TheQuartering [7/12/2023]
Tucker Carlson has stoked fury once again as he showered Andrew Tate with praise in an interview with the ‘influencer’ – claiming the sex trafficking charges against him were dreamt up by ‘Epstein’s dinner partners’.
The former Fox News host, 54, flew to Romania to sit down for a two-and-a-half-hour-long interview with Tate as part of his new Tucker On Twitter series.
The interview comes after Tate, 36, and his brother Tristan were last month indicted on human trafficking and rape charges in Romania after their initial arrest at the end of last year.
Carlson previously called Tate’s arrest a ‘conspiracy’ and ‘human rights violation’.
Now, he has sparked outrage after the release of his interview with Tate, which has racked up more than 40 million views.
Many critics have slammed Carlson for the interview, accusing him of not ‘fact checking anything he said’ and of ‘singing the praises of an accused rapist’.
However, while many hit out, Elon Musk dubbed the interview ‘interesting’, after Carlson said he uploaded it to Twitter because it wouldn’t be taken down.
Carlson – who previously hailed Tate as ‘really smart’ and ‘really real’ – glared down the camera, telling viewers: ‘Jeffrey Epstein’s dinner partners insist that Andrew Tate is a pervert and a criminal. Maybe they’re telling the truth. Either way, we think Tates’ views about men very much deserve a hearing.’
The former Fox News host continued: ‘It’s also true that in some ways, the charges against the Tates seem inevitable, like they were always going to happen. Accusing a man of a sex crime is the fastest possible way to discredit what he’s saying.’
Carlson – who was fired from Fox News earlier this year for unknown reasons and joined up with Musk and Twitter – asked viewers to ‘make up your own mind’.
But users hit back at the latest release of the show, with some calling Carlson a ‘clown’ for interviewing the indicted Tate.
‘Somehow Tucker felt no obligation to fact check anything Andrew Tate said?’, another Twitter user noted.
‘Glorifying an accused rapist/human trafficker. For two and a half hours. This man until not long ago had the most popular cable show in America,’ another said.
The show also drew criticism from the likes of DailyBeast reporter Justin Baragona, who said: ”After lamenting about how young men are now withdrawing into porn, Tucker Carlson then proceeds to sympathetically interview an unapologetic pornographer – for two and a half hours!’
