Tuesday on FNC’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson defended prior statements regarding so-called great replacement theory pertaining to the U.S. electorate and how Democrats had openly claimed shifts in demographics would be to their political advantage.
Carlson’s remarks come in the wake of the Buffalo, NY shooting in which the suspect allegedly used the theory for justification for actions.
Many on the left had attacked the FNC host, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who Carlson called a coward for declining to appear on his FNC show.
Transcript as follows:
Last May, a 17-year-old high school senior called Payton Gendron received an assignment in his economics class. The assignment asked, “What do you want to do when you retire?” He answered, “Commit murder-suicide.” Gendron’s teacher immediately reported his threat to authorities who sent him to the emergency room for a psychiatric evaluation.
Gendron was there for just 20 hours, as he wrote later in his diary, quote: “I got out of it because I stuck with the story that I was getting out of class and I just stupidly wrote that down. That’s the reason I believe I’m still able to purchase guns.”
But he was lying. Gendron’s intention to commit mass murder was, as he later wrote, quote: “Not a joke. I wrote that down because that’s what I was planning to do.” And he was.
Payton Gendron was mentally ill. His classmates knew that. Gendron made strange facial expressions and said odd things in class. Last year, he showed up for school for a full week wearing a hazmat suit — “Boots, gloves, everything,” recalled another student.
Police and school administrators understood perfectly well that Gendron was potentially dangerous. That’s why they sent him to the psych ward. Even his own parents must have known that something was very wrong. Gendron’s diary describes how his mother helped him bury a cat he had beaten to death in the garage and then beheaded with a hatchet.
On Saturday, Payton Gendron, as you know, finally did what he said he would do. He committed mass murder. He opened fire in a crowd of strangers in a Buffalo supermarket. He murdered 10 of them.
So how did the adults around him let this happen? In a country with functioning leadership, we would be asking that question. The signs of mental illness were certainly there. The people in charge missed those signs or didn’t take them seriously enough or weren’t paying close enough attention. In any case, they didn’t fix it. They let a killer slip through.
So, what did they do wrong with Payton Gendron, and how can we learn from it? We should learn from it if we want to prevent more mass murders. But that’s not at all what our leaders are asking tonight. Hardly. Instead, they’re asking the only question that ever occurs to them — how exactly can I benefit from this? How can I leverage this tragedy to my advantage? How can other people’s suffering make me more powerful?
It didn’t take long for Joe Biden to find a way. Biden flew to Buffalo this morning to speak about what Payton Gendron did. There have been a number of mass murders since Biden became President. Some of them have been racially motivated.
A little over a year ago, in fact, there was even another supermarket massacre that happened to have the same casualty total. A Syrian-born man murdered ten people in Boulder, Colorado. He even used the same caliber rifle that Payton Gendron brought to Buffalo.
But Joe Biden didn’t bother to fly to that crime scene. He didn’t go to any of them, in fact. Biden went to Buffalo today because he thought he could blame his political opponents for what happened there, which, of course, he promptly did. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: And other nations ask me, heads of state and other countries ask me: “What’s going on? What in God’s name happened on January 6? What happened in Buffalo?” They ask.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: January 6th and the Buffalo Massacre — so how is a political protest at the Capitol related to a murder spree by a demented teenager in New York State over the weekend? What do those two events have in common? And who exactly are these unnamed heads of state who are connecting these unconnected events in conversations with Joe Biden?
You may have wondered that, but don’t ask because it’s not meant to be asked. It is instead a dream sequence. It’s a rhetorical device meant to connect everything that might challenge Joe Biden and bunch all of these things together in the same repulsive moral category.
January 6th, mass murder, the bubonic plague — it’s all the same. It’s all bad. And because it’s bad, Joe Biden informed us today, after 250 years, we’re going to have to suspend the Bill of Rights and we’re going to begin where the Bill of Rights begins, with the freedom of speech.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: You can’t prevent people from being radicalized to violence, but we can address the relentless exploitation of the Internet to recruit and mobilize terrorism.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “The relentless exploitation of the Internet to recruit and mobilize terrorism.” Okay. But can anyone show, has anyone ever shown that this specific case, Payton Gendron, was quote: “recruited and mobilized by the internet”? Well, no, in fact.
By his own account, he was mentally ill. He snapped. He’d been planning this for a long time. He did what his diseased brain commanded him to do. The internet did not make him do it. He did it himself, but even if Gendron had been quote, “radicalized by what he read on the Internet,” what then exactly?
Many have been radicalized by what they’ve read. Pol Pot was radicalized by reading “Das Kapital.” He went on a murder spree. He killed more than a million people. Should we ban that book? Should we ban all books, all internet sites that quote, “radicalize people?” What exactly is Joe Biden saying here?
Well, he’s saying that thanks to what happened in Buffalo over the weekend, you no longer have any rights at all, including the most basic, which is to read what you want. After nullifying the First Amendment, Joe Biden moved to the Second Amendment.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: The venom of the haters and their weapons of war, the violence in the words and deeds that stalk our streets, our stores, our schools. This venom, this violence cannot be the story of our time, but there are certain things we can do. We can keep assault weapons off our streets. We’ve done it before.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So, because a mentally ill 18-year-old used a specific rifle to commit these crimes, you can’t have that rifle. Now, Joe Biden’s bodyguards can have that rifle, so can Nancy Pelosi’s and of course, they do. In fact, you pay for it all. But they’re important, and you are not, so you can’t.
So, because the people in charge failed to protect shoppers in Buffalo, you’re not allowed to defend your family despite the fact you may believe your family is every bit as important as Joe Biden and his family and Nancy Pelosi and her family, but they’re not as important.
So, we’re going to defund the police and disarm you. That’s how it works now, sorry.
And then Joe Biden got to the main point of his speech, which is that people who criticize his immigration policies are responsible for the violence you saw in Buffalo. Here’s the President of the United States explaining that.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: The hate that through the media and politics, the internet has radicalized angry, alienated, lost, and isolated individuals into falsely believing that they will be replaced. That’s the word “replaced” — by the other.
And I condemn those who spread the lie for power, political gain, and for profit.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So you lock the country down, lock kids out of their schools for two years, force them to get quote, “educated on the internet,” but it’s someone else’s fault that they’re quote “alienated.” They’ve been hearing about the great replacement theory.
You’ve heard a lot about the great replacement theory recently. It’s everywhere in the last two days and we’re still not sure exactly what it is.
Here’s what we do know for a fact. There is a strong political component to the Democratic Party’s immigration policy. We’re not guessing this. We know this and we know it because they have said so. They’ve said it again and again and again.
They’ve written books on it and monographs and magazine articles. They have bragged about it endlessly. They talk about it on cable news constantly and they say out loud, we are doing this because it helps us to win elections.
That’s not something that is said once. It’s something that gloated about again and again and again and we think that’s wrong and in case you doubt us, here they are.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
STACEY ABRAMS (D), GEORGIA GUBERNATORIAL CANDIDATE: Blue wave is African- American. It’s White, it’s Latino, it’s Asian Pacific Islander.
It is made up of those who’ve been told that they are not worthy of being here. It is comprised of those who are documented and undocumented.
JULIAN CASTRO (D), FORMER H.U.D. SECRETARY: In a couple of presidential cycles, you’ll be on election night, you’ll be announcing that we’re calling the 38 electoral votes of Texas for the Democratic nominee for President. It’s changing. It’s going to become a purple state and then a blue state because of the demographics.
SEN. DICK DURBIN (D-IL): The demographics of America are not on the side of the Republican Party. The new voters in this country are moving away from them, and instead they’re moving to be Independents or even vote on the other side.
BIDEN: An unrelenting stream of immigration, nonstop — nonstop. Folks like me, who are Caucasian of European descent for the first time in 2017 will be in an absolute minority in the United States of America, absolute minority.
Fewer than 50% of the people in America from then on will be White European stock. That’s not a bad thing. That’s a source of our strength.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So, you played clips of them saying it, and you’re the deranged conspiracy nut. Maybe the funniest part is they may not be right. The Democratic Party has decided that rather than convince you, people who were born here, that their policies are helping you and making the country better and stronger, they will change the electorate. Again, they say that. We’re not guessing.
But the funniest part is they may be wrong, actually, judging by recent polling. It turns out your average Salvadorian landscaper’s politics are a lot closer to Donald Trump’s than they are to Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi. So, their basic calculation may be completely wrong, but that’s not even the point. It has nothing to do with who we’re letting in. It has nothing to do with race and ethnicity. It has to do with two things.
One: the purpose of the U.S. government is to serve American citizens, period. Two: you should never craft any Federal, which is to say, nationwide policy in order to help a specific political party. That is by itself in isolation, immoral. It doesn’t matter what the policy is, and that’s exactly what they’re doing. And again, they brag about it and not just Democratic Party politicians.
Virtually every media figure on the left has been bragging about this for decades. Oh, it’s a conspiracy theory. Really? Well, here’s Ana Navarro from her time as a Harvard fellow. This is what she wrote, quote: “The demographic trends show that the minority vote in the United States will continue to grow in numbers and influence. Unless you’re under the influence of hallucinogens, it is hard to imagine future scenarios where the Republican Party can win national elections.”
That piece, by the way, is called “Old White, Straight Male Voters Ain’t What They Used to be.” End quote.
So, let’s see. If you don’t want people to be paranoid and angry, maybe you don’t write pieces like that and rub it right in their face and give them the finger day after day. Maybe that would deescalate it a little bit. You think, Joe Biden, Ana Navarro? But they’re not the only two. This has been the prevailing view on the left for a long time.
Here’s a POLITICO piece from 2013. We could go on for hours, by the way, but here’s this, quote: “Immigration reform could be a bonanza for Democrats.” The Democratic Party, the piece said, are, quote, “pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that could produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states, they now win easily.” End quote.
Again, as noted, that calculation may be completely wrong. A lot of those people the Democrats are importing may wind up being deeply sympathetic to the other party because they’re actually not White liberals. That’s the secret. But it almost doesn’t matter how they vote.
Thinking about politics in those terms is immoral. That is wrong. You are gaming the system. That is not democracy. It’s the opposite, and they’ve bragged about it for more than a decade.
Here’s another example, also from 2013. The Center for American Progress announced that, quote: “Supporting real immigration reform that contains a pathway to citizenship for our nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants is the only way to maintain electoral strength in the future.”
Oh, great replacement theory, anyone? These people are lunatics. They’re telling you what their strategy is. When you note it, they scream at you and call you a criminal. In 2018, “The New York Times” published an editorial called, “We Can Replace Them.” Just in case subtlety is not your thing, quote: “Right now, America is tearing itself apart as an embittered, White, conservative minority clings to power, terrified of being swamped by a new, multiracial, polyglot majority.” Right, okay.
In 2020, Joe Scarborough — real moral voice over at MSNBC — quoted this: “Trumpism accelerated damage done by demographic changes and will harm Republicans for years. Demographics is destiny.” End quote.
Are you allowed to say that? Once again, they’re wrong and if you haven’t looked at an electoral map recently, look at the districts. The almost 100% Hispanic districts in the Rio Grande Valley that are bearing the brunt of our open borders, they’re now red.
So, you’re wrong, Joe Scarborough, but the fact that you’re saying demographics is destiny tells you the great replacement theory is coming from the left. They don’t think it’s a theory. They think it’s real.
In 2021, “The Washington Post’s” Jen Rubin celebrated a report that the number of White people in this country was declining. Can you even imagine? Quote: “This is fabulous news,” she wrote. “Now we need to prevent minority White rule.”
My God, talking like that. Is there any more divisive thing you could write? We could give you a million more examples. We’re offended by this because it’s wrong and we’ve said so, but for saying so, according to Carl Cameron on MSNBC today, we should be thrown in jail. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CARL CAMERON, FORMER FOX NEWS CHANNEL REPORTER: You’ve got to watch out because the Republicans have become the purveyors of misinformation and when our two-party system is broken like that, democracy is seriously in trouble.
The President acknowledged that. It’s time to actually start doing things and maybe taking some names and putting people in jail.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “Maybe taking some names and putting people in jail.” Hmm. Who would those people be? Well, thanks to the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, we now know.
Schumer just sent a letter to our bosses here at FOX News blaming this show for the mass murder in Buffalo, as well as several other mass shootings in recent years. According to Chuck Schumer, this show spreads, quote: “dangerous rhetoric and needs to be pulled off the air immediately in the name of public safety.”
Now, again, Chuck Schumer is a Federal official. He is the leading Democrat in the United States Senate and he is calling for media censorship. Now, there was a time like maybe 18 months ago when that would be considered a direct violation of the First Amendment. Now we hear it every day. “Let’s throw them in jail.”
We wanted to hear more from Chuck Schumer about this. We invited him on the show tonight, as we always do, but because he is a coward, this is the only media appearance probably in history he’s turned down.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor