Fox News’ Tucker Carlson recently hosted Pete D’Abrosca, a congressional candidate who has ties to white nationalism and has supported the bigoted, anti-immigrant campaign of a group known as “groypers,” who are trolling conservative public events with anti-Semitic dog whistles and other hateful rhetoric.
Since D’Abrosca announced his congressional bid and anti-immigrant platform over the summer, he’s been lauded by far-right personalities and publications including Ann Coulter and the white nationalist publication VDare and appeared on the conspiracy theory outlet Infowars (which he had also appeared on before). In that most recent appearance, he agreed with the host that Democrats get elected through “illegal voting” and defended the leader of the “groypers,” a far-right media figure, Holocaust denier, and pro-segregation activist named Nick Fuentes who hosts “America First” on YouTube.
Carlson himself has a long history of promoting anti-immigrant white nationalism and espousing talking points that align with the beliefs of D’Abrosca and Fuentes. This commentary has included repeatedly promoting the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, referring to a group of migrants at the southern border as an invasion that is “absolutely destroying America,” and arguing that Mexico is trying to “change the demographics” of the U.S. to sway elections. He’s called the idea that white supremacy is a serious problem in the U.S. a “hoax” and said immigration makes America “poorer, dirtier, and more divided.”
During his December 6 appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight, D’Abrosca promoted his plan for a 10-year immigration moratorium, a proposal that fits with Carlson’s previous denigration of immigrants:
Carlson asked D’Abrosca how he can get away with pushing views most people oppose, and D’Abrosca declared, “There’s a new Republican Party in town,” saying its members are “less controlled by, should we say, the Conservative Inc. crowd, or maybe the donor class in Washington, D.C., and the political elite.” “Conservative Inc.” is the catch-all term groypers use to refer to establishment conservatives. D’Abrosca went on to criticize college conservative group Turning Point USA and right-wing website The Daily Wire, both targets of Fuentes’ and the groypers’ to effort to shift conservative politics to the far-right by targeting right-wing groups and personalities deemed insufficiently loyal to "true conservativism” with racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-LGBTQ attacks.
Along with his comments about conservatives, D’Abrosca’s statements on Carlson’s show about immigrants also mirror talking points Fuentes circulated to his followers on the messaging app and white nationalist cesspool Telegram:
From D’Abrosca’s December 6 appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight:
PETE D’ABROSCA: Imagine being an ordinary American and going to college with the idea that there’s upward mobility in society and that you're going to improve your life by going to college and you take on a hundred thousand dollars plus of student debt and you get out and you're competing with a foreigner for a computer engineering job who will work for less and who will work more hours.
D’Abrosca has also previously attacked Fuentes’ targets on social media:
After his segment on Tucker Carlson Tonight, D’Abrosca earned praise from alt-right figures, including American Identity Movement (formerly Identity Evropa) leader Patrick Casey and “crying Nazi” Christopher Cantwell, Cantwell commiserated with an alt-right troll who praised Carlson as “fully on board with destroying Conservative Inc.” He also got attention from Fuentes, who called the segment a “HUGE” deal and said it was “hard to believe it was even real, it was so good.” This is not the first time Carlson has earned explicit praise for white nationalists.
The admiration goes both ways. D’Abrosca’s ties to Fuentes’ “groyper” movement are explicit in his social media posts:
Additionally, on November 4, D’Abrosca was interviewed by Infowars about the groyper movement and presented himself an insider.
Indeed, D’Abrosca is a former blogger who previously fearmongered about immigration in posts for the right-wing news site Big League Politics and has a long history of using extremist anti-immigrant rhetoric and affiliating with white nationalist groups and personalities. A Media Matters review of D’Abrosca’s social media posts reveals he, like Tucker, has promoted white nationalist conspiracy theories and troll campaigns and used racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic rhetoric:
In October of this year, he wrote that white people are “being replaced by Third World peasants that share neither their ethnicity nor their culture.”
He also said of a meme depicting President Donald Trump as a wrestler physically attacking the CNN logo: It’s “just art goys, relax.”
He also wrote: “If you’re a traitor who betrays your country by importing replacements, you deserve worse than being cursed at.”
D’Abrosca has also promoted and shared links from the white nationalist website VDare, including retweeting a post from the site that said: “As our demographics continue to shift, American political campaigns begin to take on third world aesthetics”
D’Abrosca’s campaign represents a disturbing trend in national politics: He’s one of many far-right personalities who are attempting to translate their bigotry into political power by running for office in 2020. In interviewing D’Abrosca, Carlson handed members of a fringe white nationalist movement a national platform to espouse a racist ideology. The interview also demonstrates another favorite tactic of Carlson’s: going out of his way to promote fringe white nationalist figures and movements.
