| Dear Friend, Tucker Carlson once said, “I lie if I’m cornered or something. I lie.”(1) He is certainly lying now. Confronted with his culpability in spreading racist, hateful “replacement” rhetoric to his millions of viewers, Carlson is saying that he’s “still not sure exactly what [replacement theory] is.”(2) Excuse us?! Carlson has advocated for “replacement theory” on his show and podcast more than 400 times since 2016.(3) “Replacement” rhetoric pushed the Buffalo shooter to kill ten people over the weekend, and it was behind several other massacres as well as the Charlottesville hate march. Fox “News” needs to be held accountable for being a primary spreader of this toxic hate speech. Courage California is sounding the alarm across social media and rallying grassroots pressure to remove Fox “News” from cable, and we need to keep the pressure on until Comcast, Charter, and other providers act.
Carlson earns $35 million a year by stoking fear and anger in his viewers about nonwhite and immigrant populations, and he has become more popular than ever.(4) He has more than three million viewers, his videos regularly go viral, and his racist rhetoric is going mainstream. A full third of U.S. adults believe in the idea that the left is trying to “replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views.”(5) Even an ex-Fox “News" reporter agrees that what Carlson is doing is egregious. Carl Cameron, a former chief political correspondent for Fox, said it is obvious that the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto echoed what Carlson has been saying on his show, and the network needs to be held accountable.(6) The trouble is, no one is reining in Fox “News” (which shouldn’t be allowed to call itself “news” at all!). The network only cares about building its viewership for advertising dollars and lining shareholder pockets -- not actually performing a public good. So it’s up to the public to demand that cable companies refuse to run Fox “News” as long as the network refuses to stop its hateful, racist rhetoric. Our campaign to deplatform Fox is picking up steam in the media, and it’s becoming more and more of a possibility. We need to ramp our campaign and stop Fox “News”! Donate $5 now and help take the racist rhetoric of Fox “News” off the air! Yours in the fight against hate and disinformation, Irene, along with Amber, Angela, Annie, Isidra, Jay, Lindsay, LisaMarie, Mai, Mai, Raquel, and Scottie (the Courage team) PS: The best way to support Courage California and our work for equity and justice is to become a recurring monthly donor so we'll have the ongoing support we need over the long haul. Click here to chip in $5, $10, or $20 a month, or whatever you can afford. Donations go to support all of Courage California's work for a more progressive California and country. Follow us now on Facebook or Twitter! Footnotes:
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