By now you’ve likely heard a few of the choice quotes from the Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson recorded a few years ago on shock radio: Iraq is a “crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys;” “I love women, but they’re extremely primitive, they’re basic, they’re not that hard to understand;” and that Warren Jeffs, former head of the breakaway Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints who had a 12-year-old wife and is now serving a life sentence for assault and accomplice to rape, was only persecuted for being “unpopular” and living a “different lifestyle,” and that “The rapist, in this case, has made a lifelong commitment to love and take care of the person, so it is a little different.”
Carlson says he won’t apologize for being “caught saying something naughty…more than a decade ago.” Naughty? Of course he speaks naughty most of the time, for example just weeks ago he asserted that immigrants make the US “poorer and dirtier and more divided.”
Bret Stephens, the New York Times columnist who works hard to keep his fangs from showing in order to present an image of a Republican with a human face, echoed and supported David French of the National Review who wrote in response to Carlson, “Our nation cannot maintain its culture of free speech if we continue to reward those who seek to destroy careers rather than rebut ideas.”
Ah, yes. Let’s have a civil debate about whether a nation of people (from the Cradle of Civilization) are “semiliterate primitive monkeys,” or whether women are “primitive,” or whether a rapist who makes “a lifelong commitment to love and take care of the person,” is in fact rapist, or just a little different.
Kathleen Parker, Washington Post columnist and resident resectable reactionary, noted that Carlson’s advertisers were abandoning ship, and urged Tucker not to “Bow to the Mob.”
An Arizona social activist named Imraan Siddiqi responded to Brett Stephens: “Ilhan [Omar] quoted a Diddy lyric and you wrote 10 articles about it. Tucker called Iraqis monkeys—and those are “ideas,” to be “rebutted.”
Here is an account of my dinner with Tucker Carlson: https://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2017/05/my-dinner-with-tucker-carlson.html
Bill Ayers 