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Former Fox News anchor and provocative U.S. political commentator Tucker Carlson will visit Calgary on Jan. 24 for a live speech followed by an interview.
Carlson, whose popularity skyrocketed as he brought far-right talking points into mainstream news on his show Tucker Carlson Tonight, will also be in conversation with Premier Danielle Smith toward the end of the event.
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Since being fired from Fox News, Carlson has started hosting a new show called Tucker on X, where he has challenged the murder of Black man George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, purported the killing of Christians in Ukraine, and deemed the non-profits tending to undocumented immigrants in the U.S.’s southern border as “criminals.”
Carlson, who had his start in journalism by writing for neo-conservative magazine the Weekly Standard, went on to host shows at CNN and MSNBC before being hired by Fox News. There, he was a proponent of Donald Trump and pushed out several conspiracy theories regarding the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and Ukrainian bioweapons.
Fox terminated Carlson after settling a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems by paying $787.5 million for falsely claiming election fraud.
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Christian Darbyshire, partner at Tine Public — the organizer of the event and other talks involving notable names, including Barack and Michelle Obama, Oprah and Ellen — said Carlson has grown in popularity in the past couple of years.
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“He gets tens of millions of views on each of his shows, sometimes hundreds of millions of views,” Darbyshire said. “So, he’s gotten to the point where his profile is massive now, and so a lot of people want to see him.
“There’ll be additional cities that will probably be announced at some point, but Calgary is the first one that got organized.”
He added that the company reached out to the Alberta government, which showed interest in attending.
Darbyshire said it’s not yet known what issues Carlson will address during the event.
“We’ll probably have clear direction on all that sometime in January, a few weeks before the event,” he said.
Tickets for Carlson’s appearance go on sale at Ticketmaster.ca at 10 a.m. Wednesday.
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