And called women “primitive”
Carlson once told Bubba, during one of their many calls, that “what gets women going is arguing with them.” “It’s true,” he said. “You debate politics with a woman and just go—just full-blown out there, especially feminism. If you’re talking to a feminist, and she’s giving you, ‘Well, men really need to be more sensitive,’ (say) ‘No, actually, men don’t need to be more sensitive, you just need to be quiet and kind of do what you’re told.’”
A year later Carlson elaborated his stance. “I love women, but they’re extremely primitive,” he said. “They’re basic, they’re not that hard to understand. And one of the things they hate more than anything is weakness in a man.”
When he said the concept of sexual harassment was “made up”
Memorably, during a 2006 segment with Democratic strategist Steve McMahon on his now defunct MSNBC show Tucker, Carlson posited his belief that sexual harassment is a concept “made up” by Democrats.
“This is a group that made up the concept of sexual harassment,” Carlson said of the political party. “‘You look great today.’ ‘Boom, I’m charging you with a crime.’”
Carlson even made a now loaded joke at his own party’s expense. “You want a sex scandal? The Republican party, baby, that’s where you go,” he said.
And claimed COVID-19 “feminizes” people
In an on-air comment to British broadcaster and former Brexit Party politician Nigel Farage in 2021, Carlson gave credence to a rumor that contracting (and subsequently being treated for) COVID-19 had “weakened” British prime minister Boris Johnson.
“So somebody who knows him told me―and I’d be interested in getting your take on this―that getting COVID emasculated him, it changed him, it feminized him, it weakened him as a man,” Carlson said.
Farage dismissed the rumor, saying he thought the prime minister had been “very seriously ill.”
“But the virus itself—this is true―does tend to take away the life force in some people, I notice,” Carlson insisted. “I mean, it does feminize people. No one ever says that, but it’s true.”
When he admitted to hating liberal women
In a 2022 conversation with Ben Smith for the news platform Semefor, Carlson defended himself against an accusation of racism by clarifying that he’s “not mad at Black people,” but rather “well-educated white liberals.” And in particular, white liberal women.
“In my mind, the sort of archetype of a person I don’t like is a 38-year-old female white lawyer with a barren personal life,” Carlson explained.
When he blamed feminism for mass shootings
In his coverage of the Highland Park shooting last year, Carlson—a champion of male empowerment—offered up a truly rancid take on the suspected shooter’s possible motivations. On air, he waxed poetic about the alleged shooter’s plight as an “alienated young” man adrift in America, where “endless psychotropic drugs that are handed out at every school in the country by crackpots posing as counselors” and “the authorities in their lives—mostly women—never stop lecturing them about their so-called privilege.”
