Canada is facing an existential crisis like much of the rest of the West, and Canadians need to understand that to finally fight back against the people in power there.
That was the message from former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who delivered an impassioned speech in Calgary, Alberta, on Tuesday. His Calgary speech was one of two sold-out appearances in Alberta, with 4,000 attending in Calgary and 8,000 in Edmonton, according to Politico.
On X, formerly known as Twitter, Carlson dubbed his lecture “Liberating Canada: The Calgary Speech.”
Carlson said that the three things that strike him most about Canada when he visits are its natural beauty, the politeness of its people, and that its comedians left decades ago.
“I do think it’s important to laugh at your circumstances, not just because it makes you feel better—though it does—but because it gives you perspective on them,” he said. “Humor requires some distance, some critical distance both from yourself and your surroundings, and you can’t really see things clearly until you have that.”
If you have a country where humorous people feel they have to leave, “that’s a huge problem,” Carlson said. Furthermore, he explained that you can’t form an effective political or resistance movement if you can’t laugh at your enemies.
Pointing out that your enemies are both evil and ludicrous “saps their power,” the former Fox News host said, citing the example of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“Let’s say you had some sort of weird prime minister who liked to dress up in fussy costumes, it would be superimportant to point that out, like, a lot—like, relentlessly,” Carlson said.
He followed up by saying that because many young Canadians take Trudeau seriously, it’s important to point out “what an absurd poseur this guy is.”
“He’s a ridiculous figure,” he said.
Carlson said that Canadians should resist Trudeau to the maximum extent of their ability, but before they do that, they should laugh at him until they “can’t breathe.”
Trudeau is like a person who shows up for a costume party, but it’s not a costume party, and speaks as though he has some moral authority, he said.
The second piece of advice Carlson had for Canadians is that they need to recognize what’s happening to them.
“This is not a political debate in 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,” he said.
That isn’t hyperbole, Carlson stressed.
“If you have a government giving fentanyl to your children as they are in [British Columbia] … what’s the message of that?” he said.
Carlson was referring to a provisional government policy in British Columbia that, as of last August, reportedly began allowing “safe” recreational fentanyl to be distributed to adults and minors.
He noted that fentanyl is the leading cause of death for people under 40 in the United States.
“If someone is giving fentanyl to your children without telling you, they’re trying to kill your children, which are your inheritance, the only meaningful thing you will ever produce on earth,” he said.
He then turned his attention to Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program, or MAiD.
“If you are killing 50,000 of your citizens—the government is doing that through the MAiD program, and a lot of them are not terminally ill; they are just sad—and the government is encouraging them to submit to being killed by the government, and then won’t release the recent statistics, what is that?” Carlson asked rhetorically.
Carlson called that a “genocide” and said that it’s hard to know who is actually being killed, because the government is holding back statistics.
Carlson also spoke about the erosion of civil liberties in Canada. He said he’s not talking about liberties granted by the “crown,” but about the most basic civil liberties granted by God, including “the freedom of speech, which is inalienable. It cannot be taken from you, no matter who is in Ottawa,” the nation’s capital.
“It doesn’t matter who is in the prime minister’s office. Your rights remain the same. You were born with them, because you are not a slave, you are a human being, and you have inherent dignity because God made you,” he said.
If the government is trying to take those rights away in the “name of safety,” he said, and then they take away your right to bear arms and defend yourself, then saying that you don’t have a right to complain about it while subsidizing what is becoming state media to promote this message, their message is “you are bad.”
Carlson said that Canada has the highest level of immigration per capita in the world. No matter where that population is coming from, “if you change the population of the country, you change the country, and you dilute the voting power of the people who invested in that country, the people who were born there and lived there long term.”
He said that was simple “math.”
Not only is that “horrifying,” Carlson said, but there’s been no public debate over it. Even if those who promoted that policy said that it was for economic reasons, he said he would be OK with that.
But they can’t do that, he said, because when you look at factors such as housing prices and the strain on public services, such as the health care system, it’s clear that the system is overburdened.
Finally, he pointed out what Canada is doing to its Christians.
If 90 churches are burned to the ground, and the prime minister and his associates are “endorsing that,” Carlson said, and pastors are put in jail for preaching the Gospel, “you’re serving someone other than the people of Canada.”
“That’s really scary, and if you dress it up in the passive-aggressive, self-help language of the modern Left,” that’s just another form of authoritarian fascism, Carlson said.
Politics and politicians won’t save the country from these problems, he concluded. Instead, he said, Canadians who wish to resist need an “attitude change.”
Timidity needs to be replaced with bravery, he said, and muddled thinking must be replaced with clarity to understand that all the terrible policies are aimed at “you.”
The stakes in this conflict are “existential,” he said.
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