Fox News opinion host Tucker Carlson has been praised by white nationalists and criticized on a Newsmax segment for promoting the "replacement" conspiracy theory on his weekday television program Tucker Carlson Tonight.
Carlson, one of Fox News' most popular hosts, first touted the conspiracy theory last Thursday, claiming that Democrats support a surge in immigration as part of a plan to shore up support for their political party. He claimed Democrats view immigrants to be "more obedient voters from the Third World." After significant backlash, Carlson doubled down on his remarks during his Monday evening show, saying that "in order to win and maintain power, Democrats plan to change the population of the country."
Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and holocaust denier, tweeted his support for Carlson's comments but said the anchor should have gone further, criticizing him for suggesting that his remarks were not about race. "Of course replacement migration is obviously racial and Tucker probably understands that but is unwilling to say it, maybe because he would get fired if he did," Fuentes wrote.
Scott Greer, the Highly Respected podcast host whose "questionable ties" to white nationalists have been highlighted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, tweeted last week that Carlson's "offense was speaking truth to power."
Meanwhile, a Tuesday morning segment on conservative Newsmax TV featured criticism of the theory. Dick Morris, host of the channel's Dick Morris Democracy, said that he didn't view Carlson's remarks as "racist," but argued that the theory was "just factually wrong."
"He's assuming that politics is linear, that you get a Latino immigrant and he's gonna replace an Anglo voter and the Anglo voter was gonna vote Republican, the Latino will vote Democrat," Morris said. "That's just not true. Historically, huge changes happen in people when they hit American soil and they live here and begin to understand it. You know, 200 years ago they said that Irish immigrants would bring Catholicism to the United States and it would be a left-wing force, and then 150 years ago—it's the Italians were gonna replace Northern Europeans, a hundred years ago women were gonna replace men."
"None of that happened," he pointed out. "They all became ethnic groups that assimilated into the electorate. In fact, Irish and Italians are now the mainstay of the Republican Party."
Last Thursday, Carlson said: "If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So, every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter. So, I don't understand we don't understand this. I mean, everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it. Oh, you know, the White Replacement Theory—no, no, no. This is a voting rights question."
"I have less political power because they're importing a brand-new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that?" he asked.
On Monday evening, Carlson doubled down, saying: "Demographic change is the key to the Democratic Party's political ambitions. Let's say that again for emphasis because it is the secret to the entire immigration debate. Demographic change is the key to the Democratic Party's political ambitions."
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) sent a letter to Fox News last week, urging the network to part ways with Carlson.
"It was shocking to hear this kind of open-ended endorsement of white supremacist ideology from an anchor and commentator on your network. At ADL, we believe in dialogue and giving people a chance to redeem themselves, but Carlson's full-on embrace of the white supremacist replacement theory on yesterday's show and his repeated allusions to racist themes in past segments are a bridge too far," ADL CEO Jonathan A. Greenblatt wrote in the letter.
As Morris highlighted, the "replacement" theory doesn't hold water when looking at the long history of immigration to America and how different demographics vote. While the majority of minority voters currently tend to vote for Democrats, former President Donald Trump actually made substantial gains among Latino, Black and Asian voters in the 2020 election. Compared to 2016, exit polls showed that Trump gained 3 percentage points with Hispanics and Latinos, 4 percentage points with African Americans and 5 percentage points with Asian Americans.
