In Melbourne, the commentator warned native Australians that immigrants would dispossess them.

On monday, Tucker Carlson wrapped up the seventh in a series of speeches to right-wing Australian audiences. To attend the event, I had to walk under a bright-pink sign acknowledging that the “traditional owners” of the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre are an Aboriginal people, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung.

Judging by the speech I heard, this sign was not put up at Carlson’s request. “Anyone who tells you this is not your country plans to take it away from you,” Carlson said, to approving Aussie yawps (“Yeah! Tuck-ah!”). He loved Australia, he said, and proved it by delivering a heartfelt description of how he had recently held a koala and inhaled its musk.

Australians’ biggest fault, he told them, was that “you’re too happy; you don’t pause to think how bad it could get.” Someone was plotting to take all of this away. “The only way you could wreck a country like this is on purpose.”

The whole evening was haunted by a question: Who, exactly, is wrecking Australia on purpose and planning to “take it away”? Probably not the Wurundjeri Wol Wurrung. The very fact that Carlson, an American, was there suggested that whoever it was had done some wrecking in America too. Carlson said, in a couple of carefully worded asides, that he was an emissary from the future, to warn native Australians of the coming dispossession. “I’m here from a country that’s further down the road,” he said, in his role as Ghost of Nativism Future. “It doesn’t end well.”