This week Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star who now hosts America’s One the top podcast, his show was an apologist for Adolf Hitler. Daryl Cooper, who runs a history podcast and newsletter called Martyr Mad, considers Winston Churchill, not Hitler, to be the main villain of World War II. In social media Post It has since been dismissed, with Cooper arguing that Nazi-occupied Paris was “infinitely preferable in virtually every way” to the city on display during the opening ceremony of the recent Summer Olympics, where a drag queen’s performance angered the right. On his show, Carlson introduced Cooper to listeners as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today”.
During a wide-ranging two-hour talk, Cooper presented the mainstream history of World War II as a myth shrouded in taboo intended to prop up a corrupt liberal political system. Cooper argued that the idea that Nazi Germany represented the epitome of evil is “a core part of state religion” that we have “emotional triggers” that prevent us from dispassionately examining the past.
This clever rhetorical formulation, familiar to various forms of right-wing propaganda, flatters listeners for their willingness to reject all they have learned from mainstream experts, making them feel brave and wise enough to absorb the absurdities. Cooper proceeded in a soft-spoken, false-justified way to create an alternative history in which Hitler tried hard to avoid war with Western Europe, Churchill was a “psychopath” fomented by Zionist interests, and millions were in concentration. The camps “died” because the overwhelmed Nazis did not have the resources to care for them. Elon Musk promoted the conversation on his Platform X as “very interesting”, though he later deleted the tweet.
Some on the right found Carlson’s turn to Holocaust atheism surprising. “Tucker Carlson was not expected to become an outlet for Nazi apologists, but here we are,” said Eric Erickson, a conservative radio host. wrote At X. But Carlson’s path was entirely predictable. Nazi sympathies are the natural endpoint of politics based on glib contradictions, right-wing transgressions and racial grievances.
After all, there are few better trolls than Holocaust deniers, who like to pose as heterosexual truth-seekers oppressed by an Orwellian elite. (Wild Anti-Semitic Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust has been named (his journal “An Inconvenient History: A Quarterly Journal for Free Historical Inquiry.”) Those who deny or downplay the Holocaust often excel at copying the forms and language of legitimate scholarship, using it to undermine rather than explore reality. They bombard their opponents with out-of-context historical detail and bad-faith questions, and they know how to use crude provocation to get attention.
Long before 4Chain existed, the disgraced Holocaust-denying author David Irving urged his followers in a speech in the early 1990s to break the “monstrous pseudo-religious atmosphere” surrounding World War II by becoming aggressively distasteful. “You need to say things like: ‘More women died in the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz,'” he said.
Until recently, American conservatives largely maintained antibodies against Irving-style obscurantism. Right-wing thought leaders generally shared the same broad historical understanding of World War II as the rest of society, felt patriotic pride in America’s role in it, and viewed Hitler as spiritually evil. Instead of recognizing that right-wing politics, taken to the extreme, might shade into National Socialism, they will throw Nazi comparisons at the left, as conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg did in his 2008 book “Liberal Fascism.”
Goldberg’s approach was unorthodox, but he represented a broad fascist consensus in American politics. Cooper is, in fact, correct that hatred of Nazism helped shape Western societies. If we can agree on nothing else, we can agree that part of the function of liberal democracy was to build a fortress against the rise of figures like Hitler.
However, for parts of the contemporary right, the social consensus under liberalism is artificial and even oppressive. Finally, the “Matrix”-derived metaphor of being “red-pilled” suggests the realization that everything you’ve been told about the nature of reality is a lie, and thus everything is up for grabs. And once you discard all epistemological and moral guidelines, it’s easy to descend into vulgar nonsense.
Candace Owens, another anti-awake right-wing celebrity who has recently become Hitler-inquisitorReceived wisdom about the shape of the Earth has also been questioned. “I’m not a flat earther,” she said In July. “I am not a round earth. In fact, I am the one who left the cult of science.
Apparently, like Owens, every red-pill conservative argues that Hitler gets a bad rap. But the weakening of the intellectual quarantine surrounding Nazism — and the MAGA Right’s fetish for ideas their enemies see as dangerous — makes it easier for influential conservatives to surrender to fascist impulses. When they do, they pay no penalty in political relevance, because there is no conservative establishment able to discipline its ideologies.
Carlson has just embarked on a national tour with special guests at each stop. In addition to Alex Jones, he is scheduled to appear alongside vice-presidential nominees JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr.
Ultimately, Holocaust denial is not really about history, but about what is valid in the present and what can be imagined in the future. If Hitler is no longer widely perceived as a negation of our deepest values, America will soften to Donald Trump’s most authoritarian plans, including imprisoning vast numbers of undocumented immigrants. Detention camps.
Towards the end of their conversation, Carlson and Cooper discuss how the “European postwar order” has enabled mass immigration, which, Carlson says, has destroyed Western Europe. “So why not have a Nuremberg trial for those people?” asked Carlson. “I don’t understand. I mean, it’s such a crime.”
“Well,” Cooper replied, “we have to win first.”
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