Tucker Carlson Tells Washington Post Writer To 'F**k Yourself' For Buckley Carlson Question
A Washington Post journalist said Monday that Fox News host Tucker Carlson gave a hostile response to a question about his son, Buckley Carlson.
Media critic Erik Wemple wrote that his blog reached out to the far-right commentator about an accusatory phone call Carlson reportedly made to a House GOP leader after an anonymous insider hinted that Buckley Carlson got a Capitol Hill job because of nepotism.
“Normal people understand it’s wrong to go after a man’s family,” Carlson replied, Wemple wrote in his Monday column. “But you don’t because you’re a soulless ghoul who literally works for Jeff Bezos. Go fuck yourself.”
Carlson has been on the warpath since the quote from a “GOP strategist” appeared in The Daily Beast, according to Axios. Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) “dies to be liked by the Establishment. He hires Tucker Carlson’s son, a 24-year-old kid, to be his communications director,” the unnamed wonk told the outlet. (Buckley Carlson actually is 25.)
Carlson blamed Banks’ potential rival for House Republican whip, Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), the National Republican Congressional Committee chair. He ordered Emmer to reveal the source of the quote in an angry call, but Emmer denied any connection to it, Axios reported. Carlson didn’t buy it and told the lawmaker he now had a personal beef with him, according to the outlet.
Wemple chronicled the controversy in a column headlined, “Tucker Carlson, Megalomaniac.”
The media critic noted that innumerable “GOP strategists” could have weighed in and that Carlson’s assumption that it came from Emmer’s camp is “unreasonable, bordering on downright twisted.”
Wemple said Carlson’s “fuck yourself” reply revealed the Fox News star’s “thin skin.”
“No sense of proportion; a compulsion to attack; a reliance on conspiratorial thinking as a way of explaining the world: That quote captures the essential aspects of Tucker Carlson, none of them pretty,” Wemple wrote.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
