Currently, Fox News' Tucker Carlson is on a totally-planned-and-not-at-all-strategic vacation after dismissing the growing threat of white supremacist terror in the United States as a "hoax" and "not a real problem." The comment, which managed to be surprising even on a show as routinely riddled with white nationalist talking points as Carlson's, has had a surge of advertisers dropping Tucker's show.

Now, I could write for hours on the idiocy and lack of self-awareness incarnate that is Tucker Carlson (and I probably will sometime). But for the time being, I want to focus on his extraordinarily bad take because, as currently unpalatable as it is in the wake of the El Paso massacre, it's a view stubbornly clung to by far too many.

Carlson starts his argument by claiming that "the combined membership of every white supremacist organization in this country would fit inside a college football stadium." Ignoring the fact that,

1) Even that's a few thousand too many white supremacists for anyone's liking, Tucker, and,

2) The association between the sheer numbers of a group and the threat they pose isn't linear, this reasoning is so flawed as to be irrelevant.

Many people, Tucker included, still consider the only real white supremacists as KKK members or card-carrying skinheads. But in the Internet age, these terrorists can be radicalized anonymously, without having to formally join any kind of organization. In short, gauging the threat white nationalists face by membership numbers is dumb.

And if white supremacy is a "hoax," then it's a pretty damn lethal one. Right-wing extremists accounted for the majority of extremist violence in 2018, to the point where every radicalized murderer had had ties to a right-wing movement at some point in time.

Now I know that none of these facts are new and I'm not saying anything particularly mind-blowing. But it frustrates me to no end that, despite clear, concise, quantitative evidence demonstrating the threat these people pose, some (Tucker Carlson included) refuse to acknowledge it because it makes them uncomfortable. The prevalence of this kind of terrorism is forcing people to confront some of their preconceptions about who is and isn't dangerous. The post-9/11 understanding of terrorism was that the threat was other — now, with that understanding changing as the threat of right-wing extremism comes to the forefront, we have to accept the fact that extremism can come in many forms.

While that's obviously an uncomfortable realization, not accepting it isn't really a choice. No matter what some guy on Fox says, or what people on Twitter want to believe, white supremacy is a real danger in the United States. Not wanting to believe that it is doesn't diminish it, in fact, it adds to the danger. Willful ignorance of this issue leads to less emphasis on it which leads to people actively dying as no action is taken against these terrorists.