YouTubers Josh Pieters and Archie Manners are the duo behind Goon Squad Productions and the platform’s “Josh & Archie” channel, where they regularly pull pranks on famous people and other important figures in their often viral interviews. On Thursday, the pair revealed a major trick they played on former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, in which they took credit for adjusting Kate Middleton’s well-known Mother’s Day photo.
Things started when Pieters contacted Carlson’s team by email and claimed he was the one who edited the Princess of Wales’ popular image, which the Associated Press and other photo services later withdrew after discovering that it had been digitally modified.
After reminding viewers of Middleton’s ongoing health and Photoshop-related problems, Pieters mentioned in the video that Carlson has “interviewed Putin and covered some really important stories” before showing a clip of the commentator expressing his dislike for a “plus-sized, obese purple M&M” on Fox News.
Since getting dismissed by the network, Carlson launched his own streaming platform. That’s the outlet Pieters emailed to arrange a potential interview with Manners, who pretended to be the recently fired digital content creator for the Prince and Princess of Wales.
“Tucker Carlson’s people have replied,” Manners informed Pieters. “They’re calling today at 6 p.m.”
The pair then devised a plan to move forward. Since Pieters was out of town, Manners was left to handle business.
“I just saw the email that you had sent,” an unnamed woman from Carlson’s team told Manners. “So if you could just kind of explain the story,” she added, before Manners jumped in.
His story was that, as an employee (named George, coincidentally like Middleton’s oldest son) of Kensington Palace, he was asked to edit a photo before it was sent to “all mainstream media.” After the organizations issued a kill notice, “well, now I’ve been fired.”
The woman then asked if Manners could show the original, unedited photo first, and also for proof that he worked at the palace at all — “Not because I don’t believe you, we have to ask this for every single person.”
Manners relayed the information to Pieters, who put together proof of employment.
“Just use Photoshop, it’s very easy. That’s what everyone else is doing at the moment, it’s very in,” he told Pieters.
The pair agreed to “make it silly” to determine if Carlson’s team would appropriately vet them as a source.
Manners also asked Pieters to “un-edit” the Mother’s Day photo (“It’ll be quite fun,” he explained). Pieters dutifully swapped out a few details in the photo and added a Christmas tree in the room behind Middleton and her children. He also created a fake Kensington Palace logo which included three words in Latin that translate to “Every little helps” — the motto for the grocery store chain Tesco.
The trick worked, and Manners is soon shown at Westminster Studios in London, where he connected with Carlson via video. In the voiceover, Pieters insisted that he felt Carlson would realize something was wrong and call off the interview, but things went ahead as planned.
At one point, Carlson himself said that “we’ve done our best to verify” Manner’s claims, which possibly indicated that someone — or maybe everyone — didn’t quite believe his story.
And that’s what Carlson’s team in fact later told TMZ. The outlet reported that someone on Carlson’s staff identified Manners as a well-known prankster within an hour of the interview and that “Tucker’s team wasn’t totally convinced the story was real to begin with, but decided to tape the interview anyway while continuing to look into the story.”
The pranksters also let the cat out of the bag early, announcing the prank online ahead of went they said they’d been told Carlson would be running the segment next week.
It makes sense that Carlson’s team hoped to get ahead of the story and claim they knew what was going on the entire time, but the fact remains that the former Fox News host has a checkered history of his own that works against him. Carlson has frequently appeared to dabble in lies, misinformation and falsehoods — he has practically bathed in them, such as his recent interview of Putin.
Carlson’s lies about election fraud were at the heart of the $787.5 million lawsuit the network lost to Dominion Voting Systems in 2023. He spent years disparaging those who spoke out against claims the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. The lawsuit produced plenty of evidence, mostly through text messages Carlson sent to others, that showed the commentator didn’t necessarily believe the claims he himself parroted on his show — and that he believed Trump was “a demonic force, a destroyer.”
Carlson has continued to peddle misinformation since his dismissal. As recently as January, he told viewers that “illegal immigration outpaced American births” during August 2023, a statement that has been proven so incorrect it would be comedic if it wasn’t clear that the man has no issue spinning untruths to prove a political point. Whether he was on to the joke Manners and Pieters played or not, one thing is clear: if Carlson got a taste of his own medicine, he probably deserved it.
Watch the entire Goon Productions prank in the video above.
