Tucker Carlson delivered a monologue on the state of the country and the history of using the National Guard to enforce law and order.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, not to be depressing, but here’s the truth and something you should keep in mind over the next few years. The United States, two things to keep in mind. The United States is moving, not inexorably, but still moving toward civil war, number one. And number two, civil wars are the very worst kind of wars, worse than any kind of war fought against a foreign adversary. So to number one, why is America moving towards civil war? Well, for the same reason all countries that wind up in civil war get there because the differences between their population, between people within their borders becomes too great to bear. People decide I have nothing in common with people who live near me and I don’t wanna live near them anymore. In other words, diversity, difference is actually intolerable to most people. Not necessarily racial diversity, though sometimes that too, but diversity of all kinds. It is not our strength. In fact, it is without question our weakness and it has always been. If you have nothing in common with your wife, do you have a stronger marriage? No, of course your marriage falls apart and the same is true for countries. And the truth about the United States is that on every level, beginning with a demographic level, the American population is less in common with itself, with one another than ever before. When I was born, which wasn’t that long ago, it was the modern era, was air travel and air conditioning, electricity. When I was born, the United States was about 90% white Christian. It’s now less than 40% white Christian. Now you may think that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s a massive change, an unprecedented change really, in a very short period of time. And of course it’s not accidental or organic. That was the result of policies put in place to achieve that result and they did. There are people who didn’t want a majority white Christian country. Okay, they got what they wanted, but what do they have? They have a country with no majority demographically at all. There is no American majority, which is to say 51% of people who have something very basic in common. And so what you have is an inherently fractured country. Languages, religions, ethnicities, backgrounds, beliefs, too innumerable to catalog. And so a country like that, unless unified by something, will split apart, particularly when that country is the size of a continent and is held together by a pretty fragile web of infrastructure, air routes and highways. And so unless you are very self-conscious about keeping it together physically, but also spiritually, explaining to people why they should have any regard at all, much less any obligation to people in say the next town, much less the next state. Unless you do that self-consciously, unless you inculcate a sense of national identity, it will by nature fall apart. That is a physics principle, entropy. It’ll blow up unless you hold it together. And this has been an untended garden for decades, decades. Nobody in charge of the United States over the past say 40 years has really tried to articulate why all of us should live together on the same continent. There’s kind of been an unspoken ethos of America, a kind of gay rights technocracy, globo homo. We’re all kind of cool with lifestyles, but that’s thin gruel in the end. It’s also repulsive, but even if you like it, it’s not enough to hold people together who don’t have common beliefs, backgrounds, languages, religions, it’s just not. It’s pathetic, it’s rich people politics. It doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s just an adornment. It’s political jewelry, it’s a bumper sticker. It’s not a national identity and it’s not enough to hold your country together. And that’s why ours is coming apart because people don’t have enough in common. So what would happen if it came apart? What would happen if there were a civil war? Well, the first thing to know is it would be incredibly violent because wars are by nature violent and civil wars especially so, violent and crazy. And you do hear from time to time, people on both sides, particularly on the left, but not only on the left say, well, I’m just sick of it. I’m just sick of it. I’m ready, I’m ready for the fight. People who say that have never seen what that looks like. Anyone who has seen what that looks like approaches the entire topic with care and respect because it’s incredibly ugly and its effects are generational. And if you don’t believe it, consider our own civil war which ended 160 years ago in 1865 and we’re still fighting it. We’re still arguing over the names of Confederate generals, tearing down their statues, renaming military bases, stereotyping people in the South. That war is still ongoing on some level. It’s not a hot war, but it’s very much a cold war and has been for 160 years. Go to Spain. Their civil war ended in what, 1939. They’re still arguing about it. They’re still passing legislation about it. The wounds left by civil wars do not heal quickly. They last for, I don’t know, hundreds of years and they completely remake the country, usually for the worse. So disunity is easy. Rebuilding into a single country after a civil war is very, very hard and sometimes it never even works. There are civil wars in effect ongoing on this planet right now for hundreds of years and they probably will never be resolved because the people fighting each other within national borders don’t have anything in common. That’s the truth. So if you want to prevent a civil war, figure out what everybody, or at least the bulk of the people in your nation have in common and emphasize that. And so what would that be in our case? Hard to know. In fact, at this stage, really the only realistic hope for national unity is spiritual revival. Is a place where most Americans wake up to realize that God exists and created every single person in the United States of America. And that’s what we have in common, our humanity. Not because our common humanity is meaningful by itself, but because our common humanity comes from God and we’re created in his image. And only when people truly realize that will they hesitate before killing each other. But in the meantime, and we hope that comes soon, but in the meantime, there is a step that the government at all levels, federal, state, and local, can take to restore at least a sense of calm in the midst of rising chaos. And if you can’t smell that right now, then you obviously have long COVID because it is redolent. This country is on the brink. And in fact, you saw the normal dummies today on social media taking pictures from Portland, Oregon. Everything is fine here in Portland. They’re liars. Or they’re intentionally blind to the reality right in front of them, which is the country is degrading. And you can tell by its cities, they are falling apart. There’s no country in the world with as many ugly, dangerous, dysfunctional, dirty cities as we have. It’s painful to say that as someone who was born and has always lived here and plans to always live here. But that’s a fact. And as someone who travels a lot, I can affirm what you already know. Our cities are dying. And when your cities die, your country dies. And a lot of people don’t want to believe this because they moved to rural areas and are hoping to sort of ignore it. I’d be in that category. But it’s nevertheless true. When your cities die, your country dies. And our cities are dying the kind of death that can’t be permanent. They’re dying the death born of chaos where things just get so crazy and people literally die on the street. Also have sex and defecate on the street, but die on the street. And that’s intolerable. Chaos is intolerable. People can’t handle it. So out of chaos comes what? Democracy? Spontaneous order? No. Imposed order? Dictatorship? Of course, each and every time. That’s what happens out of chaos. People beg for a strong man. There’s always someone willing to oblige. And that’s exactly what they get. And that’s exactly what we’re going to get unless some kind of order is restored. Which is another way of saying restoring order is not a step toward totalitarianism. It may be the only way to prevent it. But we need to do it now. Walk through any American city and be honest with yourself. Is this working? It’s clearly getting worse. What will it look like in 10 years? The differences between states are getting more profound. You wouldn’t expect that actually. After the advent of radio and then television, the internet, mass media, the idea was, well, regional differences are going away because all of us are united by the media we consume. And that’s no longer true. And in fact, our media are exacerbating the differences or highlighting them anyway. And so a place like South Florida is more different from South California than it’s ever been. And extrapolate forward five years, eight years, 10 years. Will it be possible to drive from South Florida to Southern California? Well, of course it will. It’s America, really. Is it possible to drive from Sao Paulo, Brazil to Rio? Not really, because it’s too dangerous. Because it’s too chaotic. And Brazil, by the way, is not a third world country. Brazil is a real country about the size of the United States with a highly educated, impressive population, amazing natural resources, a lot going for it. And yet that country through successive governments has been unable to restore order to its highways. So that’s the rule globally. That’s the state of nature globally. And that could very easily happen here. And we’ve been moving in that direction for decades. We sit, those of us on the East Coast, and look over at the West Coast, my home state of California, and watch its politicians declare boycotts against this or that American state. Or say in public, I’m not going to follow this federal law. The federal government has no dominion here. We all sort of laugh, oh, they’re so crazy. Each one of those actions is a form of insurrection. In fact, every bit as profound as anything that happened in Fort Sumter in 1861, the battle that kicked off the Civil War, the deadliest war in American history, the one from which we’re still recovering, those are acts of insurrection. Either you have a federal government with power over the states, or you don’t. Either federal laws apply to all 50 states, or they don’t. And for decades, some states have opted out of federal law, and the rest of the states have just sort of laughed at them or tried to ignore it. Oh, marijuana’s illegal, we’re gonna have marijuana anyway. Oregon decriminalized fentanyl and meth five years ago. If ever there was a time to send federal troops into Oregon, it was when Oregon did that, thereby killing thousands and thousands and thousands of its citizens, and also ignoring federal law. Those are illegal narcotics. We blow up boats full of those things. But the state of Oregon decided unilaterally, well, we’re just gonna effectively legalize them. And lots of states have done that, and the feds have done nothing. But now, because the issue is immigration, which is a core issue, the federal government is doing something. President Trump has announced that he is sending federal troops to the state of Oregon and to the city of Chicago. He’s not yet sent federal troops to Oregon. There’s a court fight that’s way too complex and not that interesting to explain at the moment, look it up, that has prevented that. But National Guardsmen have arrived, mostly from Texas, in the state of Illinois, in Chicago, to force, the president says, that city to allow ICE, the Immigration Service, federal immigration officers, to do their job, to deport people who are breaking federal law, illegal aliens. And the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois have said multiple times, we do not follow federal immigration law in the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago. So the president is forcing this issue, they’re in violation of the law. He says he’s working to uphold the law. Here is the response of J.B. Pritzker, who is the long time, six years now, I think, governor of Chicago, to the president’s deployment of National Guards troops to Illinois, watch. GOV. J.B. PRITZKER (D-IL): What I know is, in the early days of the Nazi regime, they started, slowly but surely, taking away people’s rights. And what we’re seeing now is the very same thing. They’ve gone into cities now with the military. Think about that, in your lifetime, have you ever seen anything like that? Where the president of the United States is sending military or troops dressed as military, ICE and CBP, in camouflage, with automatic weapons, into our major cities. It’s wrong. CARLSON: He’s such a buffoon. So demented is the Democratic Party, that guy thinks he’s gonna be president. Have you ever seen this before? In American history, has there ever been a single instance of some Nazi in the White House sending troops into a state to uphold federal? It’s never happened before. It’s never happened before, except it’s happened like a million times. And it’s been celebrated almost every single time. Beginning at least in September of 1957, three years after the Brown versus Board of Education decision came out from the Supreme Court, banning segregation in public schools in the United States. And in the state of Arkansas, in the capital city, Little Rock, Central High School, a high school, was not following this Supreme Court decision. And so Dwight David Eisenhower, General Eisenhower, commander of American troops in Europe during World War II, the president of the United States, sent the 101st Airborne to Central High School. The 101st Airborne, not like 300 fat guardsmen from San Antonio, but the 101st Airborne, with M1s, to a high school. And then he left his vacation and he went on television to explain why he did it. And remarkably, thanks to the internet, we have the tape. Here’s part of it. PRESIDENT DWIGHT EISENHOWER: In that city, under the leadership of demagogic extremists, disorderly mobs have deliberately prevented the carrying out of proper orders from a federal court. Local authorities have not eliminated that violent opposition. And under the law, I yesterday issued a proclamation calling upon the mob to disperse. CARLSON: Yep, that was General, then President Eisenhower, September 1957, sending the 101st Airborne to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, because the racist governor, Orval Faubus, wouldn’t let black students attend a white high school. And every liberal in America applauded, shoot them. There was one girl in the crowd that day who smirked or scowled at one of the young black ladies being escorted into the school. And she shouldn’t have done that. It was cruel, obviously. But it wrecked her life. That picture, which ran the Arkansas Democrat, September of 1957, wrecked her life, actually. She never got out from under that. And that’s a measure of how strongly the media, the American establishment, and some of the public were behind the president. Look, it’s a Supreme Court order. It’s the law of the land. You can’t disobey it or else we have mob rules. Someone’s gonna rule, okay? It’ll either be a dispassionate law that treats everybody equally, or it will be an individual who plays favorites. So your choice really is not between no law and law. That’s not a choice. Your choice is between the rule of law or anarchy, which leads to dictatorship. That’s your choice. And Eisenhower, in an interesting speech, 13-minute long speech, laid this all out, which is on YouTube. You should check it out. He explained why he did it. It wasn’t about simply desegregating a high school in Little Rock. It was about upholding the basis of the American judicial system, which is to say the basis of America itself, which is equal application of the law, fairness under the law. It’s a nation of laws, not men. And he did that, and it was roundly applauded, and it worked in some ways. Public education was totally destroyed nationally, but whatever, the rule of law was upheld. Five years later, noting what a popular move this was, apparently his successor, John F. Kennedy, faced a pretty similar situation at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi. It was, again, September 1962, and there was a lone black student attempting to enroll. His name was James Meredith. He’s still alive. He’s 92 years old. He’s a total right winger, by the way, which is interesting. But he was trying to enroll, and the school would not accept his application because he was black. And so President Kennedy also sent the military to Ole Miss. How many did he send? President Trump has sent three to 500 guardsmen to Chicago, to a city of millions. President Kennedy sent 31,000 U.S. soldiers, U.S. Army soldiers, to a campus of 6,000. Yeah, that’s more than five armed soldiers per student. 31,000 American troops descended on the campus of Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi at the very end of September, early October 1962, and they shut it down, and they camped on the quad in tents, and they put tanks on the football field, and they put machine gun emplacements on the quad. A couple people were shot to death, and President Kennedy made a bit overkill, in fact, disgusting overkill, in fact, fascist overkill, but the point is he was applauded for it because there was a federal law emanating from a Supreme Court decision, and he was upholding it in the same way that President Trump is currently attempting to, in a much less vigorous way, uphold federal immigration law passed by the United States Congress, which is core to the country. Who lives here is the main question in any country. Who lives there? What is a country? It’s the people who live there, and immigration law is the way that you regulate that, so if you don’t control that, you’re literally not a country, so that’s not an optional law. That is a core law, and in the case of Chicago and Portland, but particularly Chicago, shameful. Thousands, thousands of people are shot in Chicago every year. Whole parts of Chicago, you can’t go to. Not if you’re like me, you can’t. It’s so racist and violent, you literally can’t walk through parts of a city that you pay for as a federal taxpayer. As an American, you can’t walk through it. Several years ago, you’ll remember there was a huge debate in Europe. Are there no go zones in Paris? Are there parts where native-born Parisians can’t go? Well, they’re not welcome. Oh, that’s not true, they said, that’s not true. But of course, whether or not, of course it was true, but what’s even more true is that that’s the state of play in the United States and has been for generations. Huge parts of a city, huge. You could walk all day through parts of a city that you actually can’t walk through because they’re too dangerous for you, and Chicago is particularly, particularly disgraceful in its decline. And you have to guess about that. I’m gonna show you a video in just a second, but you don’t have to guess. Look at the numbers, look at the outflow from Chicago. Are people who were born in Chicago staying in Chicago? No, they’re fleeing. Go to Southwest Florida. Go to dinner in Naples some night and ask, anyone here from Illinois? It’s half the room. And they’re grateful to be gone. That’s how dystopian it is on every level, economically primarily. But even on a more basic level, it’s just too dangerous. Oh, the freedoms we’re losing, really? What about my freedom to walk to the liquor store at midnight without getting killed? How about my freedom to stop at a red light without getting shot? That’s totally real. It’s not fake, it’s not racist to say that. The mayor of Chicago is an open racist. So irony of ironies, here you have a president sending troops facing down a recalcitrant racist local official. That does sound like 1962, doesn’t it? Except this time, the president in question is not getting accolades from the New York Times. He’s being called a dictator, a dictator.

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