Carlson is by some accounts the most-watched journalist in the world. He comes across as reasonable, well informed and exudes charm. He also provides a forum for nut jobs and at times promotes crazy conspiracy theories.
He long ago crossed the line for me.
Tucker Carlson’s History Lessons
The media personality spreads bizarre ideas about World War II.
By The Editorial Board, WSJ
Updated Sept. 10, 2024 6:03 pm ET
Tucker Carlson delivers a speech during the Australian Freedom Conference at Hyatt Hotel Canberra in Canberra, Australia in June Photo: lukas coch/Shutterstock
Conservatives have rightly rebutted the false history offered by the New York Times that America’s founding wasn’t really in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence but instead was in 1619—with the arrival of the first slaves. So why are some on the right now indulging their own false history of World War II and Nazi Germany?
That’s the question raised by Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with Darryl Cooper, a provocateur who offers a bizarre history of the Holocaust and Winston Churchill, among other things. Mr. Carlson presented Mr. Cooper to his millions of Twitter followers as an “honest popular historian,” but he’s closer to a crackpot.
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Mr. Cooper claims Churchill is the real villain of World War II because he opposed Adolf Hitler’s march through Europe. He also offered Mr. Carlson’s audience a novel theory about the Nazi slaughter of six million European Jews, which he attributes to an unfortunate miscalculation.
The Nazis “launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners . . . . They went in with no plan for that and just threw these people into camps,” Mr. Cooper said. As a result, “millions of people ended up dead there.”
Yes, the Waffen-SS officers didn’t know what to do with all those people with yellow Stars of David they had rounded up. So they settled on putting them on railroad cars and sending them off to the gas chamber. That was some dilemma Himmler and Eichmann faced. This is Holocaust rationalization, if not denial, and no commentator should give it air time.
As he often does, Mr. Carlson defends his interview as merely giving a forum for contrarian ideas. But Holocaust rationalization isn’t contrarian. It’s false history, and dangerous to the extent it might influence the young and uneducated to believe it.
It’s all the more worrisome given the outbreak of antisemitism on the American left. Anti-Israel protesters, including some in Congress, are trucking in slogans that treat Jews as oppressors and call for the destruction of the Jewish state. The Nazis also believed and promoted anti-Jewish conspiracies. American conservatives should be a bulwark against this ethnic hatred.
A favorite resort of Mr. Carlson these days is to claim that critics are trying to “cancel” him. It’s true the left often does censor legitimate dissenting ideas, as it did during the pandemic. But critics of Mr. Carlson’s interview are rebutting his nonsense, not canceling him. He can’t spread bad history and expect it to go unchallenged.
Conservatives have long taken pride in recognizing that there is objective truth. The left thinks all ideas are relative, or constructs of one’s material conditions, as the Marxists say. Recognizing the truth means accepting that certain historical events really happened and are evil, such as mass murder by the Nazis and Communists. Moral or historical relativism has never been a conservative tenet.
It’s also a strange conservatism that runs Churchill out of its pantheon. As the Churchill biographer and historian Andrew Roberts has explained, blaming him because Britain went to war after Hitler invaded Poland gets the history egregiously wrong. Churchill wasn’t even Prime Minister yet and Britain had a defense pact with Warsaw. Churchill is one of the great leaders in Western democratic history.
There has always been a temptation on the political right to wade into the fever swamps of conspiracy and crank history. Think Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s. The rise of social media has made bad ideas and demagoguery easier to spread, especially when promoted by prominent media or political figures. When that happens, others on the right have a particular obligation to rebut those ideas.
We don’t like the habit, popular among Democrats and the press, of calling on political figures to denounce this or that statement by others. It tends to be a one-sided partisan demand made of Republicans.
But JD Vance and Donald Trump should be aware that the more Mr. Carlson traffics in nutty falsehoods, the more they will be asked about their association. Voters will make their decisions for many reasons, but one of them will be the political company they keep.
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