Fox News used-to-be Tucker Carlson really wanted to score an exclusive interview with a Kate Middleton insider, as speculations, conspiracies, and rumors swirl around the Royal Family following the Princess of Wales’ mysterious medical issues and subsequent disappearance from the public eye.
Oh, at that weird, clearly photoshopped Mother’s Day photo too, of course.
But it turned out that all Tucker Carlson got was humiliatingly pranked.
British YouTubers Josh & Archie, who are well-known for being famous pranksters with a YouTube following to the tune of 1.5 million, managed to get one over on the Fox News washup in the worst kind of way when they managed to trick Carlson into believing that he was interviewing a Kensington Palace whistleblower who was looking to spill the tea on the now infamous edited image of the Princess with her children on UK’s Mother’s Day.
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Instead, Tucker was actually conducting a full-blown fake interview with Archie Manners, who was posing as the Prince and Princess of Wales’ former digital content creator and told Carlson that he was fired from his position for doing such a poor job on the editing of the notorious image that the public caught on.
Tucker, of course, was infamously canned from Fox News last year and now runs his own gig, The Tucker Carlson Network, which streams on X (formerly known as Twitter.) Manners and his co-conspirator Josh Pieters forged employment documents from Kensington Palace that they provided to Tucker, who ate it up hook, line, and sinker.
Carlson was either truly desperate, truly ignorant, or a heady combination of both, considering that the fake letter of engagement for the whistleblower was complete with a clause that allowed the Palace to amputate one of his limbs, should he fail during his probationary period.
Nevertheless, Tucker steamrolled on with what he thought was one hell of an exclusive hot take and sent manners to a London studio with a direct hotline to Carlson for the big interview.
The YouTubers posted a video of the prank to X, in which Tucker is seen introducing his fake whistleblower guest: “We’ve done our best to verify that your identity is what you say it is. You’re not a fake [Alexei] Navalny or doing a prank.”
Manners fired off in character, “I was fired for negligence because the editing that I did was found … the editing job was almost too big to do.”
The YouTube prankster went on to tell Carlson that the photo was actually taken by Middleton’s uncle over the holiday season and Manners was forced to edit out a Christmas tree from the background, prompting Tucker to respond, “It is an amazing story.”
Ultimately, Tucker was thrilled with the whole interview, telling Manners, “That was great,” with Carlson’s team telling the YouTuber that the interview would stream “early next week.”
Speaking with Deadline, Manners said that he and his prankster partner Pieters ultimately decided to blow their own cover because they did not want disinformation going out to Tucker Carlson’s 12.6M social media followers.
“We didn’t want to cause any more rumors, that are not true, to go out to lots and lots of people,” he said. “We just didn’t want to be too worthy about that in our video.”
Manners said he was so successful in pranking Carlson because he “stroked” the Fox washup’s massive ego with the “bullshit” claim that he was giving Tucker the exclusive story because “mainstream media in the UK wouldn’t touch it.”
Josh & Archie and have pranked many, many people over the course of their YouTube career, including the likes of Carole Baskin and free-speech firebrand Katie Hopkins.
You can watch their Tucker Carlson prank video here:
We Pranked Tucker Carlson… pic.twitter.com/pGceMRn26t
— Josh Pieters (@joshua_pieters) March 14, 2024
Featured image via screen capture
