Justin Trudeau’s Canada looks like a tyranny and perhaps Washington should consider intervening to “liberate” it.
Do not laugh. Rather cry. Because this delirium does not come from an obscure far-right American group. It is the star host of Fox News, Tucker Carlson, who is preparing a documentary on this subject.
The trailer, which has just been unveiled, oozes demagoguery and dishonesty1.
Tucker Carlson wonders if Washington should “liberate” the population of a neighboring country if it was ruled by an authoritarian leader. He cites as examples the military operations of the United States in Iraq and Libya.
He then suggests that a neighbour, Canada, is now akin to a tyranny. In particular, it uses excerpts from interviews made in the wake of the adoption of health measures against COVID-19 and the police operation that led to the end of the siege in Ottawa in February 2022.
While Fox News announced this documentary, Elon Musk, new hero of the followers of the Trumpist movement in the United States, took a malicious pleasure in denigrating the CBC.
The big boss of Twitter had fun, on his platform, to add a series of labels to the CBC account. It had thus become easier for the detractors of the Canadian network – like the conservative Pierre Poilievre – to accuse it of being a tool of “propaganda” in the service of Justin Trudeau. Elon Musk ended this scam a few days later, without warning.
It’s probably just a coincidence that these two events overlap. Nevertheless, it is indicative of two major trends that should concern us.
First, Canada, its government and, more broadly, all of our country’s democratic institutions have become targets for the Trumpists and their allies.
It’s not the first time it’s been noticed. At the beginning of 2022, several tenors of the American right publicly showed their support for the demonstrators who besieged Ottawa and protested elsewhere in the country against sanitary measures.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, entrepreneur Mike Lindell – an unwavering ally of Donald Trump – compared Justin Trudeau to Vladimir Putin.
At the same time, Elon Musk (him again!) compared the Canadian Prime Minister to Hitler.
The second trend is that the forces of the radical right are now managing to coalesce and exert their influence beyond borders.
This is exactly what Steve Bannon, the former eminence grise of Donald Trump, dreamed of. In 2018, he told the New York Times that he wanted to “build a populist infrastructure for the global populist movement”.
The Italian writer and political adviser Giuliano da Empoli (author of the book The Kremlin Mage) reports this statement in an illuminating little essay titled Chaos Engineers.
He says that Steve Bannon then understood that there was a space to create an “International of nationalists, a platform designed to pool experiences between the different movements active in Europe and America”.
Bernard Harcourt, a law professor at Columbia University, confirms that Steve Bannon’s dream has come true. “I am deeply concerned that this infrastructure, which is real and powerful, is solidifying,” he told us.
In a book titled Critique & Praxishe called this phenomenon the “populist international”.
“The XXe century was marked by a certain form of left-wing internationalism, which began with the Russian revolution, continued with the Chinese revolution and Mao, as well as insurgencies across Asia, Africa and Latin America . There was an element of contagion,” the professor pointed out.
According to him, it is now “right-wing populist autocrats and fascist movements” that form an “international”, that is to say that they manage to inspire and feed each other, ignoring borders.
These movements are not homogeneous. Their claims and goals are not always similar. But it seems clear that they represent, for the most part, an existential threat to liberal democracies in their current form.
The report of the American special prosecutor Robert Mueller, on the Russian interference, in 2019, had shown that the regime of Vladimir Putin sought above all to sow discord within Western democracies.
It is also, visibly, what the multiple partners of the International of Populist Autocrats wish to do. Accentuate divisions, increase divisions, contribute to radicalization and, consequently, weaken democratic institutions.
It also seems obvious that their union is their strength.
Despite the defeats of some of its most important tenors in recent years, such as Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, the movement remains dynamic and influential.
Tucker Carlson’s call to liberate Canada may seem outlandish, even laughable. We would, however, be wrong to underestimate – and not denounce – such populists and their incendiary rhetoric.