Tucker Carlson, Host of Fox News, went beyond his usual thinly veiled, racial rants Thursday night, supporting the explicitly white “replacement theory” supremacist. The American Defamation League has requested that Carlson be fired in response.
Tucker Carlson is one of the leading voices of today’s conservatism and a likely Republican presidential candidate. Thus, his embracing of the same poisonous rhetoric that fills up hateful manifestos from the neo-Nazi sites and far-right terrorists is yet another step down to America’s ninth hell circle. Carlson for his part insists his “replacement theory” version is not racist except his contempt for the protesters of Black Lives Matter or his insistence that Iraqis are “semi-literate primitive monkeys”:
Statements
“I know the left and all the small porter-keepers on Twitter are literally hysterical if you use ‘replacement’ to suggest that the Democratic Party tries to replace the electorate that is now voting with new people, more obedient Third World voters,” Carlson told his audience, one of the biggest in cable news. “But they’re hysterical because that’s what actually happens. Let’s say it. Let’s say it. That’s true.” That’s true.
I don’t have to waste your time, deconstructing this and showing how bigoted, absurd and conspiratory it is on several levels. It’s evident on her face.
But it is important to emphasise here that Carlsons views are fundamental to modern conservatism, while they are expressed more unpleasantly than most conservative experts would dare. And to understand why you can not even read through 100,000 word histories that trace white supremacist views from the terrorist resistance, William F. Buckley’s writings, the Goldwater insurgency, the South Strategy or reaganite orthodoxy.
Furthermore, since ancient times, every older generation has a moral panic over the new, usually more illuminated visions of the next. White evangelical America is praying for a new great awakening centred around strange moral panics like clockwork from generation to generation. And, almost every time, white supremacists try to deny non-whites or younger voters the franchise. Only the degree of panic that has beset Conservatives since Barack Obama was elected, their repeated loss of popular elections and the realisation that they are no longer a “silent majority,” if ever.
Republican party starts a campaign against Tucker Carlson
Republicans have now been engaged in an unprecedented and desperate campaign to suppress the electorate, mostly aiming at growing non-White populations and younger voters. Carlson only publicly states what the mainstream Republican Party updates as an issue of ideology and public policy.
Second but perhaps more important: trying to preserve the current hierarchy of wealth and power held by white men implicitly believes in a version of white supremacy. It is inevitably followed by cold logic.
Since it is a fact that white men held the vast majority of wealth and power in America and continue to hold it, you must believe one thing must be true: either you think white men intrinsically deserve more, or you think institutional patriarchy and racism have combined to suppress and oppress women and colourful people from the access to goods and power If you believe the latter, you meet the minimum standard to adhere to modern social liberalism and become a conservative pariah. You are by definition a chauvinist and white supremacist if you believe the latter. You are indissoluble from chauvinists and white supremacians on both social and political levels when you claim not to be a chauvinist or white supremacist, but you believe no action should be taken even to protest – much less control or redistribute resources – to mitigate structural racism and patriarchy. One cannot simply declare the problem solved and assume that everyone is now having the same chances of succeeding, because the problem is, obviously, not resolved on a social or political level and obviously not everyone has the same chances.
Conservatives hate to be labelled “conservatives” as racist or misogynist. The problem is that there isn’t really a difference for them. You’re a white supremacist if you’re trying to stop non-Whites from voting. If white men have obscene sums of money and women (and women of colours in particular) disappear, and you oppose even the most modest attempt to change this equation because you believe those rich white men deserve it more implicitly in some ways, the line of reasoning ends directly in misogyny and white supremacy.
There are legitimate discussions on the degree of regulation and redistribution at which levels and in which ways it may be necessary. But these debates take place within left and center-left factions. The right has expanded these ideas to its core, inherently and necessarily racist and misogynist, worldview entirely as anathema.
Tucker Carlson just says loudly what all of them think. That’s what they thought for decades. It is only that Conservatives no longer have the convenience to say that they still have a viable political vision or a silent majority. Thus, the implicit and silent became explicit and loud. The cable news station reflects and controls their voters by millions.
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