FNC’s Carlson: ‘America Is a Happy Country, Despite Everything’

Friday, FNC’s Tucker Carlson opened his program with a departure from politics to call attention to good things about the United States.

The Fox News host highlighted America’s geographic features and qualities of the American people that set it apart from other countries.

Transcript as follows:

CARLSON: So many things seem so completely screwed up right now that it can be overwhelming, and over time, it’s also misleading.

If you pay too much attention to what is happening, you can easily conclude that America is a rotten country. But that’s wrong. It’s not.

America is still the best there is. Two things about America make it great: the country and its people. This is a truly beautiful place. That’s the first thing.

If you’re absorbed in your phone all day, it’s easy to forget that, but look around. It’s stunning. Switzerland has the Alps, Zimbabwe has Victoria Falls, but multiply that by an entire continent and you’ve got what we have — America.

From the islands of Puget Sound to the islands in Casco Bay, to the Rockies and the Badlands in the Upper Peninsula and the Appalachian Mountains in between. Spend a day hiking to the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming. You might not see another person.

How can a place so gorgeous, be so empty? We’ve got a lot of those here.

Wake up in Big Sur, California some morning. The smell of redwoods and salt air will change you. You’ll feel things you inherited from your ancestors coming from places the modern world cannot touch.

We are blessed to live in a place like this, more blessed than we acknowledge. No matter what happens next, no matter who becomes the President, now or in the future, nothing can diminish the dignity of an Eastern white pine towering above the spruce in the New England forest.

All of it is ours to enjoy. Thank God.

We’ve got a lot of people to enjoy it with an awful lot. Americans are still the best people misguided as we sometimes are. This isn’t an especially religious country anymore, but surveys on churchgoing do not tell the whole story.

Even now, most Americans know they are not really in charge of the universe. They know there’s something bigger out there, bigger than all of us combined. And when you understand that, when you know in your bones, how small you are and how short the ride is likely to be, you tend to treat people better. Americans do.

Don’t let cable news fool you. Don’t let us fool you. This is a profoundly nice country, the nicest in the world.

Americans are kind to children, to pets, to strangers. We give more money to charity than any other place. We tip our waiters more.

There’s no country on Earth you’d rather be lost in. Someone will help you.

In America, we don’t eat dogs, we rescue them. They sleep on the bed. We give them funny names. We cry when they die. It’s a sweet country.

In some ways, it’s getting better. The music is definitely improving, so is the food. Believe it or not, we still make things here and a lot of them are pretty good.

That probably won’t change. Americans love innovation, but they are distrustful of anyone’s radical plans for the future.

Most people here don’t want an abrupt reshuffling of everything. They prefer incremental improvement. That’s why we’ve had only one revolution. It’s why we fought off the metric system all these years, and thank heaven, we have.

It’s why we still have Christmas, and always will. Christmas in America is great. Even if you don’t really understand what it’s about, and many people don’t. It’s still the happiest time of the year and therefore it’s the most American.

America is a happy country, despite everything. Our happiness is fundamental. It’s in our founding documents. It’s in our people. Nothing happening tonight can take that away.

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor