Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt Tries to Link Tucker Carlson and Mass Shootings

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt drew a connection between mass shootings and Tucker Carlson of the Fox News Channel, arguing Tuesday that the “replacement” theory espoused by gunmen is shared by Carlson on his show.

As Breitbart News noted earlier this month, Greenblatt demanded that Fox News fire Carlson for arguing that Democrats are lenient towards illegal immigration partly because they want to change the existing U.S. electorate by adding new voters.

Greenblatt accused Carlson of espousing a white supremacist conspiracy theory, which holds falsely that such “replacement” is orchestrated by Jews. But Carlson did not endorse that idea. He also quoted Democrats describing their strategy candidly.

In a new op-ed at the Times of Israel that cites the Anti-Defamation League’s annual survey of antisemitism in the U.S., Greenblatt draws a connection between mass shootings in recent years and Carlson’s more recent remarks (emphasis added):

And, just as the wildfires that have devastated the West Coast in recent years were predicted by decades of scientific data, the mass shootings in Poway, El Paso, and Atlanta came after ADL and others had elevated the indisputable evidence of amplifying intolerance, hatred and extremism. Today, we released our annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents for the 2020 calendar year, a report we have published for more than four decades. Disturbingly, 2020 joins 2019, 2018, and 2017 as four of the five worst years in the more than 40 years that ADL has been collecting this information.

But is this really a surprise when one can turn on a major news network and see the replacement theory espoused in primetime to millions of viewers? Or log on to the largest social media service and be recruited by the Proud Boys? And, although our audit encompasses mostly incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault perpetrated by individuals who are not extremists, the evidence we have compiled suggests that the climate of acceptable discourse toward Jews has worsened considerably in recent years and, as we have seen throughout history, hatred that targets Jews typically targets other marginalized groups too.

The mass shooting in Atlanta, cited by Greenblatt above, has no known connection to extremism; though most of the victims were Asian, the shooter appeared to have targeted the victims at local massage parlors because of his sexual compulsions.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.