David French’s claim (National Review, 3/11/19) that no one was really offended by Tucker Carlson’s defense of raping 12-year-olds, or his calling Iraqis “primitive monkeys,” was described by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens as “astute as usual.”
A tweet (3/12/19) from New York Times columnist Bret Stephens approvingly quoted—calling it “astute as usual”—a statement from the National Review‘s David French (3/11/19): “Our nation cannot maintain its culture of free speech if we continue to reward those who seek to destroy careers rather than rebut ideas.”
Were French and Stephens defending Ilhan Omar? Julian Assange? Ha ha, of course not; they were speaking in support of Fox host Tucker Carlson, who is facing some pressure from advertisers after the group Media Matters released audio of him on shock radio from a few years back, saying things like Iraq is a “crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys.”
For champions of civility like Stephens, the problem for public discourse is not this sort of statement, but any suggestion that the public could be better served. As Arizona activist Imraan Siddiqi put it in a response tweet to Stephens:
Ilhan quoted a Diddy lyric and you wrote 10 articles about it. Tucker called Iraqis monkeys—and those are “ideas,” to be “rebutted.”
The Timesman isn’t the only one engaged in Carlson rehabilitation. The Washington Post, having already gifted readers with a Kathleen Parker column (3/12/19) headed “Tucker Carlson, Don’t Bow to the Mob,” published a March 13 news report that explained, “In one set of recordings, Carlson made controversial statements about child rape and comments that could be construed as misogynistic.” Which was followed immediately by Carlson’s quote:
If you’re talking to a feminist and she’s giving you, “Well, you know men really need to be more sensitive,” no actually, men don’t need to be more sensitive. You just need to be quiet and do what you’re told.
I reckon that could be construed as misogynistic, as could, just possibly, if one were inclined, Carlson’s comment that “I love women, but they’re extremely primitive, they’re basic, they’re not that hard to understand.” (The Post later edited the story to give it a different dodge, referring to “comments that some have called misogynistic.”)
As for his statements on child rape, they’re only “controversial” if one imagines a substantial block of folks that share his view that Warren Jeffs should be free. The former head of the breakaway Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Jeffs is serving a life sentence for assault and accomplice to rape for, for example, “arranging” a “marriage” between a 14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old cousin. Jeffs himself had a “wife” who was 12 years old, but that’s not really rape, Carlson explained: “The rapist, in this case, has made a lifelong commitment to love and take care of the person, so it is a little different.” Jeffs, Carlson maintains, was only persecuted for being “unpopular,” with a “different lifestyle.”
Carlson says he won’t apologize for being “caught saying something naughty…more than a decade ago.” Media Matters is clear that the tapes are relevant to the views of a host who just a couple months ago was saying immigrants make the US “poorer and dirtier and more divided.” Says the group’s president Angelo Carusone, “We were actually helping people better understand just how vile your current Fox News show is by showing what that worldview really looks like.”
What can you say about Tucker except that the guy is a tremendous p.o.s..
It’s like that old saying, “You can take the bowtie off the boy, but you can’t make him not be a gd evil dweeb.”
What would we do without “the liberal media”?
Be more liberal … ya think?
Bravo ! Tucker Carlson is such a snobbish, racist, stuck up bully
Is the outrage over Tucker Carlson related to his stupid comments from many years ago or to his good interviews with the likes of Stephen Cohen and Tulsi Gabbard and Max Blumenthal? I suspect the latter.
Hear, hear. I was thinking the same thing, mostly based on the warm welcome that the MSM has given Tulsi Gabbard with the role out of her presidential bid.
You suspicion is incorrect, since very few of us (ie; FAIR readers or liberals/progressives) ever watch that Carlson, so we have no knowledge of his interviews. For myself, it’s enough to know that he cloaks himself in the mantle of the National Review, a Wm F Buckley creation for the 1%, to know that he’s not worth watching/reading.
The sad, ugly world of our friends who prefer Fox ‘News.’
“Haha, of course not” solid journalism there. Wasn’t is Cronkit who pionered the journalistic misdirection approach of asking a question you know is incorrect, then ansewering your own intentionally misleading question yourself with “haha, of course not”. Do you have any concern for journslistic principals at all? Or, any sham? You are simply opinion, not eben close to being anything near unbiased facts at all. Journalists don’t ask questions in reals stories that they already know are incorrect because they introduced they factually incorrect notion into the piece in the 1st place then laugh at how stupid the notion THEY made up is. Of you had taken any journalism classes and turned in crap like this, it would get an f and an explanation.as to how far removed this is from journalism. Pathetic, unprofrssionel, biased, mocking tones. Solid jouralism there for sure.
So spot on. Any moron who can develop a website and work a keyboard. Is considered a journalist these days. And don’t get me started in what ‘Journalism schools’ are teaching these days. True journalism is gone and it’s because people go to these pathetic sites like this to read what they want to read and these the sites are trying to survive in a world where any monkey behind a keyboard can be called a journalist so they write crap like this to lure their audience and build click-bait revenue. What’s really sad is my Google news feed thought this was important for me to see…there in lies an even larger problem.
Has FOX NEWS lost their balls ?!
Don’t make me stop watching FOX
It’s all WE have !!!
Please please let’s find someone who write a non persuasive article.
A good journalist is someone who can write a piece and the reader does not know if the writer is L or R
tThis stuff is more TRASH
He didn’t defend child rape. The minister was marrying off jailbait teenage girls to adult men not a whole lot older than the girls. The marriages were consensual. He was mostly just saying that it’s not the same thing as grabbing a stranger off the streets and violently raping her, which is correct. Anyway, the 26 year old man marrying the 16 year old girl would be legal in many US states and most of the world. 14 year old girl and 19 year old guy is nothing. He’s not much older than she is. No one thinks stat rape is even rape, much less child rape. It’s typically consensual. It’s more properly called “illegal intercourse.”
I don’t think saying women are primitive and basic is misogynistic. I don’t agree with the statement, but it’s not hateful. It’s not even insulting. By the way, humans aren’t angels or saints. We’re dirty low-down mammals, as nasty as grizzly bears and mountain lions.
Telling her to be quiet and shut up isn’t misogyny. It seems more like sexism, and that’s not the same thing. Carlson seems sexist, but he’s been rewarded for it. He has a 3-digit lay count, so he must be doing something right. I think he was saying that instead of being more sensitive, it might work better to just act like a dominating sexist pig to your woman. Sadly, he might well be correct because women often do respond well to that type of mistreatment.
ILLEGAL immigrants have absolutely left the US poorer and dirtier. That’s beyond dispute. Not immigrants in general though.
The comments about Iraqis are straight up racism or bigotry, but they are sadly common, especially in wartime. Iraqis were killing our soldiers and my nations adopt hateful attitudes towards other countries whose armies are killing their own. Remember the world wars?
This is a whole lot about nothing. The Left Wing Outrage Machine gets old. Why don’t you focus on stuff that really matters?
Soooo.. just set the bar at 6” and revel in your abandon, eh? Inspirational words there —- nice exercise in apologetics. Maybe OJ needs an appeals lawyer team that you can join?
So Carlson has proven himself a bigoted asshole. It is no less true that “Our nation cannot maintain its culture of free speech if we continue to reward those who seek to destroy careers rather than rebut ideas.” It is doubtful, however, that there is such a culture to maintain in the U.S. or U.K., where a handful of bigoted billionaires controls the information that reaches the masses.
I like tucker even more after hearing this.. the Iraqis are primitive… fuck Islam…full of hate and bullshit . Dirty as mud people