Tucker Carlson spent the day Monday lying to his audience about the role he played in helping to inspire Saturday’s horrifying massacre by a white nationalist unhinged by “replacement theory” rhetoric. The “great replacement theory” is a classic white supremacist trope that is the foundation of the modern white supremacist movement in America. It is a notion that fueled the hateful chants of “Jews will not replace us!” in Charlottesville in 2017. And it has lit the fuse in explosive hate crimes, most notably the hate-motivated mass shooting attacks in Pittsburgh, Poway and El Paso, as well as in Christchurch, New Zealand, and now Buffalo.
Carlson has spent years pushing the idea, and a New York Times investigation found he has promoted it in more than 400 episodes of his program since he joined Fox News’ prime time lineup in 2016. People have been warning Carlson and Republicans that this was the kind of outcome they were encouraging. And now that it’s happened, they want to pretend that the criticism is just opportunistic when in fact, it’s holding his feet to the fire of his own words.
Carlson has been spouting a weak defense of his antics, first attempting to claim that he’s still unsure what the conspiracy theory is, but then also accusing his critics of attacking “Trumpism,”-- making no mention of his own oft-repeated “replacement” theory and the role it may have played in providing the fuel for the Buffalo shooter’s violent radicalization. That’s made clear in the shooter’s own words in his manifesto—namely, his belief that nonwhite people were “replacers” whose mere existence disempowered white people like himself.
In several passage, the Buffalo shooter repeated Carlson talking points, talking about the inevitable demographic decline of white people, noting that the national population keeps growing despite a drop in white fertility rates: “All through immigration. This is ethnic replacement. This is cultural replacement. This is racial replacement,” he wrote, and made the inevitable leap such logic takes: “This is white genocide.” Carlson’s partisan-reductionist version of “replacement theory” is that Democrats are secretly “trying to replace the current electorate” with “more obedient voters from the Third World.” He has repeatedly promoted it on his nightly talk show.
Carlson already has a remarkable record of dabbling increasingly in white supremacist rhetoric dating back to 2006, including recently unearthed recordings of his ramblings on radio. His greatest hits include a regurgitation of neo-Nazi propaganda about “white genocide” in Africa, not to mention his mutual promotion of the white nationalist website VDare. There is a reason white supremacists love Carlson’s show, and why they assiduously watch it in hopes of picking up pointers.
Perhaps most egregiously, Carlson has repeatedly claimed that white-nationalist domestic terrorism is a “hoax.” The very act of calling out white nationalism, according to Carlson, is a racist attack on white people: “You could live your entire life here without running into a white nationalist. No matter what they tell you, this is a remarkably kind and decent country,” he claimed. “Attacking people for their race is exactly how you destroy a country."
Replacement Theory has been identified as a major ideological wellspring of domestic-terrorist violence, with the FBI calling it out in an internal assessment of terrorist threats. Carlson and his colleagues at Fox also avoided any mention of “replacement theory”—and in fact deliberately whitewashed the reality that Saturday’s massacre was an unmistakable act of domestic terrorism.
P.S. As if we needed any more evidence of Carlson's hypocrisy-- back in 2018, Tucker was furious when SNL made a joke about Dan Crenshaw. But on Monday night, Carlson mocked the fact that the veteran lost his eye in combat, calling him 'Eyepatch McCain.' What more do we need to say about this douchebag dilettante?
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