Samantha Bee offered her two cents on the Tucker Carlson imbroglio currently engulfing Fox News on Wednesday, saying that the host’s old disparaging remarks towards women and Iraqis is probably what got him his job at the network.
“That is vile and disgusting and presumably the audition tape that got him a job interview at Fox,” Bee said during the monologue of her TBS show “Full Frontal. “Tucker Carlson publicly advocated a genocide while promoting his MSNBC show?”
On set, Bee played several of the most damaging moments from the Carlson audio released by Media Matters this week.
“I love women, but they’re extremely primitive. They’re basic,” Carlson said in one moment during his collected appearances on Florida shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge’s radio show.
“If there were a Democrat to come out in the 2008 election and say, ‘you know what the problem is, it’s these lunatic Muslims who are behaving like animals and I am going to kill as many of them as I can if you’d elect me.’ I’d vote for you if you said that,” he added, during another moment on the show.
He also said Iraq was a place filled with “semi-literate primitive monkeys.”
Bee has a personal bone to pick with Carlson. In May 2018, the host attacked her on air after the comedian called Ivanka Trump a “feckless c–.” Carlson said he was stunned by Bee’s use of the term and said it just wasn’t a word that should be in anyone’s vocabulary.
“That one word that [Bee] used. I don’t know any man who uses that word because it is kind of the one word that is actually degrading,” Carlson told radio host Tammy Bruce on his own show. “It’s the thing that feminists are always telling us. That word really is.”
Among the many things Carlson was quoted saying on Bubba’s show was a pointed jab at television host Alexis Stewart, who he called “c–ty.”
Bee later apologized for using the word toward Ivanka. Tucker, however, has remained defiant. In a statement Sunday, he refused to concede wrongdoing and said anyone aggrieved should come on his show. Fox News has stood resolutely behind him throughout.