All night long they’re saying immigrants are coming to replace you

Whether he actually believes it or not I’m just going to assume that he does

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I’m sorry I know it’s early but let’s read a transcript of Tucker Carlson’s show from Tuesday night. He was talking about Ilhan Omar who is braver than any American troop that has ever lived as we all know and he said among a lot of other horrible shit that she is “living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country.”

Here’s the relevant part, via Media Matters.

Ilhan Omar has an awful lot to be grateful for, but she isn't grateful, not at all. After everything America has done for Omar and for her family, she hates this country more than ever.

In a recent piece in The Washington Post, the reporter put it this way, quote, "In Omar's version, America isn't the bighearted country that saved her from a brutal war and a bleak refugee camp. It wasn't a meritocracy that helped her attend college or vaulted her into Congress. Instead, it was the country that had failed to live up to its founding ideals, a place that had disappointed her and so many immigrants, refugees, and minorities like her," end quote. If anything, that's an understatement.

Omar isn't disappointed in America, she's enraged by it. Virtually every public statement she makes accuses Americans of bigotry and racism. This is an immoral country, she says. She has undisguised contempt for the United States and for its people. That should worry you, and not just because Omar is now a sitting member of Congress.

Ilhan Omar is living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country. A system designed to strengthen America is instead undermining it. Some of the very people we try hardest to help have come to hate us passionately.

Maybe that's our fault for asking too little of our immigrants. We aren't self-confident enough to make them assimilate, so they never feel fully American. Or maybe the problem is deeper than that, maybe we are importing people from places whose values are simply antithetical to ours. Who knows what the problem is, but there is a problem, and whatever the cause, this cannot continue. It's not sustainable.

No country can import large numbers of people who hate it and expect to survive. The Romans were the last to try that, with predictable results. So, be grateful for Ilhan Omar, annoying as she is. She's a living fire alarm, a warning to the rest of us that we better change our immigration system immediately, or else.

I probably don’t need to mention that is some straight white supremacist shit. He’s barely even trying to hide it anymore if he ever even was.

“‘Tucker Carlson said something nauseatingly racist last night’ is a statement roughly as newsworthy as ‘the sun rose again this morning,’” New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz wrote in a thorough point by point examination of all the lies told in the segment which you should read.

“Still, the host’s latest diatribe against America’s first Muslim congresswoman merits examination. And not merely because it is exceptionally hateful, even by Tucker’s formidable standards. Rather, Carlson’s monologue also serves as an object lesson on the right’s intellectual bankruptcy and moral cowardice.”

Omar for her part described the situation exactly as it is.

None of this is surprising to you or new. None of this is shocking anymore but something about this segment and the one that followed up on Wednesday struck even reporters who follow Carlson regularly as beyond the pale.

Even Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic took time in between diaper changings and crying about all powerful campus authoritarians barely out of the freshman fifteen to say enough is enough.

The next night Carlson of course doubled down which is the only move he has left at this point. Omar is the real racist he said. His show “more than any other show” he said  “has taken an aggressive position in favor of color blind equality and against racism.” [Citation needed]

It feels to me and maybe this is just because I’m one of the real racists that things are coming to a head. Maybe I’m just imagining things I don’t know but on the other hand I just read a story in the New York Times that said “nationwide raids to arrest thousands of members of undocumented families have been scheduled to begin Sunday…” so who is to say what sort of effect this constant barrage of fear-mongering from Carlson and the gang down at the racism factory is having on people’s lives.

I don’t typically watch Carlson or anything on Fox News but Andrew Lawrence of Media Matters does every night for work which frankly sounds like a huge fucking bummer. Lawrence thinks this is a new low for Carlson and that his rhetoric is ratcheting up to unseen levels even judging by the already impossibly low bar he’s set for himself.

I called Lawrence to talk about how dangerous this shit is getting and what watching Fox News for a living feels like.

I think it’s pretty easy for us to all get outraged about whatever the latest Tucker thing is every day, but even with that in mind, this segment on Omar seemed extreme for him you’re saying?

Yeah absolutely. The thing with Tuesday night, he singled out one particular person, and it was a member of Congress, and just straight up called her a danger to America, and an example of why immigration in general, the way our immigration system runs, is going to destroy America. It’s not just the quotes. If you listen to his tone, the type of people who watch his show, it’s extremely dangerous to say this type of thing.

He’s been spouting off white nationalist rhetoric since he got this eight o’clock gig, but this was different. It really was. I watch this shit every single night, and I was pretty shocked at what he said. It was really vile, and that type of stuff is dangerous.

Didn’t Judge Jeanie say some terrible shit that night too? How much space does he have left to go on this?

Who knows what the next step is, but one thing that’s so frustrating is that he’s escalating. He gets called out for this stuff over and over again, and it just doesn’t matter. There’s no repercussions for it. Fox News has always had racism on the airwaves, but it’s different now. It used to be sort of like the country club racism, which is still awful, and dangerous, but now it’s like straight up blood and soil white supremacist rhetoric. You have the Daily Stormer praising Tucker every single night. They don’t ever take a step back and say, alright, maybe this language is a little bit rough. There’s no self reflection at all.

Dude, last night, it was depressing seeing that stuff broadcast, and this is one of the top two most watched show in cable news. It’s just awful. It shouldn’t even be on the airwaves, never mind one of the most watched shows on cable news. It’s depressing to see it happen over and over, but I think it also ties to – were you following when Media Matters published the Bubba tapes with Tucker? We got a little blowback, like, why even publish this stuff? It’s five, six, seven years ago. There’s one clip where he called Iraqis semi-literate primitive monkeys. And he said that, and I don’t know if this is the exact quote, but it was along the lines of they don’t operate like they’re human beings. That’s how he thinks of that part of the world in general.

So to get back to what he said about Omar, he doesn’t think of these people as people. He thinks of them as sub-human at best. There’s this pattern with him, and you sort of have to understand what he’s been saying for years, to get to what he said this week. What his point is is that it’s us versus them, and us is the WASP-y trust fund babies like himself, the white Americans, and immigration is bringing it down. These people aren’t truly Americans. That’s like the great replacement theory that’s popular with white nationalists. He’s spouting that stuff almost every single night without coming right out and saying the great replacement theory, but everyone knows what he’s talking about.

It’s really dangerous and really scary. Like I said, I watch this every night. It’s just sick, it’s really gross.

And Trump retweeted a CNN piece on it?

CNN did a piece on it and they hammered Tucker saying what we’re saying. Then Mark Levin quote-tweeted it and said CNN is defending the anti-semite Omar, and Trump retweeted Levin.

Jesus. How long have you been doing this job?

It was like mid-2016. Bill O’Reilly was still on the air when I came back.

And a big part of your job is watching this shit every day?

Yeah… basically the way that the night shift works is there are five of us, and I kind of quarterback the whole thing. We watch the shows throughout the night, and the people who monitor the shows send out what we call our flags. It’s basically emails: here’s a segment, here’s what they said. It’s my job to say, well, what they said is bullshit, but fact check that, clip this… We do a lot of research throughout the night, going back and finding old clips that might tie into what’s happening today. Our job is basically to watch it so other people don’t have to.

That said I think it’s important for people to actually start watching. I don’t think people understand how awful it is. It gets to a point where… we’ve had discussions in the past where all night long they’re saying immigrants are coming to replace you, and it’s like, how many times can we clip that and put it out before it loses its power? It gets to the point where it’s almost boring. But it shouldn’t be. We should always be shocked by this stuff being said on the most watched cable news station in the country.

Where is Tucker at with advertisers?

He is struggling man. As far as his commercial breaks, they are few and far between right now and it’s a lot of MyPillow, a lot of like informercials. His major ones left are Sandals, and I don’t know if Bayer came back. They had left, I think they might be back. [Note: they didn’t] Sandals never goes anywhere, and StarKist tuna refuses to leave?

Fucking racist tuna man. I think we’re a Chicken of the Sea family here but I’m gonna have to look into that.

It’s bleak! This is just my theory, and there’s nothing behind this, but Fox News can’t move on Tucker because it will look like they’re giving in to Media Matters, first of all. Second of all, they have spent the last two years saying that anybody who gets fired from anywhere it’s encroaching on the first amendment. Their viewers would be furious if they gave in and got rid of Tucker, but it’s gotta be costing them money. They don’t have any A+ advertisers left.

You probably saw my thing about losing your family to Fox News a while ago. Do you have family like that? And do you understand how someone watching this shit every day could be turned into a xenophobe even if they have no reasons to care about that sort of shit in their life?

Absolutely. As far as my personal family, like, not really. My dad is a Trump supporter. He’s a casual Republican now, he doesn’t really watch the news. He knows that Trump triggers the libs and I guess that’s why he likes them. But this has been a twenty year campaign by Fox News saying we’re the only ones you can trust. This stuff, seriously man, I don’t know what you watch, but you should try watching Fox News only for a week, especially primetime, because it’s just a non-stop barrage of they’re coming to replace you! Immigrants are coming to rape your white daughters and get your son hooked on opioids. MS-13 is coming to Small Town USA. It’s non-stop.

The stuff that they don’t cover on Fox… I haven’t seen any reports on the sexual assaults happening in the concentration camps on the border. There’s barely any mentions of the conditions on the border. And when they do they bring in CBP spokesmen to come in and say that AOC is lying and everything is great, it’s more like a summer camp than a concentration camp. It’s a totally different world.

So I can understand getting caught up in that Fox bubble because you don’t hear or see what’s going on.

How does it effect you? Do you feel like shit all the time?

I wouldn’t say all the time. We have a really awesome crew, so we have a lot of fun with it when we can. I would say the toughest nights are when there’s a mass shooting. The night of the Parkland massacre, Laura Ingraham brought on the manufacturer of the AR-15 [Editor’s note “Assault Rifle One Five”] to talk about how safe it is. The night of the New Zealand massacre, Tucker’s entire segment about it was the libs are gonna come take your guns away, they’re going to use this for political purposes. Those are really tough nights, where every hour or two you have to get up and walk around. But for the most part those are few and far between. For the most part you have to make fun of this stuff. Really the only way to keep your sanity is to try to have fun with it when you can.

If you had to psychoanalyze Tucker, do you think he’s a true believer, or just a grifter who knows this racism shit sells?

I get that question a lot and my response is you can only believe what he says.

It doesn’t matter of course. If he says it he says it. I just mean as a point of human curiosity.

Right. The guy’s a white supremacist. That’s my view. And he’s using the megaphone that Fox News has given him to push white supremacist beliefs. It’s dangerous for the country. Whether he actually believes it or not, I’m just going to assume that he does.

Safe to assume!

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