Fox News host Tucker Carlson, in his never-ending quest to be the most ludicrous host in cable news history, called on the United States military to invade Canada and “liberate” the country from “authoritarian” leader Justin Trudeau.
“And I mean it,” he insisted Thursday, just in case viewers thought he was joking.
Interviewing “manly” Canadian college professor David Azerrad on his Fox Nation show, Carlson discussed last year’s “Freedom Convoy” made up of anti-vax truckers protesting against Canada’s vaccine mandates. Carlson, along with most of Fox News, was a major proponent of the demonstrations.
“So I have to ask you about Canada, and what we saw happen there last winter—the trucker protest and then the crackdown by the authoritarian government of Canada,” Carlson said.
Azerrad, meanwhile, joked that he thought Carlson was going to ask whether “Trudeau was Castro’s son,” prompting the far-right Fox host to then go on a tangent in which he invoked America’s botched 1961 invasion of Cuba.
“I’m completely in favor of a Bay of Pigs operation to liberate that country,” Carlson declared. “Why should we stand back and let our biggest trading partner, the country with which we share the longest border, and actually, I’ll just say, a great country, I love Canada, I’ve always loved Canada because of its natural beauty, why should we let it become Cuba?”
He continued: “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.”
After his guest asserted he wasn’t quite at that point yet, Carlson added: “I’m just talking myself into a frenzy here!”
This isn’t the first time that Carlson, who has been praised in the past over his supposed non-interventionist “anti-war” stance, has advocated for military action against the United States’ neighbors. (Of course, much of Carlson’s so-called anti-war rhetoric comes in the service of authoritarian leaders, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.)
In 2019, for instance, the ultra-nationalist host seemingly advocated for military intervention in Mexico, calling the country a “hostile foreign power” while saying the U.S. “must strike back.”
