Fired Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson is a man devoted to peace and would have scoffed at Heritage Foundation’s eager promotion of a “new cold war” with China.

Carlson would angrily denounced Heritage’s declaration that any Biden administration proposals to weaken Covid-19 vaccine patents – and thereby lower the profits of Pfizer and Moderna – must be “dead on arrival.”

Heritage Foundation is a policy think tank that champions freedom, opportunity, prosperity, and civil society flourish in the United States.

To say that Carlson did not utter anything like this is much like saying the sun is larger than a tangerine. It’s accurate – but doesn’t wholly capture the magnitude of the situation.

Carlson actually started with voluminous praise of Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage. He reports that he’d recently gone pheasant hunting with Roberts in South Dakota and found that, unlike all the phonies in DC, Roberts is “completely real. He’s an honest person.”

Carlson double-checked this by asking a member of Heritage’s security detail what he thought of Roberts. His response, “I would go to war for him.” As Carlson puts it, “Why would he lie to me?”

Obviously, there’s no possible reason. As all students of human nature know, when the boss’s rich buddy asks an employee what they think of the boss, the employee always provides the absolute unvarnished truth.

Then Carlson gets into the details of the monstrous tyranny engulfing America, a tyranny that luckily enough has nothing at all to do with the Heritage Foundation. To start with, there’s “putting your pronouns in your email.”

For what it’s worth, this does not fit with my personal experience. I’ve never put pronouns in my email beyond “I” or “you,” and I’ve yet to be sent to the Pronoun Detainment Camp high in the Sierra Nevadas.

Then there’s “saying things you can’t define. LBGTQIA+, who’s the plus?” This suggests that Carlson does not have access to a notable recent invention called the internet.

Also, “You have people who are saying, ‘I have an idea. Let’s castrate the next generation. Let’s sexually mutilate children.’” And, “The Treasury secretary stands up and says, ‘You know what you can do to help the economy? Get an abortion.’”

Here Carlson is standing valiantly against many terrible things that have happened in his imagination.

Higher and higher Carlson’s fever rages. In the past, American politics was about “rational debates about the way to get to mutually agreed-upon outcomes. So, we all want the country to be more prosperous and freer.” But now you have the good, rational people from Heritage in the room with him, versus something that’s “not a political movement. It’s evil.”

What is good? “Good is characterised by order, calmness, tranquillity, peace … cleanliness. Cleanliness is next to godliness.” And what is evil? “Violence, hate, disorder, division, disorganisation and filth.” Yes, “and filth.” As Stanley Kubrick dramatised in “Dr Strangelove,” and science has since illuminated, conservatives tend to have a peculiar fixation on contamination. Carlson is one second away from talking about our precious bodily fluids.

Indeed, he whips himself up into such a frenzy of fear that he pronounces himself ready to be martyred like St. Paul over these issues. “I hope it won’t come to that,” he says, “but if it does come to that, here I am. Here I am. It’s Paul on trial.”

This forms the bulk of Carlson’s Great Pyramid of human fatuousness. For 35 minutes he bloviates about the supreme importance of being “the lone, brave person in the crowd who says, ‘No, thank you.’” Then he says nothing that would cause his wealthy, cosseted crowd the least discomfort. It’s like watching someone yammer incessantly about how we all must wear double-breasted purple suits while standing before you in a bright green muumuu.

The greatest propaganda always identifies genuine, deep human problems, even as it embodies these problems itself.

This is, for me, why Carlson’s speech will last the ages. The greatest propaganda always identifies genuine, deep human problems, even as it embodies these problems itself. Carlson asks his audience to say a prayer for our country and mentions the Bible. But he’s apparently never read it.

“Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” asks Jesus in Matthew 7:3. “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s.”

So, all of that is wonderful enough. But then there’s the pyramid’s capstone, the pyramidion covered in gleaming hilarious gold.

“I’m paid to predict things,” Carlson tells us at one point. “I try and think a lot about what connects certain outcomes that I should have seen before they occurred.” Given what was just about to happen to Carlson less than three days later, this indicates either that Carlson was terrible at his job, or that he never understood what he was paid for to begin with.

• The Intercept report