Tucker Carlson's Old Misogynistic & Offensive Comments Resurface. He Calls Critics Hypocritical 'Mob.'

Tucker Carlson Not Apologizing After Audio of Offensive Comments

After a progressive media organization dug up years’ worth of his incendiary old comments from a shock jock’s radio show, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said he would not apologize and would not back down from his “mob” of critics — who have “been working hard to kill” his show since the beginning.

Carlson’s forceful response, during his Monday night show, came amid ongoing scrutiny of his appearances on the Bubba the Love Sponge Show. Carlson called into the Florida-based radio program “approximately an hour a week” from 2006 to 2011, according to the liberal group Media Matters for America.

Since Sunday, Media Matters has been publishing excerpts and clips of Carlson’s most startling Bubba the Love Sponge Show remarks, covering topics including gender, race and sexual abuse.

The audio published by Media Matters shows Carlson, among other incidents, denigrating women and the Middle East, jokingly using a gay slur and defending Warren Jeffs, a polygamist leader and convicted sexual abuser.

Among many examples:

Women, he said in October 2007, were “extremely primitive.” He described Martha Stewart’s daughter Alexis as “c—y” in May 2006 and, in 2007, he ridiculed a Miss Teen USA contestant.

“She’s so dumb, she’s like — she’s vulnerable. She’s like a wounded gazelle separated from the herd,” he said.

Asked if he ever thought about the contestant sexually, he initially demurred but later said, “I was thinking about tapping my foot next to her stall” — a reference to a clandestine bathroom hookup.

In December 2007, he said Oprah was “anti-man.” In August 2008, he called Paris Hilton and Britney Spears “two of the biggest white whores in America.”

That October, he said, “Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys — that’s why it wasn’t worth invading.”

Carlson worked at MSNBC as a host during the early years of his radio appearances but his show there was canceled in 2008. He joined Fox News in 2009, initially as a pundit.

On his show on Monday, Carlson said “the words were spoken in jest” and were “taken out of context, or in any case bear no resemblance to what [I] actually think or would want for the country.” He did not elaborate further.

The president’s son Donald Trump Jr. echoed this defense on Twitter, retorting that Bubba The Love Sponge was “obviously a serious policy show where no satire would be made.”

However, when Carlson went on the show to discuss Jeffs, in September 2006, he sounded much more serious than on other episodes, where he adopted a tone of exaggerated (even playful) outrage.

But he seemed to view Jeffs’ case as an example of government overreach. Authorities said Jeffs was an accessory to rape because he arranged marriages between underage girls and adult men in his group. Carlson argued the charges against Jeffs were “bull—“

“Arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old and a 27-year-old is not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her. That’s bullshit,” he said.

When host Bubba Clem challenged him (“That’s just a small little thing that they got him on”), Carlson pushed back.

“Since when do you believe everything the government says?” he said, later adding, “All of a sudden, like we’re very skeptical about everything until like some prosecutor comes out and says, ‘This guy’s bad,’ and the rest of us nod in agreement like a church choir, ‘Yeah, he’s bad.’ How do we know he’s bad? What do we know exactly? Nothing.”

Carlson noted he believed Jeffs’ religious practices were “disgusting” and “immoral” but made a libertarian’s argument for polygamy: “If you’re, like, for the government butting out of the bedroom and for gay marriage, and for the right of strip clubs to operate unimpeded by governments — how exactly can you be against polygamy?”

Carlson’s comments were made on Sept. 5, 2006, a few days after Jeffs was taken into custody.

In a 2009 appearance when Jeffs came up again, Carlson said, “I’m not for child rape” but that Jeff was “in prison because he’s weird and unpopular and he has a different lifestyle that other people find creepy.”

Jeffs’ accessory conviction in Utah was eventually overturned. But in 2012, he was sentenced to life in prison for sexually assaulting two of his own underage brides, according to the Associated Press.

On his show on Monday, Carlson did not address his previous comments in detail. Instead, he framed the issue around what he called the “outrage machine” and said he was being hypocritically pursued by liberals who wanted to silence him. There would be no point in regret or an apology, he said. So he didn’t offer one.

“The left’s main goal, in case you haven’t noticed, is controlling what you think,” he said.

“Going forward, we’ll be covering their efforts to make us be quiet,” he continued.

The previous day, he released a statement on Twitter:

“Media Matters caught me saying something naughty on a radio show more than a decade ago. Rather than express the usual ritual contrition, how about this: I’m on television every weeknight live for an hour. If you want to know what I think, you can watch. Anyone who disagrees with my views is welcome to come on and explain why.”

Speaking with PEOPLE, Media Matters President Angelo Carusone says the group has more audio to release but likely will not do so “for a little while.”

“We’ve largely been trying to find a way, because that’s our job, to tell a more effective story about Tucker Carlson’s promotion of white supremacy and misogyny,” Carusone says. (Washington Post columnist Erik Wemple drew a similar parallel, arguing Carlson’s radio show appearances were not materially different from what he’s said elsewhere.)

Of future audio of Carlson’s previous radio appearances, Carusone says, “There’s a ton.”

However, “There’s no way we’re going to release it all. I will not publish something that does not have relevancy,” he says.

He has no qualms about pressuring Fox News’ advertiser-based business model, which he says “commercializes” the kind of bigotry and bad faith that prevents any kind of necessary political dialogue between liberals and conservatives.

Carusone has also faced criticism, largely from conservative media outlets, who point to his own years-old remarks: In this case, blog posts that used offensive terms to describe transgender and Jewish people, among other things.

Carusone says those posts were part of a short-lived attempt at parodying right-wing extremism, but he acknowledges they can be harmful. He says the posts regularly resurface when Media Matters targets a conservative personality.

The National Review, in a characteristic treatment, called Carusone’s old posts “astonishing hypocrisy.”

Carlson said on his show that he has the full support of Fox News.

“We’ve always apologized when we’re wrong, and will continue to do that. That’s what decent people do. They apologize,” he said. “But we will never bow to the mob. Ever. No matter what.”

A network spokeswoman tells PEOPLE Carlson will be on the air this week and next, following earlier incorrect reports he was planning a vacation.

Asked for comment, the spokeswoman referred PEOPLE to Carlson’s statements on the controversy.