Dear Tucker Carlson,
Terry H. Schwadron
Aug. 17, 2019
Dear Tucker Carlson,
I know you’re “on vacation” for a undisclosed time after you broadcast a Fox News commentary that said white supremacy is not really an issue in the country. Indeed, you said white supremacy is “a hoax” by Democrats engaged in a “relentless bid to divide this country.”
Mind you, even such Republican voices like Dan Crenshaw, R-TX, tweeted, “White supremacy has no place in this world. Violence inflicted because of someone’s race or ethnicity is vile, repulsive, and one of the worst evils we face.” Ivanka Trump said, “White supremacy, like all other forms of terrorism, is an evil that must be destroyed.” Even her father added some similar words he read from a teleprompter that were roundly castigated as empty from his deeds.
Your analysis, Mr. Carlson, was that “the combined membership of every white-supremacist organization in this country, would they be able to fit inside a college football stadium?”
Here’s Conor Friedersdorffrom Atlantic Magazine:“The segment was riddled with reasoning so inane, one wondered if stupidity or sophistry was the more charitable explanation.” He noted that the 19 terrorists who drove planes into the World Trade Center would have fit in a football stadium, as would the mass shooters of the last year or two, who said they drew their inspiration from white supremacist arguments.
Advertisers apparently agreed, and have left your show in droves, presumably rescheduling your vacation to immediate, since that seems to be what happens at Fox when something goes wrong.
So, just for your education, here’s what a federal judge had to say in a lawsuit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center against neo-Nazi leader Andrew Anglin: The judge ordered him to pay $14 million in damages against a Jewish woman and her family for hatefully and anti-Semitically hectoring them in the small town of Whitefish, Montana, where they both live. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Dana L. Christensen adopted an earlierrecommendationby U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeremiah Lynch after Anglin refused to show up for court proceedings.
Just for perspective, this was days after the mass killings in El Paso and around the two-year anniversary of the Charlottesville, Va. Nazi uprising. Anglin, the founder of the web forum Daily Stormer, was a major promoter of that rally. Anglin, who publicly calls Donald Trump “Our Glorious Leader,” acknowledged in an interview last year that he uses his website to indoctrinate children as young as 10 into neo-Nazi ideology. “My site is mainly designed to target children,” he told a Radical Agenda radio interviewer.
The target of his venom in Whitefish apparently was Tanya Gersh, a local real estate agent. Anglin published dozens of articles urging his followers to launch a “troll storm” against Gersh, falsely accusing her of trying to extort money from the mother of white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, also of Whitefish. The campaign started with anti-Jewish themes, rose to harassing phone calls with recorded gunshots, showed the 12-year-old Gersh son being sent to an death oven, included a vow to lead a gun-toting march to the Gersh home.
Let’s just assert that the language and imagery in the multimedia campaign was despicable and frightening. The law center sued on behalf of the family. Anglin’s current whereabouts are unknown, the SPLC lawyer said, vowing to pursue Anglin across the globe to get the judgment.
His organization, The Daily Stormer, has established 22 physical chapters in the United States as well as an online presence. Since the 2016 elections, Anglin has used it to harass Muslims, foreigners, immigrants and others: He wrote, “We want these people to feel unwanted. We want them to feel that everything around them is against them. And we want them to be afraid.”
Anglin claimed his actions were protected by the First Amendment, but the court earlier rejectedthat claim, in part based on medical evidence of emotional distress on the Gersh family over more than two years — day after day, night after night, on the street, over the radio, the net, with street signs.
The court finding was for $4 million in compensatory damages, plus $10 million in punitive damages “to punish Anglin and deter him from engaging in such conduct in the future.” The court also ordered Anglin to remove blog posts and online images encouraging the harassment campaign.
SPLC calls this a hate group, indeed a white supremacist group, one of 1,020 hate groups across the country.
Mr. Carlson, we don’t know what you call it.
But please, don’t insult our intelligence by saying it ain’t so.
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www.terryschwadron.wordpress.com