The Buffalo supermarket massacre on Saturday was committed in the name of a racial conspiracy theory that I help propagate daily. Myself and the 76 million people who pay for the basic cable package are an important source of income for Fox News, the leading ratings channel.
Tucker Carlson, the main propagandist of the “big replacement”, is also Fox’s most-viewed anchor. He is largely responsible for taking the hateful idea from the fringes of society that there is a plan to import immigrants en masse to place white native Americans in a permanent electoral minority.
The New York Times published a series of investigative stories about Carlson, whose power over the Republican Party now rivals that of Donald Trump. He is even touted as an eventual candidate for president. The non-existent major replacement was covered as fact by Carlson with alarming frequency throughout the 1,100 episodes analyzed by the American newspaper.
Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer called Carlson, as early as 2017, “literally our greatest ally.” Shortly after the massacre that left ten black people dead, he demonstrated on the air, to no one’s surprise, his intention to double down on the bet that has earned him an estimated annual salary, at low, at US$ 6 million.
The lucrative depravity of Rupert Murdoch, 91, and his son Lachlan — who champions the radical far-right more than his father — was not, unlike other media phenomena, the discovery of an untapped audience market. Fox News and Tucker Carlson used violent content from the dark corners of the internet and bathed the racial conspiracy with studio lights and a daily prime-time slot attended by an average of 2.2 million Americans.
It’s important to note that young people, like the 18-year-old killer who carefully planned the Buffalo attack, don’t need Fox News to kill. Chances are high that the shooter is not a viewer of the channel. Most of the cable TV audience in the US is over 55 years old. At the same time, the growing radicalization of the Republican Party and its media enablers cannot be separated from the climate of political and racial violence that has had Trump as the most potent symbol of the presidency.
It is common for acts of domestic terrorism in the US to be analyzed under the theory of the “lone wolf”, the extremist who acts on his own. The Buffalo Killer was the one shooting, but it’s not a lone wolf. He lives in a country where the population consumes a regular diet of conspiratorial delusions, like the increasingly present QAnon. And he is far from suffering from loneliness – his pack is numerous and roaming the digital world. The attack plans were shared on a chat app over the course of five months. These are performance details that are the envy of the Islamic State.
Above all, the shooter defends ideas expressed by Republican senators and deputies. There is no number of victims capable of diverting the Republican Party from this path of extremism. House Republican No. 3, Elise Stefanik, took to Twitter on Monday to write: “Democrats are desperate to open borders and give massive amnesty to illegals, allowing them to vote.” Stefanik was born and pursued a political career in the same state of New York where the massacre took place.
