Tucker Carlson’s Ultra-Misogynistic Clips Appear on Video

**Content warning: Extreme misogyny, child abuse, rape, Tucker Carlson**

The rightwing media watchdog group Media Matters for America dropped a compilation of clips from old Tucker Carlson radio appearances Sunday night. I didn’t know it was possible to find Carlson any more disgusting, but here we are.

The clips are from a gross shock-jock show called Bubba the Love Sponge, on which Carlson was a regular guest.

The compilation is a smorgasbord of misogyny.

“I love women, but they’re extremely primitive, they’re basic, they’re not that hard to understand,” he said in one segment.

“I feel sorry for unattractive women,” he said, speaking about Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. “I mean it’s nothing they did, you know?” He also said, “there’s no Canadian woman that you’d want to pay to sleep with.”

He called Britney Spears and Paris Hilton “two of the biggest white whores in America” in response to another co-host talking about “miscegenation.”

He said he supported 2008 Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson because “Anybody who answers ‘my trophy wife is my favorite possession’ is my hero. I don’t give a shit. I’m voting for the guy.”

He said that “what gets women going is arguing with them” about politics, especially feminism. “If you’re talking to a feminist, and she’s given you, ‘Well, men really need to be more sensitive,’ [say] no, actually, men don’t need to be more sensitive. You just need to be quiet and kind of do what you’re told.”

There’s a lot more, including repeatedly calling Lexie Stewart “cunty” (a word he had such outrage over when Samantha Bee used it) and saying “If it weren’t my daughter, I would love that scenario” when talking about fantasies of lesbian experimentation at his 14-year-old child’s boarding school.

But maybe–maybe; he gives himself a lot of competition here–the grossest thing he says is the way he expresses anger over the imprisonment of Warren Jeffs, the former president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a cult that encouraged plural marriage, including marriage to underage girls. Jeffs was on the FBI’s most wanted fugitives list and arrested in 2006. He’s serving a life sentence for charges of rape and accomplice to rape. Tucker thinks that’s a shame.

Here’s the exchange:

CO-HOST: Yeah, that’s what Warren Jeffs’ in prison for. He’s not in prison for polygamy, he’s in prison for child rape.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, actually, he’s not in prison for that. He didn’t — Warren Jeffs didn’t marry underaged girls, actually.

CO-HOST: No, he’s in prison for facilitation of child rape.

CARLSON: Whatever the hell that means.

CO-HOST: That means that —

CARLSON: He’s in prison because he’s weird and unpopular and he has a different lifestyle that other people find creepy.

CO-HOST: No, he is an accessory to the rape of children. That is a felony and a serious one at that.

CARLSON: What do you mean an accessory? He’s like got some weird religious cult where he thinks it’s OK to, you know, marry underaged girls, but he didn’t do it. Why wouldn’t the guy who actually did it, who had sex with an underaged girl, he should be the one who’s doing life.

He went on to say that Jeffs is “not accused of touching anybody; he is accused of facilitating a marriage between a 16-year-old girl and a 27-year-old man.” For one thing, that’s not true. Jeffs was convicted of raping his own “wives,” aged 12 and 15. A number of his own nieces and nephews also accused him of raping them when they were very young.

But according to Carlson, marrying and raping a young girl “is not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her” because marriage includes a “commitment.”

What are the odds that Carlson is one of those people who don’t believe marital rape exists? From the sound of it, I’d guess high.

CARLSON: Look, just to make it absolutely clear. I am not defending underage marriage at all. I just don’t think it’s the same thing exactly as pulling a child from a bus stop and sexually assaulting that child.

CO-HOST: Yeah, it’s — you know what it is? It’s much more planned out and plotted.

THE LOVE SPONGE: Yeah, it should be almost — you almost should put a premeditation —

CARLSON: Wait, wait! Hold on a second. The rapist, in this case, has made a lifelong commitment to live and take care of the person, so it is a little different. I mean, let’s me honest about it.

Media Matters has even more horrific quotes on their website.

After the video went viral, Carlson is refusing to apologize. It would be really easy for him to say that those clips from a decade ago don’t reflect his views now, or that he was playing up a persona for a gross shock jock show. Instead, he thinks we should … watch him more?

#FireTuckerCarlson and #BoycottTuckerCarlson are both trending online, but neither of those things are likely. This is the image Carlson has spent more than a decade building. It’s why Fox news hired him, it would be shocking if it were also why they fired him.

As for boycotting him, again, his words here are disgusting but they’re nothing new. If you’re not already boycotting him, is this really going to be the thing that changes your mind?

Of course, there is another option. There are plenty of companies that make money off of Tucker and his show and if you feel passionately about his terrible words, it’s worth thinking twice about supporting them.

Also, if you’re in New York, Media Matters is hosting a protest outside of Fox News’ headquarters this coming Wednesday afternoon. If you attend, make sure to let us know.

(via Media Matters, image: Rich Polk/Getty Images for Politicon)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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