Tucker Carlson's specious non-apology

The Fox News host is not a victim of the "outrage machine." He is a conductor.

Tucker Carlson.
(Image credit: Illustrated | REUTERS/Lucas Jackson, 3000ad/iStock, Strawberry Blossom/iStock)

Tucker Carlson was caught, in his telling, "saying something naughty on a radio show more than a decade ago."

The naughtiness in question was not a single something but a litany of execrable comments about women ("they're extremely primitive; they're basic; they're not that hard to understand"), Hillary Clinton ("so strongly anti-penis"), teenage girls' sexual experimentation ("If it weren't my daughter, I would love that scenario"), the ideal immigrant ("Be hot, be really smart"), Iraq ("a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys"), and more.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.