I’m fairly sure most of you don’t watch Fox News or other right wing media. I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to . But I think it’s important to pass on at least some of what they’re doing so we know where Republican voters are getting some of this stuff. Here’s Tucker Carlson this week proposing that the US invade Canada:
Tucker Carlson on Thursday called for the U.S. to invade Canada and remove Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The Fox News host claimed he meant it before saying he was talking himself “into a frenzy.”
During Fox Nation’s “Tucker Carlson Today,” Carlson referenced the arrests last year of anti-vax truckers in Canada. The demonstrators paralyzed commerce and won over extremists with their traffic-tying protests of COVID-19 safety measures. At the time, Carlson said the country had become a dictatorship because the government took action.
And now he suggested he’d like to do something about it.
“I’m completely in favor of a Bay of Pigs operation to liberate that country,” Carlson said. “Why should we stand back and let our biggest trading partner … why should we let it become Cuba? Like, why don’t we liberate it? We’re spending all this money to liberate Ukraine from the Russians. Why are we not sending an armed force north to liberate Canada from Trudeau? And I mean it.”
The right-wing personality then laughed and said, “I’m just talking myself into a frenzy here.”
A Bay of Pigs operation? Sounds great. What could go wrong?
It’s tempting to think that Carlson is just joking or trolling at worst. But he’s really off the deep end in a dozen different ways and I don’t think people who watch him see him as a comedian. Here are just a few other example from the last week:
Those are just two. Here are a few more from Tuck and other Fox News hosts from this week.
I had always assumed that Carlson was joking most of the time, sticking it to the libs and tongue in cheek. But I don’t think that anymore. I think he’s truly drawn to the Viktor Orban ideology and is quite serious about pushing that agenda. I also think he’s hungry for big money, (That New York Times profile from a few months ago makes that clear.) But I’m increasingly convinced that he’s going nuts. I mean that in a purely clinical sense of the word. He’s unstable. Watch that video and hear his looney laughter. He does that all the time and it’s extremely creepy. I don’t think he can help it.
I guess the big question is what so many people see in this guy. They love to watch him and I don’t think it’s in a train wreck sort of way. They truly think he’s telling them something important. They believe him.