Chuck Schumer Sends Letter To Rupert Murdoch Calling For End To Amplification Of “Great Replacement Theory”

Ted Johnson
·4 min read
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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called on Rupert Murdoch and other top executives of Fox Corp. and Fox News to stop the “reckless amplification” of the “great replacement theory” by some of the news channel’s hosts.

The letter came following the deadly shooting rampage in Buffalo, NY, over the weekend, in which 10 people were killed. The alleged shooter had, according to a manifesto posted online, been an adherent of the “replacement theory,” or the belief that elites are trying to replace native-born Americans with non-white immigrants for political gain.

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“For years, these types of beliefs have existed at the fringes of American life,” Schumer wrote in the letter. “However, this pernicious theory, which has no basis in fact, has been injected into the mainstream thanks in large part to a dangerous level of amplification by your network and its anchors.”

Schumer did not mention Tucker Carlson in the text of the letter, but cc’d him. On Monday, Schumer directly called out Carlson in a speech on the Senate floor, citing a New York Times series that found that the Fox host “spewed rhetoric that echoes replacement theory at least 400 times on his show since 2016.”

In his letter — which the Times published here — Schumer quoted a Monday editorial from the Wall Street Journal, owned by Murdoch’s News Corp., that said politicians and media had an obligation to “condemn…such conspiratorial notions as replacement theory.”

Schumer, though, wrote that “words of condemnation are hardly enough.”

“To this end, I implore you to immediately cease all dissemination of false white nationalist, far-right conspiracy theories on your network,” he wrote.

Schumer wrote on Twitter that Carlson invited him on his show on Tuesday night, but he declined. “Tucker Carlson needs to stop promoting the racist, dangerous ‘Replacement Theory,'” Schumer wrote.

A Fox Corp. spokesperson did not return a request for comment. A Fox News spokesperson pointed to Carlson’s remarks on his show Monday, in which he said that the focus should be on the victims and called the alleged shooter a racist and his manifesto “crazy.” He called for a “colorblind meritocracy.”

But Carlson also claimed that Democrats “had begun a coordinated campaign to blame those murders on their political opponents” and that an effort was afoot to “suspend the First Amendment.” “So what is hate speech? Well, it’s speech that our leaders hate. Because a mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud. That’s what they are telling you. That is what they are wanting to tell you for a long time, but Saturday’s massacre gives them a pretext to justification.”

Last year, Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch defended Carlson after the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt called for his ouster for espousing replacement theory.

In a segment on his show, Carlson had said said, “I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to ‘replace’ the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World. But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening, actually. Let’s just say it: That’s true.”

In a letter to Greenblatt, Murdoch rejected calls for Carlson’s ouster, arguing that the Fox News host was not advocating for “white replacement theory” but that he had stated that it was a “voting rights question.”

Yet Carlson has continued to advance the “replacement theory” in other shows. In September, Carlson said, “In political terms, this policy is called ‘the great replacement’ — the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries. They brag about it all the time, but if you say it is happening, they scream at you with maximum hysteria.”

In a speech in Buffalo on Tuesday, President Joe Biden more generally called out those who amplify the theory. He said that it was “a hate that through the media and politics, the internet, has radicalized angry, alienated, lost and isolated individuals into falsely believing that they will be replaced.”

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