Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson opened for Kid Rock at two of the artist’s recent live shows – watch the footage below.
The singer-songwriter played two nights at the Lamar Dixon Expo Center in Gonzales, Louisiana on April 5 and 6 as part of his current ‘Rock The Country’ tour with Jason Aldean.
Ahead of the headline sets, former Fox News presenter Carlson delivered a speech during an unexpected support slot at the venue (via Loudwire).
“You may be asking, what am I doing here?” said Carlson, who was standing behind a podium that displayed the message ‘United States Of ‘Merica – Kid Rock’. “And y’know? I don’t really know.”
He went on to tell the crowd that he ended up participating in the show after inviting Rock to his house for dinner a few months prior. “And he said, ‘You should come and open for me on my summer tour’,” Carlson recalled of the pair’s conversation.
“And I said, ‘I’m honoured, of course. But I don’t play an instrument. Actually, I’m an unemployed talk show host. So what would I do at your show?’ And he said, ‘You will figure it out, and you will like it!’”
Carlson explained that he initially had “no idea” what he was going to talk about at the gig. “I woke up this morning and I went on the internet. Familiar?” he continued. “And I read all these stories and I thought to myself, ‘This is the most depressing thing that’s happened to me in a long time’.”
He added: “This country is fucked up! That’s what I thought. I did think that, which is a sad thing to think […] But then I got here and I walked through the crowd, and I thought, ‘No. No, it’s not!”
Carlson explained: “The country they tell me about on the internet is fucked up. The country that I experience when I walk through this crowd, or when I wake up in my town of 100 people in a rural area, is a beautiful country filled with beautiful people.”
He then spoke about an encounter with a Trump supporter at the show before his speech: “She said, ‘I love you’. And I said, ‘I love you too’. And I meant it. And I thought, ‘That’s the America that I know’.
“[A] little weird, slightly crazy, full of love and beautiful. And that describes the man I’m here to introduce. Yes, it does. If you could take one person out of this nation of 350million people and present it to the rest of the world and say, ‘What’s a real American look like?’
“I would say, ‘That American would be both disobedient, but decent. That American would both give you the finger and burst out laughing at the same time’. That’s right!”
Carlson said: “Can you put a price on living free in the last free country? So let me tell you, my fellow Americans, what we’ve got. All gathered here tonight are free people united by our love of country and under God.
“And in the name of that country and that God, we’re here to celebrate a party that will not stop. And so, as I know you can, please be as noisy and disobedient as possible for Kid fucking Rock.”
Last December, Carlson interviewed Rock for his Tucker Carlson Network on YouTube. During the chat, the artist opened up about his friendship with former US President Donald Trump – calling him the “toughest son of a bitch I know” (via Newsweek).
“I can relate to him in a lot of ways,” he said at the time.
In 2017 Rock hinted that he would be running for US Senate in Michigan, but later confirmed that he would not be doing so. He told The Guardian in 2015: “I am definitely a Republican on fiscal issues and the military, but I lean to the middle on social issues.”
Rock courted controversy last year when he hit out at Anheuser-Busch over its partnership with trans activist and influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Later, radio host Howard Stern said he was “dumbfounded” by the artist’s transphobia.
Dolly Parton subsequently defended her decision to keep a duet with Rock on her 2023 album ‘Rockstar’, arguing that cancel culture is “terrible”.
In other news, Carlson was recently tricked into interviewing a YouTube prankster about the online speculation over Kate Middleton. Back in February, Jon Stewart criticised Carlson’s trip to Russia to interview Vladimir Putin.
The post Tucker Carlson opened for Kid Rock at recent US shows appeared first on NME.
