He may play one on TV but Tucker Carlson is no fool.
When the Fox News commentator stares into the camera on his talk show and rants for 10 minutes that President Biden’s immigration policies are aimed at replacing “legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries,” he knows exactly what he is saying, word for word. Carlson is laying fresh logs on the embers of a racist theory that has stoked many white Americans’ worst fears.
This once-obscure “great replacement theory” espoused by Carlson and other right-wing media talking heads — the notion that American elites want to replace white citizens through immigration policy and by exploiting simple demographic shifts — has gained traction with frightening speed. A recent AP poll revealed that roughly one-third of American adults agree with Carlson’s conspiratorial ramblings.
Even more chilling is that the theory has found an audience among unstable individuals with unfettered access to guns. In 2018, a white man with a history of antisemitic internet posts shot and killed 11 worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue. The following year, another white man posted a hate-filled manifesto speaking of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” minutes before opening fire at an El Paso Walmart, killing 23 people.
The latest racist massacre occurred Saturday at a supermarket in a predominantly Black, low-income neighborhood in Buffalo, N.Y. The suspect, an 18-year-old white man, gunned down 10 people, and, in statements after his arrest, made it clear that he was targeting the Black community. The suspect also reportedly posted a racist manifesto online in which he wrote that the customers at the supermarket came from a culture that sought to “ethnically replace my own people.”
This toxic stew of hatred and firearms should certainly raise the alarm for lawmakers in Texas, where anyone who can legally own a firearm can now tote it virtually anywhere, thanks to the new permitless carry law.
That the Buffalo suspect was able to purchase an assault rifle modified with an illegal magazine in a state with some of the strictest gun laws in the nation should push Congress toward swift action. In mass shootings between 2009 and 2020, high-capacity magazines led to five times as many people shot per mass shooting, according to the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety.
While there is no indication that the Buffalo suspect was a devoted Carlson viewer, they are clearly speaking the same language, which can’t simply be dismissed as isolated tirades from a bigoted lunatic. Not when antisemitic incidents in the United States have reached an all-time high and hate crimes have reached their highest levels in 12 years. Not when Carlson’s reckless propaganda is delivered with such surgical precision.
