We’ve documented how the Media Research Center was totally on board with replacement theory — the white supremacist-based conspiracy theory that Democrats are replacing white Americans with swarthy-looking immigrants to boost their election prospects — before the mass shooting targeting Black people at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket, the alleged perpetrator of which invoked replacement theory in a manifesto that echoed rants by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. After the massacre, the MRC took the approach of denying that replacement theory is racist.
When it was pointed out that top Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik had unmistakably alluded to replacement theory by warning of a “PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION” due to Democrats’ alleged “plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington,” Nicholas Fondacaro rushed to her defense in a May 16 post, insisting that the co-hosts on “The View” “falsely claimed Stefanik had peddled in ‘replacement theory,'” then tried to whitewash her words: “All Stefanik has said is that Democrats had hoped new immigrants who registered to vote would support them and not Republicans. She also pointed out how that hope was not working out for them and Republicans were seeing historic gains among Hispanic and African American voters.
Kyle Drennen huffed in a post the same day that mentioning that the shooter’s embrace of replacement theory echoed that of prominent Republicans and right-wing entertainers like Tucker Carlson was a “politicization of the attack.”
Clay Waters — the MRC’s biggest defender of replacement theory — served up a muddy attempt to parse what it purportedly is and is not: “It’s no conspiracy theory to think Democrats want more immigrants allowed into the United States and to eventually give them the vote, expecting them to vote for the party who granted them citizenship. It’s certainly not an embrace of “replacement theory” to think so.
Kevin Tober sycophantally gushed over Carlson’s response to his critics on that night’s Fox News show:
Fox News host Tucker Carlson had to be champing at the bit to get back on television Monday night after having to endure an entire weekend of many in the leftist media blaming him and others for the mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York on Saturday afternoon. When Carlson opened his show Tucker Carlson Tonight, to defend himself and his fellow conservatives, he did not disappoint.
[…]Carlson ended by making clear that the truth about the Buffalo supermarket killer tells “you a lot about the ruthlessness and dishonesty of our political leadership.” He added that “within minutes of Saturday’s shooting before all of the bodies of those ten murdered Americans had even been identified by their loved ones, professional Democrats had begun a coordinate campaign to blame those murders on their political opponents.”
The leftist media will do anything to smear Americans who they disagree with. Our media and culture is completely toxic and those who continue to bitterly divide America should be held accountable.
Tober didn’t mention that Carlson did not discuss his past enthusiasm for replacement theory during the show.
Tim Graham used a May 17 post to join his underling in complaining that Stefanik was being criticized for her replacement theory-adjacent rantings with a blend of whitewash and whataboutism:
“Overthrow our electorate” is pretty hot talk, but it’s quite similar to media outlets who heavily imply this somehow leads to “Stefanik echoed racist mass shooter.”
[…]Sotomayor also mentioned an unnamed Stefanik spokesman explained the ads came “when New York City was debating whether to allow roughly 1 million non-residents the chance to vote only in local elections. City council approved the measure in December, allowing those living in NYC for over 30 days with a work permit — not undocumented immigrants — to partake.”
So is that a “baseless conspiracy theory,” that Democrats eagerly want illegal immigrants to vote? You get smeared with murderous racists when you object.
It’s all in a day’s work at a Democrat rag. Their blogger Greg Sargent also got into the act with”How Elise Stefanik and the GOP sanitize ‘great replacement’ ugliness.”
This is the same partisan newspaper that publishes gushy puff pieces about race-baiting radical Squad congresswomen, from Ilhan Omar to Cori Bush.
Alex Christy complained that “CBS’s Stephen Colbert returned to The Late Show on Monday after a COVID absence to declare that half of Republicans agree with the Buffalo racist mass shooter, including Fox’s Tucker Carlson and Rep. Elise Stefanik,” insisting that “opposing giving amnesty and citizenship for illegal immigrants is not Great Replacement Theory.” If that was all Carlson and Stefanik had done, Christy might have a point.
Mark Finkelstein tried to play the same misdirection game Graham did by claiming replcement theory can’t possibly be racist if you don’t say the quiet part out loud and explicitly reference race:
CNN wants you to believe that the Democrats are a political party . . . above politics. That in fashioning their policies, the thought that massive, record-breaking flows of immigrants across the southern border might help them politically never crosses the Democrats’ minds!
And if you disagree? If you think that, in fact, Democrats view those immigrants as, in the phrase that Mark Steyn made famous, “undocumented Democrats,” well then, you are a racist, spewing a “garbage” conspiracy theory.
That was the message Monday on CNN’s New Day, in a segment centered on the Buffalo mass shooting in which 10 people were killed at a supermarket.
CNN reporter Sunlen Serfaty cast Republicans and conservatives as embracing a “far-right” replacement theory. But when you actually listen to what people said in the clips CNN played, you’ll note that they frame their views on Dem immigration policy explicitly in terms of its political implications, eschewing the racial or ethnic concerns that some on the fringe express.
Thus, Rep. Brian Babin said that the Democrat strategy is to replace the American “electorate.” Rep. Scott Perry said the Dems’ goal is to “transform the political landscape.” Senatorial candidate J.D. Vance said that Democrats have concluded that they can’t win unless they “bring in a large number of new voters.” And Tucker Carlson said that Democrats are “importing a brand-new electorate.”
And CNN deceptively edited its clip of Sen. Ron Johnson. They rolled the bit in which he said that Democrats are trying to change American “demographics”–but omitted what immediately followed: “to ensure their — that they stay in power forever.” So Johnson was speaking of the Democrats’ political ambitions. But CNN made it appear he was focused on the racial or ethnic implications of their plans.
Fondacaro re-expressed his issues with women by smearing the co-hosts of “The View” as a “clucking coven” as he bashed them for noting there’s not much difference between the racism of the Buffalo shooter and “parents storming school boards and saying, ‘we don’t want the talk about race relations, we don’t want to talk about anti-racism,'” then ranted a bit about “the racism of Critical Race Theory.”
It was Waters’ turn to defend and whitewash Stefanik in a May 17 post:
After the despicable, racially motivated mass shooting in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York Times congressional correspondent Annie Karni kept the paper’s previous political smears against Republicans going in Tuesday’s paper against a ranking Republican in Congress: “Racist Attack Spotlights Elise Stefanik’s Echo of Replacement Theory.”
The Times is too cowardly to directly accuse Republicans of espousing “great replacement” theory, so Karni engaged in cloudy wordplay to conflate Republican stands against illegal immigration as genocidal.
[…]Karni buried Stefanik’s sensible response to the story’s lead paragraph smears in paragraphs 15 and 16, in which Stefanik noted Biden’s call for a pathway to citizenship for 11 million “undocumented,” and a proposal to give 800,000 noncitizens the right to vote in New York municipal elections.
Kevin Tober managed not to defend replacement theory in a May 18 post; instead, he was mad that MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell noted that Fox News and owner Rupert Murdoch profit mightily from its hosts pushing it, then played a redirection game: “Claiming the chairman of a major news network and the Republican Party don’t care how many Americans die from mass shootings is beyond disgusting. The premise of the entire controversy is wrong. The mass shooter behind the tragedy in Buffalo wrote in his manifesto that he thought Fox News was out to get him and specifically attacked Murdoch.” Tober didn’t explain how the shooter sounded so much like Carlson if he thought Fox News was out to get him.