Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer sent a letter to Fox News executives urging them to stop amplifying the “Great Replacement theory” after a shooting in Buffalo, New York left 10 people dead.
Mr Schumer, who represents New York in the US Senate, sent the letter to Fox Corporation chairman Ruper Murdoch, executive chairman and chief executive Lachlan Murdoch, Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott and president and executive editor Jay Wallace asking them to “cease and desist” amplifying the “Great Replacement” theory.
The racist theory postulates that Democrats and other shadowy elites, including Jewish people, want to supplant white Americans with Hispanic voters and other immigrants of colour.
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“For years, these types of beliefs have existed at the fringes of American life,” Mr Schumer wrote. “However, this pernicious theory, which has no basis in fact, has been injected into the mainstream thanks in large part to a dangerous level of amplification by your network and its anchors.”
Fox News host Tucker Carlson has frequently parrotted rhetoric that proponents of the theory use, talking about Democrats are trying to “replace the current electorate” with “more obedient voters from the third world”.
“I urge you to take into consideration the very real impacts of the dangerous rhetoric being broadcast on your network on a nightly basis,” Mr Schumer wrote. He noted how alleged shooter in Buffalo repeated many of these ideas in his reported manifesto before he allegedly opened fire and killed ten people and wounded another three, 11 of whom were Black.
“In a manifesto posted online, the individual responsible for this heinous murder wrote that the shoppers there came from a culture that sought to ‘ethnically replace my own people,’” Mr Schumer wrote.
Mr Schumer also wrote how the shooter at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in 2019 who killed 23 people decried “the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and the shooter who killed 11 worshippers in a synagogue in Pittsburgh blamed Jewish people for allowing “invaders” into the United States.
“These incidents alone, to say nothing of the many more which have occurred in recent years, have led to dozens of lives being lost and countless others irreversibly impacted,” he said.