Yahoo Finance Lachlan Murdoch Rejects Calls To Oust Tucker Carlson; Fox Host Repeats Remarks That ADL Calls “White Replacement Theory” — Update
UPDATED, 5:45 PM PT: On his Fox News show on Monday, Tucker Carlson stood by his comments last week that triggered the Anti Defamation League to call for his ouster.
Carlson repeated the segment from last Thursday that the ADL said was an endorsement of the “white replacement theory,” or the conspiracy theory that elites are trying to place white with immigrants.
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Then he repeated the general thrust of his remarks.
“Demographic change is the key to the Democratic party’s political ambitions,” Carlson said in a 20-minute segment on Monday. “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. In order to win and maintain power, Democrats plan to change the population of the country. … Their goal is to make you irrelevant.”
He cited the case of California, now a reliably Democratic state. He said, “California changed because the population changed.” He said an analysis of the 2012 presidential election showed that “if you were actually from there, if you lived in the state of California in 1980, you probably still voted Republican. You hadn’t really changed. But as your state swelled with foreign voters, your views became irrelevant. … The power to control your own life disappeared with the arrival of new people who diluted your vote. That was the whole point. That’s not democracy. It’s cheating.” He accused the Democratic party of rigging “the game with more people. They packed the electorate.”
He also told his audience that the dilution of the vote “was true for all native born Americans, not just Republicans.”
In The Washington Post, conservative columnist Michael Gerson wrote about Carlson’s remarks last week, when the Fox host said that the idea of natural born citizens having their votes diluted was not a “racial issue” but a “voting rights question.”
“There is a reason, of course, that ‘everyone’ wants to make a racial issue out of this,” Gerson wrote. “Because it is a putrescent pile of racist myths and cliches. Nearly every phrase of Carlson’s statement is the euphemistic expression of white-supremacist replacement doctrine. ‘The Democratic Party’ means liberals, which translates into Jews. They are importing ‘new people’ from the ‘Third World’ means people with black and brown skin. Those kinds of people, in the racist trope, are ‘obedient,’ meaning docile, backward and stupid. Their votes do not constitute real democracy because they are replacing the ‘current electorate’ — which is presumably whiter and less docile. These paler, truer Americans are thus deprived of their birthright of political dominance. And fighting back — making sure the new Third World people have less power — becomes a defense of the American way.”
PREVIOUSLY: Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch responded to the Anti Defamation League’s call for the ouster of Tucker Carlson, concluding that the Fox News host was not advocating for “white replacement theory” in a segment last week.
But the ADL’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt is questioning just how much of a “full review” the company did of the piece, in which Carlson was conversing with Mark Steyn.
In a letter to Greenblatt, dated on Sunday, Murdoch wrote that they “respectfully disagree” that Carlson was advancing the conspiracy theory, embraced on the far right, that elites are plotting to replace whites with immigrants.
“A full review of the guest interview indicates that Mr. Carlson decried and rejected replacement theory,” Murdoch wrote. “As Mr. Carlson himself stated during the guest interview: ‘White replacement theory? No, no, this is a voting rights question.'” In the letter, Murdoch also noted, “Fox Corporation shares your values and abhors anti-semitism, white supremacy and racism of any kind. In fact, I remember fondly the ADL honoring my father with your International Leadership Award, and we continue to support your mission.”
But Greenblatt wasn’t buying it.
“As you noted in your letter, ADL honored your father over a decade ago, but let me be clear that we would not do so today, and it does not absolve you, him, the network, or its board from the moral failure of not taking action against Mr. Carlson,” Greenblatt wrote in a letter in response to Murdoch.
He added, “With all due respect, Mr. Carlson’s attempt to at first dismiss this theory, while in the very next breath endorsing it under cover of ‘a voting rights question,’ does not give him free license to invoke a white supremacist trope. In fact, it’s worse, because he’s using a straw man – voting rights – to give an underhanded endorsement of white supremacist beliefs while ironically suggesting it’s not really white supremacism.”
He also questioned the extent of a “full review” of the segment, writing that “it seems the reviewers missed the essential point here.”
The day after the Thursday segment, Greenblatt sent a letter to Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott, telling her that Carlson had “to go.” In the letter to Scott and Murdoch, Greenblatt also pointed to other instances where he said Carlson was siding with white supremacist ideology.
In the segment (watch it below), Carlson said, “I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to ‘replace’ the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World,” Carlson said. “But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening, actually. Let’s just say it: That’s true.”
Carlson added that “on a basic level, it is a voting rights question. One person equals one vote. 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 what we don’t understand ’cause, I mean, everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it. Ooh, 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? The power that I have as an American guaranteed at birth is one man, one vote, and they are diluting it. No, they are not allowed to do that. Why are we putting up with this?”
CNN first reported on the ADL letters.
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