“I urge you to immediately cease the reckless amplification of the so-called 'Great Replacement' theory on your network’s broadcasts,” Schumer said in the letter on Tuesday.
“Just days ago in Buffalo, a white man killed ten people in a supermarket on the city’s predominantly Black east side. 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.’”
Fox News viewers are nearly three times more likely to believe in the "Great Replacement" theory than other networks, Schumer said in the letter, citing a recent AP poll. Nearly one third of adults in the United States believe that a group of people is trying to replace Americans born in the United States with immigrants for electoral gain, the results of the same poll revealed.
Fox political commentator Tucker Carlson, to whom the letter was sent, subsequently invited Schumer to his show to debate the letter, but Schumer declined the invitation and reiterated his call for Carlson’s show specifically to stop promoting Replacement Theory.
“[Tucker Carlson] invited me on his show tonight to debate the letter I sent,” Schumer said via Twitter on Tuesday. “I’m declining. Tucker Carlson needs to stop promoting the racist, dangerous ‘Replacement Theory.’”
The exchange comes following a mass shooting allegedly perpetrated by 18-year old Payton Gendron, who is believed to have also written a manifesto describing white supremacist beliefs as motivation for going on a rampage in a Buffalo supermarket and killing ten people. The FBI qualified the shooting as a racially motivated hate crime and US President Joe Biden refereed to the incident as domestic terrorism.