Nicholas Confessore was the author of the vast New York Times smear on Fox News host Tucker Carlson earlier this month, in which he crowned Carlson’s show “the most racist show in the history of cable news.”
Confessore eagerly brought the same nasty energy to blame Carlson for Saturday’s mass killing at a Buffalo supermarket by a murderer who apparently targeted black victims. Confessore and graphics editor Karen Yourish were joined by five other contributing reporters on the front of Monday’s Times: “Creeping Into the Mainstream, A Theory Turns Hate Into Terror.”
Confessore attempted to connect the whole Republican Party with the murders.
….replacement theory, once confined to the digital fever swamps of Reddit message boards and semi-obscure white nationalist sites, has gone mainstream. It crystallizes the fear — sometimes in muted form — that white people will not be the numerical majority of America’s future. Has become an influential force in conservative media, politicsThe theory was based on a theory. Remixed and borrowedRetweets, small-dollar donations and retweets can be used to draw audiences.
How did Tucker Carlson, Fox News, and Tucker Carlson get involved in this story? Confessore claims that there is not much to this, at least in the paragraph. However, the Republican Party is still to be blamed for mixing and “sanding away” racism.
By his own account, the Buffalo suspect, Payton S. Gendron, followed a lonelier path to radicalization, immersing himself in replacement theory and other kinds of racist and antisemitic content easily found on internet forums, and casting Black Americans, like Hispanic immigrants, as “replacers” of white Americans.In recent months, however, the Republican Party has adopted a variety of these ideas that have been diluted and stripped of anti-Black or antisemitic themes. They are now commonplace at Republican Party hearings and in Republican campaign ads.
Tucker Carlson is the Fox host and has been more vocal in his support of replacement theory than any other public figure. who has made elite-led demographic change a central theme of his show since joining Fox’s prime-time lineup in 2016. A Times investigation published this month showed that in more than 400 episodes of his show….
Confessore was the proud author, and he is a MSNBC political analyst.
Five congressmen were shot at an Alexandria ballfield by a man who was a fan MSNBC. host Rachel Maddow, but don’t hold your breath for the TimesThis is how to get it.
Some mainstream issues like amnesty for illegals were too fringy, even if they are part of the main border control agenda. Confessore attacked Rep. Elise Stefanik for a Facebook ad claiming amnesty for illegal immigrants would “overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” It’s no conspiracy theory to think Democrats want more immigrants allowed into the United States and to eventually give them the vote, expecting them to vote for the party who granted them citizenship. It’s certainly not an embrace of “replacement theoryIt is possible to believe so.
The TimesHe tried hard to make Tucker’s link sound authentic. His attempts at making the Tucker link sound real were sometimes laughable.
Measuring the extent of Mr. Carlson’s influence in spreading replacement theory may be impossible. But controversies around the host’s use of “replacement” rhetoric appear to have at least helped drive public curiosity about the idea….
The Buffalo suspect appears to have immersed himself on web forums like 4chan and 8chan, where versions of replacement theory abound….
Wait, so the killer wasn’t a Fox News fan? Tucker Carlson wasn’t even mentioned in the killer’s 180-page manifesto, a fact we learn in paragraph 26.
Mr. Carlson’s replacement rhetoric comes without the explicitly antisemitic elements common on racist web platforms. There is no indication that the Buffalo gunman watched Mr. Carlson’s show, or any other on Fox, and Mr. Carlson has denounced political violence even as he fans his viewers’ fears.
But there are also notable echoes between Mr. Carlson’s segments and the Buffalo suspect’s long litany of grievancesIt reflects the blurry border between internet-fuelled griping and lines that are common in conservative media.
Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch was also a focus of killer Payton Gendron’s manifesto, a fact the Times skipped.