As a New York Times investigation revealed in April, Tucker Carlson has spent more than 400 shows and counting “amplify[ing] the idea that a cabal of elites want to force demographic change through immigration,” i.e. the “great replacement,” a racist conspiracy theory that liberal politicians are trying to silence and ultimately wipe out white Americans. That conspiracy theory featured heavily in the suspected Buffalo shooter’s 180-page manifesto, the one he allegedly wrote and published detailing his plans to kill Black people before he went on to take 10 lives. Viewed side-by-side, it’s not difficult to see that the two men share a stomach-turning, dangerous, deeply deranged point of view. But Carlson, a smirking vector of hate, would like people to know that his racist point of view has nothing whatsoever to do with the Buffalo shooter’s racist point of view. Absolutely nothing!

During his Monday night show, the Fox News host took pains to distance his rhetoric with that of accused killer Payton Gendron, which he attempted to do by noting that the cold-blooded killer’s declaration was all over the place and in need of a good editor. “What [Gendron] wrote does not add up to a manifesto,” Carlson explained to his viewers. “It is not a blueprint for a new extremist political movement, much less the potential inspiration for a racist revolution. Anyone who claims that it is is lying or hasn’t read it. Instead Gendron’s letter is a rambling pastiche of slogans and internet memes, some of which flatly contradict one another. The document is not recognizably left-wing or right-wing, it’s not really political at all. The document is crazy, it’s the product of a diseased organized mind. At one point Gendron suggests that Fox News is part of a global conspiracy against him. He writes like the mental patient he is. Disjointed, irrational, paranoid.”

Say what you will about Carlson—and what you should say is that he’s a plague on society—it’s truly amazing that the first point of his little expository monologue, “Why People Should Stop Saying the Buffalo Killer Sounds a Lot Like Me,” is that the manifesto was rambling. “A rambling pastiche! Nothing like the tightly scripted screeds millions of people hear from me nightly!” As for the idea that Gendron is mentally ill, yes it’s probably true that a person who would shoot and kill nearly a dozen has mental issues—which makes him the perfect target for the hateful world view pushed by, for instance, a cable news host viewed by millions of people each day.

Also true? That passages from Gendron’s manifesto sound eerily similar to commentary that has come out of Carlson’s mouth:

While Gendron did not mention Carlson by name, he wrote that he had been influenced by the extremist online forum 4chan, where’d come across “infographics, shitposts, and memes that the White race is dying out.” From there, the alleged killer said he found other outlets peddling similarly hateful ideology, like the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. As The Guardian noted on Tuesday, Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin has described Carlson as “literally our greatest ally,” and praised his great-replacement commentary in 2021. “[Carlson was] dropping the ultimate truth bomb on his audience: Jews aggressively lobby for the same demographic policies in America that they openly declare would destroy their own country,” Anglin wrote.

After insisting that there are absolutely no parallels between his and the shooter’s outlooks, Carlson then went on to—what else—attack Democrats and others who have accurately pointed out that both he and mainstream Republican lawmakers have been relentlessly pushing the “great replacement” theory for years, and absurdly claim that his First Amendment rights are under attack. “If your daughter was murdered on Saturday in Buffalo,” he said, “you wouldn’t care why the killer did it or who he voted for. But the truth about Payton Gendron does tell you a lot about the ruthlessness and dishonesty about our political leadership. Within minutes of Saturday’s shooting, before all of the bodies of those 10 murdered Americans had even been identified by their loved ones, professional Democrats had begun a coordinated campaign to blame those murders on their political opponents.”

He added, ridiculously: “Because a mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud. That’s what they’re telling you, that’s what they’ve wanted to tell you for a long time. But Saturday’s massacre gives them a pretext to justification.”

Of course, as Rolling Stone writes, “There isn’t any significant contingent of people responding to the Buffalo shooting by saying Carlson or anyone else shouldn’t be able to express their views. Carlson is merely mad that his critics are expressing their views, which is that Carlson is a racist, and that the work he’s done to mainstream the ‘great replacement’ theory and the fact that the shooter’s manifesto is filled with it may not be totally coincidental.… The question he should probably be asking, and that Americans are plenty justified in asking themselves, is why the views of one of the influential figure in conservative media are so closely aligned with those of a mentally ill teenager who felt slaughtering 10 people at a supermarket was a righteous act.”

On Tuesday, Joe Biden dubbed the shooting an act of domestic terrorism and, without calling out Carlson or the many Republicans who’ve parroted his white supremacist bullshit by name, blamed them for infecting the minds of Gendron and others.

Whereas, you’ll be surprised to hear, Mitch McConnell was offered the opportunity to condemn the great-replacement theory, and declined.

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Kevin McCarthy would rather not discuss the time he momentarily had a conscience

Well this is uncomfortable

Does anyone have any idea what Senator Kennedy is talking about? No, but neither does he

Elsewhere!

Buffalo shooting suspect may face domestic-terrorism charges, D.A. says (Insider)

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