Tucker Carlson’s vile legacy is mainstreaming white supremacy.

It's up to us to drive the hate back to the fring

“You will not replace us!...Jews will not replace us!”

That vile chant by torch wielding, white supremacists in 2017 at the “Unite the Right Rally” in Charlottesville, Virginia was likely the first time you heard the core belief of what is known as, “The Great Replacement Theory.”  This “theory”’ is meant as a warning to white people that soon, people of color – typically immigrants, Latinos and African Americans – will one day outnumber white people and in essence “replace” them.

But in just a matter of years, this toxic concept went mainstream all thanks to one person: Tucker Carlson.

The first hints of Carlson’s embrace of this dangerous conspiracy theory can be tracked back to 2018 when Media Matters—a media watchdog organization--raised red flags. Then Carlson was declaring on his top-rated Fox News’ show that immigrants were going to replace an aging white population. Carlson asserted that he isn’t “against the immigrants” but rather “for the Americans” because “nobody cares about them. It’s like, shut up, you’re dying, we’re gonna replace you.”

From there, Carlson got worse. We know this from a NY Times study in 2022 titled, “How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable.” The newspaper documented that over the next few years, Carlson peddled some version of the great replacement theory over 400 times.

Just one example came in 2021 when Carlson told his audience of primarily white viewers that, “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…with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.”  He added, “They become hysterical because that's what's happening, actually. Let's just say it! That's true.”

The fact that this very theory has been cited by others who committed deadly attacks to preserve white supremacy – such as the 2019 El Paso, Texas, rampage that targeted Latinos and left 23 dead – is why the Anti-Defamation League called in April 2021 for Carlson to be fired.

But Carlson refused to stop. For example, as Media Matters detailed about a 2022 broadcast: “Tucker Carlson gives a full endorsement of the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory.” That is when the Fox News host scoffed at critics who mocked, him saying, “The Great Replacement… it's not a conspiracy theory, it's their electoral strategy. And we know that because they say it all the time.”

Not content with simply peddling this toxic theory, Carlson would also downplay the threat of white supremacy. For example, declaring on his show in 2019 that “white supremacy was a hoax.” Adding, “If you were to assemble a list, a hierarchy of concerns, of problems this country faces, where would white supremacy be on the list?...It’s actually not a real problem in America.”

Carlson made those comments in response to FBI Director Christopher Wray’s testimony at the time before Congress, “that a majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of white, what you might call white supremacist violence.” Clearly, Carlson viewed himself as the defender of white supremacy.

Now you understand why white supremacists have long openly praised Carlson. The editor of the neo-Nazi publication The Daily Stormer dubbed Carlson  “literally our greatest ally.” Holocaust denying, white nationalist Nick Fuentes said after Carlson’s 2021 open embrace of the “Great replacement theory” that the Fox News host had finally opened the eyes of America to the truth “and there is nothing liberals can do about it.” And in 2021, former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke praised Carlson for mainstreaming the Great Replacement theory.

Before long, GOP members of Congress followed Tucker’s lead. In 2021, Trump loving GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz tweeted: “@TuckerCarlson is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America.”

Polls soon made clear that Carlson’s efforts to mainstream hate had found big support among the GOP base. A 2022 poll found that nearly two-thirds of Republicans agreed with a core belief of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that alleges Democrats are encouraging demographic change in the country to replace “more conservative white voters.” And that same poll found that 68 percent of GOP voters said they believed that the recent shift in U.S. demographics is “not a natural change but has been motivated by progressive and liberal leaders actively trying to leverage political power by replacing more conservative white voters.”

Soon we saw an increasing number of Republican candidates embrace this concept as the NY Times laid out in a 2022 article titled, "Republicans Play on Fears of ‘Great Replacement’ in Bid for Base Voters.” The Times found that more than a dozen GOP candidates had run ads warning of an immigrant “invasion” in the country or otherwise diluting the power of native-born citizens.

What I laid out is the trajectory of how a toxic and dangerous idea traveled from the fringes of society to becoming a mainstream idea embraced by one of the two major political parties.

To be clear, Carlson did not make the GOP base bigoted. Carlson simply showed them it was okay to hold and even say these despicable views in public—after all, he was doing it on national TV. 

Carlson may be replaced at Fox News, but his legacy is a GOP that is the very definition of a white nationalist movement.  In other words, Carlson achieved what he set out to years ago. It’s now up to us to drive Carlson’s toxic views back to the fringes of society where they belong.

---