Tucker Carlson claimed that a report naming Americans who donated to the anti-vaccine mandate truckers in Canada is “not journalism,” but rather an “incitement to violence.”
The Fox News host has been lashing out at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for his handling of the protests, and Wednesday night was no different. This time, Carlson also took aim at a piece of investigative journalism by The Washington Post that shed light on the sources of funding for the protests.
“Trudeau’s allies in the media, of course, have been very busy helping him. They’ve been harassing anyone who dared to donate to the truckers,” Carlson asserted.
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On Tuesday, the Post revealed several Americans who contributed financially to the cause, thanks to hacked data from GiveSendGo that was provided to journalists by the nonprofit leak publisher Distributed Denial of Secrets. According to the report, just over half of the nearly $9 million in donations came from Canadian residents, while 42 percent came from the U.S. The highest number of donations came from Americans as well.
“Can you imagine?” Carlson asked. “That’s not journalism. It’s an incitement to violence, among other things.” Carlson didn’t explain how exactly the report meets the high threshold of inciting violence. Perhaps this is one of those instances where viewers aren’t supposed to take him seriously, as his lawyers have successfully argued in court.
Carlson then mentioned a Feb. 15 story in the Ottawa Citizen that named a cafe owner who gave $250 to the cause. “Now that owner is receiving threats and had to close her business,” Carlson said. But what Carlson doesn’t mention is that the owner’s name had already circulated on Twitter, and it was this that prompted the threats that forced her to close up shop—not the Ottawa Citizen article. How the news article constituted “harassment,” as Carlson claimed, especially when the cafe owner willingly spoke with the reporter, is unclear. (Carlson also got the reporter’s name wrong.)
Similarly, the donors named in the Washington Post article either responded to reporters’ emails, are current or former government employees, or are high-profile individuals. For instance, Oregon resident Nancy Vasa wrote, “I believe that we are falling off the cliff to communism and the people rising up could be our last chance to get Americans to fight for our freedoms.” She added that she believes “the vaccine mandates are part of a mass murder by Big Pharma.”
