Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer went all-in Monday in his condemnation of Fox News and its most popular host Tucker Carlson, saying they are “poisoning peoples’ minds” and “stoking cultural grievance and political resentment that eerily mirrors the messages found in Replacement Theory.”
In a blistering speech on the Senate floor Monday, Schumer spoke of the danger of the far-right’s theory that the Biden administration is intentionally trying to replace the white population of America with people from third-world nations. And Schumer then drew a direct line from those spreading Replacement Theory to Fox News.
“This is Replacement Theory in a nutshell,” he began. “It is dangerous and a deeply anti-American worldview. It is poisoning peoples’ minds who spend hours wandering the darkest wasteland of the internet. And let’s be clear, it’s a message that’s also found a special home in several right-wing outlets and on one cable news channel in particular, Fox News.”
Schumer said that organizations like Fox News which have a “craven quest for viewers and ratings,” have perfected “the craft of stoking cultural grievance and political resentment that eerily mirrors the messages found in Replacement Theory” for years.
The New York Times reported last month that in “more than 400 episodes” of Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” “Carlson has amplified the notion that Democratic politicians and other assorted elites want to force demographic change through immigration, and his producers sometimes scoured his show’s raw material from the same dark corners of the internet that the Buffalo suspect did.”
“This is a poison that’s being spread by one of the largest news organizations in our country,” Schumer said. He noted that the editorial board at The Wall Street Journal — which is also owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. – wrote, “politicians and media figures have an obligation to condemn such conspiratorial notions as White Replacement Theory.”
“Those are the words of the Wall Street Journal editorial page,” he pointed out. “They are right. But condemning racist ideologies and violence is necessary but hardly sufficient.”
You can watch Chuck Schumer in the clip at the top.
