Mike Huckabee left his job hosting his own show on Fox News Channel earlier this month, and says one of the biggest culture shocks for him while there was foul language in the workplace.
Huckabee's show was aired on weekends, and rather than move to New York he just commuted there from his home in Arkansas once a week.
Appearing last week on "Mickelson in the Morning" on WHO radio in Des Moines, Iowa, the former Arkansas governor and likely 2016 GOP presidential hopeful said his first days on Fox News were "absolutely a cultural shock."
"It’s one thing to go as a guest, a visitor, a tourist," he said. "If you go to work, you’re in that sort of hotbed of the New York culture for a while. For someone like me, I thought, 'man, this is a different planet.'"
Huckabee noted that in a business meeting in the South or Midwest no one would use the F-word or "gratuitous profanity."
"In New York, not only do the men do it, but the women do it," he said.
Such language would be considered inappropriate for men to use in front of a woman, he said.
"And for a woman to say them in a professional setting," Huckabee said, "as we would say in the South, 'That's just trashy.'"
Huckabee's current book,
"God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy," focuses on the cultural divide between the "bubbles" he calls New York, Washington, D.C., and Hollywood, and the "bubbas" in the rest of the country.
He has faced heat from the left for a line in the book critical of pop singer Beyonce's lyrics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.