One of the important ways that the white nationalist movement—its ideas, its agenda, its talking points—has spread in recent years has been through mainstream right-wing pundits regurgitating its propaganda and its twisted, ahistorical, and afactual perspectives.
So it’s not in the least surprising that even as the movement’s toxic effects begin to spread and manifest themselves, especially in the horrific violence it inevitably engenders, many of those same voices that enabled the spread of white nationalism are now busily proclaiming it a nonissue, an inconsequential matter involving just a tiny handful of individuals.
Particularly Tucker Carlson.
Mind you, 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.
But after Tuesday’s hearing on hate crimes and white nationalism in the House of Representatives, Carlson went more than on the offensive—he went completely over the top. White nationalism, he claimed, isn’t really on the rise. It’s in your imaginations. It’s really just a boogeyman whipped up by Democrats to scare people.
The very act of calling out white nationalism, according to Carlson, is a racist attack on white people.
That’s their story and they’re sticking to it.
“What happens when you could no longer denounce your political opponents as Russian spies? This is a major problem in the Democratic Party right now but they have a solution: You just call them white nationalists instead,” Carlson said on his show. “It's every bit as stupid and slanderous, and it's even more effective in shutting them up.”
It was an extended rant:
Nobody likes racists, nobody wants to be called a racist, the Left knows that, so they use the word as a cudgel to beat their political opponents into submission and have their way.
They have done this so often and for so many years that over time with the word "racist" has lost a lot of power. It is dulled from overuse. The Left needs a new attack line, a new way to make you shut up and obey. Now, they found one. Watch former Georgia politician Stacey Abrams deploy it against White House adviser Stephen Miller.
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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.
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Attacking people for their race is exactly how you destroy a country. That's what Democrats are doing. They know that they are doing it, it's obvious they just don't care.
Carlson was taking his cue, of course, from the testimony given the day before by Candace Owens at the House Judiciary Committee hearing on hate crimes and the rise of white nationalism. Owens had created a media stir with her fiery exchange with Rep. Ted Lieu after he played an audio recording of Owens making apparently apologetic comments about Adolf Hitler.
But it was Owens’ opening remarks attacking the hearing itself for even being held that set the tone for Carlson:
There isn’t a single adult today that in good conscience would make the argument that America is a more racist or a more white nationalist society than it was when my grandfather was growing up. And yet we’re hearing these terms sent around today because what they want to say is that brown people need to be scared, which seems to be a narrative that we hear every four years, right ahead of a presidential election. …
Let me be clear: The hearing today isn’t about white nationalism or hate crimes; it’s about fearmongering, power, and control. It’s a preview of a Democrat 2020 election strategy, same as the Democrat 2016 election strategy. They blame Facebook, they blame Google, they blame Twitter, really, they blame the birth of social media, which has disrupted their monopoly on minds. They called this hearing because they believe if it wasn’t for social media, voices like mine would never exist. …
What they won’t tell you about these statistics and the rise of white nationalism is that they simply changed the dataset points by widening the definition of hate crimes, and upping the number of reporting agencies that are able to report on them. What I mean to say is that they are manipulating statistics.
The goal here is to scare blacks, Hispanics, gays, and Muslims into helping them censor dissenting opinions, helping them gain control of our country’s narrative which they feel that they lost. They feel that President Trump should not have beat Hillary. …
The bottom line is that white supremacy, racism, white nationalism, words that once held real meaning, have now become nothing more than election strategies. Every four years, the black community is offered handouts and fear. Handouts and fear. Reparations and white nationalism. This is the Democrats’ preview.
Mind you, Owens is a peculiar case, another woman of color in the mold of Michelle Malkin who uses her minority status as a shield against accusations of racism for the things she says, including her inane remarks about Hitler. In the meantime, the organization she represents, Turning Point USA, has multiple connections to the alt-right and the white nationalists whose existence she dismisses.
Indeed, the event in England at which Owens made her ill-advised remarks was part of a TPUSA expansion push headlined as “The Solution to Cultural Marxism”—which is, in fact, a hoax conspiracy theory concocted by white nationalists in the 1990s and promulgated by them even today. Owens herself referenced it in a tweet attacking the controversial Gillette “men” commercial, saying it was “emblematic of Cultural Marxism.”
On Thursday, Carlson invited former Blaze correspondent Jon Miller on to talk about former Attorney General Eric Holder’s remarks about America’s greatness, which devolved into a discussion of how people are being attacked for wearing their Make America Great Again hats.
That’s Miller’s specialty, and it led of course to Tucker’s point: “When you tell someone your neighbor is a white nationalist, then you start to say, you know, I don’t want to be around that person. And it really divides the country. When you think you are living amongst white supremacists and white nationalists and Nazis, it’s dangerous, and it’s creating a lot of animosity and it’s tearing us apart.”
“It scares the hell out of people,” Carlson said.
Actually, what scares the hell out of people is white nationalists walking into mosques and mowing down 50 people, or into a synagogue and murdering another 11, or into a Texas high school and gunning down 10 people. And that’s just been in the past year.
What scares the hell out of people is that hate crimes have soared to record levels—and even so, it is certain that the numbers reported are severely undercounted. The Anti-Defamation League also recorded a dramatic increase in propaganda incidents involving white nationalists, particularly as they have focused much of their efforts into recruiting on college campuses.
The tide is cresting. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently reported that it had recorded an all-time high in numbers of hate groups operating in America, 1,020, much of it attributable to the apparent toxic influence of Donald Trump, to whom white nationalists have been pledging allegiance since well before the election.
And no, despite Owens’s evidence-free assertion, those statistics have not been manipulated. We all know it because we all can see signs of it in our daily lives, and on the news.
Trump, like Carlson and Owens, has minimized their presence. After the Christchurch attacks, he opined to the press that he didn’t see white nationalism as a “rising threat” globally: “I don’t really, I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.”
It’s difficult to get a handle on just how large the numbers of identifiable white nationalists have grown to be both in the United States and globally, but Charlottesville demonstrated that they have real numerical strength and the ability to inflict real harm. Experts who have grappled with the problem estimate, from internet traffic numbers alone, that participants number in the hundreds of thousands worldwide, if not millions.
As CNN noted, the partisan divide over how to handle white nationalism could not have been more starkly on display at Tuesday’s hearing. That divide is borne out in polling as well: A recent Morning Consult poll found that, among white voters, only 16 percent of Republicans consider it to be a significant threat or problem, while 60 percent of Democrats do consider it a looming threat. However, only 37 percent of the general population consider white nationalism a serious problem.
