This is Tucker Carlson, the new king of cable news.
He took over Bill O’Reilly’s slot in April,
and since then he’s had the most watched news show on cable.
Fox viewers love him because he takes on the liberal elite,
and Fox executives love him because
he’s not embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal.
But there’s someone else who really likes Tucker Carlson.
In replace of O'Reilly we get Tucker,
who I think is a much better figure.
He’s certainly more intelligent.
This is Richard Spencer, one of the most
notorious white supremacists in the country.
He at least has a kind of open-mindedness
in a way that Bill O’Reilly never would.
Spencer isn’t the only professional racist
giddy about Tucker’s show.
Here’s David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK,
tweeting ‘god bless Tucker Carlson.’
And here’s the white supremacist website Daily Stormer
calling Tucker “literally our greatest ally.”
So what the hell is going on here?
Why are white supremacists so excited about Tucker Carlson?
In a lot of ways, Tucker is a typical Fox News host.
He complains about political correctness, attacks the liberal media,
interviews Fabio.
Okay, that was weird.
But what’s caught the attention of white supremacists
is the way Tucker talks about immigration.
Normally, conservative pundits focus on illegal immigration.
All Americans should welcome legal immigrants,
folks who obey our laws and go through the proper procedures.
But Tucker is different.
Tucker’s spent the first few months
of his show depicting both legal and undocumented immigrants
as potential criminals.
We decided to take a closer look at the link between
immigrants and crime in this country.
We really don’t have good numbers on the crimes
committed by immigrants, illegal and otherwise.
He goes after Latinos.
Mexican citizens make up more than fourteen percent
of the entire federal prison population.
He goes after Muslims.
Why is violent terrorism an inevitability in Europe?
There are a lot of Muslims living in Europe now.
And he goes after refugees.
Who would have thought that all those migrants
are having a big effect on the crime rate.
That talking point is, of course, bullshit.
Native-born Americans are incarcerated at higher rates
than both legal and undocumented immigrants.
Cities with high refugee populations typically see their crime rates decrease.
And the overwhelming majority of terror attacks in the EU
aren’t religiously motivated.
But that hasn’t stopped Tucker from making that myth
a central theme on his show.
Foreigners come to our countries and kill our people.
You think our leaders would blame them but no, they blame us.
Oof, “foreigners.”
Dropping a hard F.
A hard F.
Tucker Carlson’s major reason for existing is to create a frame
in which immigrants are a grave threat to the survival
of America as we know it.
This is Chip Berlet.
He’s a journalist who’s spent decades
studying the language of right-wing extremists.
That’s the classic right-wing populist idea,
that there’s a group of threatening people,
they’re not like us,
and we need to stop them before they stop us.
Tucker obviously isn’t the first person to do this.
American history is full of demagogues who used
the myth of immigrant crime to smear marginalized groups. Look at the crime rate that’s changed in terms of the immigration
It’s a myth that’s persisted as the crime rate has dropped
as more immigrants have come to America.
But what makes Tucker different,
and what makes white supremacists like him so much, is that,
aside from the haircut, he doesn’t look the part of a David Duke.
He makes anti-immigrant propaganda look mainstream.
Tucker Carlson is kind of a restatement of all of these things
in a kind of neat, well-dressed package.
One of the ways Tucker does this is by cherry-picking,
focusing on individual stories of immigrant crime
to smear immigrants as a whole.
In March for example, Tucker fixated on the story of
two undocumented immigrants who were accused
of raping one of their classmates.
We told you plenty about that horrifying crime in Rockville, Maryland
and why wouldn’t we tell you that?
It highlights the critical downsides of existing American immigration policy.
It was the perfect Tucker Carlson story because it let him peddle
an old-school, racist trope about immigrants being rapists
without having to actually say it outright.
Why are people embarrassed to point to something
that actually happened and draw obvious conclusions from it?
He only had to hint at it.
Sometimes, when foreign countries send their people here,
they are not sending their very best.
This whole way of packaging information is designed to give
plausible deniability while cementing the bad idea
in the minds of the viewers.
That case ended up getting dropped, by the way,
after prosecutors found that the facts didn’t support the charges.
But it didn’t matter.
Tucker had already made his point.
On Twitter, David Duke said Tucker’s coverage of the story
was one of his best performances.
This is a common trick that demagogues use shape
the already entrenched prejudices of the audience.
Another way Tucker normalizes harmful tropes about immigrants
is by inviting anti-immigrant extremists to do his dirty work for him.
With the Maryland case, it was people like Ann Coulter.
There are all these Americans who wouldn’t have dead children,
who wouldn’t be raped but for our immigration policy.
After the terrorist attacks in the UK, it was Katie Hopkins,
a woman who literally called for a “final solution” on Twitter.
A final-
Yeah.
People talk about integration, I always hear the world colonization.
We have opened our arms and told everyone to come
and effectively take over.
It’s basically the handing off of the concern
to a group of people who are more than happy to
take you by the hand and turn it into a fist.
Also can we talk about the annoying eyebrow thing
Tucker does when he’s talking to someone he agrees with?
He acts like his mind is being blown by the most basic comments.
He’s doing it right now, isn’t he?
But the thing white supremacists love most about Tucker Carlson
is his rejection of multiculturalism.
Tucker argues that the problem with Mexican and Muslim immigrants
is that they’re not ‘like us.’
They come from different, inferior cultures.
This is a country founded on European culture.
Is the Western civilization we’re talking about superior
to the culture that these immigrants are bringing.
And Tucker says that welcoming those different cultures
is making America a worse place to live.
Our leaders worship multiculturalism so we encourage
immigrants to reject our culture because all cultures are equal,
except that they’re not all equal.
This probably goes without saying,
but that’s really similar to how white supremacists talk about immigration.
And Tucker peddles this idea on his show constantly.
Also you've got a lot of nerve talking about the sanctity
of Western culture for a guy who went on Dancing With The Stars
and did this.
You don’t have rhythm where you come from?
Nice.
Y’all never invented hips?
Okay.
That kind of language means that Tucker’s anti-immigrant shtick
isn’t actually about immigration.
It’s about people who seem different.
Which is why a Tucker segment about illegal immigration
suddenly veers into why Spanish speakers are making schools worse.
Does it make a school better when people move in who don’t speak English?
Why a segment on that Maryland rape case
suddenly becomes about how the defendants should’ve learned English.
What they should’ve done is put him in some remedial English
and learn some English first.
Tucker is training the biggest audience in cable news
to be suspicious of people who aren’t like them.
This is having an effect on my kid’s school, on my culture,
on the economy, and your point is you’re not allowed to have that opinion.
To view them as threats.
I’m talking about terror threats, I’m talking about rioting,
I’m talking about a massive spike in crime.
As invaders.
The invasion of Europe intensified this weekend.
More than 7,000 African migrants arrived in Italy.
And that’s why white supremacists love Tucker Carlson.
Not because they think he’s one of them,
but because as long as he’s teaching his audience
to view difference as dangerous, he’s making their jobs a lot easier.
I’m no fan of Bill O’Reilly,
but even he recognized talk of “European culture”
as a dog whistle for white supremacists.
I want to preserve my heritage like every people does.
Preserve your heritage?
What does that mean?
How about European heritage?
What does that mean?
They’re people!