After Tucker Carlson Inspires a White Supremacist Mass Shooting, FOX News Viewers Blame Black People

     Nearly half of Republicans believe in the Great Replacement Theory. It's a sad realization that has hit many Americans, but the GOP is no longer simply a political party on the opposite side of the aisle: it is a cesspool of hate and domestic extremism. Earlier this week, my seven-year-old niece, who splits her time between the home of her father and her mother, told me about her grandpa's "Fuck Joe Biden" sticker on his truck. In the same breath, she told me about a close friend of hers who said he "hates black people." He's also seven. This was at her father's: her mother, upon being told, tried to pin the blame on "phone time," not on the fact that she, like her friend, is a Trump supporter, and that's what Trump supporters believe: just a few blocks away from her home, there is a sign comparing Governor Tony Evers to Hitler for his COVID safety measures. We can do what we can with the limited time we have her, but still I worry about what she is being indoctrinated to become. She did tell me she knew not to treat anyone differently because of their skin color and mentioned a book in her classroom, but, given the activities of GOP parents across the nation, I doubt that book will be there much longer.

     Tucker Carlson is the Rush Limbaugh of television. Now, personally, I wish he'd finish the act, but he's not fat and old and he has money saved up from being the trust fund baby of the Swanson's frozen food company, so that doesn't seem likely. Carlson, however, needs to pay a price: MSNBC, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, NPR, USA Today, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Axios, The New York Times, Insider, NBC, AZCentral, and countless other media sources and nonprofits have been warning that his embrace of the Great Replacement Theory, a white supremacist theory that claims that white people are being replaced by minorities for electoral purposes, would have severe consequences with such a large audience: those consequences have now made themselves clear. Tucker Carlson's rhetoric appeared over and over again in the 180 pages of anti-black, anti-Jewish rhetoric that Payton S. Gendron spewed before he drove from Conklin, New York, to Buffalo and shot and killed 10 people, eight of whom were black. For all their talk about backing the blue, talk that kept up after the Capitol insurrection, one of the dead was a retired officer who tried to stop the mass shooting.

     This attack was premeditated: he drove three and a half hours from Conklin to Buffalo because the zip code the supermarket was in had the highest black population per-capita in the state. The zip code Gendron grew up in, meanwhile, is the most pro-Trump one in the state of New York. The town of 5,500 can act shocked, but their words and their actions helped mold the man who would commit one of the worst hate crimes in American history. He had plans laid out about where he would walk through the store to kill people and painted a racial slur before the brutal massacre, which he livestreamed on Twitch.

     As the shooting was being announced on the FOX News webpage, readers demonstrated what subhuman white supremacist scum they are. Because the shooting was in Buffalo, which they, too, cared for some reason had the highest black population per-capita in New York, claimed that America: "doesn't have a gun violence problem; we have a BLACK violence problem." They also blamed what they called "the 13 percent" and sardonically joked that the gun was in custody, that the shooter would be released on $1,000 bail, and that Governor Hochul would be monitoring the situation to pardon the black man responsible. If I didn't have it here, nobody would believe it. They're not going to admit that they were wrong, that it was a Trump-supporting white supremacist who inflicted this violence: they're going to deflect.

     Look at Wendy Rogers, the state senator from Arizona. She has already claimed that the "Fed Boys" were gearing up for "another summer," actually implying that this was a false flag operation by the federal government to spark a summer of protests and influence the results of the 2022 midterms in favor of the Democratic Party. They already know black people voting helps Democrats, and now the GOP is actually claiming that black people getting shot is being done intentionally to help Democrats. This takes the conspiracy theory craziness to a whole new level. Alex Jones has been sued into bankruptcy for the exact same words, Wendy.

     There's something sadly ironic about this. When the Waukesha Parade Attack occurred, the GOP blamed Democrats and Black Lives Matter for the deaths of five people; as a Wisconsinite, this one really pissed me off. Yes, he supported Black Lives Matter. A Republican or a Democrat committing a crime has nothing to do with the party unless it is done in furtherance of those ideals or the party stands by the individual in spite of these actions. As a black man, the odds were overwhelmingly high that he would support his own life. However, he did not ram his car to make a political statement; he is a career criminal who was leading police on a high-speed chase. Still, the right jumped on a chance to call this a domestic terrorist attack (which it was) done by Black Lives Matter (which it was not). The San Bernardino shooter was a PETA supporter, and yet PETA was never linked to that event. The same cannot be said for the January 6th Capitol Attack, the Biden Bus Attack, the Austin Democratic Party HQ Attacks, and other incidents of hate and violence committed by the GOP, which is responsible for more violent terrorist attacks than Muslim extremism and left-wing extremism combined, including this one.

     Of course, he's another white conservative, so he was taken into custody without injury. He probably got Burger King afterward, and the media has already made it its mission to begin humanizing Payton Gendron. This shooting reminds me of Charlottesville, when Trump's campaign of hate led to a violent white supremacist march and violence against peaceful counterdemonstrators. Tucker Carlson and the GOP's rhetoric since Trump lost has culminated in this moment. It was the murder of George Floyd that resulted in the Black Lives Matter protests and the Charlottesville Attack that led to Joe Biden running for and winning the presidency. These souls cannot have died in vain: Tucker Carlson and FOX News need to pay for what they did, and I mean that quite literally. FOX News needs to be taken off the air via a massive pressure campaign and sued into the ground by these families. The GOP needs to pay a heavy price at the polls this November. 

     Most importantly, we need to build on both President Biden's executive action on gun violence and the legislative action he took via the Emmett Till Antilynching Act and the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act by buckling down on the Disarm Hate campaign. 25 states, states with Democratic trifectas, Republican trifectas, and in between, have passed legislation barring people convicted of hate crimes, be they misdemeanors or felonies, from buying guns. Oregon, New Mexico, Nevada, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Maine are six liberal states that could easily adopt this policy; Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and North Carolina have Democratic governors who can give it their all to make this happen. Meanwhile, Arizona, Alaska, North Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Ohio, and Mississippi have ballot initiatives that can be undertaken to bring the number of states with these laws in place. The easier route, one I hope is taken, would be to pass the Disarm Hate Act to ban hate crime convicts from owning firearms at the federal level.

     Let's take the same approach those brave parents, students, and young adults took after Sandy Hook, after the Pulse Nightclub Shooting, and after Parkland: let's fight like hell. Let's make Tucker, FOX, Wendy Rogers, and the GOP, not to mention the worthless punk who pulled the trigger, pay for their actions, and let's stop this from happening again by working to disarm hate.