Tucker Carlson offered a full-throated embrace of the white supremacist “great replacement” theory Monday on Fox News, mere months after trying to distance himself from it in the wake of a racially motivated massacre in New York.
“The great replacement? Yeah, it’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s their electoral strategy,” the Fox News host said, as the words “Democrats often celebrate demographic change” appeared on screen.
The racist conspiracy theory claims that white Christians are being intentionally replaced by immigrants, people of color and non-Christians. It’s been touted by multiple racially motivated mass shooters, including the one who killed 10 Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, in May; the man who gunned down 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019; and the shooter who massacred 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso later that year.
Carlson attracted renewed criticism for peddling the theory on his show after a manifesto written by the Buffalo shooter was found to reference it. At the time, Carlson acted as though he’d barely heard of it.
“You’ve heard a lot about the great replacement theory recently; it’s everywhere … we’re still not sure exactly what it is,” he said, even though he’d previously mentioned it on his show more than 400 times.
His comments drew fresh condemnation Thursday.
“The difference between a Tucker Carlson monologue and a white supremacist mass murderer’s manifesto is the Tucker Carlson monologue gets aired in prime-time on the nation’s most-watched cable news network,” said Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at media watchdog Media Matters.
Carlson’s program often revolves around us-versus-them rhetoric, trying to convince his viewers that Democrats and other unnamed left-wing forces are acting to control them and change their way of life, in part by importing immigrants to change voting demographics.