Tucker Carlson’s concept of pushing fear of immigrants and change of US demographics have reached its peak- instilling fear into people’s minds, and creating a huge division in public and the government.
Carlson lay dormant for years and came back with his show “Tucker Carlson Tonight”, which had become the prime evening news months after Donald Trump’s painfully obvious defeat. As we all know, Fox being too pro-Trump and Sean Hannity being at the forefront of the Trump campaign practically licking his feet, Carlson wanted to come with another method to become one of Trump’s faithful servants- one where he didn’t have to regularly apologize for Trump’s behavior’s, like Hannity.
And that idea is what led him to the forefront of national cable news, with his “Tucker Carlson Tonight”, which drove Trump’s idea of panic- panic over America’s changing ethnic composition. It has also been reported by Media Matters that Carlson in fact continuously and probably subtly used the language of replacement to suggest that Democrats are conducting some sort of “demographic replacement” to gain political power. In addition, it was also reported last September by Media Matters that Carlson had told his viewers that Biden is aiming to “replace ‘’legacy Americans’” and “change the racial mix of the country”.
Though Carlson has maintained distance from the President, he is seemingly taking up the idea of the “great replacement”, which has taken a stronghold in the American and European conspiracy theories in recent years. Basically, it’s a far-right, white supremacy theory, popularized by Renaud Camus, who believed that the native white Europeans were being replaced by non-white immigrants- a movement which will supposedly lead to the end of the white race. This man’s idea, along with another British author Bat Ye’or’s idea, who coined the concept of “Eurabia” is mainly focused on Muslim immigration, who will allegedly replace the white Europeans with their high birth rates. This same ideology was embraced by the white supremacists, who warn of white Europeans and Americans decline, thus creating a dumb idea that they are facing some sort of demographic threat and a strong mission to preserve the “whiteness” against immigrants invaders- both Muslims and Jews.
Carlson thrusted this idea to the viewers, for example, last April where he argued that the Democrats were allegedly “importing more obedient voters from the third world” to “replace the current electorate” for power. Furthermore, he went out of his way to seek news or stories, observed by a friend, that were sometimes “really weird” and most of the time inaccurate but that would surely knock onto the fear door of viewers of a declining American culture. He goes further to create a discrimination divide by using derogatory language and promoting anti-immigration policies, describing the immigrants as a “flood of illegals” and these immigrants making America “poor and dirtier”. This idea was also taken up by Laura Ingraham, who warned the viewers that the Democrats wanted to replace “many of you”.
This ideology of the “great replacement” or as Ingraham referred to as the “invasion of the country” has led to various terrorist violence, some including the 2019 El Paso shooting, 2011 Noway attack, which killed 77 people (most of them were children), the Christchurch Mosque shooting in New Zealand in 2019, where 51 Muslims were killed.
Carlson’s claims about immigrants is what’s dirtying America and these concepts, “great replacement”, “Eurabia” are some primary beliefs of the white supremacists, which doesn’t deserve any place in the mainstream networks that are viewed by millions of people. Unfortunately, these ideas are the roots of polarization and division in the US, and the inevitable result will be a deeply divided nation, continuously in war, without any support and with white terrorists roaming in the streets.