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Salon: Tucker Carlson's Expanding Definition of Who Shouldn't Get to Vote
This great article by Dahlia Lithwick exposes how Tucker is following in Trump's footsteps and continuously pushing the boundaries of what is mainstream in trying to normalize racist and sexist rhetoric whether it is attack women in the military, immigrants, BLM protesters or Asian American victims of hate crimes.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/tucker-carlson-s-expanding-definition-of-who-shouldn-t-get-to-vote/ar-BB1fEFLc?ocid=msedgdhp
There is never a good time to talk about Tucker Carlson. As John Oliver recently reminded us, offering up attention to those who seek attention in a media world driven solely by monetizing our scarce attention feels uniquely horrible. But Carlson has been pushing harder and harder on his defense of a national voting regime that limits the ability of what he described last week as “new people, more obedient voters from the Third World” to vote. His flirtation with anti-immigrant dog whistles has become a full-on marching band, which means it may be time to talk about him. As he invoked “white replacement theory” last week, Carlson was at pains to say that he wasn’t endorsing the “great replacement theory,” a noxious idea prevalent in white supremacist circles that describes the ways in which white cultures are reverse-colonized by Black and brown immigrants—led by Jews, progressives, and globalists—who are building to an extinction-level event. The theory is cited time and again by mass murderers and Nazi enthusiasts. In defending Carlson this weekend, Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch insisted that Carlson wasn’t amplifying these white ethno-nationalist talking points; he was merely talking about who gets to vote. That’s quite strange because Carlson wasn’t talking only about voting and, as his clarification of his position this week makes clear, he wasn’t only talking about immigrants either.
In response to a call from the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt to fire the Fox host over the dip into dangerous racist tropes, Murdoch insisted that “a full review of the guest interview indicates that Mr. Carlson decried and rejected replacement theory.” In Murdoch’s fun retelling, Carlson actually renounced the theory when he said the following: “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 are importing a brand-new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that?” Not to be too lawyerly about it, but adding the words no, no, no before parroting a racist theory about a foreign-born electorate that dilutes your vote doesn’t represent a real disavowal.
But the most interesting aspect of Carlson’s choice to hide behind “voting rights” in his claims about “new people” and “obedient” voters helicoptered in from the “Third World” isn’t just that it’s of a piece with the burgeoning conservative trend of stating outright that some minorities should absolutely have a harder time voting—a triple lutz perfected last week in the pages of National Review. The weird thing is that in hiding from accusations of the kinds of racism that alienate sponsors, Carlson ended up saying that his biggest problem is actually with natural-born American citizens who vote for Democrats in red states. In other words, he’s building himself a pretext sandwich: He isn’t just decrying immigration or immigrants voting; he is also decrying Americans voting so long as they are Democrats.
As Heather Digby Parton points out, Carlson’s strange alternative “demographic” complaint isn’t actually about immigration at all, lawful or otherwise. It is about how some Americans are less American Americans. Perhaps he thinks it gets him out from under the pile-on about being anti-immigrant, but it also vaults him into pre–14th Amendment, Dred Scott–sounding claims that citizens of one state may not be citizens of another, or even of the U.S. And as jarring as the racism may be, the attack on some Americans as foreigners in their own country is almost more radical.
In response to a call from the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt to fire the Fox host over the dip into dangerous racist tropes, Murdoch insisted that “a full review of the guest interview indicates that Mr. Carlson decried and rejected replacement theory.” In Murdoch’s fun retelling, Carlson actually renounced the theory when he said the following: “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 are importing a brand-new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that?” Not to be too lawyerly about it, but adding the words no, no, no before parroting a racist theory about a foreign-born electorate that dilutes your vote doesn’t represent a real disavowal.
But the most interesting aspect of Carlson’s choice to hide behind “voting rights” in his claims about “new people” and “obedient” voters helicoptered in from the “Third World” isn’t just that it’s of a piece with the burgeoning conservative trend of stating outright that some minorities should absolutely have a harder time voting—a triple lutz perfected last week in the pages of National Review. The weird thing is that in hiding from accusations of the kinds of racism that alienate sponsors, Carlson ended up saying that his biggest problem is actually with natural-born American citizens who vote for Democrats in red states. In other words, he’s building himself a pretext sandwich: He isn’t just decrying immigration or immigrants voting; he is also decrying Americans voting so long as they are Democrats.
As Heather Digby Parton points out, Carlson’s strange alternative “demographic” complaint isn’t actually about immigration at all, lawful or otherwise. It is about how some Americans are less American Americans. Perhaps he thinks it gets him out from under the pile-on about being anti-immigrant, but it also vaults him into pre–14th Amendment, Dred Scott–sounding claims that citizens of one state may not be citizens of another, or even of the U.S. And as jarring as the racism may be, the attack on some Americans as foreigners in their own country is almost more radical.
