Tucker Carlson, currently the right-wing “media personality” enjoying the highest ratings at Fox News, has taken to touting “Replacement Theory,” also known as “the great replacement,” and other members of the right-wing media universe are surely likely to follow given it so closely aligns with their generally racist, anti-democratic agenda. Replacement Theory is a blatant appeal to white people’s worst racist fear, their irrational paranoia that people of color are pushing then out of the country. It is nothing but a thinly veiled version of “Jews will not replace us,” the NAZI chant used by white supremacists in Charlottesville, VA in 2017. Jews, of course, only represent about 3% of the U.S. population, but according to Replacement Theory, with the help of their “liberal elite” allies, they are engineering a conspiracy using people of color to take over the country. This notion harkens back to anti-Semitic tropes going back many centuries but especially prevalent in the period leading up to the NAZI takeover of Germany.
Tucker has evolved from using a dog whistle to openly promoting a white supremacist conspiracy theory that panders to his audience’s basest fears, portraying them as victims rather than the racist aggressors they so often are. He shamelessly nurtures racist hatred, but his own greed and egotism—pandering to the lowest common denominator in pursuit of ratings—has long since reduced the harm done to the social fabric of our country into nothing but collateral damage.
Tucker is Not Ashamed of His Virulent Racist Hatred of the “Other.”
Tucker’s latest racist tirade was sparked by Haitian refugees trying to enter the country at the southern border. While most of us were horrified by the sight of thousands of homeless people camped under a bridge in squalor with border agents on horseback using reins as whips to beat them back from the American side of the river, Carlson and his right-wing media ilk are only concerned at the prospect of more non-white people coming into the country (although it would appear that black people disturb them a good deal more than brown people do). Carlson has thus portrayed the situation at the border as one more Democratic plot to wrestle the country away from white “real” Americans, bellowing threatening phrases like:
- “Unrelenting stream of immigration”
- “Change the racial mix of the country”
- “Replace the current electorate”
To Tucker’s way of thinking, Replacement Theory merely calls out the enemy’s evil plot for what it is—a way to take the country away from people like him!
The coup de grace, of course, is that racist haters like Tucker object to “Critical Race Theory” because they claim it depicts all white people as evil racists (it doesn’t). I certainly agree that all white people are not racists, but people like Tucker Carlson are sure working on it—oh, how they’re working on it! They incorrectly portray Critical Race Theory as hateful and divisive but happily endorse Replacement Theory, which most certainly is.
Tucker Carlson and the rest of right-wing media have taken hate mongering, which is all it really is, to a level at which calling it racism hardly does it justice.