MRC Pretends Tucker Carlson’s Replacement Theory Isn’t About Race

Acting like it’s contractually obligated to defend everything Fox News does, the Media Research Center has rushed to the defense of Fox News host Tucker Carlson over his promotion of the “replacement theory,” in which he accuses liberals of supporting immigration to replace supposedly “real” Americans at the polls.

In an April 11 post, Duncan Schroeder bashed CNN’s Don Lemon for pointing out the racist nature of Carlson’s argument, insisting we should take Carlson’s denial at face value:

Lemon is lying about Carlson making his argument about race, as Carlson explicitly stated in the segment in question that his point about Democrats wanting mass immigration has nothing to do with race but that it is instead “a voting rights question.”

Lemon is also lying about Carlson’s argument being “complete nonsense” because Democrats have acknowledged that winning elections is part of why they support mass immigration. In a 2013 interview with CBS, former Obama cabinet member and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro predicted that Texas will turn blue due to “the population growth of folks from outside of Texas.”

You know what else is “outside of Texas”? 49 other states filled with Americans from which people could move to Texas. In the link Schroeder supplied to back up this claim, there’s no evidence Castro was talking about immigration from other countries.

The next day, MRC executive Tim Graham spent a podcast complaining about CNN’s Brian Stelter — a longtime MRC obsession — highlighting Carlson’s argument, attacking guest Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League as an arm of the Democratic Party for doing so. Graham then played whataboutism on Carlson: “You can’t actually say the Democrats are very eager to be pro-immigrant — and not just on behalf of the people who are immigrating now, but certainly on behalf of the people who immigrated 10 years ago. This is one of the reasons they’re so hot to always say there’s no widespread voter fraud because they don’t want to suggest illegal immigrants are voting.” 

On April 14, Curtis Houck devoted an entire post to whining that the Washington Post was covering the story:

In a bit so obvious that they couldn’t have denied it if they even tried, The Washington Post has spent the past week going into overdrive in favor of censorship. The Post has called for removing Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson from the air to the tune of at least 11 items over the past six days, attacking the highly-influential primetime show.

The Post played its role as a cog in the hate movement against Fox and insisting Carlson is a white supremacist. The effort has recently added the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to its ranks and a conveniently-timed interview with head Jonathan Greenblatt on CNN’s Reliable Sources over Carlson’s opposition to mass, unfettered immigration.

Houck didn’t deny Carlson’s remarks were racist, but he reframed them as Carlson would, insisting they were merely “about immigration and liberals wanting to create a system in which new immigrants would become dependent upon the state and the Democratic Party for their well being.”

An April 17 column by Jeffrey Lord cheered Carlson, declaring that “Tucker had drawn the wrath of the mob for pointing to the obvious. Which is to say the American left is deliberately creating and using the chaos at the US southern border as a way of re-populating the US, in this case with poor illegal immigrants who would presumably be the political pawns of the Democratic Party.” Lord also didn’t deny that Carlson was repeating a white supremacist argument.

Tucker may well be pushing a racist argument, but conservatives believe he’s generally good at owning the libs, and in the end that’s all the MRC cares about.