One cannot know what brain spasm was occurring inside Tucker Carlson’s head Tuesday night, but he really ought to walk back his assertion that “white supremacy” is “not a real problem in America” and, worse, that it’s “a hoax.”
One word, Tucker: Charlottesville.
The violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 occurred not because some lone-wolf neo-Nazi got jiggy with his automobile. Instead, hundreds of white supremacists, many of them armed, paraded through the streets, torches aloft, yelling slogans such as “Jews will not replace us.” They were organized. They marched in paramilitary formation. And there surely were not any “very fine people” among them. Not a single one.
White supremacists by the score openly browbeat perceived opponents on Twitter. They operate websites and recruit converts. They keep trying to build compounds to replace the infamous one that operated for some time in Hayden Lake, Idaho. The FBI officially says white supremacist terrorism is a significant problem, and it is.
Broadened to include the “alt-right,” the ranks of Americans with strongly identifiable white-identity beliefs has been numbered as high as 11 million by a researcher at the University of Alabama. Granted, that hardly means 11 million Americans want to reinstitute Jim Crow laws, much less make lynching a weekend sport. But when a popular news site openly calls itself the “platform for the alt-right” and when the once-important Conservative Political Action Conference repeatedly invites those with major white-supremacist ties to be featured speakers, it is surely a sign that racial-identity views are being mainstreamed on the Right as well as on the Left.
Twenty-eight years ago in Louisiana, a neo-Nazi entered the final three weeks of a campaign for governor in a within-margin-of-error tie in the polls. Skinheads roamed the French Quarter, in one incident even mugging an FBI agent and beating him within an inch of his life. Newspapers received calls warning that they soon would suffer the fate deserved by all “[N-word] lovers.” The experience should have taught all people of good will that just one neo-Nazi possessing remarkably good skills as a media manipulator can earn a following that comes close to taking significant power.
Even if only 1,000 white supremacists operate with malice and some level of coordination in the United States — and there are many more than just 1,000 — it would be, despite Carlson’s weird protestations, a very real problem.
While the word “racism” is thrown around far too often, with far too little care about its actual meaning, this is the real thing; a belief in inherent racial superiority. It is a horrid evil, even if unaccompanied by systemic action. For any major news network host to make light of it is unconscionable. As the Tucker Carlson I know is someone who surely has a conscience, there is every good reason to expect that he will publicly withdraw his ill chosen words.
