Tucker Carlson Deserves Blame—But Not for Buffalo
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Every Monday, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
Caitlin Flanagan’s masterful “Chasing Joan Didion” has me thinking about travel.
What have you learned while away from home? Paint a picture of where you went and share your insights.
Conversations of Note
Top of the mind: the mass shooting Saturday in Buffalo, New York, in which a white-supremacist terrorist killed 10 people. My colleague Graeme Wood, an expert on murderous extremists, read the killer’s apparent manifesto and grappled with whether it ought to be shared or suppressed.
The Los Angeles Times editorial board argued that “Americans have ignored the insidious creep of white supremacy into the public discourse to the point that it has become normalized.” As an example it cites the so-called replacement theory, “the lie that Democrats and American Jews are plotting to replace white voters with people of color,” asserting that similar arguments have been aired hundreds of times in recent years by the Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson.
The terrorist mentioned replacement theory in his apparent manifesto. But Glenn Greenwald counters that “there was no indication he knew who Carlson was, that he had ever watched his show, that he was influenced by him in any way, or that he admired or even liked the Fox News host.” The killer professed to having been radicalized online and cited influences that did not include Carlson. Greenwald goes on to argue that there’s an ideological double standard after mass shootings:
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