‘If it weren’t my daughter, I’d love it’: in crude audio, Fox host Tucker Carlson praises 14-year-old girls sexually experimenting, defends child marriage, slurs ‘white whores’
- Tucker Carlson and Fox News are facing a fierce backlash over his conversations with radio shock-jock ‘Bubba the Love Sponge’
- Carlson calls Paris Hilton and Britney Spears ‘the biggest white whores in America’, and discusses other prominent women in degrading terms
Unearthed recordings of TV host Tucker Carlson making vulgar and sexist remarks, defending statutory rape and repeatedly using a crude reference to female genitals have led to calls for Fox News to fire the evening host.
Fuelled by the hashtag #FireTuckerCarlson, the backlash comes as the conservative network is taking heat for comments made by another of its top hosts, Jeanine Pirro, which led to a rare rebuke of talent by Fox News.
On Sunday, the watchdog group Media Matters for America, which is devoted to correcting conservative misinformation in the US media, resurfaced numerous call-in appearances Carlson made on a radio show hosted by a shock-jock known as between 2006 and 2011.
Transcripts and a montage of the audio recordings feature Carlson degrading women based on their looks and sex appeal. He also slurs several prominent women, including Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, Martha Stewart’s daughter Alexis Stewart, and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
He calls Paris Hilton and Britney Spears “the biggest white whores in America”. HuffPost founder Arianna Huffington he calls “a pig”.
Discussing a situation in which classmates of his 14-year-old daughter are sexually experimenting with each other at boarding school, Carlson says: “If it weren't my daughter I would love that scenario.”
Sex with underage girls in an arranged marriages is “not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her,” he says on a different occasion. “The rapist, in this case, has made a lifelong commitment to live and take care of the person, so it is a little different,” he says.
He also praises a 13-year-old boy who was molested by a teacher. “Could you sleep with a 165-pound woman 28 times in one week? Are you physically capable of doing that or do you take your hat off to this kid?” Carlson says.
The recordings mostly hail from the time Carlson was a conservative political commentator for MSNBC, where he worked from 2005 to 2008. In 2009, he joined Fox News, on which he hosts live five nights a week.
As #FireTuckerCarlson gained traction Sunday night, Carlson took to Twitter to address the recordings. But rather than “express the usual ritual of contrition,” he advised people to watch his show and invited anyone who disagrees with his views “to come on and explain why.”
Representatives for Fox News did not respond to a request for comment on Carlson.
Carlson came under fire in late 2018 after he made on-air comments that described mass immigration as making the country “poorer and dirtier and more divided.” Advertisers such as Lexus, Pfizer, Takeda, Voya Financial, IHOP, Jaguar, Pacific Life, Ancestry and SodaStream publicly said they removed their advertisements from his show. The network stood by him then.
Though Fox News has not yet commented on Carlson, it condemned Pirro, who drew criticism over the weekend for her remarks about Represetative Ilhan Omar’s hijab and whether the Minnesota Democrat’s religious beliefs opposed the Constitution.
“We strongly condemn Jeanine Pirro’s comments about Representative Ilhan Omar,” the network said in a statement. “They do not reflect those of the network and we have addressed the matter with her directly.”
Omar thanked Fox News for its response on Monday, tweeting: “No one’s commitment to our constitution should be questioned because of their faith or country of birth.”
