Tucker Carlson is obsessed with Perth
Clive Palmer imports MAGA energy to Australia with the Freedom Conferences.
I'd never seen such tight security at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre — and the previous time I’d been there, counter-terror cops had charged me with aggravated burglary.
This time, on Monday night, about a dozen police officers milled around as punters queued to be checked by full-body scanners.
As I waited, a young man approached me wanting a soundbite for his podcast.
"Why have you come to see Tucker Carlson?" he asked, shoving the end of his phone in my face.
"I think he's one of the best entertainers in the world," I told him.
When I eventually entered the theatre, the Perth leg of The Freedom Conferences, presented by Carlson's co-headliner Clive Palmer, was underway. Pierre Kory MD, an Ivermectin advocate from the US, was onstage running through a PowerPoint presentation of his negative press clippings. He said he was lucky to have retained a licence to treat patients, unlike some of his like-minded colleagues. "I even see patients in Australia," he said, then shushed theatrically as the crowd cheered. "That's probably going to put me in jail on the way home."
Next up was Australian GP Melissa McCann, who also alleged Covid corruption and cover-ups. Then, filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza, who Donald Trump once presidentially pardoned for a political finance fraud conviction, made brief remarks before screening an excerpt from his documentary 2000 Mules. It detailed the "ballot-trafficking" operations that supposedly stole the win for Biden in 2020. The film was pulled from distribution in May following a successful defamation suit by a man it accused of voter fraud.
The venue had filled by the time Clive Palmer was given a fawning introduction. Despite media reports of the tour's low ticket sales, there was barely an empty seat in the 2500-capacity Riverside Theatre. Pictures of Palmer with leaders including John Howard, Prince Philip, and Bill Clinton (the last of whom attracted boos) flashed up on the big screen. But Palmer was a no-show. At the last possible moment, the event’s MC said Clive had come down with laryngitis and wouldn't be joining us. Instead, we were shown a video of his speech from a previous tour stop.
A man seated a few rows in front of me was outraged. He yelled at the screen, "Where's Clive? Where the fuck's Clive?" (At the evening's end, as the crowd cleared, the same man remained fast asleep in his chair, six or seven beer bottles at his feet.)
But not everyone minded the iron ore magnate's absence. "It was actually better because Clive didn't show up," one young woman told me after the show. "I'm not a fan of him after he used that much taxpayer money."
The real attraction was always Tucker. From the moment he took the stage, Carlson had the crowd enthralled. "I have been obsessed with Perth, Australia since I was 10 years old," he said to hearty applause.
His views on gender came to the fore when he moved to some crowd-pleasing jibes. He repeatedly insulted New Zealand's former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. "I was going to visit, but I just couldn't bring myself after they elected that chick," he said to roars of approval. He thought Canada had lost its way and its masculinity as the most far-gone of the “Anglosphere” nations being destroyed by threats from within. A group of four men sitting in the front row could invade it, he said, possessing between them more testosterone than the entire country.
Normally forthcoming with his opinions, there was one conflict the ousted Fox News star preferred not to dwell on.
"I'll decide who I hate," he said, defending his refusal to condemn Vladimir Putin.
A heckler yelled the name of Carlson's former boss: "Murdoch!"
"I heard that, and I'm not responding!" Carlson said, laughing. "I'm half deaf in this ear, and I still heard that!"
Tucker's well-honed ability to weaponise grievances was on display when he turned his attention to the housing crisis. It was a tragedy, he said, that many young people today lacked the prospect of owning even "dorky, middle-class" homes of their own. He blamed the situation on his major preoccupation: mass immigration. In Australia's case, he added, a unionised construction sector didn't help.
A few times, Tucker touched on religious matters. "I know this is a secular country, but I'm completely convinced there is a spiritual war going on," he said towards the evening's end. The rapturous applause suggested the disclaimer wasn't necessary in this room.
"Every culture from the beginning of time, and I mean all recorded history, has believed there is a battle unseen between good and evil... The West post-1945 is the only culture in recorded history that hasn't believed that, and I'm kind of thinking maybe it's true."
And maybe it is. As much as I'd enjoyed the evening’s performance, I left the Convention Centre feeling spiritually deflated. A woman at the bus stop was telling me how generous Palmer had been with those five million doses of hydroxychloroquine, but I couldn't focus on her properly. After four and a half hours of the Freedom Conferences, my energetic field was skew whiff.
I was there, I’d been telling myself, to learn from a master of political communication, but I’d been laughing along with the rest of them. Normally, I get my Tucker in TikTok-sized doses. A lengthier exposure made me wonder if there's a spiritual price to pay for cleaving apart one's aesthetic and moral judgements.
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Gerard Mazza
