Let’s have a toast for the jerk offs

The Ye-Is-Exploited-By-Tucker outtakes are even worse than you’d expect:

Fox News recently aired a two-part interview between Tucker Carlson and Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West. Motherboard has obtained portions of the interview that were edited out of the final broadcast. These include numerous antisemitic sentiments from Ye, a strange and lengthy digression about “fake children” he claimed were planted in his house to manipulate his own children, and a statement that he’s vaccinated against COVID-19. 

Carlson used the interview, which was presented as a piece of landmark television, to hit on a few of Fox News’ favorite boogeyman, with Ye’s enthusiastic participation: the Clintons, former President Obama, COVID restrictions, and, of course, the Kardashians. But what the Tucker Carlson team chose to leave out is just as revealing. 

In the version of the interview that made it to air, Ye described what he said was pressure not to support Donald Trump when the latter was a candidate, called the singer Lizzo “clinically unhealthy” for her weight, and tried to explain his decision to appear at Paris Fashion Week with conservative pundit Candace Owens in matching “White Lives Matter” shirts. Carlson praised the interview as “interesting, deep, provocative,” and aired nearly two full hours of it over the course of two nights.

“Do you feel at times you were manipulated by political forces through your wife?” Carlson asked hopefully at one point, in a fairly representative piece of footage. (Ye responded that he was unaware of how close Kim Kardashian was to “the Clintons” during the time they were married.) A simple statement of fact from Ye—“I was vaccinated”—was edited out of a part of the conversation about COVID; Carlson has repeatedly used his show to air false and dangerous claims aimed at discouraging his viewers from getting vaccinated. 

The obvious takeaways are that 1)Ye seriously needs help, which is not an excuse for his hateful rhetoric, and 2)no matter how big a piece of shit you think Tucker is, he’s worse.

Still, we try to be Fair and Balanced here, so I present an alternative perspective on Point 2:

The idea that Tucker didn’t air this footage because he found it “irresponsible” is really something. https://t.co/Am3KfqLrZH— Isaac Chotiner (@IChotiner) October 11, 2022

You can type this shit, but it certainly can’t be called thinking.