Tucker Carlson thinks there will be dire consequences if Confederate statues come down

Fox News host Tucker Carlson is afraid that if "fanatics on the left" get their way and Confederate statues are removed from public places, it will set off a chain of events leading to the First Amendment going by the wayside and Thomas Jefferson being wiped from the history books. "Watch out, Abraham Lincoln," he intoned. "You're next."

In an attempt to back up President Trump's assertion that "both sides" were to blame for the violence at Saturday's white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Carlson launched into a rant against liberal mobs who are tearing down with impunity statues of Confederate soldiers, asking his audience which statues will go next. "It's not a joke," he said. "Suddenly, it's a serious question." George Washington, Jefferson, any one of the Founding Fathers who had slaves, could be next on the list, and while slavery is "evil," Carlson said, it's only been "150 years" since "slavery was the rule, rather than the exception around the world." Plato, the Aztecs, and Native Americans on the Trail of Tears had slaves, he said, and "if we are going to reduce a person's life to the single worst thing he ever participated in, we had better be prepared for the consequences of that."

Other Fox commentators had a completely different takeaway from the press conference, with Charles Krauthammer saying it was "a moral disgrace" and Kat Timpf, co-host of The Fox News Specialists, calling it "disgusting." Timpf said it "shouldn't be some kind of bold statement to say, 'Yes, a gathering full of white supremacist Nazis doesn't have good people in it,'" and shared that it was "honestly crazy for me to have to comment on this right now because I'm still in the phase where I am wondering if it was actually real life — what I just watched." Catherine Garcia

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