Maybe this is a good thing that Tucker Carlson codified racist beliefs and conspiracy theories and put them forth in a succinct and short form like this. According to him, white people are being “replaced” or at least that’s the worry. You may recall the chants at Charlottesville, “Jews won’t replace us,” or “You won’t replace us,” same difference. The fear is that “they” are coming to get what belongs to you. Who is “they” and how are they going to do that? Anybody who votes as a Democrat, apparently.
Carlson: “If you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate … they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening actually. Let’s just say it: That’s true.”
Tucker Carlson gives an passionate defense of “white replacement theory”https://t.co/QKSkGoRjzC pic.twitter.com/SOUlrxRgnt
— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) April 9, 2021
The 40 acres and a mule reference is to the line in Gone With The Wind, where a huckster on the street is telling a group of recently liberated slaves that they’re going to be given 40 acres and a mule “and you’re gonna vote. And you’re gonna vote the way your friends vote.” Carlson and the rest of Fox News is now busily explaining how all of Joe Biden’s policies are socialist and put together for the purpose of bribing and “importing” people who will come into the country and vote Democratic, in order to get continued bribes. That’s how simplistic it is. There is considerable blowback, as you might well expect. Daily Beast:
“It is horrifying that Fox News continues to empower Tucker Carlson and other white nationalist ideologues to broadcast this kind of hateful poison into the homes of tens of millions Americans,” said Logan Bayroff, VP of communications for J Street, in a statement to The Daily Beast. “The ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory isn’t just rhetoric—its racist, antisemitic propaganda that has helped incite deadly violence against American Jews, Muslims, immigrants and other vulnerable minorites. Every time that this white supremacist hatred is amplified like this, the threat of future attacks on our communities grows.”
“The ‘great replacement’ theory is a xenophobic and antisemitic conspiracy. Racist extremists like Tucker will only amplify it more as climate change increasingly drives dislocation and migration,” Jewish progressive group If Not Now added in a tweeted statement. “The fight for Jewish safety is the fight for migrant and climate justice.”
A Fox News spokesperson insisted to The Daily Beast that Carlson was somehow actually dismissing the theory, pointing to the host’s comments where he called it a “voting-rights question.”
As Greenblatt noted, this exact theory—that a shadowy elite are deliberately eradicating the white vote—was the inspiration behind some of the most gruesome and deadly mass shootings of the past few years.
The racist killers behind the El Paso and Christchurch massacres, for instance, both left behind manifestos in which they wrote at length about the theory. The shooter responsible for murdering 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh openly believed that George Soros and Jewish humanitarian aid groups were bringing Central American migrants (“invaders,” as he referred to them) to the United States in order to “kill our people,” the white race.
Now where this gets truly perverse is that Carlson says that white supremacy doesn’t exist, yet his entire manifesto Thursday night was that white people, whom he characterizes as a kind of indigenous species, who own America, are being replaced. Which is it, laddy?
This is going to pick up steam in the days ahead. Carlson has lost advertisers before and this may be another one of those times.
We can only hope advertisers wise up to this garbage-spewing sack of hot air. He needed to be quashed years ago, along with the rest of his ilk. I know this kind of bloviating makes money for Faux, by keeping the rabble worked up, but I keep hoping for adrenal exhaustion to set in soon.
BTW, the second day in a row that I’ve received an email notice for the newsletter! And while the ads aren’t jumping around anymore, they seem awfully aggressive. Wish there was a way to get rid of all of them.
Must be a nice gig auditioning for a top position in Hell. Born into the Swanson frozen dinner fortune, he’s following the family tradition, i.e., getting rich feeding the masses crap.
Interesting, isn’t it, that melanin-deficient people are so worried about being replaced. That seems to me like an acknowledgement that they are incompetent. If one is competent, one should not need to have any worries about being replaced.
And, of course, this is why attempting to fight racisim by stressing that whatever the hated out-group is, the people in it are not inferior, is going to fail.
No, I’m not saying we should accept the false notion that some groups are inferior. It does mean there’s more to this than simple racism, and that maybe teaching children self esteem is not such a bad idea.