Soon the quadrillion online takes on Tucker Carlson’s firing by Fox News will be forgotten. Someday, Carlson himself will fade from human memory. Eventually people will think about cable news as much as they today ponder semaphore.

Yet I believe that one act of Carlson’s – his last pre-termination appearance, an April 21 speech at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala – will endure for millennia. It is a gargantuan achievement and will abide like a pyramid in the sand, an eternal monument to humanity’s infinite vanity, self-deception and self-congratulation.

I’ve found it difficult to choose snippets of Carlson’s words to quote. It’s like trying to explain the perfection of Michelangelo’s David to someone, but being only able to show them its fingers, nipples and wrinkly foreskin. You need the whole experience, to see how the parts fit together to express a larger truth, to genuinely understand its magnificence.

So if you possibly can, I urge you to read the entire transcript. Even better, watch the whole thing. Then we can reconvene below for an in-depth discussion.

As you see, Carlson’s speech is about the “two conclusions” to which he’s come during the past, dark decades.

The first is that he perceives a dangerous phenomenon in which Americans are “going along with a new, new thing, which is clearly a poisonous thing, a silly thing, saying things they don’t believe because they want to keep their jobs.” This is because “the herd instinct is maybe the strongest instinct … not to be cast out of the group, not to be shunned. … It’s harnessed, in fact, by bad people in moments like this to produce uniformity.” Huge swaths of Americans, then, have “become quislings, you see them revealed as cowards.”

Because of this, says Carlson, America’s institutions are “all run by weak people.” And “weak leaders cause an angry country.”

His second conclusion is better news: For every 10 cowards, there is one shining individual who has, in Carlson’s words, stood up to say, “No, I’m not doing that. … It’s a betrayal of what I think is true. It’s a betrayal of my conscience, of my faith, of my sense of myself, of my dignity as a human being, of my autonomy. I am not a slave. I am a free citizen, and I’m not doing that. And there’s nothing you can do to me to make me do it.”

Moreover, Carlson proclaims, “The truth is contagious. Lying is, but the truth is as well. And the second you decide to tell the truth about something, you are filled with this – I don’t want to get supernatural on you – but you are filled with this power from somewhere else.”

Here’s what you might assume Carlson would say next, if you’re the kind of dreamer who’s filled with an irrepressible hope that words can have meaning:

Carlson would have confessed that he himself is one of these shameful cowards. As everyone in the room surely knew, Carlson collected huge checks from Fox even as it encouraged its audience to believe what Carlson and everyone there knew was false: that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Carlson would have explained that he’d been a quisling to the truth and gone along with a new, new poisonous thing because he wanted to keep his job. He’d have apologised for being part of the herd trying to punish heretics, since he wanted Fox to fire a reporter who was reporting on the topic accurately.

In other words, he is one of the weak leaders creating an angry country. He knows these things because he was personally tested – and failed.

And that would have been merely the start of Carlson’s electrifying, manly truth-telling. He was speaking to all the potentates of the Heritage Foundation, one of the most powerful forces in US politics supporting the capitalist depredations and hawkish foreign policy that we know Carlson hates with such passionate sincerity.

Scarred by his moral collapse after the 2020 election, Carlson is now going to seize an incredible opportunity to be the one man in 10 with the courage to defy the herd to their faces!

He could have begun by paging through the Heritage Foundation’s 2022 annual report. He would have noted that Heritage’s top donors, giving over $1 million per year, include Barb Van Andel-Gaby: a member of the family that co-founded Amway, a multilevel marketing scheme and one of American business’s scuzziest bottom-feeders.

Another is the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which Carlson would be horrified to note was a top contributor to the Project for a New American Century, the neoconservative outfit that helped make the invasion of Iraq happen.

He would be likewise appalled to see Heritage also got over $500,000 from Ray Stata, the co-founder of Analog Devices. Analog is a semiconductor company created with technology invented in the US that is now – as it explains in an SEC filing – “leveraging an outsourcing model for manufacturing operations.” (It also owns factories in Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia, as well as the US)

Then Carlson, in his role as a journalist committed to transparency, would excoriate Heritage for granting anonymity to 25 big contributors. He would be disgusted to see that Heritage tells donors “we pledge always to respect your philanthropic intent” and that it offers “a written contract clearly stating the purpose and intent of the donation and how it shall be spent.”

Worst of all, the annual report proudly features a photograph of Donald Trump – a man Carlson believes to be a “demonic force” – at Heritage’s annual leadership conference.

Next, Carlson would have gotten down to specifics. He would have told his audience that Americans, wearied by the endless wars of US elites, would be disgusted to learn of Heritage’s close ties with the world’s largest military contractor, Lockheed Martin.

• The Intercept report