After the Anti-Defamation League renewed its call for Tucker Carlson to be fired from Fox News for voicing the racist “great replacement” theory about immigration, the primetime host had a pithy response: “Fuck them.”
Carlson was speaking to the former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly on Sirius XM. He made the comments in question on his show on Wednesday, which averages more than 3 million viewers a night.
Claiming the Biden administration was trying “to change the racial mix of the country”, Carlson said: “In political terms, this policy is called ‘the great replacement’, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.
“They brag about it all the time, but if you dare to say it’s happening they will scream at you with maximum hysteria.”
The “great replacement theory” originated on the far right. Perpetrators of recent mass shootings have cited iterations of the theory in “manifestos” attempting to justify their actions.
Carlson raised the theory in April, claiming it was not racist but a matter of hardball politics. The ADL chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, called for Carlson to be fired.
Lachlan Murdoch, chief executive of the Fox Corporation, wrote back: “Mr Carlson decried and rejected replacement theory. As Mr Carlson himself stated … ‘White replacement theory? No, no, this is a voting rights question.’”
This week, Greenblatt repeated his call.
“For Tucker Carlson to spread the toxic, antisemitic and xenophobic ‘great replacement theory’ is a repugnant and dangerous abuse of his platform.
“If it somehow wasn’t clear enough before to the executives at Fox News that Carlson was openly embracing white nationalist talking points, let last night’s episode be case and point.”
The Council on American Islamic Relations also said Carlson should be fired.
Kelly asked Carlson how he felt when “sure enough the ADL comes after you”.
“The ADL?” Carlson said, laughing. “Fuck them.”
The ADL, he said, “was a noble organisation that had a very specific goal, which was to fight antisemitism, and that’s a virtuous goal. They were pretty successful over the years. Now it’s operated by a guy who’s just an apparatchik of the Democratic party.
“It’s very corrosive for someone to take the residual moral weight of an organisation that he inherited and use it for party.
“So the great replacement theory is, in fact, not a theory. It’s something that the Democrats brag about constantly, up to and including the president.
“And in one sentence, it’s this: ‘Rather than convince the current population that our policies are working and they should vote for us as a result, we can’t be bothered to do that. We’re instead going to change the composition of the population and bring in people who will vote for us.’ So there isn’t actually inherently a racial component to it, and it’s nothing to do with antisemitism.”
Kelly also played a clip of Joe Biden speaking in 2015, which Carlson used on Wednesday.
In the clip, the then vice-president says: “An unrelenting stream of immigration, non-stop, non-stop. Folks like me who were Caucasian, of European descent for the first time in 2017 will be in an absolute minority in the United States of America, absolute minority. Fewer than 50% of the people in America from then and on will be White European stock. That’s not a bad thing. That’s as a source of our strength.”
On Wednesday, Carlson said: “An unrelenting stream of immigration. But why? Well, Joe Biden just said it, to change the racial mix of the country … to reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here, and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the Third World … This is the language of eugenics, it’s horrifying.”
Analysts have shown that the clip is edited misleadingly.
As the Washington Post pointed out, Biden made the remarks as part of “about six minutes of commentary, beginning with the fact that the city of Boston came together as a community after the bombing during the Boston marathon.
“‘I’m not suggesting … that I think America has all the answers here,’ Biden said. ‘We just have a lot more experience. By that I mean, we are a nation of immigrants. That’s who we are.’”