Tucker Carlson, one of Donald Trump’s favorite broadcasters, coddles Nazi apologists.
On his show, Tucker on X, he recently interviewed Darryl Cooper, whom he introduced as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today,” a title that is completely overblown and unwarranted.
Cooper, a podcaster and the writer of the newsletter Martyr Made, spent more than a hour fabricating a rose-colored version of World War II that flies in the face of reality. In the process, he virtually absolved Nazi Germany of its central role in the Holocaust, insulted Jews, and insinuated that Winston Churchill was mainly responsible for extending the war.
Tellingly enough, Carlson did not challenge Cooper. Perhaps he agreed with his worthless views.
Meanwhile, the owner of X, Elon Musk, who has an unfortunate tolerance for hate speech, hailed Carlson’s interview as “very interesting” and “worth watching.” Amid an ensuing uproar, Musk deleted his incriminating post, confirming his unpredictable character. Early this year, he visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp to make amends for comments that offended Jews. But in light of his initial reaction to Cooper’s observations, he appears to have learned very little.
In his off-the-wall comments, Cooper suggested that the genocidal Nazi regime did not really intend to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Instead, he portrayed the Final Solution as merely a logistical failure.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Final Solution, Adolf Hitler’s pet project, was meticulously planned down to the last detail. It did not happen spontaneously, though some atrocities were not pre-planned. Yet incredibly enough, Cooper claimed that the Nazis “went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there.”
What an inversion of the facts!
In case Cooper has forgotten, the Nazis were hell bent on killing Jews en masse, having planned the systematic murder of European Jews at the 1942 Wannsee conference in Berlin. And with this diabolical objective in mind, they built extermination camps, such as Treblinka, Majdanek and Sobibor, in occupied Poland.
Having mapped out their genocidal vision in advance of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Nazis sent mobile killing squads, or Einsatzgruppen, into Soviet territory and the Baltic states to shoot Jews in what is known as the Holocaust of the bullets. These massacres resulted in the deaths of about one million Jewish men, women and children.
Hitler and his cohorts had every intention of exterminating Jews, even as the German army struggled to defeat Allied armies on the battlefield. Even as late as 1944, when Germany was on the cusp of losing the war, the Nazis targeted the Jewish community in Hungary for destruction.
In Cooper’s vile opinion, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of the war, claiming he was “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.”
“Now, he didn’t kill the most people, he didn’t commit the most atrocities, but I believe… that when you get into it and tell the story right and don’t leave anything out, you see that he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did,” Cooper told Carlson.
The truth, of course, is very different.
Hitler, not Churchill, was the arch aggressor. He ignited the war by invading Poland. He prolonged it by bombing Britain and occupying Western European countries such as France, Holland and Greece. To cap off his demonic imperialist campaign for domination, he invaded the Soviet Union, which proved to be his downfall.
A White House spokesman, Andrew Bates, got it right when he classified Cooper as a “Holocaust denier” and lambasted his remarks as “moral rot” and a “sadistic insult … to the memory of over six million Jews who were genocidally murdered” by the Nazis.
Yet Carlson remained conspicuously and disgracefully silent as his guest presented him with his twisted theories.
As one observer has noted, Carlson’s willingness to bring controversial race and immigration issues into the mainstream has attracted neo-Nazi followers. “Tucker Carlson is literally our greatest ally,” Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, wrote in 2016. “I don’t believe that he doesn’t hate the Jews.”
Racists like Anglin are especially pleased that Carlson has promoted the “great replacement” theory, the white supremacist notion that mass immigration from Asia and Africa to the United States is a plot to replace native-born white Christians with non-Christian minorities.
In the face of Cooper’s rant, Trump has been uncharacteristically quiet. The reason is clear. Carlson is one of Trump’s most vocal supporters. At the Republican Party convention this past July, Carlson appeared as a speaker and sat near Trump in the bleachers.
On September 21, Carlson is due to appear at a rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania with Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance. Responding to Carlson’s interview, Vance said he “obviously does not share” Cooper’s views. On the other hand, he “does not believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture.”
Vance’s reaction is mainly disappointing on two counts: his refusal to criticize Carlson for inviting Cooper in the first place, and his reluctance to challenge Carlson’s decision not to question Cooper’s outrageous statements.
Much to Trump’s probable detriment, some undecided American voters may remember this incident when they cast their ballots in the November 5 presidential election.