Three days after a shooter who expressed white supremacist beliefs killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson declared that the threat of white supremacy is a hoax.

“It’s actually not a real problem in America. The combined membership of every white supremacist organization in this country would be able to fit inside of a college football stadium,” Carlson said in his Tuesday night monologue. “This is a hoax. Just like the Russia hoax. It’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power.”

Carlson is lying to his viewers. While the number of people in organized white supremacist groups is small as a proportion of the population, their ranks have swelled since Donald Trump began running for president.

Simply counting members of white nationalist groups understates the actual threat: Recent white supremacist mass killers — like the one who attacked a black church in Charleston, a synagogue in Pittsburgh, and a heavily Latino group of Walmart patrons in El Paso — have not been card-carrying members white supremacist groups. They are radicalized independently and online, a kind of threat that’s much harder for law enforcement to predict and stop than a plot organized by a terrorist cell.

There are many indications that the white supremacist threat is growing. Data from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish anti-hate group, shows that right-wing extremists were responsible for the vast bulk of documented killings by political extremists in the United States in 2018. FBI Director Christopher Wray said in late July testimony that the FBI had already made as many domestic terrorism arrests in 2019 as it did in all of 2018 — and, further, that “a majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.”

So why is Carlson so vehemently denying that white supremacy is a problem? Maybe because he’s embraced a worldview disturbingly similar to that of outright racists.

Tucker Carlson: White supremacy is "actually not a real problem in America." Calling white supremacy and issue is "a hoax" and "a conspiracy theory used to divide the country" pic.twitter.com/ydzmJ0L7UI — Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) August 7, 2019

This is a man who once said immigrants are making America “poorer, and dirtier, and more divided” and who argued that “if you’re a leader of Western civilization you ought to believe it’s superior” to non-Western societies. This is a man who has parroted white nationalist talking points about South Africa’s black leadership seizing land from white farmers.

This is a man who claimed that Roma asylum seekers in Pennsylvania — “gypsies” is the slur Carlson used for them on air — “defecate in public, chop the heads off chickens, leave trash everywhere, and more.” This is a man who has referred to nonwhite immigration into the United States as an “invasion” over and over and over again, the exact same language that the El Paso shooter used in his manifesto.

Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer, has referred to Carlson as “literally our greatest ally” — describing his hourlong broadcast as “basically ‘Daily Stormer: The Show.’” Alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer praised him as “very intelligent.” David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, once tweeted “God bless Mr. Carlson.”

Tucker Carlson and conservatism’s white nationalism problem

Carlson is not a fringe figure in the conservative movement. He is one of Trump’s favorite pundits who has privately advised the president on policy and host of one of the highest-rated shows on television during his timeslot. He founded the Daily Caller, one of the largest conservative news websites, and was a keynote speaker at the recent “National Conservatism” conference (a gathering of conservative luminaries that aimed to develop an intellectual scaffolding for the new nationalist populism).

The fact that Carlson is not only tolerated in the movement, but celebrated, points to a serious problem for conservatism today: the movement’s impoverished understanding of race and racism.

For decades, the modern conservative movement has depended on racial appeals — sometimes coded, sometimes overt — to seize political power. From Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to Reagan’s rhetoric about “welfare queens” to Trump making the subtext the text, whites with high levels of racial grievance have been a crucial part of the Republican political coalition. Conservative movement agenda items that hurt working-class whites, like cuts to the welfare state, are made palatable to them through racially coded rhetoric.

“What Reagan had succeeded in doing was tarnishing liberalism as a giveaway to people of color,” Ian Haney López, a professor at UC Berkeley who studies race and American politics, told me in a 2017 interview. “Investment in our cities, investment in our schools, investment in social welfare programs, all of that was branded as giveaway to undeserving minorities.”

To defend this approach, conservatives have developed an intellectually stripped-down theory of racism, defining it as a matter of raw, individual animus that boils down to committing a hate crime or using the n-word.

One of the most prominent conservative intellectuals in America, Charles Murray, is most famous for arguing that people of African descent could be genetically less intelligent than white people — a position many conservatives today insist is not racist. Toleration of such racially inflammatory views blurs the line between conservatism and outright white supremacy, making it very difficult for conservatives to police the boundaries between the two.

So long as Republicans and conservatives are unwilling to recognize this error — to reckon with the devil’s bargain they made decades ago, and the rationalizations they’ve deployed to justify it — they will be unable to prevent figures like Trump and Carlson from becoming a defining element of the conservative movement and Republican Party.

They will, in short, be complicit in the revival of a more naked form of white supremacy.