling without us having to actually be there.