Exclusive: Tucker Carlson Details Uncomfortable Conversations with ‘Stupid’ Simon & Schuster Executives Who Wouldn’t Let Him Out of Contract After Josh Hawley Book Cancellation

Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson, author of The Long Slide: Thirty Years in American Journalism, told Breitbart News on Tuesday that Simon & Schuster — the publisher of his latest book — was “disgusting” and “immoral” in its cancellation of Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) book.

Carlson recounted conversations he had with with John Karp, CEO of Simon & Schuster, and Dana Canedy, the company’s senior vice president and publisher. He recalled how he wanted to break his contract with Simon & Schuster after learning of the company’s cancellation of Hawley’s book in January.

“Someone called me and told me that Hawley’s book had been canceled,” Carlson said on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow, whose New York Times bestselling book Breaking the News was also published by Simon & Schuster. “I’m not a close friend of Hawley’s. He’s a senator. I know him, but he’s not like a friend or anything, but I was just so shocked by it. I thought, ‘Well, okay, I’m under contract to write this book. I know them, they owe me a fair amount of money. I’m kind of implicated in this. I should probably find out what’s going on.'”

He continued, “So I called John Karp. I called him right from my truck and said, ‘You know, like what is this?’ And he said, ‘You know what? We canceled [Hawley] because he supported the insurrection,’ and I said, ‘But you don’t have to agree with Hawley’s vote. Democrats cast a very same vote four years before, and did you cancel their books?’ And he said, ‘We think we did the right thing,’ and I said, ‘I think what you did is disgusting. I think it’s immoral. You can’t be for censorship. If you’re a publisher, that’s antithetical to your mission. That’s outrageous,’ and he said, ‘Well, you know, that’s what we did,’ and I said, ‘Well, if I’m going to write a book for you — firstly, I want out of my book contract, but if I can’t get out of it — I want to write about what you did.'”

“[Karp and Canedy] agreed to talk to me two days later on a Zoom call for an hour,” Carlson remarked, “and they did, and I took the transcript of it and put in the intro [of my book].”

Carlson said Karp and Canedy were incapable of explaining their rationale for canceling Hawley’s book.

“What [I] learned from it is that these people are stupid,” he remarked. “That was the first thing. That was [and is] always the most shocking thing. I’ve dealt with people of ill will, people who are greedy, but the people in charge are supposed to be smart, and when you really press them to explain themselves, you realize they’re limited.”

Carlson determined that Simon & Schuster proceeded with publishing his book — despite its detailing of Karp’s and Canedy’s “stupid” and “pathetic” attempts to justify the company’s conduct — out of fear of reputational damage.

He stated, “They can’t even describe or justify their own decisions. It’s like pathetic. The more I got into this [and] the more I reported out censorship by Simon & Schuster, the more enraged I began to get, and I said to them, ‘I’m really going after you. Maybe you want to cancel the book’ — nope — and I think their calculation was [that] it would be worse publicity for them to cancel my book about how they canceled someone else’s book. It would become too damaging to them.”