Tucker Carlson and the Daily Caller: Taking white nationalism mainstream
MONDAY, AUG 21, 2017 04:59 AM EDT
Tucker Carlson and the Daily Caller: Taking white nationalism mainstream
Carlson's media empire steers just clear of the alt-right, while telling racists their beliefs are respectable
AMANDA MARCOTTE
Donald Trumps temper tantrum last week, in which he defended a torch-wielding mob of people chanting Nazi slogans as fine people, was so terrible that it may be hard to believe that Republican voters will stand by him. But sure enough, they are doing just that. A CBS poll found that an alarming 67 percent of Republicans approved of Trump equating white supremacists with those who showed up to resist them.
If this is a surprise, it shouldnt be. Huge chunks of conservative media have spent months, in some cases years, softening up audiences for white supremacist apologetics and inviting white supremacists in as active members of the conservative community. With sites like Breitbart, whose comment section sometimes reads like a Klan rally, this has been more obvious. But one of the most effective mainstreamers of white supremacist ideas has been Tucker Carlson, both in his role as a Fox News host and through the website he founded in 2010, the Daily Caller.
Carlson started the Daily Caller in 2010 as a right-wing alternative to the Huffington Post, but, as a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center lays out, the website has drifted towards a more white nationalist bent in recent years.
Throughout the 2016 election and since, the Daily Caller has not only published the work of white nationalists, but some of its writers have routinely whitewashed the Alt-Right, while one editor there is an associate of key Alt-Right figures, write SPLC researchers Stephen Piggott and Alex Amend.
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http://www.salon.com/2017/08/21/tucker-carlson-and-the-daily-caller-taking-white-nationalism-mainstream/