​Tucker's 'Great Replacement' Either Totally Fine Or Doesn't Exist Or HEY WHAT ABOUT RACHEL MADDOW, LIBS?

The explanations keep coming.

 As we've noted, right-wing proponents of the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory have been trying awfully hard to explain that they have no moral culpability for Saturday's racist mass shooting of 13 people in Buffalo, New York. It's a problem for for them, since the shooter's manifesto obsesses at length about "replacement," an international Jewish conspiracy seeking to genocide white people through immigration and through relatively lower white birth rates. (I can remember my mother fretting about the birth rate thing way back in the 1970s, too). The argument goes that complex demographic changes are actually being engineered to end white people's majority status in the population, which of course would be the end of America.

Wingnuts who've pushed the "Great Replacement" lie have tried to distance themselves from the shooter, claiming that something else caused the massacre ( furries , or maybe the COVID lockdowns ), or more typically, doubling down on the paranoia about immigration while still insisting it's true. But they're going to great lengths to insist they've never advocated violence, they've merely warned of a literal invasion by foreign hordes making war against America, lawlessly destroying our way of life, and turning the country into "a third-world hellhole" (literally part of the title of a book by Ann Coulter).

So yeah, a bit more on that, because while this "Great Replacement" stuff is bullshit, it's bullshit that's driving much of what passes for the Republican Party's agenda. Ever since that Kenyan guy became president, they want "their" country back.

Wait! Tucker's 'Great Replacement' Isn't The Killer's 'Great Replacement'!

In an elegant variation on the theme denying any similarities between rightwing immigration panic and the shooter's ideology, Daily Wire columnist Hank Berrien explained that you just have to understand they're totally different things!

Berrien notes a New York Times story that

cited the gunman’s alleged support for so-called “replacement theory,” an anti-semitic conspiracy theory that claims Jews are importing minorities to change the country’s racial makeup.

And while the gunman may have written about the "Great Replacement," it has absolutely nothing to do with perfectly valid patriotic "claims that Democrats favor amnesty for illegal immigrants in order to change the voting demographics of the country, which [Tucker] Carlson has asserted." That's different, so libs shouldn't "conflate" the two. One is about evil Jews trying to change America's racial makeup, while Tucker is only talking about voting blocs, and that has nothing to do with race.

We suppose that might win some awards for hair-splitting, were it not for the tiny detail that Carlson goes far beyond just talking about voting, and explicitly discusses the supposed plot in racial terms. As the Times recently detailed, Carlson has referenced the idea some 400 times, and while he does sometimes frame it as a scheme to change the voting population, he constantly uses scary language about ruling elites who want to replace real Americans — that's "YOU," the Fox News viewer — with "third-world immigrants." And he's constantly emphasizing that those nasty Democrats are stealing the USA by "trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World." Here, a short, partial compilation, which is only one minute long and feels like forever. (Caution: includes Tucker's hysterical laughter):

Tucker Carlson pushing Great Replacement Theory, all in one place, courtesy of the @MehdiHasanShow on @MSNBC. Watch/share/be disgusted: pic.twitter.com/uwOeYkWHSW

— Mehdi Hasan (@Mehdi Hasan) 1652663302 

Again and again, we're told one of the biggest threats about these "third world" immigrants is that they're "more compliant" than red-blooded American voters. We guess they think those voters are simpletons who will dance for their puppetmaster (probably George Soros). Gosh, no racism in that characterization.

And again, there's no plot here. Democrats are sympathetic to migrants and refugees because we're liberal saps who still believe America is best when it provides refuge to those huddled masses yearning to breathe free and all that, not because we expect a political payoff. But it's awfully hard for right-wingers to see anything as not motivated by seeking a partisan edge, or even a nefarious plot to steal elections -- cough, cough, projection! -- so when we talk about asylum and social justice and all that, they just know in their hearts we have to be lying, because humans never help others without expecting something in return.

Get real.

Didn't Rachel Maddow Also Inspire A Shooting? (No, She Did Not)

In one of the weirder sideshows to the shooting, a whole bunch of wingnuts on Twitter wondered why leftists are so insistent on smearing Tucker just because his racist rhetoric sounds a lot like the shooter's racist rhetoric, even though the shooter didn't watch Tucker. After all, the lefty who shot up that baseball practice in 2017, nearly killing GOP Rep. Steve Scalise, was a big fan of Rachel Maddow. But those hypocritical leftists never accused Maddow of inciting that shooting! Sean Hannity said blaming Carlson was just "intellectually lazy and intellectually dishonest”:

“What you’re looking at here, is the face of evil. That’s what this is. This isn’t about politics, it is about evil,” Hannity said, going on to point out that members of the GOP didn’t blame Rachel Maddow or the Democrats for the shooting that injured House Minority Whip Steve Scalise in 2017 —even though the shooter was a Sanders supporter and a Maddow watcher.

Couple things here.

1) The fuck they didn't. Newt Gingrich blamed a "pattern" of "increasing hostility on the left" for telling people "It’s OK to consider assassinating Trump," and Don Junior tweeted that the shooting was clearly inspired by that production of Julius Caesar in which Caesar looked like Trump. Others said Sanders was at fault, because hadn't he talked about a political revolution? That monster.

2) Neither Sanders nor Maddow ever advanced anything remotely parallel to the toxic "Great Replacement" crap that both the shooter and Carlson pushed, although we suppose their excuse might be that the baseball practice gunman didn't write a manifesto.

Tucker Explains Shooter Wasn't 'Political' Somehow

On his own show Monday night (we didn't watch and you can't make us), Carlson dismissed the shooter's long written rant as not really a manifesto, and not even "political," apparently because it lacked the intellectual heft of good political writing like Edmund Burke'sReflections on the Revolution in France or Donald Trump's Disquisition on What You Can Get Away With When You're a Celebrity. 

   The Washington Post explains:

“What he wrote does not add up to a manifesto,” Carlson said, noting that what [Payton] Gendron allegedly wrote was racist. “It is not a blueprint for a new extremist political movement, much less the inspiration for racist revolution. Anyone who claims that it is lying or hasn’t read it.” [...]

Carlson did not directly mention the racist theory during the monologue at the top of his show. The host, who denounced racism and described the alleged document from Gendron, 18, as “a rambling pastiche of slogans and Internet memes, some of which flatly contradict one another,” said: “The document is not recognizably left-wing or right-wing; it’s not really political at all. The document is crazy.”

Egad! A mishmash of incoherent crap? Sounds like a Trump interview, honestly. But Carlson knew who the real victims were: Right-wing pundits, and also YOU, the Fox Viewer: "So what is hate speech? Well, it’s speech that our leaders hate." See what he did there?

“So because a mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud. That’s what they’re telling you. That’s what they’ve wanted to tell you for a long time, but Saturday’s massacre gives them a pretext, a justification.”

In other words, we're right back to the standard Tucker Carlson victimhood narrative, because the powerful elites are still coming for you, and you need to stay angry forever. The real threat isn't armed racists, or racist propaganda stirring up resentment. No, it's those elites trying to silence the racists who are telling you to arm yourself against the dusky hordes who are trying to steal your nation.

Postcript

Last night, Tucker explained, in typical Tucker fashion, that he isn't even sure what this "Great Replacement" thingie is, but he's definitely sure the Democratic Party formulates immigration policy in order to help it win elections, and that this is just true because Democrats are just constantly saying this out loud. At this point Tucker played clips of Democrats saying out loud that demographic change exists, which only proves Tucker's point if you think demographic change is a reason to shit your white man pants.

At the end of the package, he exclaimed, "So you play clips of them saying it and you're the deranged conspiracy nut!"

Also racist, Tucker. Don't forget "racist."

[ Daily Wire / New York Times / Hannity / NBC News / WaPo / LAT ]

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