Fox News, the most powerful propaganda arm of the Republican Party, crossed a Rubicon of sorts on Thursday, confirming that it is exactly what many media observers have suspected for some time: an organization dedicated to stoking the embers of white supremacy and nationalism to an audience of Republican viewers it considers primed and ready for such a message. That Fox's deliberate incitement of its viewers' race-based fears will almost certainly result in acts of violence directed toward Americans is apparently of little or no importance to the network, assuming it is even a consideration.
As Media Matters reports, on Thursday at 7 PM EST, Fox News Primetime ran a segment featuring white nationalist “personality” and Fox host Tucker Carlson, in which Carlson said the following:
TUCKER CARLSON (GUEST): I'm laughing because this is one of about 10 stories that I know you have covered where the government shows preference to people who have shown absolute contempt for our customs, our laws, our system itself and they are being treated better than American citizens. Now, I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term "replacement," if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World. But they become hysterical because that's what's happening actually. Let's just say it: That's true.
Video of the segment is below:
Carlson then proceeded to trot out a facile analogy, suggesting that any child would understand that he or she was being ”replaced” if their parents suddenly adopted other children and provided them with “twice the allowance,” gave them “brand-new bikes,” or allowed them to “stay up later.”
Using Fox News’ trademark of grievance and indignation, Carlson helpfully explained that what was really at issue was “voting rights” of an American electorate under assault from an influx of immigrants. (In what was probably unintended irony, as Carlson delivered these statements the Fox News ticker simultaneously noted that Israel was commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day with a moment of silence.) In this he was simply acting out his primary function as a Republican party mouthpiece, paid to gin up the fears of the Republican base.
But Carlson’s intended message was plain: Americans should consider themselves under existential threat from immigrants who threaten to “replace” them in American society. This is the same fear-mongering prescription employed by right-wing demagogues in Europe, with Muslims as their preferred target. As employed by Carlson here, and legitimized by the thin veneer of Fox as a quasi-news outlet, the message is blunt and obvious: Immigrants are to be feared as something alien and deadly, they constitute a mortal danger to Americans, and they must be stopped at all costs.
As explained by Nikki McCann Ramirez writing for Media Matters, Carlson’s regurgitation of this “replacement” terminology was deliberate, as was his intent:
For decades, white nationalists have invoked the specter of nonwhite immigration, multiculturalism, and declining birthrates to argue for the existence of a vast conspiracy aimed at eliminating white populations as a dominant demographic. On Fox News, Tucker Carlson is distributing the language, grievances, goals, and inherent call to action of the conspiracy theory to massive audiences.
On the April 8 broadcast of Fox News Primetime, Carlson offered perhaps his most explicit justification yet for the core belief of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory: that a wave of “Third World” invaders is coming to replace you and reshape your environment, and that you, the audience, should do something about it.
As a serial promoter of white nationalist philosophy, Carlson knows fully well the historical context of what he is saying. The “Great Replacement” theory grew out of white supremacist conspiracy theories dating back to the 1800s, but became popularized in alt-right and white supremacist circles by a book published in 2012 by French nationalist Renaud Camus, who used the term in speaking of the supposed encroachment by Muslims on the “traditional” French population. It has since been adopted as a rallying cry of the far right, a one-size-fits-all conspiracy theory designed to evoke nationalist fears of “impure” immigrants. One of the slogans shouted by the white supremacists who violently descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, was “Jews will not replace us,” echoing this “Great Replacement” fear.
Carlson also knows that the poisonous nature of this rhetoric and its lethal consequences are well established. In March 2019, for example, a gunman walked into two different mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and opened fire, killing 51 people in what investigators characterized as an attack deliberately “intended to be imitated by others,“ in which the murderer preceded his assault with the “release of a white supremacist manifesto decrying immigration and immigrants.” That manifesto was titled “The Great Replacement.”
One month later in April 2019, another individual killed a woman and wounded three others at a synagogue near San Diego, California. He too released a statement shortly before opening fire purporting to set forth his reasons for the killings, attacking Jews for “the meticulously planned genocide of the European race.” Much as Carlson did in his analogy on Thursday, Earnest also noted in his “manifesto” that even “a child can understand the concept of self-defense.”
And four months after that, another gunman opened fire at a shopping mall in El Paso, Texas, killing 20 people, seven of them Mexican. That gunman expressed his support and admiration of the perpetrator of the Christchurch killings and issued a similar manifesto immediately before his assault, in which he proclaimed “[his] support [of] the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
The single common factor underlying the Christchurch, San Diego, and El Paso killings was the evocation of the “Great Replacement” theory by the killers, the same theory Carlson referenced on Fox News Thursday, and the same warped white supremacist screed that was beamed into the homes of millions of Fox News viewers that evening.
But this is really nothing new for Fox News. As Ramirez notes:
Fox News is one of the primary outlets casting immigrants as a threatening force invading America. In 2019 alone, prior to the El Paso massacre, Fox News’ fearmongering about a migrant invasion included over 70 on-air references to an invasion of migrants, at least 55 clips of then-President Donald Trump calling the surge of migrants an invasion, and at least 21 uses of invasion rhetoric by hosts Carlson, Brian Kilmeade, and Laura Ingraham.
Peter Neumann is a co-founder of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization, based in London. Interviewed for The Washington Post after the El Paso shootings, Neumann explained how the “Great Replacement” rhetoric has become the common theme cited by terrorists to justify their race-based killing:
“The Great Replacement theory has become the master narrative for a vast number of far-right attacks,” said Neumann, the terrorism researcher. “It’s the narrative that connects them all.”
The idea that one of this country’s major, established media outlets would allow itself to become a conduit for such monstrous white supremacist rhetoric would have been unthinkable only a few short years ago. One of the reasons that is no longer the case is undoubtedly due to Donald Trump’s cynical, winking affirmation of such groups. But it now appears the entire Republican Party is willing to take the same leap; Carlson is simply testing the waters here, with the full support of Fox and the Republican Party it represents.
The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League has called for Carlson’s removal as a result of this segment.
In a related article for Media Matters, Matt Gertz lists those companies whose ads aired during the Fox News Primetime segment described above:
Alongside Carlson’s interview, Fox aired advertisements for blue-chip companies like Amazon, Chevron, Energizer, Farmers Insurance, Ford, General Motors, GlaxoSmithKline, Liberty Mutual, Novartis, and USAA.
These are the companies making this type of hate speech possible. As Gertz notes, Carlson’s role has been expanded on Fox to such an extent that the so-called “blacklisting” of Carlson’s show by these same companies is essentially meaningless: “Because Carlson is so thoroughly incorporated into Fox’s programming, that does not suffice.”
This type of speech is simply the prelude to more instances of mass murder. If Fox News continues to allow its spread—from Tucker Carlson or anyone else—the network should own the consequences.