With Tucker Carlson dabbling in racist “white replacement” theorizing late last week, a renewed effort to pressure Fox News to fire one of its top hosts has emerged. The head of the Anti-Defamation League named and shamed Fox’s leadership, stating that “Tucker has got to go” in light of Carlson’s claim that the Democratic Party is importing “third world” voters to boost its electorate. “Tucker Carlson has a history of sanitizing stereotypes and of spreading this kind of poison, but what he did on Thursday night really was indeed…a new low,” the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt said during a CNN interview. “From Fox management to the Fox board to Fox shareholders—how can they countenance their network being used to mainstream the most violent and toxic ideas?”
In the past, major advertisers have pulled their funds from Carlson’s show, including in 2019 when the host claimed that white supremacy was a “hoax” shortly after a racist gunman targeted Mexican shoppers at an El Paso Walmart and killed 22 people. Greenblatt called on current advertisers to carry on the tradition. The onus is on Fox’s advertisers, affiliates, and “cable companies who carry their signal” to “act…and say, ‘America is no place for hate,’” he argued. Greenblatt also sent a letter to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott on Friday, writing that Carlson’s “rhetoric was not just a dog whistle to racists—it was a bullhorn. Fox should take these fringe ideas and put them where they belong—in the fringe—not place them in primetime, where they serve as a gateway drug to tens of millions of Americans.”
On Monday afternoon, CNN reported that Greenblatt had received a reply from Lachlan Murdoch, the presumptive heir to the bulk of his father’s business. “Fox Corporation shares your values and abhors anti-semitism, white supremacy, and racism of any kind,” he wrote. “Concerning the segment of Tucker Carlson Tonight on April 8th, however, we respectfully disagree…. A full review of the guest interview indicates that Mr. Carlson decried and rejected replacement theory. As Mr. Carlson himself stated during the guest interview: ‘White replacement theory? No, no, this is a voting rights question.’”
In the segment in question, Carlson told guest Mark Steyn, “I know that the left and all the 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.… Every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.” At the time, a Fox News spokesperson suggested Carlson was not describing white-replacement theory, but a voting rights issue.
Carlson’s comments have taken on a life of their own, pinging across the internet along with fervent criticism. New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote on Sunday, “When Carlson worries about immigrants from the third world, he is talking about Hispanic, Asian, and Black people who he worries will outnumber ‘current’ voters. Current voters, in this formulation, are the white people who make up the majority of the American electorate.”
Michael Gerson, a columnist and former aide to George W. Bush, published a Washington Post op-ed on Monday that warned Carlson’s rhetoric is giving “new life to Trumpism,” even with Trump’s removal from the daily news cycle. “Nearly every phrase of Carlson’s statement is the euphemistic expression of white supremacist replacement doctrine,” Gerson wrote. “They are importing ‘new people’ from the ‘Third World’ means people with black and brown skin. Those kinds of people, in the racist trope, are ‘obedient,’ meaning docile, backward, and stupid. Their votes do not constitute real democracy because they are replacing the ‘current electorate’—which is presumably whiter and less docile. These paler, truer Americans are thus deprived of their birthright of political dominance. And fighting back—making sure the new Third World people have less power—becomes a defense of the American way.”
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