Tucker Carlson, for reasons unknown, decided to give an interview to the left-wing site Mediaite. You may recognize them from some of the weakly attempted hits they’ve propagated on RedState. If you read the opening of the article, it’s clear the biases held by the author as he pronounces Carlson a more “articulate” version of Trumpism, insinuating his rise was not organic.

Of course, anyone that actually listens to Carlson’s ideology knows that’s nonsense. The top-rated host has never been shy about disagreeing with the President and there are several aspects of their ideologies that differ, for better or worse depending on your outlook.

After the lengthly opening to make Carlson look especially sinister (he once criticized Tammy Duckworth!), he was specifically asked the controversy surrounding one of his writers who made racist comments online. That writer lost his job as a result. Here was the response.

Now I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Blake Neff. He was the head writer of your show for more than three years, and then he resigned.

He was the head writer?

That’s what CNN reported.

He was a writer on the show. I write a lot of the show. We don’t have a head writer, but whatever. He worked on the show for three years-ish.

CNN reported that he was posting racist and sexist comments anonymously online. You addressed the resignation on your show and your comments were, I’d say, more defiant than contrite. Obviously you didn’t write these things, but what did you make of the ordeal.

What should I have been contrite for?

Well I think people were expecting you to perhaps apologize for the things that your writer was writing online.

Why would I apologize for something that someone else wrote that I didn’t know about?

Carlson’s tendency to stand his ground is refreshingly honest. He’s correct in so much as asserting that he had nothing to apologize for. Someone on his staff did something bad in their personal life. It was not connected to the show in any way and to accept that premise would be a mistake.

But it was what Carlson had to say about CNN that really stood out.

You seem to feel bad for him to a certain extent.

I mean I made it pretty clear what I thought. I didn’t like what he said, I didn’t agree with it, I told him that, and I said this on the air, and I guess it offended the normal… the self-righteous muppets jumping up and down, those kids at CNN, unhappiest people maybe in the world, you know who got for a moment to feel like they were morally superior to somebody else, and that’s what they get off on, or whatever.

I just reject that whole way of looking at the world, that whole way of living, where you jump up and down like, ‘I’m a good person, Unlike like this person!’ and then you denounce someone. And like, I read The Crucible. Like I know this is a feature of human nature, but I’m not participating in that crap. You know what I mean?

Carlson is right. This was a writer no one had ever heard of. He did something wrong and he paid the price. But the media wanted a larger pound of flesh, namely to get Carlson’s show off the air. That’s the entire goal of the “media watchdogs” over at CNN. They thought they had their big scoop and it turned out to not put a dent into Carlson because in the end, this episode had nothing do with him or his show. No doubt that frustrated figures like Brian Stelter and Olivier Darcy.

The author of the Mediaite piece would go on to try to trap Carlson in a gotcha, claiming that the writer had once claimed he wrote the first draft of the show. By his logic, that must have meant his racism was a part of the content. Carlson handled that in expert fashion as well, pointing out that it’s his show and if someone doesn’t like what he says, they should blame him and not some no name writer.

This entire episode strikes me as lazy. They can’t take down Carlson based on what he says on TV, so they attempted to do so by targeting a writer on the show who never actually wrote anything racist in relation to the show itself. It’s a sort of backdoor cancellation attempt and it blew up in the faces of those that pushed it. Carlson’s ratings are only continuing to grow, and his penchant for straight talk is a big reason why.

(Please Follow me on Twitter! @bonchieredstate)