Tucker Carlson undercuts his own Great Replacement fearmongering
Written by Nikki McCann Ramirez
Published
Tucker Carlson has an extensive catalogue of claims that the Democratic Party is orchestrating a “great replacement” of “legacy Americans” by easing policies that discourage immigration. Carlson has suggested that the people entering the country will vote for Democrats if they are ever granted citizenship. The “great replacement” conspiracy theory, a core belief in white nationalist ideology, holds that white people are being intentionally and systematically replaced by nonwhite people through mass immigration.
While Carlson has claimed that his concerns are political, it’s impossible to ignore the racialized language Carlson uses when invoking the spectre of the great replacement theory, going so far as to accuse President Joe Biden of using “the language of eugenics” when Biden, then vice president, said in a speech that the United States’s influx of immigrants made the country stronger. As noted by Mediate, in an October 13 interview with The Daily Caller -- during which he struggled to answer basic questions about claims he had made on his prime-time show -- Calrson contradicted the core of his political justification for fearmongering to viewers about their impending “replacement.” Carlson admitted that the immigrants coming to the United States may not even vote for Democrats.
When Nichols confronted Carlson about the disconnect between his opposition to immigration and his assertions that many immigrants share common values with conservatives, Carlson claimed that he wasn’t attacking the immigrants themselves. The assertion is plainly false. Carlson regularly characterizes immigrants as dangerous or undesirable, calling them “violent criminals,” and generally blames them for making the country “poorer, and dirtier, and more divided.”
Carlson’s confession that the immigrants arriving into the United States aren’t a mass of liberal voters intent on usurping the conservative population lays plain the true insidiousness of his fearmongering about the great replacement. It’s never been about preserving the country’s democratic integrity, as Carlson has repeatedly claimed. He admits that many of the immigrants coming into the United States share common values with those who already live here. His problem is with the immigrants themselves; Carlson assigns immigrants an inherent cultural incompatibility that he himself contradicts but nonetheless keeps pushing in order to continue foisting his white nationalist vision for the nation on the public.