Journalist Glenn Greenwald speaks to the media before accepting the George Polk Award on April 11, 2014, in New York City.(Andrew Burton / Getty Images)
The mass shooting in Buffalo, which left 10 people dead, has ignited a debate about the role the “great replacement” conspiracy theory plays in contemporary politics. As many commentators note, the “great replacement” theory not only animates the manifesto of the alleged shooter but also has become, in only a slightly watered down form, a staple of right-wing media programs like Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News.
Glenn Greenwald, a contrarian writer on Substack, rushed to Carlson’s defense in a lengthy post. First noting, correctly, that shooters have many different ideologies, Greenwald goes on to downplay Carlson’s well-documented history of racism. According to Greenwald, “Carlson believes…that the proper citizenry of the United States is multi-racial and that Black Americans and Latin Americans and Asian-Americans are every bit as much U.S. citizens, with all of the same claims to rights and protections, as every other American citizen.”
Is Tucker Carlson really as enlightened as Greenwald believes? To take this up, I spoke with Eoin Higgins of the newsletter The Flashpoint, who has written multiple times about Greenwald’s habit of acting as Carlson’s pro bono mouthpiece.
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Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.