Candace Owens andTucker Carlson discussedCardi B 's Grammys performance in a Monday Fox News show.- Owens said Cardi's performance of the song "WAP" was "an attack on American values."
- Cardi responded, tweeting: "Yaaaayyyyyyy WE MADE FOX NEWS GUYS!!! Wap wap wap."
Fox News' Tucker Carlson and the conservative activist Candace Owens tore apart Cardi B's Grammys performance of "WAP" on Monday night, saying it was a harbinger of the end of the American empire.
Carlson and Owens' nearly five-minute back-and-forth, a video of which was reposted by The Daily Beast, was the latest attack on "WAP" from right-wing personalities.
After the song, which features Megan Thee Stallion, was released in August, the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro read out the song's sexually explicit lyrics on his Daily Wire show and said that they were harmful to the feminist movement.
Carlson used the recent controversy over Dr. Seuss as a jumping-off point to tear apart Cardi B's performance. Conservatives believe the criticism of Dr. Seuss' books over racist imagery is overblown, and that the author is the latest victim of a cancel culture perpetrated by the left.
Carlson said that the criticism over Dr. Seuss was hypocritical in a culture where Cardi B's performance is called art. Carlson said, "It's hard not to conclude they're intentionally trying to degrade our culture and hurt our children."
-nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) March 16, 2021
Owens, a guest on the show, said that she agreed 100% with Carlson's "assessment that this feels more sinister."
"I mean Dr. Seuss, gone. Mr. Potato Head, problematic, not enough genders available," she said, referring to Hasbro's decision to drop the "Mr." from the toy's name to make it gender neutral. "We've seen going through the supermarket as a traumatizing experience. We lost Aunt Jemima last year. We lost Land O'Lakes butter last year. We lost Uncle Ben and his rice last year because everything is so traumatizing for children to look at."
"But this? This spectacle? Virtually what we were looking at last night was a lesbian sex scene being simulated on television, and this is considered feminist. It's iconic. It's forward. It's progressive," Owens continued.
"This is starting, to me, to seem like it's not even left or right. It's not a political issue. This seems like an attack on American values, American traditions, and you're actually actively trying to make children aspire to things that are grotesque," Owens said, adding, "We are celebrating perversity in America."
Carlson brought up the fact that Owens recently had a baby in January, and asked whether she wanted her son to grow up in "a world like this."
Owens said she didn't, and that she is seriously considering homeschooling her child so that he's not "polluted with this."
"This is not the patriarchy that's keeping young women down. It's displays like this, displays of blatant nudity and sexualization, that is keeping women down in this society," Owens said.
-iamcardib (@iamcardib) March 16, 2021
"We are seeing the destruction of American values and American principles, and it's terrifying. I think parents should be terrified that this is the direction that our society is heading towards. We are weakening America - that's really what we should be talking about. This is a weakening of American society," Owens said.
She continued, "We are about to see the end of an empire. America cannot survive, it cannot be sustained, under these sorts of values and principles."
Cardi B reacted to Carlson and Owen's conversation on Twitter on Tuesday, tweeting: "Yaaaayyyyyyy WE MADE FOX NEWS GUYS!!! Wap wap wap."
This isn't the first time that Carlson has discussed "WAP" on his show. Back in August, he criticized President Joe Biden for agreeing to do an interview with Cardi B, saying that she was trying to hurt children.
-Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 19, 2020
Carlson complained that the title of the song was so explicit that he couldn't read it out on the air, and said that "people are getting rich pushing that crap on the country, and they should be ashamed of themselves."
Carlson said he wasn't being prudish, and told viewers to "go online right now and look up the lyrics to this song, and then ask yourself, if you're Joe Biden, would you suck up to the person who sang it? And ask yourself, what is this doing to our kids? The people pushing it clearly are trying to hurt your children, why is no one pushing back?"
Cardi B mocked Shapiro after he criticized her lyrics last year, tweeting, "I can't believe conservatives soo mad about WAP," and sharing fan-made remixes of Shapiro's video.