It’s ‘shocking’ that authorities did nothing in response to an expose by the Wall Street Journal, the former Fox News host says
The US government’s failure to respond to the revelation that Instagram is hosting a vast network of pedophilia accounts indicates that the taboo surrounding child molestation in American society is about to crumble, former Fox New star Tucker Carlson has said.
“American society… is governed by taboos” and taking charge of them is a way of controlling what people think, Carlson argued in the second episode of his new show on Twitter, which came out on Thursday.
Taboos in the US have been changing rapidly in recent years, and “this is not happening organically. What we’re allowed to dislike is being dictated to us from above, sometimes by force,” he claimed.
Carlson, who was taken off air by Fox News in April, described child molestation as “the greatest taboo of all,” but warned it was “teetering on the edge of acceptability.”
“A generation ago, talking to someone else’s children about sex was widely considered a ground for a thrashing; touching them sexually was effectively a death penalty offense,” he said.
But now “people who run our country don’t see child molesters as the worst among us. It’s never been more obvious than yesterday when the Wall Street Journal ran a long expose about ‘kiddy porn’ on Instagram,” he said.
In its report on Wednesday, the WSJ claimed that the popular social media platform, which is owned by Meta, hosts a large network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage-sex content. It has capitalized on Instagram algorithms that help connect pedophiles to distributors of child porn, the article claimed.
The story is “accurate” as nobody at Instagram, nor Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has denied it, Carlson argued. “It was all pretty shocking. But not as shocking as what happened next, which was effectively nothing at all,” he said.
It was revealed that “one of the world’s most influential companies was promoting pedophilia and nobody in power did anything about it. The Justice Department didn’t announce an investigation; the Congress didn’t schedule hearings; the guy who runs Instagram, Adam Mosseri, still has his job,” said the host.
According to Carlson, those in power would still claim to believe that child molestation is wrong, “but the tone has changed unmistakably. When they say it’s bad they mean it in a kind of abstract way.”
