Fox News host Tucker Carlson told attendees at a Turning Point USA conference in a video aired Tuesday, to know their “enemy” as “the person who’s funding” rioters and vandals in the streets of America.
“Your enemy, as horrible as they are, is not some crazed ideologue wearing black, spray painting statues. That person is loathsome and should be in jail, trust me,” Carlson said at the December conference.
“But your actual enemy is person who’s funding him and making that kind of behavior possible and is doing it for a very specific reason, to tear down the past, to destroy the past.” (RELATED: ‘Not Doing Their Job’: Trump Criticizes DC Police As Confederate Statue Toppled Right Outside Their Headquarters)
Carlson argued that people who want to destroy the past want to “eliminate all reference points. If you have no idea what came before you, you have no idea what normal is,” he said, adding that “you cannot understand the consequences of what’s happening now if you can’t look to the past and understand the consequences of the same behavior in another time.”
Carlson insisted that “The root of wisdom is knowing what happened before.” He contended that a country “is very easily manipulated” when it loses that context.
The Fox News host told the enthusiastic crowd that “small is almost always better than big. That’s the truth. The circle of people in your life who care enough about you to help you when things go wrong is really small.”
He criticized the current trend to believe that “friends” are people we correspond with on “the fake digital world” of social media: “the actual number of people who will take affirmative steps to help you is very, very small.”
Carlson told the crowd that “anyone who tells you that your real loyalty has got to be to some larger group of people, some political group or some group of people who look like you, give them the middle finger — those are your enemies.”
America’s past has been severely assessed since both peaceful protests and violent riots rocked cities across the U.S. in 2020. Many historical statues have been illegally toppled or legally removed.
On Tuesday, city staff in Boston removed the Emancipation Memorial from a park. The statue depicts a freed slave getting up from his knees while Civil War President Abraham Lincoln stands by.
Critics of the historical statues maintain that they honor men who did not believe in racial equality as we understand it today and could be described as white supremacist. (RELATED: Toppling Historical Statues ‘A Healthy Expression’ Of Rage)
Ballerinas Kennedy George, 14, and Ava Holloway, 14, pose in front of a monument of Confederate general Robert E. Lee after Virginia Governor Ralph Northam ordered its removal after widespread civil unrest following the death in Minneapolis police custody of George Floyd, in Richmond, Virginia, U.S. June 5, 2020. REUTERS/Julia Rendleman
Protesters have torn down statues of President and Civil War Gen. Ulysses S. Grant as well as American anthem composer Francis Scott Key in San Francisco.
After a mob attempted to remove a statue of President Andrew Jackson near the White House in June, President Donald Trump authorized the Federal Government “to arrest anyone who vandalizes or destroys any monument, statue or other such Federal property in the U.S. with up to 10 years in prison, per the Veteran’s Memorial Preservation Act, or such other laws that may be pertinent.”