Tucker Carlson Claims White Supremacy Is a "Hoax"
By Tuesday, the death toll from the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, had climbed to 22, and federal authorities announced they were investigating the shooter, who allegedly wrote that he was trying to stop a "Hispanic invasion," as a domestic terrorist. That night, on his primetime Fox News show, Tucker Carlson said there's no real threat from white supremacists.
In his own words:
If you were to assemble a list a hierarchy of concerns, of problems this country faces, where would white supremacy be on this list? Right up there with Russia, probably. It's actually not a real problem in America. The combined membership of every white supremacist organization in this country, would they be able to fit inside a college football stadium? I mean, seriously. This is a country where the average person is getting poorer, where the suicide rate is spiking. White supremacy, that's the problem. It's a hoax. Just like the Russia hoax. It's a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power. That's exactly what's going on.
Of course, no one needs a KKK membership card to be a white supremacist, particularly with newer online forums, like the message board 8chan, available as a place for extremists to convene. Dylann Roof, who killed nine people during a Bible study at a historically black South Carolina church in 2015, didn't officially belong to any white supremacist groups, but he did begin his radicalization online. And there was no bouncer making sure only dues-paying white nationalists attended the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, where marchers chanted, "Jews will not replace us." The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups in the U.S., doesn't have membership records for every white supremacist organization, though the Center does say that a broad swath of right-wing extremists fall under subgroups: "Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, racist skinhead, and Christian Identity."
There's plenty of research available on white supremacist violence. A report from the Anti-Defamation League found that right-wing extremists killed more people in 2018 than in any year since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Over the last decade, right-wing extremists have been responsible for 73 percent of all extremism-related homicides, versus 23 percent caused by Muslim extremists. The threat of white nationalist violence is so significant that the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on it in April of this year. In July, FBI director Christopher Wray said the bureau had already made as many white nationalism-related arrests this year as it did in all of 2018.
White supremacists have been responsible for some of the highest-profile mass shootings in recent years. In 2012, six people were murdered in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and five years later, another white supremacist traveled from Baltimore to New York just to murder a stranger with a sword. In 2018, a shooter killed two people at a Kroger grocery store in Kentucky after he failed to force his way into a predominantly black church. And along with the El Paso shooter, white supremacists who murdered people in mass shootings at synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, California, all subscribed to the same "great replacement" conspiracy theory that Carlson has frequently promoted on his own show, the idea that so-called white culture is imperiled by non-white immigrants, and that liberal elites are behind the plot. "This is more change than human beings are designed to digest," Tucker said about changing demographics in 2018, and it "makes societies volatile." In the same segment, he added,"Our leaders are for diversity, just not where they live."
On top of pushing the great-replacement conspiracy theory, Carlson has frequently used his show to air white nationalist grievances. Last September, he attacked the idea that diversity can be a good thing, asking, "How precisely is diversity our strength? Can you think of other institutions, such as marriage or military units, in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are?" In June of this year, he repeated a discredited rumor that the South African government is killing white farmers and seizing their land. In July, he called Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee who came to the U.S. legally as a child, "living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country." According to BuzzFeed News, Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, has called Carlson "literally our greatest ally," and referred to Tucker Carlson Tonight as "basically Daily Stormer: The Show."
Also on Tuesday, the same day Carlson claimed the threat of white nationalist violence is a fiction, a man in Mississippi pleaded guilty to setting a cross on fire in the small town of Seminary. In his plea, he "admitted that he built and burned the cross to threaten, frighten, and intimidate" underage African-American and "other African-American residents," because they lived near him.
Originally Appeared on GQ
