Two days after The Tucker Carlson Tonight anchor said she referred to herself as Dr. Jill Biden because of “status anxiety” and likened her honorific to “Dr Pepper”, he delivered a seven-minute monologue on the theme on Wednesday.

With what seemed to be with his tongue in his cheek, Carlson described an elaborate scenario in which a patient on the brink of death does not receive treatment from a medical professional, but instead is given a “slide show on ethnic diversity in Delaware’s community college system,” referring to the topic of Jill Biden’s doctoral dissertation.

Claiming that he had read the “embarrassing” dissertation, Carlson said it contained “typos everywhere” and accused her of being “borderline illiterate.”

“Jill Biden’s doctoral dissertation is our national shame,” he said, before claiming that there were passages with numerical errors. Perhaps acknowledging that he had gone too far, he added: “OK, we’re being cruel there.”

Carlson described how the criticism of her wish to use the title was being framed by other media outlets as misogynist.

He continued: “They’re telling you that no one would ever call a man dumb. OK, well, that’s wrong. We call Dr. Jill’s husband dumb all the time.

“In fact, we’re going to go full feminist here and admit that Dr. Jill is a lot smarter than the man she married. Not that it’s saying much,” he added, concluding that the use of such an honorific was “a class thing,” which is “based on credentials like the ones Dr. Jill Biden has.”

Newsweek has contacted the Biden transition team for comment.

The debate over her use of the title flared up this week when The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by a former English lecturer at Northwestern University, Joseph Epstein. The article, which referred to Jill Biden as “Kiddo,” argued that she should drop the honorific because she has an Ed.D., an education doctorate.

The New York Times reported how women believed the piece was “blatantly sexist and emblematic of the way many men question or disparage women’s credentials.”

Epstein’s former employer distanced itself from his WSJ piece, issuing a statement to say it is “firmly committed to equity, diversity and inclusion, and strongly disagrees with Mr. Epstein’s misogynistic views.”

The president-elect’s communications director Kate Bedingfield called the op-ed “patronizing, sexist, elitist drivel.”