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The Independent UK
The Independent UK
National
Josh Marcus

Tucker Carlson tells fans to drop out of college and ‘have more kids than you can afford’

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Tucker Carlson has some unique advice for his young male fans: drop out of college and have “more children than you can afford.”

“College is ridiculous unless you’re moving towards some very specialised degree you can only get in college, if you want to be a veterinarian or physicist or something,” he said. “If you’re in the humanities, I can give you a list of 100 books, you can find it on the internet, and you would be better educated at whatever stupid college you would go to.”

The popular but controversial Fox News host, himself a bowtie-wearing product of boarding schools, debate societies, and a liberal arts college, made the comments on Sunday, speaking with the Piece of Schmidt interview show on YouTube.

“Have more children than you can afford,” he added. “Take a job you’re not qualified for. Go balls out. I don’t know what everyone is waiting for. Have some adventure in your life. Do something crazy.”

During the interview, Carlson and host Daniel Schmidt, a student at the University of Chicago, bonded over what the YouTube host called a “pervasive” amount of “anti-white sentiment” on campus and in society at large.

“We had a really good system I think that I grew up under,” Carlson said in response. “We’re gonna try, knowing that we’re gonna fail in some places, we’re gonna try as hard as we can to be colorblind and to be meritocratic, to judge people on what they do, not how they were born.”

The Fox host is the child of a well-connected banker and Republican media executive and former ambassador, Richard Carlson, and Lisa McNear Lombardi, who hailed from a wealthy California ranching family. When Tucker Carlson was a child, his father remarried Patricia Swanson, an heiress to the Swanson frozen foods fortune.

By his own admission, Carlson spent most of his college years drunk and was a poor student.

A 1991 yearbook entry under his name from his time at Trinity College includes references to being part of a non-existent “Dan White Society,” an apparent reference to the man who murdered Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay elected official, in 1978. The entry also mentions affiliation with the Jesse Helms Foundation, named for the US Senator from North Carolina known for his anti-gay stances and opposition to civil rights.

Carlson has brushed off the reporting, which appeared in 2021 the Washington Post, saying, “Jeff Bezos had one of his minions, a mentally unbalanced middle-aged man called Erik Wemple, pull our dusty college yearbook and call around and see if we’d done anything naughty at the age of 19,” Carlson alleged.

The Fox News host has attracted controversy for openly espousing the “great replacement theory,” a white supremacist idea that elites are trying to undermine the position of white people through immigration.

Last week, Carlson went on a long rant on Tucker Carlson Tonight and blamed the government for “changing America completely and forever” and “undermining democracy” by replacing US-born Americans with immigrants.

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