Tucker Carlson for UFO Czar? Plus: David Frum's Descent into Historical Revisionism

​It seemed silly enough when, a few minutes before New Year’s, the Daily Star announced that UFO documentary producer Mark Christopher Lee wants singer Robbie Williams, who recently confessed to encountering a supposed flying saucer, to serve as the U.K.’s UFO ambassador. It was doubly silly that Lee made the recommendation via UFO journalist George Knapp, who is friends with Williams (!). 

​But that story paled before a recent report late last week in Radar Online repeating gossip around Mar-a-Lago that conservative pundit Tucker Carlson is “begging” President-Elect Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk to make Carlson the government’s de facto UFO czar. Radar reports that Carlson has repeatedly raised the issue with Trump and his cronies. “He's convinced that UFOs do exist,” an anonymous “insider” told Radar, “and he’s spent an awful lot of time on research, looking into conspiracy theories and cover-ups.” This unnamed source claimed Carlson’s belief is genuine and that this is a move he made out of conviction, not for attention.
 
Carlson previously appeared on Ancient Aliens to speculate about UFOs and made headlines over the past year and a half with repeated claims about dark UFO conspiracies, demonic encounters, and other paranormal nonsense.

Of course, Ancient Aliens has some explaining to do now that a burst of radio waves from a distant star detected in 2022 that the show and some scientists had claimed was evidence of contact from an advanced alien civilization turned out to be a natural emanation from a dead star.
 
But I want to devote the majority of this posting to a disturbing piece (non-paywalled version here) by David Frum published in The Atlantic this weekend. The conservative Canadian-American pundit published a transcript of an address he gave on December 4 to the Canadian Institute for Historical Education in which he defended white “settler colonialism” and the residential schools that stripped Native children from their families and worked to destroy indigenous cultures. An example of unreconstructed neo-Victorianism, Frum’s piece was riddled with outdated ideas about history and a startlingly naïve view of anthropology and culture.
 
Frum’s speech was ostensibly in defense of John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister of the Dominion of Canada, who federalized that country’s patchwork of residential schools following, like his American contemporaries, a plan to assimilate Native peoples (known as First Nations peoples in Canada) into what was seen as a white Anglo-dominated nation by forcibly re-educating them in Anglo culture and capitalism and thus destroying traditional Native cultures and especially the collectivism of those cultures.
 
Macdonald, who served most of the years from 1867 to 1891, presided over a system that mirrored that of his American contemporary, Richard Henry Pratt, who operated residential schools on this side of the border. “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one,” Pratt said in an 1892 speech. “In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.” Macdonald’s position was the same in all but wording.
 
Canadians turned against Macdonald’s memory during the Black Lives Matter-influenced protest movement of the early 2020s, eventually removing a statue of him from the town where Frum lives, much to Frum’s dismay.
 
In his speech, Frum, makes plain his disdain for the social justice movement, attacking BLM protests, land acknowledgement statements (which I personally find performative), and the general idea of multiculturalism. He opens his discussion of the residential schools not with the damage they did to Native cultures but by celebrating their success in vaccinating the children forced to attend them at gunpoint against smallpox. He acknowledges the grim death toll of these schools and their rampant sexual and physical abuse, but he considers this only a “disgrace” against a system that was fundamentally legitimate and intended to benefit Native children. He attacks the Canadian government for mourning the deaths of the children who died at these schools because what researchers believed to be a mass grave of students killed at Kamloops seems more likely not to have been a mass grave.
 
This incident allows Frum to proceed to defend what he sees as the “high culture” of Canada’s white population against the “wanderers from Siberia”—yes, he uses those words to describe the first Americans—about whose many cultures he knows nothing. He excuses British and French colonization of North America as a historical inevitability made possible not by force of arms—though Europeans killed and enslaved Native people in large numbers—but through an accident of disease. Noting that “microbes” caused a massive population collapse (though he uses the 90% figure, while often cited in popular sources, is an estimate on the highest end), he essentially repeats the imperialist idea of terra nullius, that the mass deaths (caused, again, by a big whoopsie!) left the continent wide open for white people to settle. Any further conflicts, he says, were justified by the right of conquest, citing similar conquests of the Middle East and North Africa by the Arabs and England by the French.
 
But it is disease that he sees as the ultimate justification for the Canadian and American campaigns to wipe out all traces of Native culture, for, you see, in his telling, Native peoples’ cultures had died in the population collapse and they needed white people to give them a new culture to replace their failed ones:

Such a catastrophe must have convulsed the afflicted societies. Former structures of authority and belief must have been shaken, old gods discredited. The ability of Indigenous people to defend themselves against the incursions of the Europeans was broken by microbes at least as much as, or more than, by the newcomers’ superior military capability. […] After contact with Europeans, one social reality largely vanished and was replaced by another. 

​And, besides, he adds, Native people conquered and replaced each other all the time, so what is the difference when white people came and conquered them, too? It’s just the circle of life, hakuna matata. The most horrifying sentence in his essay is this unrepentant Victorian monstrosity: “Sooner or later, the Old World was going to discover the New. How might that encounter have gone differently in any remotely plausible way?” You see, Europeans are so vastly superior that of course they were destined to kill off, enslave, and “replace” Native peoples. That Frum cannot conceive of treating Native peoples as equals, or even of establishing a multicultural polity, speaks volumes about his hierarchical beliefs about race and culture.
 
He extends this so far that he blinds himself even to the history of the country he claims to defend. In judging Canada’s treatment of indigenous people superior to how they treated themselves, he claims a key benefit is the idea of a united polity where all citizens are part of the same social contract: 

The idea that people separated by thousands of miles of distance could owe a duty of care to one another because they were citizens of the same nation was carried to North America in the same sailing ships that brought to this continent all of the other elements that make up our liberal democracy.

​I shouldn’t have to point out that the whole of Canada was not “the same nation” at the time the residential schools began or in the decades of efforts to stamp out indigenous cultures that preceded those schools. The Dominion of Canada formed during the Confederation of 1867, but British Columbia wasn’t part of Canada until 1871, and Newfoundland did not join until 1949. Canada’s “liberal democracy” did not arrive as one full package with the first settlers, since the various provinces were originally ruled as Crown Colonies from London. The British North America Act of 1867 established the outlines of Canada’s liberal democracy, but with severe limits and controls from London, and even after successive delegations of power from London to Ottawa, Canada did not achieve full independence (called “patriation” in Canada) until 1982. I’m pretty sure by then they were using airplanes.
 
Now, where have we heard about the right of people from another society to impose their government and culture on colonized people? Gee, I guess Frum should be pretty upset about the Constitution Act of 1982. Those colonized people should be grateful to be benevolently ruled by a superior culture that knows better.