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Carlson’s forceful response,during his Monday night show, came amid ongoing scrutiny of his appearances on theBubba the Love Sponge Show. Carlson called into the Florida-based radio program “approximately an hour a week” from 2006 to 2011,according to the liberal group Media Matters for America.
Since Sunday, Media Matters has been publishing excerpts and clips of Carlson’s most startlingBubba the Love Sponge Showremarks, covering topics including gender, race and sexual abuse.
Among many examples:
Women, he said in October 2007, were “extremely primitive.” He described Martha Stewart’s daughter Alexis as “c—y” in May 2006 and, in 2007,he ridiculed a Miss Teen USA contestant.
“She’s so dumb, she’s like — she’s vulnerable. She’s like a wounded gazelle separated from the herd,” he said.
Asked if he ever thought about the contestant sexually, he initially demurred but later said, “I was thinking about tapping my foot next to her stall” — a reference to a clandestine bathroom hookup.
In December 2007, he said Oprah was “anti-man.” In August 2008, he called Paris Hilton and Britney Spears “two of the biggest white whores in America.”
That October,he said, “Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys — that’s why it wasn’t worth invading.”
Carlson worked at MSNBC as a host during the early years of his radio appearances but his show there was canceled in 2008. He joined Fox News in 2009,initially as a pundit.
On his show on Monday, Carlson said “the words were spoken in jest” and were “taken out of context, or in any case bear no resemblance to what [I] actually think or would want for the country.” He did not elaborate further.
The president’s sonDonald Trump Jr.echoed this defense on Twitter,retortingthatBubba The Love Spongewas “obviously a serious policy show where no satire would be made.”
However, when Carlson went on the show to discuss Jeffs, in September 2006, he sounded much more serious than on other episodes, where he adopted a tone of exaggerated (even playful) outrage.
“Arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old and a 27-year-old is not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her. That’s bullshit,” he said.
When host Bubba Clem challenged him (“That’s just a small little thing that they got him on”), Carlson pushed back.
“Since when do you believe everything the government says?” he said, later adding, “All of a sudden, like we’re very skeptical about everything until like some prosecutor comes out and says, ‘This guy’s bad,’ and the rest of us nod in agreement like a church choir, ‘Yeah, he’s bad.’ How do we know he’s bad? What do we know exactly? Nothing.”
In a 2009 appearance when Jeffs came up again, Carlson said, “I’m not for child rape” but that Jeff was “in prison because he’s weird and unpopular and he has a different lifestyle that other people find creepy.”
Jeffs’ accessory conviction in Utah was eventually overturned. But in 2012, hewas sentenced to life in prisonfor sexually assaulting two of his own underage brides, according to the Associated Press.
“The left’s main goal, in case you haven’t noticed, is controlling what you think,” he said.
“Going forward, we’ll be covering their efforts to make us be quiet,” he continued.
The previous day, he released a statement on Twitter:
“Media Matters caught me saying something naughty on a radio show more than a decade ago. Rather than express the usual ritual contrition, how about this: I’m on television every weeknight live for an hour. If you want to know what I think, you can watch. Anyone who disagrees with my views is welcome to come on and explain why.”
Speaking with PEOPLE, Media Matters President Angelo Carusone says the group has more audio to release but likely will not do so “for a little while.”
“We’ve largely been trying to find a way, because that’s our job, to tell a more effective story about Tucker Carlson’s promotion of white supremacy and misogyny,” Carusone says. (Washington Postcolumnist Erik Wempledrew a similar parallel, arguing Carlson’s radio show appearances were not materially different from what he’s said elsewhere.)
Of future audio of Carlson’s previous radio appearances, Carusone says, “There’s a ton.”
However, “There’s no way we’re going to release it all. I will not publish something that does not have relevancy,” he says.
He has no qualms about pressuring Fox News’ advertiser-based business model, which he says “commercializes” the kind of bigotry and bad faith that prevents any kind of necessary political dialogue between liberals and conservatives.
Carusone has also faced criticism, largely from conservative media outlets,who point to his own years-old remarks: In this case, blog posts that used offensive terms to describe transgender and Jewish people, among other things.
Carusone says those posts were part of a short-lived attempt at parodying right-wing extremism, but he acknowledges they can be harmful. He says the posts regularly resurface when Media Matters targets a conservative personality.
TheNational Review, in a characteristic treatment, called Carusone’s old posts“astonishing hypocrisy.”
Carlson said on his show that he has the full support of Fox News.
“We’ve always apologized when we’re wrong, and will continue to do that. That’s what decent people do. They apologize,” he said. “But we will never bow to the mob. Ever. No matter what.”
A network spokeswoman tells PEOPLE Carlson will be on the air this week and next, following earlier incorrect reports he was planning a vacation.
Asked for comment, the spokeswoman referred PEOPLE to Carlson’s statements on the controversy.
source: people.com
