It was a day early but Tucker Carlson got a wonderful birthday gift yesterday, didn't he?
Let me explain.
Tucker Carlson was born on this date in San Francisco in 1969.
Yesterday, in Buffalo NY a young man killed nearly a dozen people (injured a few others) in what police described as a "racially motivated hate crime."
The shooter, of course, reportedly left a manifesto explaining his actions.
Sections of that manifesto seemed to, well take a look:
The
suspect in Saturday’s killing of 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket
allegedly wrote a document endorsing “great replacement theory,” a
once-fringe racist idea that became a popular refrain among media
figures such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham of Fox News and
conservative writer Ann Coulter.
Before
the shooting rampage that also left three wounded, the suspect, Payton
S. Gendron, 18, allegedly posted a lengthy document invoking the idea
that White Americans were at risk of being “replaced” by people of color
because of immigration and higher birthrates.
Keep that phrase in mind. The "great replacement theory."
Shows up here:
But the most prominent espouser of the theory has arguably been Tucker Carlson. In a damning three-part series examining Carlson’s outsized role in stoking white supremacist fears, the New York Times
recently found that Carlson has long pushed the false conspiracy theory
that Democrats were carrying out an elaborate mission to bring “more
obedient voters from the third world” in order to replace the current
electorate and win elections. Carlson has even defended the theory’s role in motivating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol building.
And here:
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson has repeatedly pushed “replacement” rhetoric on
his show. “I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on
Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’
if you suggest for 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,” Carlson said in April 2021.
Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of moving parts in this story and only a few have Tucker Carlson's name on them.
But let's look a little deeper at that Times piece on Tucker:
Alchemizing media power into political
influence, Mr. Carlson stands in a nativist American tradition that runs
from Father Coughlin to Patrick J. Buchanan. Now Mr. Carlson’s on-air
technique — gleefully courting blowback, then fashioning himself as his
aggrieved viewers’ partner in victimhood — has helped position him, as
much as anyone, to inherit the populist movement that grew up around Mr.
Trump. At a moment when white backlash is the jet fuel of a Republican
Party striving to return to power in Washington, he has become the
pre-eminent champion of Americans who feel most threatened by the rising
power of Black and brown citizens. To channel their fear into ratings,
Mr. Carlson has adopted the rhetorical tropes and exotic fixations of
white nationalists, who have watched gleefully from the fringes of
public life as he popularizes their ideas. Mr. Carlson sometimes refers
to “legacy Americans,” a dog-whistle term that, before he began using it
on his show last fall, appeared almost exclusively in white nationalist
outlets like The Daily Stormer, The New York Times found. He takes up
story lines otherwise relegated to far-right or nativist websites like
VDare: “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has featured a string of segments about
the gruesome murders of white farmers in South Africa, which Mr. Carlson
suggested were part of a concerted campaign by that country’s Black-led
government. Last April, Mr. Carlson set off yet another uproar,
borrowing from a racist conspiracy theory
known as “the great replacement” to argue that Democrats were
deliberately importing “more obedient voters from the third world” to
“replace” the current electorate and keep themselves in power. But a
Times analysis of 1,150 episodes of his show found that it was far from
the first time Mr. Carlson had done so.
“Tucker
is ultimately on our side,” Scott Greer, a former deputy editor at the
Carlson-founded Daily Caller, who cut ties with the publication in 2018
after his past writings for a white nationalist site were unearthed,
said on his podcast last spring. “He can get millions and millions of
boomers to nod along with talking points that would have only been seen
on VDare or American Renaissance a few years ago.”
Tucker, Happy birthday to you, you motherfucker.
You must be so proud of yourself.
