Chuck Schumer sends a letter to Rupert Murdoch asking for an end to the amplification of the “great theory of substitution”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has asked Rupert Murdoch and other senior executives at Fox Corp. and Fox News to stop the “reckless reinforcement” of the “Great Replacement Theory” by some of the show’s presenters.

The letter came after 10 people were killed in a shooting in Buffalo, New York over the weekend. The alleged shooter, according to a manifesto posted online, was a follower of the “replacement theory,” the belief that elites were seeking to replace Native Americans with non-white immigrants for political gain.

“For years, this kind of belief has existed on the fringes of American life,” Sumer wrote in the letter. “However, this disastrous theory, which has virtually no basis, has entered the mainstream thanks to a dangerous level of accountability on the part of its network and its hosts.”

Sumer did not mention Tucker Carlson in the text of the letter, but sent a copy. On Monday, Sumer summoned Carlson directly to speak in the Senate House. New York Times The series, which found that the Fox host “has expressed rhetoric at least 400 times in its program since 2016 that echoes the replacement theory.”

In his letter – which one Times Posted Here – Sumer quotes Monday editor Wall Street newspaperOwned by Murdoch’s News Corp., politicians and the media are forced to “understand … conspiracy theories such as the substitution theory.”

Sumer wrote that “words of condemnation are not enough”.

“To that end, please stop immediately spreading any false far-right white nationalist conspiracy theory on your network,” he wrote.

Sumer tweeted that Carlson invited him to his show on Tuesday night, but he turned it down. “Tucker Carlson must stop ‘propagating’ the racist and dangerous ‘substitution theory’,” wrote Sumer.

A spokesperson for Fox Corp. declined to comment. A Fox News spokesperson referred to Carlson’s comments Monday on his he program, in which he said he should focus on the victim and called the alleged shooter a racist, calling his manifesto of him “insane.” He called it “colorblind meritocracy”.

But Carlson also said the Democrats had “launched a coordinated campaign to blame their political opponents for these murders” and that the intent was “to stop the First Amendment.” “So what is hate speech?” Well, this is a conversation our leaders hate. Since a mentally ill teenager has killed strangers, he is unable to voice his political views of him aloud. This is what they tell you. This is what they have been saying for some time, but the massacre on Saturday offers them an excuse to justify themselves “.

Last year, Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch defended Carlson after Anti-Defamation League leader Jonathan Greenblatt called for his resignation in support of the replacement theory.

In his program, Carlson said, “I know the left and all the little doors on Twitter literally get hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to ‘change.’ In the current electorate, voters they are now voting, with new people, more obedient Third World voters. But they get hysterical because that’s what really happens. Let’s just say: this is true. “

In a letter to Greenblatt, Murdoch rejected Carlson’s resignation requests, arguing that the Fox News host did not endorse the “white supremacy theory” but rather that it was “a matter of suffrage.”

However, Carlson continued to promote the “substitution theory” in other shows. In September, Carlson said: “Politically, this policy is called the ‘great replacement’: the replacement of hereditary Americans with more obedient people from distant lands. They always brag, but if you say it’s happening, they scream at you with the utmost hysteria. “

Speaking in Buffalo on Tuesday, President Joe Biden made a more general appeal to those who support this theory. He said he is “hateful that the media and politics, via the Internet, radicalized angry, alienated, lost and isolated individuals into falsely believing that they would change.”