He’s only asking questions. Ones to which the answer is no
I’m done with Tucker Carlson. We were told that post-Fox he would be brave and unleashed, yet his commentary turns out to be desperately safe. To an untrained eye, interviewing Andrew Tate, promoting UFOs and denouncing Volodymyr Zelensky looks pretty maverick, but this is exactly the stuff you need to do to generate a regular income in the right-wing ecosphere. The circus-goer in me loves it; the sceptic in me can see the wires and mirrors.
Let’s start with the Andrew Tate interview, posted on Twitter. Tate is a hyper-macho lifestyle guru (ie, any excuse to take his top off) accused by the Romanian government of human trafficking, of using the “loverboy” method to dupe girls into producing pornographic material for social media (he denies everything). Given that the key charge here is psychological manipulation, asking him softball questions – “do you see the hand of God in your life?” – and taking his answers at face value is akin to sitting down with Ted Bundy and asking how such a nice young man ended up in jail.
“Make up your own mind,” Carlson advised the audience. But the only way you could fairly do that is if Carlson had probed Tate about past allegations of sexual abuse, misogynistic statements or that he once offered a PhD program – short for Pimping Hos Degree – that included this helpful summary of its method: “meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she’s quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she’d do anything I’d say, and then get her on webcam so we could become rich together.”
Many men are addicted to porn, revealed Tate; so why, allegedly, did he produce so much of it? He is “helping men resist slave programming,” he asserted; but enslavement is what he is accused of doing to women. The elites’ goal is to turn men into eunuchs, Tate declared, and Carlson said, “I think I buy that.” How easily a mind is made up!