Tucker Carlson spent a third day attacking left wing critics and Media Matters for America on Wednesday evening, this time zeroing in on newly resurfaced blog posts from the organization’s president Angelo Carusone.
“Carusone is himself an enthusiastic bigot,” Carlson said on his Fox News primetime show. “We know this for sure because he has written about it extensively. It turns out for years Carusone maintained a racist blog.”
The Fox News host then read a number of excerpts from Cauronse’s blog from more than a decade ago. In one post called “tranny paradise,” Carusone mocked a Bangladeshi man who had been assaulted in Thailand by a group of male prostitutes. In another, he attempted to explain his longtime boyfriend’s conservative leanings by noting his “possession of several bags of Jewish gold.”
“Jewish gold,” Carlson said. “According to Angelo Carusone, Jewish gold is a problem. Media Matters probably ought to issue a press release about this. They’ve done a lot more for a lot less.”
The story on Carusone’s blog was reported on Wednesday in the Daily Caller — a paper co-founder by Carlson in 2010.
Carusone addressed the issue during an appearance at a Media Matters sponsored protest outside of Fox News on Wednesday.
“That entire exercise on our website was a satirical parody of a right wing blow hard,” Carusone told TheWrap. “The entire thing was a caricature of what a right wing blow hard would sound like if he was living my life. It wasn’t a very good effort. I did it for two months and I stopped. It was a parody.”
“Tucker Carlson and Fox News should be grateful that Media Matters is as fair as we are because there’s a ton of stuff that we didn’t publish,” Carusone added.
On Sunday and Monday, the non-profit liberal watchdog group dropped multiple recordings of Carlson making embarrassing remarks on the radio show of Florida shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge. Among the most notable were calling television host Alexis Stewart “c–ty,” saying Iraqis were “primitive semi-literate monkeys,” and various other disparaging remarks toward women in general.
The drop was explicitly designed to put pressure on Carlson’s current and prospective advertisers and to continue an exodus which has seen dozens of sponsors leave the program in recent months. In a statement on Sunday, the host conceded to “naughty” language but refused to apologize, saying he was happy to have anyone who was aggrieved by what he thought on his show.
In a monologue Monday, he added that his network stood resolutely behind him.
“Fox News is behind us, as they have been since the very first day. Toughness is a rare quality at a TV network, and we are grateful for that,” Carlson said. “We will never bow to the mob, ever, no matter what.”