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. 

From the October 13, 2021, edition of The Daily Caller's Vince and Jason Save The Nation

JASON NICHOLS (HOST): You say the Democratic Party is looking to replace the current electorate with people from the Third World who you deem quote “more obedient” Given that the people of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras and many other places have fought bloody wars over politics recently. What makes you believe they'd be more obedient voters? 

...

TUCKER CARLSON (GUEST): Your question is there is a deep and smart question. Will these voters actually long term be Democratic voters? Will they do what the academic white liberals who run the Democratic Party want them to do long-term? And actually, I think the answer is no.

I think you're right. I think they're they're they have no idea who these people are and what they're actually like. So what we're doing is importing a lot of people from the Third World who live -- and I wish I could think of a different phrase in the Third World because it sounds pejorative. I don't mean it that way, but from poor countries who have far more traditional family structures and far more traditional and conservative attitudes than our leadership has.

...

White liberals bring these people in and imagine they’re all going to be like Oberlin graduates, you know, living in Brooklyn, you know, and drinking artisanal coffee. Actually, no, not at all! And you see it in the voting patterns, by the way, in Texas, a lot of self-identified Hispanics are enraged by Biden’s border policies. They’re not into this at all. They’re not liberal.

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.