By Todd Lassa

There was Tucker Carlson, grinning in a picture on his pre-Musk Twitter feed, holding a copy of the May 1 issue of The New York Times with part one of Nicholas Confessore’s exhaustive two-part tome on Fox News’ most popular personality. The headline: “American Nationalist: How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable News.” Confessore describes in thousands of words how Carlson may host the “most racist show in the history of cable news” and certainly does host cable news’ most popular.

Carlson is cable news’ most prominent proponent of “Replacement Theory,” which claims that expanding voting rights along with free and open borders for immigrants, especially those at the Southern border, are part of a conspiracy to reduce white Americans to minority status and assure Democrats’ control. 

The 18-year-old suspect in Saturday’s shooting of 13 people at the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York – 11 of them Black and 10 of them now dead – doesn’t fit the Boomer demographics of Carlson’s show. There is no evidence, so far, that the suspect was a viewer, though there is ample evidence, several news outlets report, that he is an adherent of Replacement Theory and began to follow racist social media outlets as a bored high school student stuck at home from when the pandemic began. 

The suspect, Payton Gendron posted a 180-page manifesto online timed for release just before his alleged attack, The Buffalo News reports, saying he believes that “whites are in danger of being replaced by non-whites, who must be removed from this country or slaughtered. Blacks and Jews draw most of Gendron’s vitriol in the manifesto.” The manifesto refers to The Great Replacement Theory, an older, more "traditional" edition of Carlson's fearmongering.

Whether or not Gendron looked away from social media long enough to watch a single minute of Tucker Carlson Tonight or not, he shared with the host the same reasoning behind their racist-nationalist philosophy.

We can’t begin to guess how Carlson might respond to this tragedy on his show Monday night. 

It must also be noted that the suspect was investigated less than a year ago as a 17-year-old high school student for making a “threatening statement” at his school, according to The Washington Post. He was held in custody for a day under a provision of the state’s mental health laws and released. 

One of the things that Carlson revels in is the sense that he and people like him (well, actually not really like him because Carlson wouldn’t truck with the plebs) are somehow victims. Because they have been victimized, they have every right to lash out.

And we can see how this turns out.