Huckabee complains of 'trashy' women in New York

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said in a recent radio appearance that while in New York for his Fox News show, he experienced significant culture shock from all the “trashy” women swearing in a professional setting.

“In the South, or in the Midwest, there in Iowa, you would not have people who would just throw the F-bomb or use gratuitous profanity in a professional setting,” Huckabee told host Jan Mickelson in a Friday appearance on Des Moines’ “Mickelson in the Morning.”


“In New York, not only do the men do it, but the women,” he said.

“My gosh, this is worse than locker-room talk,” Huckabee continued. “As we would say in the South, that’s just trashy.”

The comments come less than a month after the Arkansas Republican quit his Fox News show and announced he’s thinking of launching a bid for president. They were first reported by Think Progress.

On Wednesday, Huckabee sought to clarify his remarks, stressing that they weren’t directed at his former Fox colleagues. “I never said anything derogatory about the people at Fox News,” he said, but he has encountered “overall coarseness” while on the East and West Coasts.

“I talked about the overall coarseness of conversation and gratuitous profanity that I hear in places in what I call the bubble zoo like New York, Washington and Hollywood,” he said on Tyler Cralle’s radio show in a clip posted online by BuzzFeed Politics. “But, clearly, the reporters who took those headlines and made those stories up made ‘em up out of thin air. It’s an outright lie.”

Liberal media outlets have mocked Huckabee’s remarks — and not for the first time.

Less than two weeks ago, Huckabee appeared on The Daily Show and argued with host Jon Stewart over a portion of his book, “God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy,” in which he claimed that the rap artist Jay-Z has been “exploiting [Beyoncé] as a sex object.”

During his appearance on the show, Huckabee and Stewart debated the cultural differences between the country’s coastal urban centers and the rest of the country, which Huckabee referred to as “bubbleville” and “bubbaville.” Stewart told Huckabee he thought he’d made a “terrible mistake” in quitting his show.

In January 2014, the former governor drew criticism for stating that Democrats believe women rely on the federal government, or “Uncle Sugar,” as Huckabee put it, to provide subsidized birth control “because they can’t control their libido.”

Clarification: The headline on this story has been updated to reflect Huckabee’s assertion that he was referring in his original remarks to women in New York and not specifically to his former colleagues at Fox News.