Seth Meyers opened his first show since a white supremacist gunman killed 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, by solemnly lamenting the “absolute nightmare” of a “story we’ve now seen dozens and dozens of times.”
Shortly after those opening comments—and a darkly funny, outrage-filled musical performance from Late Night writer Amber Ruffin—Meyers turned to one of the main figures who helped spread the terrorist’s hateful ideology: Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
“With prominent figures on the right embracing and parroting the dangerous white nationalist conspiracy theory known the Great Replacement, it’s worth noting that in addition to being deeply racist, bigoted and dehumanizing, it’s also incredibly stupid,” Meyers said at the top of his latest “A Closer Look” segment.
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His two main examples were Donald Trump, who spent his campaigns and presidency fear-mongering about an “invasion” of immigrants, and Carlson, who earlier this year was denying the existence of “right-wing domestic terrorism.”
At one point, Carlson tried to calm concern by noting that the “combined membership of every white supremacist organization in this country would be able to fit inside a college football stadium.”
“First of all, a college football stadium can fit like 100,000 people, which is a ton of people!” Meyers shot back, putting a photo of a packed crowd on the screen. “If I told you, ‘Don’t worry, I rounded up all the white supremacists’ and walked you into here, I don’t think your reaction would be, ‘Phew!’”
Carlson only “wants to pretend” white supremacy isn’t a problem,” Meyers argued, “because he’s also openly and repeatedly promoted replacement theory on his show.”
After playing a montage of Carlson pushing the rhetoric that ended up in the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto, Meyers concluded that those ideas are not only “obviously racist, dangerous and dehumanizing” but also “incredibly stupid.”
“No one is being replaced. There’s no capacity limit here. It’s not like there’s a bouncer who only lets two in when two leave,” he said, adding later, “Just think about how breathtakingly dumb the logic here is. No one gets replaced when another person enters the country.”
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