Stephen A. Smith opened up about his relationships with Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Mark Levin and doubled down on his searing criticism of Tucker Carlson’s January 6 commentary in a new interview.

Smith — the host of First Take on ESPN, host and producer of hit podcast Know Mercy, and author of the New York Times-bestselling memoir Straight Shooter — spoke with Mediaite editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin for an upcoming episode of The Interview podcast set to be released Tuesday. During their conservation, the two discussed discussed Smith’s career, the world of sports, politics, and his recent criticism of Carlson.

Last Monday, Smith blasted the Fox News host’s take on January 6 — saying the commentary casting the riot as a peaceful protest left him “really, really pissed off.” McLaughlin asked Smith to expand on his reaction.

“It pissed me off,” Smith insisted. “Like I said, it did. And I’m not apologizing because to me, we can say it’s politics. Five people were killed. Thousands of people stormed the U.S. Capitol.”

“Aidan, if you go into a bank and you rob the bank. And you race out of the damn bank and jump into my car and I’m driving the getaway car. Am I not complicit? I believe I am. For Tucker Carlson to go on national TV and highlight how everyone wasn’t violent. The fact of the matter is, they followed the people in. They got in because the violent protesters kicked in windows, kicked down doors,” Smith explained. “…None of you were supposed to be there. It’s like it’s an insult to our intelligence to sit up there and say, ‘Hey, everyone wasn’t violent.’ Everyone didn’t have to be.”

Smith pivoted the back to Carlson saying, “When Tucker Carlson points something like that out, it’s like you are smart enough to know — that’s bullshit that you’re spewing. You know better than that.”

Smith argued that despite being in the sports world and not being an “aficionado” in politics, he still considered the criticism of the January 6th videos “common sense.”

“To go on national television and try to give us — paint a different picture of what we saw, it was beyond spitting in our face and telling us it’s raining… Say anything you want but to sit up there and to show us the video of peaceful protesters… to sit up there and say, ‘Well, not every single person was violent,'” Smith explained. “There’s stuff like that that makes you sit up there and say, ‘See, we can’t trust none of their asses because of stuff like that.'”

McLaughlin also asked Smith for his take on the defamation lawsuit brought against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems. Although Smith said he had not been keeping up with the lawsuit, he said its revelations would not effect his friendships with Fox News hosts Hannity and Levin, which started because of a mutual affinity for sports.

“Guys like that have always been sports fans. I’ve known them because they ran into me and they would bring me on to discuss sports… When they’d have me on back in the day, it was when I was unemployed. And ESPN had let me go. And so I always remembered that,” Smith said.

Smith said while he disagrees with many of their opinions, he has never viewed Hannity or Levin as racist in the way some on the right are viewed as racist by the Black community.

“My position in talking to them was I never got that feeling,” he said. “I’ve run across people that I felt immediately were some racist bastards. I’ve never viewed them that way. When I speak to a guy like Sean Hannity — national security, free market capitalism, protect our borders. Well, guess what? I know a lot of Black people that feel that way, that vote Democrat all day, every day. So their position is that it’s not necessarily political. It’s common sense. We just got to find a way to compromise and come together.”

Smith said his philosophy for their friendship is simple, “You believe what you believe, but don’t come to me telling me what I should believe.”

“As it pertains to this story about Fox and all of this stuff,” Smith explained, “If there’s truth to that, damn it, they were wrong. Plain and simple.”

He concluded that the information from the lawsuit, “is not going to stop me from being cool with them.”

Watch above via The Interview. The full episode drops Tuesday.

The post Stephen A. Smith Goes Off on Tucker Carlson’s ‘Bullsh*t’ — But Says Fox Drama Won’t Stop Him From Being Pals With Hannity and Levin first appeared on Mediaite.

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