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Tucker Carlson; Milo Yiannopoulos
Carlson and supposed "ex-gay" Yiannopoulos went off the rails on Carlson's show. And Carlson still thinks Pete Buttigieg isn't gay.
Far-right commentator Tucker Carlson, seemingly obsessed with who’s gay and who’s not, interviewed someone he considers an expert on the Wednesday episode of The Tucker Carlson Show — “experienced gay person” Milo Yiannopoulos.
Carlson started the episode with a clip of a Ugandan talk show host asking a guest, “Why are you gay?” Carlson claimed that’s a question Americans aren’t allowed to ask, and he went on to mischaracterize Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act and again assert that former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg isn’t really gay.
Things got even stranger when Yiannopoulos came on. Yiannopoulos is a right-wing provocateur who once identified as gay but now says he no longer is. He posited several debunked theories about why people are gay, such as absent fathers, domineering mothers, and molestation.
“In almost every case, and certainly in every male case, [being gay] is a trauma response. It is not a sexuality,” Yiannopoulos said. Jewish people become gay because they have “nebbish fathers” and “larger-than-life” mothers, he said, while Black people become gay because of fatherlessness.
He also endorsed so-called conversion therapy, the discredited and harmful practice of trying to turn LGBTQ+ people straight or cisgender. “The truth is that homosexuality and in particular conversion therapy is the first thing upon which the liberals tried what they later did to Trump, which is to system this wall of fake news, misinformation, propaganda,” he said.
“So they start off with this, you know, ‘you were born this way, honey. You are born this way, honey. You are beautiful, whatever you are.’ No, you’re like that ’cause you got raped by a priest. Or you’re like that because your mother, mom was overbearing and your dad wasn’t around.”
When he identified as gay, Yiannopoulos said, if a football player would sit next to him on a plane, he would get sexually excited and need to go to the restroom and “you know.” Carlson said it sounded like demonic possession, and Yiannopoulos replied, “Yeah, because it’s what it is. I joke. I say Gorgoroth, a semen demon. You know, he comes out the way. He doesn’t visit me very often anymore, you know, but it’s totally real.” (Gogoroth is a place in the Lord of the Rings books and provided the name of a Norwegian black metal band.)
Homosexuality, he continued, is an “addictive urge.” “When I woke up one day … I was like, oh, no, I don’t want to do this anymore. Hell is real. I don’t want to go there.” He went through a version of conversion therapy and returned to the Catholic faith.
Society has become “gayed,” he said, while using an antigay slur as well. “Everything’s gone gay,” he said. “I mean, just every bit of life. I mean music, I mean, now we force heterosexuals to listen to Lil Nas X, you know, and this sort of, you know, endless turnover of preening homosexual crooners that we call pop stars. There aren’t any anymore because pop stars require a kind of like heroic manly virtue. I think that is just, just gone now. It’s just not there anymore.” Carlson agreed that homosexuality is “relentlessly, tirelessly promoted.”
Yiannopoulos went on to say that being transgender became “popular because it got parents off the hook,” especially single mothers. “If you’ve got a gay kid, you know you did something,” he said. “But if your kid has a disease and was born into the wrong body, well, that’s not your fault, is it?” Parents of trans children don’t want to admit they were terrible parents, “so instead, no, I’m going to chop its ding-dong off and say it’s got a disease. Like that’s why it was so popular with single moms.”
He also said there are no more creative gay people in the world because “if homosexuality is not prescribed as wretched and kept at the fringes where it belongs, creativity dies.” And he agreed with Carlson that Pete Buttigieg isn’t really gay. His husband, Chasten Buttigieg, “is the closest thing you can get to a girl,” Yiannopoulos said, and he speculated that Pete Buttigieg is “performing homosexuality ... including having the sex, but probably not a lot of it.” The Buttigiegs, he added, are “buying Black children,” and Carlson called that “slavery.”
Related: 13 Times Tucker Carlson Should Have Been Fired
In reality, the couple adopted twins Gus and Penelope Rose, who are mixed-race. When going through the adoption process, they said they would adopt children of any race. “We didn't know anything about the racial identity of the kids until they started to look mixed race, which they are,” Pete Buttigieg said on the Flagrant podcast in April.
On Bluesky, where journalist Brandy Zadrozny shared the video with Carlson’s “experienced gay person” description of Yiannopoulos, the comments included some zingers. “‘Experienced gay person’ is an objectively hysterical description,” one commenter wrote. “How experienced?” another wrote. “Because we already filled our New Grad and Senior Gay positions, but are looking for a Staff Gay, with a path to becoming a Gay Fellow.”
“I need to hear from the inexperienced gay person to balance out the coverage,” another said. Some wondered if Yiannopoulos had submitted his résumé. Others had much to say about Carlson, such as “My ex boss once said of a co-worker, ‘Her expression always looks like she has a pile of shit on her head.’ That’s how I think of Tucker Carlson.”
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