Matt Gertz at Media Matters reports:
Fox News host Tucker Carlson has spent years telling his audience that white supremacists do not pose a serious threat to the public. Even as Americans motivated by racist ideologies committed acts of domestic terror — including the January 6 sacking of the U.S. Capitol — he was quick to scoff, arguing that Democrats and the press were exaggerating the threat for political gain. So after FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress the exact opposite on Tuesday, Carlson was left with three choices — admit that he was wrong, lie about what happened, or ignore it. He chose the latter path, preferring to devote his show to issues he apparently considered more pressing, like the purported cancellation of Dr. Seuss.
Wray, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump in 2017, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that white supremacist ideology “is a persistent, evolving threat” and is “the biggest chunk of our domestic terrorism portfolio, if you will, overall.” He also said that the number of arrests of such persons have nearly tripled since his first year in office.
The FBI director further described the January 6 attack as “domestic terrorism” and that “racially motivated violent extremism, specifically advocating for the superior[ity] of the white race” motivated some alleged participants. Wray acknowledged that those white supremacists had been instrumental in the attack, even as he explained that “militia violent extremists” represented the “biggest bucket” of alleged perpetrators. He also knocked down conspiracy theories that had circulated on Fox and are now prevalent among Republicans that anti-fascist activists were responsible for the violence that day.
Wray’s comments on the threat posed by violent white supremacists were consistent with his September congressional testimony, in which he said that among domestic terrorist attacks, “racially motivated violent extremists … have been responsible for the most lethal activity in the U.S.” Likewise, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report in October, finding that white supremacists had committed more lethal attacks than any other domestic extremist movement. Then-acting Secretary Chad Wolf wrote in that report that he was “particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years.”
While CNN and MSNBC aired much of Wray’s Tuesday testimony live, Fox largely ignored it so its hosts could focus more time on culture war nonsense. That’s a shame. Fox’s viewers would have benefited from hearing Wray’s presentation, which debunked a number of myths about the January 6 attacks propagated by the network as it sought to retain viewers by downplaying an assault on American democracy.
Carlson bears a particular responsibility in this case. His frequent parroting of white supremacist talking points has made him beloved within that bigoted community and reportedly triggered distress within Fox’s own ranks. And for the last several years — particularly since January 6 — he’s been telling his audience that Democrats and the press have vastly exaggerated concerns about white supremacists as part of a conspiracy against them.
He doesn’t want that information to go out to his audience because it would prove him an ass. Here’s an excerpt of something I wrote about Carlson a couple of years ago, in the wake of the El Paso mass shooting:
Anyone who has tuned into their evening lineup over the past couple of years knows that the language in the shooter’s online screed could have come from the mouths of any number of Fox network’s stars. But the only one who has been spouting the specific ideological mix that motivated the killer is Tucker Carlson.
Media Matters cataloged some of the xenophobic and racist rhetoric of the most vociferous anti-immigrant pundits on Fox News:
And USA Today analyzed the president’s speeches since 2017 and found that he has “used the words ‘predator,’ ‘invasion,’ ‘alien,’ ‘killer,’ ‘criminal’ and ‘animal’ at his rallies while discussing immigration more than 500 times. But for all of the degrading language he’s deployed against immigrants and people of color, Trump has failed to adopt a very specific term that seemed defined the thesis of the El Paso shooter’s screed: “replacement.” However, if you watched that video above, you’ll have noticed that it’s used frequently on Fox News, particularly by Carlson.
It stands to reason that Trump wouldn’t have picked that up. It’s much too cerebral for him. After all, he didn’t understand that when the Charlottesville Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us” they were talking about his own beloved daughter and son-in-law. He has no intellectual understanding of the white supremacist movement. He’s simply an old-school racist without any need for an underlying philosophy to justify it.
But the “Great Replacement” theory is a big deal among white nationalists worldwide. Essentially it comes down to two intersecting ideas. They believe that “the west” is threatened by immigrants from non-white countries resulting in white people being “replaced.” And the whole thing is part of a secret Jewish conspiracy to rule a one-race world. The Fox News “mainstream” American version doesn’t fully embrace the second idea, at least not publicly. But they are all-in on the first one, cleverly couching it in partisan political terms as a Democratic Party strategy to deny Republicans (who are, as we all know, nearly all white) their God-given right to be a majority of this country.
Since the massacre last weekend some people on the right have been saying the shooter couldn’t really be considered a person of the right because he criticized corporations and had concerns about the environment. They must not have been paying attention to Tucker Carlson. Of all the Fox News personalities who harp on immigration, he is the one with the most sophisticated white nationalist ideology. His ideas fall much more in line with the new strain of right-wing “populism” of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon than David Duke (although the latter is a big fan.)
In a nutshell, they see anti-corporatism and environmentalism as necessary to save Western civilization, not because corporations are sucking the life from working people and killing the planet but because corporations and climate change are creating conditions that make brown and back people migrate to countries with predominantly white populations. And among the “ecofascist” alt-right and the neo-Nazis, environmentalism is based upon reverence for “the land of your people” which explains the Charlottesville marchers chanting the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil.” Carlson hasn’t gone that far but these people are all walking in the same direction.
At the recent National Conservatism Conference, Carlson gave the keynote speech in which he made it clear that he believes the future of the Republican Party lies in adopting his right-wing populist agenda as a way to gain support for anti-immigration policies. He’s quite clever about it. He rails against the corporations for kowtowing to leftist advocacy:
“Somewhere in the late 1990s, corporate America realized this. They learned that if they did the bidding of the left on social issues, they would get a pass on everything else. They could freeze wages. They could destroy the environment. They could strangle free speech. They can eliminate privacy. In general, they could make public life much worse.“
And his agenda to have women leave the workforce and stay home to have more children is presented as an anti-corporate, big-government benefit proposed by Elizabeth Warren to allow women to throw off the yoke of corporate tyranny. In reality, it’s yet another Orbán policy designed to boost the native population so that immigrant labor is no longer necessary. We know this because Carlson has said as much:
“[Y]ou are saying our low birthrates are a justification for immigration. I’m saying our low birthrates are a tragedy that say something awful about the economy and the selfish stupidity of our leaders. I’m not demonizing anybody. I’m not against the immigrants. I’m just, I’m for the Americans. Nobody cares about them. It’s like, shut up, you’re dying, we’re gonna replace you.“
There have been no confirmed reports that the El Paso killer ever watched Fox News. Most young people don’t. And there is plenty of access to this extremist ideology online. But had he tuned in on any given night to Tucker Carlson’s show he could have heard all of the ideas he said in his screed were motivation for his deadly acts. Carlson has been mainstreaming that killer’s ideology for years now.