Censorship-hungry Democrats and their allies in the legacy press were quick to blame Fox News and lead prime-time anchor Tucker Carlson for the shooting in Buffalo last weekend where a gunman left 10 dead.
Moments before the killing spree, the alleged 18-year-old shooter published a 180-page white supremacist online “manifesto” complete with antisemitic grievances and anxieties about “replacement.” Despite the document criticizing Fox News as an instrument of Jewish supremacy, the mere fact that a white shooter would storm a supermarket to target black people, who made up a majority of the victims, made the tragedy ripe for identity-obsessed leftists to stoke their race war with the network and one of its most successful anchors.
MSNBC’s Joy Reid began her Monday night monologue on the “mainstreaming of racist hate,” going straight to an image of Carlson as she highlighted the firing of a former Fox producer who was terminated after being caught writing racist and sexist blog posts anonymously. Reid returned to Carlson at the end of her monologue, indicting the rival anchor as the right’s champion of racial hatred that motivated the Buffalo gunman over the weekend. Carlson, she said, “spends night after prime-time night injecting the rot from the dregs of the internet directly into the veins of Republican voters.”
While Reid spent her opening monologue in prime time going after political enemies, however, Carlson spent the evening hour demanding the nation move past its racial differences to unify the country.
“All race politics is bad no matter what flavor those politics happen to be,” Carlson said. “No race politics is better than any other. All of it is poison.”
Carlson debunked the notion that the shooter’s “manifesto” was any kind of sophisticated political document outlining a new 21st-century movement.
“The document is not recognizably left-wing or right-wing, it’s not really political at all. The document is crazy,” Carlson said. “It’s the product of a diseased and organized mind. At one point, Gendron suggests Fox News is part of some global conspiracy against him. He writes like the mental patient he is.”
At the end of the segment, Carlson argued the only way the country can move past its racial tensions is by the aggressive pursuit of a colorblind meritocracy, which was the basis of the mid-20th century civil rights movement.
“There is only one answer to rising racial tension, and that’s to de-escalate,” Carlson said, continuing:
Treat people as human beings created by God, rather than as faceless members of interest groups that might benefit some political party or other. We have a moral duty to do this because all people have equal moral value, no matter what they look like. All lives matter, period. That’s not the determination of the U.S. government, that’s the determination of God. And it’s true. And most Americans already believe it. They would like to see a return to the American way of life and the American way of life is meritocracy — ‘judge me by what I do, not by how I look. By the content of my character, not the color of my skin.’ We have a monument on the Mall to this. And yet suddenly, every voice in power is leading us in the opposite direction. And what’s the terminus of that journey? It’s destruction.
Left-wing revolutionaries, however, have only escalated their fixation on race since the death of George Floyd two years ago, capitalizing on every opportunity to do so, nuance be damned. They even argued Kyle Rittenhouse’s claim to self-defense was invalidated because he was white. The Waukesha Christmas Massacre last fall — when a black suspect motivated by anti-white racism allegedly rammed an SUV through a holiday parade, brutally killing at least six — only ever received a fraction of the attention afforded to the Buffalo shooting. President Joe Biden visited the New York supermarket Tuesday, but never made a visit to console Wisconsin families victimized by anti-white racism.
On Monday morning, GOP Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, whom the state party no longer recognizes as Republican, joined the left-wing chorus to blame extremist attacks on Republicans with an indictment of lower chamber leadership, without evidence.
“The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and antisemitism,” Cheney wrote on Twitter. “History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. [GOP] leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.”
Carlson, however, despite being a constant target of the left’s race wars, issued a far more robust plea for national unity than anyone across the legacy media landscape and their government allies.
