At a certain point you have to ask yourself why Tucker Carlson doesn't have permanent facial scarring from all the times his mask slips. The man has outed himself as an overt racist so many times that it's a wonder he even bothers pretending to be anything else in the first place. Wouldn't it save everyone valuable time and energy if he simply was honest with himself and his viewers and admitted his deep bigotry in no uncertain terms, rather than couching it in the polite-ish language of policy and social science?
I ask all this because Fox News's No. 1 cash cow has once again tipped his hand, this time slightly further than usual, during a segment on immigration and specifically the Biden administration's (truly horrible) response to the influx of Haitian asylum-seekers at the country's southern border. Watch below and see if you can tell when Carlson goes from "ordinary racist" to "🚨Super Duper Mega-Racist🚨"!
Did you catch that? Here's the key line, delivered right after Carlson directly invokes genetics and the specter of eugenic social engineering:
In political terms, this policy is called "the Great Replacement" — the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far away countries.
If the phrase "Great Replacement" sounds familiar, perhaps it's because that's the title of the manifesto posted by Brenton Tarrant before he livestreamed himself murdering 49 people at a pair of New Zealand mosques in 2019. It's the same phrase echoed by the neo-Nazi rioters who chanted "Jews will not replace us" through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Or perhaps you recognize it as the animating force behind the 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, or the 2017 mass shooting at the Tree Of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And now, here's Carlson, speaking to millions of basic cable subscribers, laundering the white nationalist catchphrase as a normal "policy" "in political terms" and not the key principle behind multiple instances of racist murder.
To be clear, Carlson has danced around the phrase (and, more crucially, its message) in the past. Just this past April, he offered the following:
Now I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term "replacement," if you suggest the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World. But they become hysterical because that's what's happening, actually. Let's just say it! That's true.
That segment, unsubtle as it was, prompted the Anti-Defamation League to call on Fox News to fire Carlson for overtly racist call to arms. The network responded by claiming Carlson had actually distanced himself the bigoted philosophy, saying "a full review of the guest interview indicates that Mr. Carlson decried and rejected replacement theory" by framing it as merely a voting rights issue.
This time, however, it's hard to see Carlson's choice not only to obliquely reference the racist theory, but in fact call it by its actual name, as anything other than a combination of his own personal bigotry and a gleeful mockery of those who previously condemned him. "Hell yeah, I'm gonna pepper my show with even more Nazi catchphrases then, and there's nothing you can do about it" seems to be the name of the game here.
Carlson isn't stupid. He knows exactly what he's doing. He's gotten tired of talking about Nicki Minaj's cousin's friend's balls, and he's gone back to his wellspring of inspiration: racism. The mask has slipped once again, although by now it's a wonder he even bothers pulling it back up at all.
