Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson faced criticism Wednesday for declaring white supremacy “a hoax,” the same day President Donald Trump visited El Paso, Texas, after a white gunman who had written an anti-Hispanic rant killed 22 people.
Carlson has faced criticism before for his commentary, including a statement that immigration has made America dirtier. His remarks Tuesday came with the nation rubbed raw by two weekend mass shootings and increased concerns by law enforcement officials about violence attached to white nationalism.
“He has used his platform to push out prejudice,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “I think it’s disgusting and I don’t think it deserves a place on a major news network.”
Fox News Channel representatives did not immediately return messages seeking comment on Wednesday.
Carlson’s prime-time show routinely draws more than 3 million viewers on weeknights, second only to Sean Hannity on Fox News. Episodes of his program landed among the Nielsen company’s list of Top 20 shows last week for both broadcast and cable television.
On Tuesday, he dismissed the concept of white supremacy as a serious problem for the country.
“The combined membership of every white supremacist organization — would they be able to fit into a college football stadium?” Carlson said. “I mean, seriously. This is a country where the average person is getting poorer, where the suicide rate is spiking.”
Adopting a low, mocking voice, he said, ”‘White supremacy, that’s the problem.’ This is a hoax, just like the Russia hoax. It’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power. That’s exactly what’s going on.”
He said he’d “never met anybody who ascribes to white supremacy. I don’t know a single person who thinks this is a good idea. They’re making this up. It’s a talking point that they can use in this election cycle.”
The ADL’s Greenblatt said that it was “incredibly irresponsible to even make such a statement while we are still burying people who were gunned down by a white supremacist.”
In congressional testimony recently, Michael McGarrity, the FBI’s top counterterrorism official, said that his organization was conducting roughly 850 domestic terrorism investigations. White supremacists and other domestic terrorists were being arrested more often, and causing more deaths, than international terrorists, he said.
On Sunday after the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, a group of former National Security Council counterterrorism directors issued a statement calling on the government to address domestic terrorism with the same dedication it used to attack international risks following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Three of 65 killings committed in the United States in 2016 by people associated with bigoted or extremist ideologies were by white supremacists or the far right, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State-San Bernardino. Last year, 17 of 22 such killings involved white supremacists or the far right. The numbers will be higher this year, the center said.
“I don’t know what the heck Tucker Carlson is talking about,” said Brian Levin, the center’s executive director. “This kind of drivel ends up infecting the socio-political discourse with perspectives that are simply not supported by the facts.”
Carlson need only have listened to his own network for a different view. Fox News White House correspondent John Roberts, reporting after Trump’s Monday speech about the shootings, noted that there were seven mass shootings by white extremists in the past 18 months.
“There are a lot of people out there who will tell you … that white nationalism, white extremism is a growing threat to this country and perhaps an underreported threat,” Roberts said.
Carlson received a tweet of support Wednesday from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who wrote that “Tucker is RIGHT!”
“Millions of white activists are NOT ‘supremacists,’” Duke wrote. “We seek NOT to oppress or destroy any race! Human rights for all — EVEN FOR WHITE PEOPLE! Stop antiWhite racism!”
Carlson is a prominent conservative activist who worked at both CNN and MSNBC and started the web site The Daily Caller. His profile increased when he replaced Bill O’Reilly in Fox’s prime-time lineup in 2017.
Some of his comments have provoked advertiser boycotts, like when he said last December that immigration made the country “poorer, dirtier and more divided.” He’s publicly questioned the notion of whether diversity makes the nation stronger and said Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar “is living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country.”
(AP)
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15 Responses
Why is YWN is in the business of promoting Fake News spread by AP and CNN? This is a perfect example of selective editing and taking comments out of context. Tucker Carlson stated that the #1 problem facing n America is white supremacy is a hoax.
MOishele: You and Tucker would have looked great in brown shirts working for Herr Goebbels. Even a number of Fox News personnel have expressed their revulsion regarding his comments last night.
Why is YWN in the business of promoting Fake News spread by Klannity and all the others at Fox?
Jews suffer from White Supremacists. They are anti semites.
Potus said there us no place for White Supremicists in America.
Dozens have not even been buried yet from the latest White Supremacist mass murder.
Turn Fox news off.
Gadolhadorah, actually “Herr Goebbels” is someone you leftists took after with your constant spreading of BIG lie, often enough hoping people eventually will believe in it.
The hoax is that some people think this moron has a brain.
Ask the people of Pittsburgh and El Paso, for examples, if white supremacy is a hoax.
rt, Pittsburgh and San Diego shooters where inspired by the same Jew-hating propaganda pushed by filthy mouth of Ilhan Omar, NYT cartoons and Obama’s friend Louis Farrakhan.
So we can conclude from this that tucker, david duke, ilhan omar, louis farakhan and moish in galus all share the same universal hate for Jews and mankind in general.
This story is a perfect example of how the “Left” takes a misquote, usually from the President, and goes around playing it for their “experts” to condemn, when in reality the original statement said something quite different.
He actually was saying that it is a hoax to say that “White Supremacy” is a “major problem” among average Americans and to imply that the President is a White Supremacist.
Statistically speaking, Tucker Carlson is absolutely correct. But facts aren’t anywhere as near important as the narrative. That Trump, despite all of his pro-Israel policies, is an anti Semite, that despite the lowest rate of unemployment for minorities, is racist because he doesn’t support open boarders, and is an incendiary fascist, all the while the left screams for the blood of his voting base. Calling fellow Jews who support Trump, follow facts, and, know that anti-semitism is a greater threat on the left than on the right BROWN SHIRTS is DISGUSTING. Shame on you, Hadora, and shame on YWN for not editing you.
Carlson is 100% correct. The number of white supremacists in the USA is minuscule, and it is very far from being one of our major problems. There are maybe 500 active white supremacists, and maybe 10,000 armchair supporters. Black supremacists, Marxist anarchists, and Islamists, are all at least 20 times greater. Those are the real problems, and media attention to the few neonazis is a deliberate attempt to distract people from them.
Contrary to the claim made in the video that “diminishing the threat of White Supremacy” doesn’t “help”, anyone with sense knows that giving publicity to the nut cases and the like simply inspires more violence (and from “all side”).
Take this case as an example from Wikipedia. The suspect was a Trump supporter on social media until stopping cold April 2017. The now infamous manifesto presumed (without sufficient evidence) to have originated by the suspect, was published 27 minutes before the shooting. Within that manifesto:
> It expresses support for and inspiration by the Christchurch mosque shootings, along with worry about a “Hispanic invasion”, automation, large corporations, and environmental degradation.
Aside from the obvious random splatter in that one line alone, it clearly notes the inspiration from previous shootings as well as motivations from largely left-wing causes as listed.
White supremacy denial, Holocaust denial: no difference.
The denial, sir, is left-leaning Jews buying into a political narrative spewed by democrat demagogues who want to eradicate free speech, freedom of religion, and the civil rights America was built upon that provided Jews with a safe haven for the last two centuries. This is no longer the 1930s, sir, and while the KKK still exists under a rock somewhere, don’t be fooled by power-hungry politicians and their lying media mouthpiece into believing the threat of terror exists on the right. It is leftist antisemitism that is the real threat to American Jewry, and to point this out has NOTHING to do with Holocaust denial. That is a total strawman’s argument used by someone who apparently cannot be bothered with facts and reason.
huju, it is your fellow Marxist Democrats who are in Holocaust denial business just your darlings AOC, Rahida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. You are in a good company.
Milhouse- the numbers don’t matter, only a small minority of muslims are terrorists. The issue is are they willing to act on their hatred and ideology. If they are, they are a major threat. Just as the republican trump appointed FBI director testified just a couple of short weeks ago.