White nationalist and Stormfront founder Don Black and his wife can’t get enough of Tucker Carlson’s Fox News shows with just one viewing, according to Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Eli Saslow.
Despite his incessant whining about being unfairly labeled a racist, we’ve long known that Carlson is a hero to white nationalists. But a recent interview on Salon reveals just how much Carlson is revered by white nationalists.
Speaking with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, Saslow discussed his new book, Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist. The woke former white nationalist is Derek Black, Don’s son and the godson of David Duke. “Once the princeling of the white nationalist world,” Marcotte notes, “after a painful process of introspection and education, Black renounced racism and left the movement.”
I would argue that what’s critically important in this story is Saslow's reporting on what changed Black. In the interview, Saslow chalks it up to a combination of social pressure/resistance, civil discourse, and outreach from other students when Black went to college.
"It seems to me right now if there’s this idea that it’s either civil resistance or civil discourse. Certainly, the students at New College Student had a huge debate between those two factions. The truth is they really worked together, and they were both super necessary. I think if it had just been one of the other, Derek never would have changed his mind about anything."
But, almost as an aside, the interview contained this nugget about how closely Black’s parents feel that Carlson speaks for them (emphases added to Saslow's responses):
Tucker Carlson. Don Black and his wife really liked Tucker Carlson. Did that surprise you?
It did surprise me, although it doesn’t anymore. Unfortunately, for this book I had spend a bunch of time on Stormfront and places like it, they love Tucker Carlson. White nationalists, I would say, consider Tucker Carlson as one of their own. He carries the rhetoric of white nationalism into the public space in ways that nobody else does.
Don and Chloe [Hardin Black] not only watch his show but then re-watch it every night. They watch it twice. …
Yes. I was like, whoa. It didn’t surprise me that they watched him. It surprised me a little bit you would watch a cable news show twice in a row.
The sense of grievance that he’s preying on is this idea that like, “Your America is being taken from you.” That’s exactly what white nationalists are saying all the time. I mean, Tucker Carlson might not say on the air, “White Americans, your America is being taken from you,” but it’s clear who he’s speaking to. Donald Trump does some of the same things.
For white nationalists, stuff like that is music to their ears. They’re constantly trying provoke white people to action, get them to embrace this idea that your country is disappearing. You are now in danger. That there’s a white genocide, you’re a threatened species. That’s basically what Tucker Carlson’s entire show is about.
Memo to Carlson: You can’t blame the left for being a hero to white nationalists. You have only yourself to blame.
Watch Carlson’s obsession with race below, while blaming the left for making “everything” about race, via Media Matters.
(H/T Eyes on Fox and DailyKos)