Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Older Recordings Of Tucker Carlson Surface: Publicly Supporting Child Rapists & Saying Rape Shield Laws Are "Totally Unfair" (Plus Racist Shit, Of Course)

Meet The 24-Year-Old Who Found The Tucker Carlson Tapes
Eli Rosenberg, Washington Post, March 17, 2019
Madeline Peltz works the night shift at the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America. Given the timing of that particular shift, one of her main responsibilities is watching Tucker Carlson's 8 p.m. show on Fox News.

And she's watched a lot of Tucker Carlson. . . .

Peltz dug into his recent past and discovered a trove of appearances he made on shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge's radio show between 2006 and 2011. She found a series of misogynistic, racist and homophobic remarks Carlson made, the audio of which Media Matters published this week.

In response, Carlson was defiant, casting himself as the victim of "the great American outrage machine," a mob of power-seeking organizations and people he says are waging a political war to censor him.

In reality, credit for the tapes' publication is due to Peltz: a 20-something in her first adult job who lives in the basement of a D.C. house she rents with five other people, a few cats and a dog named Noodles. . . .

The organization released the first audio of Carlson on Sunday. In that, Carlson called rape shield laws "totally unfair" and was adamantly supportive of Warren Jeffs, the former leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who is serving a life sentence for child rape. Carlson also said he would "love" a scenario involving young girls sexually experimenting and described women as "extremely primitive."

The next day, Media Matters for America released another audio file just moments after Carlson's show began. In that, Carlson said that white men deserve credit for "creating civilization," called Iraqis a bunch of "semiliterate primitive monkeys," and spoke about his desire for a presidential candidate to blame the "lunatic Muslims who are behaving like animals."

There was more on Tuesday. This time, Carlson could be heard joking about having sex with someone he thought was an underage beauty pageant contestant.

On his Tuesday night show, Carlson . . . took aim at Media Matters, calling it "a George Soros-funded lobbying organization whose sole mission is to punish critics of the Democratic Party." . . .

While Carlson described Media Matters as working to "bully" corporations, it is a fraction of the size of Fox News, whose revenue for 2018 has been estimated to be more than $3 billion. Media Matters has about 80 employees and a budget of about $14 million that mostly comes from private donors, Carusone said. . . .

Carlson has responded by attacking Media Matters for America . . . He has also been engaged in a long-running feud with CNN; on Tuesday he called anchor Brian Stelter a "eunuch" multiple times, name-calling that was omitted from the text of his monologue later posted on the Fox News website. . . .

Peltz said there's no doubt in her mind that Carlson has been trying to "thread the needle of mainstreaming overt white nationalism" while also avoiding the consequences for it. She cited well-publicized instances: when Carlson said in December that immigration was making the country "dirtier," and another segment in which Carlson claimed the South African government was seizing land from white owners, simply because they were white. Carlson has defended that story.

Peltz said she believes the extremism has been escalating.

"It's clear in the editorial choices that he makes that he covers demographic change as basically the end of white people," Peltz said. "As someone with one of the largest platforms in media, he frequently portrays himself as a victim. And that's a long tactic of white nationalists, going back all the way to the civil rights struggle in the South." . . .

Media Matters says it has more material . . .

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