Before she rebranded herself as a moderate conservative talking head on ABC’s The View, Abby Huntsman once played the role of right-wing firebrand as a weekend host of Fox & Friends alongside none other than Tucker Carlson.
And yet somehow, when The View’s moderator Whoopi Goldberg raised the latest controversial clip from Fox News’ current primetime star, Huntsman expressed shock and dismay at her former colleague’s argument about “Men in Decline,” as the chyron beneath him read Wednesday night.
“Study after study has shown that when men make less than women, women generally don’t want to marry them,” Carlson said in the outrage-inducing clip. “Over big populations this causes a drop in marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births and all the familiar disasters that inevitably follow. More drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next generation.”
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In response to Carlson’s rant, the New York State Department of Labor tweeted its own pay equity study at the host, urging him to “read up” on research that shows “closing the gender wage gap is beneficial for women, men, families, the US & global economies and businesses.”
“I’d be thrilled to make more than my husband,” Huntsman said in response before disclosing that she used to anchor a show on Fox News with Carlson. “This is so different than the Tucker that I know,” she added. “Anyone that's worked closely with him—he was so supportive of my career and wanted me to succeed. He’s also a big proponent of marriage and families, that is probably the biggest thing for him, but he was always great to anyone he worked with, people of different backgrounds, immigrants. He loved helping them out. So if you know Tucker personally, you would say he has a heart of gold.”
“I don’t see what good that is when he’s promoting this bad stuff to millions of people,” Joy Behar shot back to applause from the audience.
“I’m just saying it goes against the person that I know,” Huntsman added before the show’s other conservative co-host Meghan McCain shared that it was a “pleasure” working with Carlson during her time at Fox News as well.
If these former Fox employees had been paying any attention to Carlson’s show over the past year, however, they would have known that his recurring “Men in America” segments regularly put forward the idea that “female empowerment” is coming at the expense of men.
And as far as his personal kindness to immigrants, that too will come as a surprise to anyone who watched Carlson repeatedly argue on his show last month that immigrants are making America “dirtier.”
