Tucker Carlson Tapes Go Racist: Newly-Released Recordings Reference ‘Semi-Literate, Primitive Monkeys’

The bad news keeps coming for embattled Fox News personality Tucker Carlson as more recordings of his mid-2000s on-air rantings have taken a racist turn, according to a report in HuffPost. The report cites newly-released recordings of the host of Tucker Carlson Tonight unearthed by media watchdog group Media Matters, on which the right-wing firebrand can be heard openly advocating for a racist president a decade before President Donald Trump was elected. Carlson can also be heard referring to Muslims with disparaging hate speech, attacking the Obamas, and saying that Afghanistan “is never going to be a civilized country” because its people “aren’t civilized.” At one point Carlson refers to Canadians as “semi-literate, primitive monkeys.”

Between 2006 and 2011, Carlson was a weekly guest on the shock-jock radio show Bubba the Love Sponge, on which he and the hosts would egg each other on with ever more racist and misogynistic remarks, tossing red meat to the show’s hard-right audience. Carlson was hired by Fox News in 2009 but continued to appear on the show for another two years.

On one of the new recordings, Carlson says he would be open to supporting any candidate, even a Democrat, if he were openly anti-Muslim.

“I think he’d need to say, ‘Look, I’m a bigot. OK, I’m a bigot. I don’t like Islamic extremists,'” Carlson said. “I’d vote for you if you said that.”

The latest recordings were released just a day after Carlson drew wide-ranging fire for misogynistic comments in which he defended men marrying child brides, called Martha Stewart’s daughter Alexa “c***ty,” and said that Britney Spears and Paris Hilton were the biggest “white whores” in America. The new tapes pivot to a slew of offensive racial canards, including one exchange in which Carlson agrees with the hosts that having Michelle Obama in the White House as first lady could present problems because she “turns into a sister.” In another riff, the hosts joke with Carlson about how he would lose to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama at basketball because he’s black.

“I don’t know how Black [Obama] is, but I’m sure he’s a good basketball player — he says he is, anyway.”

On another recording, Carlson can be heard criticizing Obama for supposedly playing the “race card,” while at the same time suggesting he only got as far as he did in politics due to his skin color.

“Everybody knows that Barack Obama would still be in the state Senate in Illinois if he were white.”

Carlson also slams immigrants, suggesting that people who “come over and pick lettuce” provide less value to the nation and should be able to put something better on the table if they want to emigrate.

“Yeah, there’s some really good, I mean, immigrants,” Carlson said.

“I just think it’s, you know, people who come to this country ought to have something to offer. Be hot, [or] be really smart, you know?”

The new recordings were released as pressure continues to mount for a boycott against corporate sponsors of Carlson’s show, which include Mitsubishi, Proctor & Gamble, Ford, and Capital One.