Fox News host Tucker Carlson covered the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, over the weekend, which was perpetrated by a self-proclaimed white supremacist who targeted black people, leaving 10 dead.
In the manifesto the shooter uploaded to the internet shortly before the attack, he described himself as a "left-wing authoritarian" and "populist" who disliked the media, including Fox News, and outright rejected conservatism. Part of the reason for the attack was because of his belief that white people were going to be replaced by minorities due to low birth rates and mass immigration. Despite Carlson not being named by the shooter, liberal pundits and social media users have blamed the shooting on Carlson because he talks about the problems of illegal immigration on his show, accusing him of spreading the "Great Replacement Theory."
"You’ve probably heard this document described as a racist manifesto. That's not quite right. It is definitely racist, bitterly so. [He] reduces people to their skin color, that is the essence of racism and it’s immoral. But what he wrote does not add up to a manifesto. It is not a blueprint for new extremist political movement, much less the potential inspiration for a racist revolution. Anyone who claims that it is, is lying or hasn’t read it," Carlson stated on Monday.
"Instead, [his] letter is a rambling...of slogans and internet memes, some of which flatly contradict one another. The document is not recognizably left-wing or right-wing. It’s not really political at all. The document is crazy. It’s the product of a diseased and organized mind," he continued. "At one point, [he] suggests that Fox News is part of some global conspiracy against him. He writes like the mental patient he is, disjointed, irrational, paranoid. Now that's true, not that it makes the atrocities he committed easier to bear. If your daughter was murdered on Saturday in Buffalo, you wouldn’t care where the killer did it or who he voted for."
Carlson noted that in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, politicians seized on the shooting to call for censorship of "hate speech" because the shooter was "the heir apparent to Donald Trump."
