Tucker Carlson, suddenly under fire for some old comments he had made about women, has won lots of support for his refusal to cower before the Internet outrage mob.

That doesn't mean he's right. But, at a time when many conservatives just want to "own the libs," it's winning him praise from unsurprising quarters.

This is how to handle the outrage mob. Remember, even the most sincere apology means nothing to them. They want to break and ruin you. That’s their end goal. https://t.co/gngwi5EKy4 — Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) March 11, 2019



But the recently resurfaced clips of Carlson’s comments on the radio show "Bubba the Love Sponge" are every bit as a bad as his critics contend. Speaking about Warren Jeffs, who at the time of Carlson's comments was facing criminal charges for his role in arranging the marriage of underage girls, and would later be convicted of raping his own child brides, Carlson said that it wasn’t so bad because, as he put it, “the rapist, in this case, has made a lifelong commitment to live and take care of the person, so it is a little different. I mean, let’s be honest about it.”

During another segment, after Jeffs had been convicted of arranging marriages with underage girls, Carlson further defended Jeffs:



CARLSON: He's in prison because he's weird and unpopular and he has a different lifestyle that other people find creepy.

CO-HOST: No, he is an accessory to the rape of children. That is a felony and a serious one at that.

CARLSON: What do you mean an accessory? He's like got some weird religious cult where he thinks it's OK to, you know, marry underaged girls.



On different segment, when asked if his 14-year-old daughter might be sexually experimenting with other girls at her boarding school, Carlson told the host, “If it weren’t my daughter, I would love that scenario.”

In yet another clip, he defends a teacher who was in trouble for sleeping with a 13-year-old student, saying , “My point is that teachers like this — not necessarily this one in particular — but they are doing a service to all 13-year-old girls by taking the pressure off. They are a pressure relief valve, like the kind you have on your furnace.”

Carlson also had this to say about women: "They hate weakness. They're like dogs that way. They can smell it on you, and they have contempt for it; they’ll bite you" to which he later added, "I mean, I love women, but they're extremely primitive, they're basic, they're not that hard to understand. And one of the things they hate more than anything is weakness in a man."

Regardless of what you think of Carlson's critics, there's clearly plenty to take issue with in his comments, and plenty that conservatives should flat out reject.

Conservatism is not just about “owning the libs.” If it has nothing to do with values, then it's just an elaborate but pointless game of us-versus-them. One need not join a social justice outrage mob to find Carlson's sentiments here despicable, or to take a principled stand against what he said.