In 2018, when blue-chip advertisers left Fox after Carlson declared on air that mass immigration made America “poor and dirtier”, Lachlan Murdoch, his effective boss, assured him there would be no consequences. Murdoch has told investors since then that Carlson’s original content for Fox Nation, Fox’s new streaming service, has increased subscriptions by 40 per cent.

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With such protection from the Murdochs, Carlson has doubled down. He has advocated the great replacement theory more than 400 times over the course of some 1100 shows and has introduced concepts such “legacy Americans” – a dog-whistle term to denote white, American-born people formerly only found on ultra-right-wing sites.

The great replacement theory, which has its antecedents in French anti-immigration writings and in Hitler’s extermination plans to protect “white civilisation”, holds that a cabal of global elites is trying to replace white populations using strategies such as mass immigration of allegedly high-fertility non-whites. The US version accuses Jews and Democrats of colluding to flood America with black and brown immigrants whose high birth rates and obedient voting patterns will create permanent majorities for the Democratic Party. White people will be “replaced”.

Carlson has created a new narrative, according to The New York Times, “recasting American racism to present white Americans as an oppressed caste. The ruling class uses fentanyl and other opioids to addict and kill legacy Americans, anti-white racism to cast them as bigots, feminism to degrade their self-esteem, immigration to erode their political power.”

Perhaps the first time many of us were confronted with this phenomenon was the tiki torch-wielding men who marched in the Unite the Right parade in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 shouting “Jews will not replace us”.

It has now been taken up by the Republican Party which, like Fox News, has gone totally Trump and made anti-immigration a core principle. Foremost among the rabid advocates is Elise Stefanik, a Harvard-educated formerly moderate member of Congress from upstate New York, who has been rewarded for her racism by replacing the anti-Trump Lyn Cheney as chair of the House Republican Conference, making her the third-ranking Republican in the House.

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Stefanik is a frequent visitor to the Mexican border and is a leading Republican voice in condemning non-white immigration.

On Monday, two days after publication of the Buffalo murderer’s 10-page manifesto that asserted “white genocide” will result from the high fertility rates of non-white immigrants, Stefanik tweeted: “Democrats desperately want wide open borders and mass amnesty for illegals allowing them to vote. Like the vast majority of Americans, Republicans want to secure our borders and protect election integrity.”

This is more than code. In the current political climate in the US, this comes perilously close to endorsement of racist theories that young men have used to justify their race-based murders.

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The toll for these murders is rising: Buffalo last Saturday, 10 killed; 2019 El Paso – 23; 2018 Tree of Life synagogue – 11; 2015 Charleston 9. That’s 53 such murders in seven years. But the count needs to also include the 51 murders in Christchurch in 2019 and the 77 in Norway in 2011, both of which were similarly racially motivated, and both served as inspirations for the American slaughters. That gives us a grim total of 181 deaths, stemming directly from an ideology that declares whites to be supreme.

Following Buffalo, Biden condemned white supremacy as “a poison running through our body politic”, and condemned those “who spread the lie for power, political game and for profit”. Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer went further, writing to Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch: “I urge you to immediately cease the reckless amplification of the so-called ‘Great ‘Replacement’ theory on your network’s broadcasts.” At time of writing, the Murdochs had not responded.

Anne Summers is a writer and columnist who has recently returned from living in the United States.