Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has been laboring to protect Fox News' Tucker Carlson from the fact that his replacement theory conspiracy found an echo in the Buffalo shooter. Leave it to Tim Graham go to on a campaign of misdirection by using a promotion for his May 16 podcast to try and mislead about what replacement theory is:
Bill Maher attacked the notion that the federal government would run an effort against "disinformation" broadly defined. When a racist teen shot up a Buffalo supermarket, disinformation broke out as liberal outlets raced to connect it somehow to Tucker Carlson and Fox News.
The New York Times and The Washington Post admitted they couldn't prove the Buffalo shooter had even watched or enjoyed Tucker's show, but they aggressively smeared the ten deaths on him anyway. "Measuring the extent of Mr. Carlson’s influence in spreading replacement theory may be impossible," admitted the Times. "But controversies around the host’s use of 'replacement' rhetoric appear to have at least helped drive public curiosity about the idea.
On the reliably liberal Reliable Sources, CNN host Brian Stelter brought on black journalist Wesley Lowery -- whose book on race was titled They Can't Kill Us All -- to insist that Tucker and Laura Ingraham often sounded like white supremacists, and tossed in Ben Shapiro and Andrew Sullivan for spice. Stelter suggested other conservatives were also responsible, but they can't help but suggest Fox is well, an Enemy of the People, at least the non-white people.
This anger at "replacement theory" energetically ignored that liberals have been delighting in the notion of a more multi-racial America for decades. The cover story in the April 9, 1990 edition of Time magazine happily projected that "in the 21st century -- and that's not far off -- racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. will outnumber whites for the first time. The 'browning of America' will alter everything in society."
Actually, Tim, pointing out demographic changes and claiming they're part of an evil conspiracy are two completely different things.
In the podcast itself, Graham managed to find humor in the Buffalo shooting, chortling that "they never to the gun range for a mass shooting," then asserted that the media "saw opportunity" in the shooting by blaming Carlson. Citing reporting that the shooter said he was radicalized online, "There's no indication that [the shooter] watched Carlson's program. Yeah, who needs proof?" going on to launch a whataboutism rant:
This is the game that they play, and that is that if you merely suggest that Democrats are interested in importing their voters, you're for killing black people in a supermarket. You don't have to prove Tucker Carlson is a mass murderer whisperer, you just find echoes and emanations and numbers of associations. Buffalo McCarthyism? I mean, you couldn't call people a communist if they praised Fidel Castro to the skies, hmmm, Barbara Walters? All these people who said the kindest possible things about communist autocrats -- you know, but you can't call them a communist, probably you couldn't really say there's no proof that the liberals wanted us all in the United State of Fidel Castro BUT dot dot dot.
[...]
If there is a clumsy Crayola conspiracy theory, this is it. "Supermarket shooter equals Tucker! I don't even have to spell Tucker correctly!"
Graham then rushed to defend Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik for spouting similar ideas:
And it's not just the Fox News hosts. The Washington Post also had a story coming in to the new week ripping Elise Stefanik -- yeah, they tweeted this out this notion: "Stefanik echoed racist theory allegedly espoused by Buffalo suspect." Smeary smeary guilty guilty! What do we actually find? Well, Elise Stefanik ran Facebook ads that claimed this about the Democrats: “Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” All right, that's a conspiracy theory, right? They're importing voters. But somehow this leads to "Stefanik echoes racist mass shooter." This isn't journalism, this is midslinging, this is a negative campaign commercial disguised as a news story.
Graham then exhibited a surprising lack of self-unawareness by accusing others of doing what the MRC has been doing for 30-plus years:
I just don'e like the energy that's out there right now. And it's the whole energy of we have to make Republicans quit, we have to shut Fox News down. Right? There's this whole lame-o thing -- if you go to the lame-o liberal sites, what are they out there saying? You know, "white supremacist shooting means you need to re-evaluate advertising on the Fox News Channel." We all know -- and this was all over conservative Twitter -- they cannot prove that this thug shooter has ever paid attenton to Tucker Carlson anywhere at any time, whereas theguy who shot at the Republicans on the softball field in Alexandria, Virginia, had professed his love for Rachel Maddow's show. Does that mean Rachel Maddow encouraged the shooting of Republicans? That was generally not the conservative spin.
So why is that Graham's spin now? Even the conservatives pushing that spin never found anything beyond a Facebook like, whereas the replacement theory promoted by Carlson -- who serves as the largest megaphone for it -- closely echoes the shooter's replacement theory.
Graham then insisted that it's not really racist to point out there there's a conspiracy by Democrats to import foreign voters, no matter how racist that actually sounds:
It's somehow -- if you suggest that Democrats want to import voters to win elections, this is somehow voila, white supremacy! We all understand that the Democrats really do believe that we're gonna -- yes, we're going to be aggresively pro-immigrant, we're going to be pro-immigration. They believe in what you might call Univision theory, which is the more -- yeah, the more people we import from Central and South America, the more Democratic voters they're sending in. Somehow they're not racist when they're supporting this theory because they're saying it in a positive way. If you say it in a negative way, it's bad. So for example, in 2008 if I suggest Rachel Maddow is a lesbian -- this is a factual statement, I got my head handed to me anyway at the time because I said it in a disapproving tone. This is the way it works, apparently.
Now, you can find examples of Fox News hosts suggsting that Democrats want to import voters, but how is this white supremacy? I mean, if Wesley Lowrey and his ilk suggest to us that black lives matter more than white lives -- 'cause don't you dare say all lives matter -- does that qualify as black supremacy? I know for a fact Welsey Lowrey does not get to run around claiming, "Oh, the other guys, they're are the racial dividers, they're the ones that are making life difficult in America. The other guys are disturbing the peace." No, Wesley Lowrey is a guy whose whole career is built on systemic racism, systemic racism, systemic racism, riding grievances all the way to the Pulitizer Prize.
As if Graham's entire career is not built on riding grievances to, well, maybe an MRC Bulldog Award and more Mercer money.
Graham went on to huff that liberals are the real racists for accurately noting America's changing racial demographics:
The reality is we can tell you as people who have been around for 35 years the liberal media have been gleefully pushing this idea of Amercia's white minority for decades. They've been delighting in the idea of "the browning of America," and they hever thought that sounded racist or racially hostile or racially inflammatory.
Graham then claimed that immigrants might change "white Western ideas" and declared that a legitimate concern, declaring that "yes, you can make concerned who might wear a hat that says 'Make America Great Again' -- I don't have that hat -- but the idea that you're going to import immigrants to change what America stands for, what America is, yeah, if you're a Republican that might concern you."At no point did Graham provide any evidence that there is a Democratic project, overt or clandestine, to import foreign peopel for the express purpose of replacing white conservatives but insisted this theory is "falling apart" because immigrants are becoming Republicans.
Graham didn't really help his case here. Whataboutism is a distraction, not an argument.
