Fox News’ Tucker Carlson slammed Media Matters president Angelo Carusone on Wednesday over racist, anti-Semitic, and bigoted writings from his past.
Carlson’s segment came after Carusone released audio tapes of Carlson from radio interviews he was on over a decade ago in which Carlson made unsavory remarks.
Carusone made disparaging remarks about Jews, transgender people, Bangladeshi nationals, Japanese nationals, and praised a former leader in the Ku Klux Klan.
Carlson also noted that MSNBC’s Chris Hayes did not ask Carusone about his bigoted writings when he had Carusone on his show earlier this week.
WATCH:
Transcript:
Chris Hayes is an anchor over on MSNBC. The one with the glasses. Hayes’ political views aren’t very interesting: Cringing hipster sensitivity, burnished with low-grade academic buzzwords. Pretty banal stuff. But Hayes always seemed like a decent guy personally. He didn’t seem like a hater. It was hard to imagine him promoting open racism or anti-Semitism. Or at least it was, until the other night. That’s when Hayes invited a man called Angelo Carusone onto his show. Carusone runs Media Matters. Almost every day he issues outrage press releases accusing other people of bigotry. And yet, because everything is irony, Carusone is himself an enthusiastic bigot. We know this for sure because he’s written about it extensively.
It turns out that for years Carusone maintained a racist blog. One post, entitled quote, “Tranny Paradise,” addressed a crime story from Thailand. A Bangladeshi man had been robbed and assaulted by a group of male prostitutes dressed as women. Carusone objected to the idea this was even a story and ridiculed south Asians as inherently ugly and poor. Quote: “Is the writer a tranny lover too? Or, perhaps he’s trying to justify how these trannies tricked this Bangladeshi in the first place? Look man, we don’t need to know whether or not they were attractive. The f-ing guy was Bangladeshi…. What the hell was he doing with $7,300 worth of stuff? The guy’s Bangladeshi!” End quote.
In another post Carusone described how a male coach at a Japanese high school had sexually abused female players. People in Japan were horrified by this, understandably. Carusone was not. His advice: quote, “lighten up, Japs.” Later that month, Carusone, by now in a frenzy of racism, heaped praise on a former Ku Klux Klan leader.
In still another post from the same period, Carusone described a Jewish man as being handsome, quote, “despite his Jewry.” Carusone didn’t like the man’s political views, but attributed them to quote, “his possession of several bags of Jewish gold.”
Jewish gold. According to Angelo Carusone, Jewish gold is a problem. Media Matters probably ought to to issue a press release about this. They’ve done a lot more for a lot less.
And yet somehow – and this is the remarkable part – Chris Hayes managed to pretend that none of this ever happened. Hayes never mentioned the Jewish gold. He never said a word about the Japs, or the trannies, or the Klan, or even those dirty Bangladeshis who deserve what they get, no matter what the tranny lovers say. None of that. Instead, Hayes gave cover to Carusone’s bigotry and anti-Semitism. Amazingly, he even directed his viewers to Carusone’s website.
Pretty amazing. If a guy with a history of ranting about “Jewish gold” came on your show, would you ask him about it, would you challenge him on it? How could you not? You’d feel morally obligated. But Chris Hayes didn’t. That tells you a lot. Now to be clear, we’re not calling for either of these people to be imprisoned or executed, or even fired from their high-paying jobs. We’re not planning to organize an advertiser boycott against them. We won’t picket their offices with bullhorns. We won’t attack their children. But we do think you should know what they’re really like. And in Chris Hayes’s case it’s kind of depressing to find out – turns out you never really know who people are.