Apolitical
All of a sudden Fox News has gone quiet on the Great Replacement front. I wonder why.
Over at Fox News, however, there was barely any mention of the white gunman’s alleged reasoning for opening fire at a supermarket, killing 10 people and wounding three more, in a predominantly Black area.
The absence of coverage of the motive was revealing, given Fox News’s most popular host, Tucker Carlson, has pushed the concept of replacement theory in more than 400 of his shows – and has arguably done more than anyone in the US to popularize the racist conspiracy.
The racist conspiracy theory, that is.
“What can they say?” said Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a watchdog of rightwing media. “There’s no way for anyone at Fox News to really issue a convincing and compelling, forthright denunciation of great replacement theory, because it’s being discussed on the network’s primetime hour on a near constant basis.”
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In a monologue on his Monday night show, Carlson did not directly address replacement theory. He claimed the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto was “not recognizably leftwing or rightwing: it’s not really political at all”, despite the rambling document referencing a number of rightwing conspiracy theories.
Mmmyes, not really political at all, a white guy shooting a lot of not-white people. What could the politics of that possibly be?
When I read Matt Gertz, my mind read it as Matt Gaetz. I immediately thought “you’re a fine one to talk”. I read it several times to figure out if I misread it, and discovered I did. Too bad. He could have piled up a lot of hypocrisy points; it might have put him in the lead.
Bullets don’t see colour.
If he can’t pin it on the left (which he would probably do if he could) he’s not going to pin it on the right, much less himself. Of course by these standards he’d probably claim his own material is apolitical. He’s certainly not a journalist. More a standup comic with fewer laughs.
iknklast, Gertz has the misfortune of constantly being mistaken for Gaetz. It’s become a running joke on Twitter amongst those who recognise the difference. Gertz gets a fair amount of ribbing over it in a sympathetic thank god it’s happening to you not me kind of way. He generally seems to take all in good stride, but I suspect he receives some pretty rough messages from those who don’t spot the difference.
What particularly chaps me is African Americans have been here, usually unwillingly, since the beginning. The sheer raging idiocy of implying that only now is the evilllll left using them for disempowerment of the heartlandishly hued is breathtaking.
Now….this rage is not even new. The Owners have periodically been eager to import new cheap labor, and it has led to things like the Know Nothing Party. Which always blames the wrong people (Irish, Southern Europeans, Chinese, Mexicans….