The head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, said Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” that Fox News host Tucker Carlson “has got to go.”
The discussion centered around a segment on Fox News last week in which Carlson said, “I know that the left and all the little gate-keepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement.’ If you suggest that the Democratic Party trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots with new people, more obedient voters from the third world. But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening actually. Let’s just say it that is true.”
He added, “This matters on a bunch of different levels, but on a basic level, it is a voting rights question. In a democracy, 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 imported new voters, I become disenfranchised as a current voter. Everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it. ‘Oh, the white replacement theory.’ No, this is a voting rights question. I have less political power because they’re importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that? The power that I have is an American, guaranteed that birth is one-man and one-vote, and they are diluting it. Why are we putting up with this?”
Greenblatt said, “Tucker Carlson has a history of sanitizing stereotypes and of spreading this kind of poison, but what he did on Thursday night really was indeed, as put it, a new low. The great replacement theory, as it is known, is this toxic idea that there are a cabal of Jews plotting to overrun the country with immigrants, Muslims, and Black people and commit what they call white genocide. It is literally a staple of white supremacist and extremist ideology. So when Tucker Carlson introduces it to his 4.5 million viewers, he’s serving as a gateway to one of the most damaging and dangerous conspiracy theories out there.”
He continued, “The question is really from Fox management to the Fox board, to Fox shareholders, how could they countenance their network being used to mainstream the most violent and toxic ideas.”
Greenblatt added, “First and foremost, Tucker has got to go. Again, it is a risk not just to the corporation. It is a risk to our society to be promoting these anti-semitic and racist myths that literally were used by people on January 6th to try to not just interfere with the election but to murder lawmakers. I think we’ve really crossed a new threshold when a major news network dismisses this or pretends like it isn’t important. This has deadly significance. So number one, Carlson needs to go, and they need to look at their entire primetime lineup and ask does this work. At the end of the day, let’s acknowledge, Fox isn’t alone in this. They have advertisers. They have affiliates. There are cable companies who carry their signal. If Fox won’t act, it may be time for the advertisers to act. It may be time for again the affiliates and the cable companies to act to finally once and for all say that America is simply put no place for hate.”
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