The Nazis killed 6 million Jews. By accident. Oops.
During an appearance on Tucker Carlson's podcast, revisionist "historian" Darryl Cooper calls Hitler's "Final Solution" an "accident" of history. Carlson called him America's best historian.
The Nazis were not so bad. That’s according to the man former FOX News host Tucker Carlson just called “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” The Holocaust? What Holocaust? There was no Holocaust, no evil plan hatched by Hitler to exterminate the Jewish race, no “Final Solution.” Six million Jews dead? Nothing sinister about it—it was all just an accident of history, oh, and poor planning—very unlike those Germans. Oops.
Oh, and Hitler? He wasn’t so bad either. He just wanted peace. Or, as the comedian Mel Brooks once quipped, “A little piece of Poland, a little piece of France.” The “real villain” was Winston Churchill for daring to fight back when Germany was overrunning Europe and ridding it of Jews, gypsies, Poles—and anyone else not Aryan or unwilling to bend the knee to Hitler.
“[T]hey [the Nazi’s] launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth that they were going to have to handle,” pseudo-historian and holocaust denier Darryl Cooper told an approving Carlson on his podcast last week. “They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead.” Hmm, and millions of people just “ended up dead?” Funny how gas chambers and firing squads will do that.
Defender of the West. The “Wild” West?
“I see you actually as a product of the west,” Carlson said fawningly to Cooper during the podcast, “and as a defender really of the west or its values, you know, in your approach, in your open mindedness, rigor, you know, belief in accuracy and honesty.” I’m wondering, though, what western values Carlson thought Cooper is defending? Unless, perhaps, what Carlson means are the values of the “wild” west?
Even before his exile from Fox News in April 2023, Carlson had been sinking closer and closer to political rock bottom—or at least his public persona had. But with this last podcast he may have finally gotten there. You might remember that Carlson was fired by Fox for his part in defaming the elections hardware and software company Dominion Voting Systems after the 2020 election. While publicly accusing the company of “rigging” the election, he privately called the claims made by President Trump that Dominion interfered with, or fixed, the results of the election “crazy.”
Fox ultimately settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion for $787 million, and in a press release announcing the settlement the network said, "We acknowledge the Court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false." Carlson’s repeated public claims about Dominion and widespread voter fraud were prominent among them.
As part of the lawsuit’s discovery process, Fox turned over thousands of internal emails and text messages from Fox program hosts—including Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Carlson—many which privately questioned the veracity of Trump’s claims that the election had been rigged. Among those emails and text messages were messages written by Carlson, calling Trump a “demonic force, a destroyer.” Another said, “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights, I truly can’t wait.” And another, “I hate him passionately.”
After leaving Fox, Carlson started his own “network”—TCN, the Tucker Carlson Network, on social media and a website—and worked hard to get himself back in Trump’s good graces with flattering comments and Trump-friendly guests. And there he was, given a prominent speaking role and sitting next to Trump at the Republican convention in July.
Asked about the podcast, Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance has, so far, refused to criticize Carlson (as has Trump). Vance said, through a spokesperson, that “Senator Vance doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture but he obviously does not share the views of the guest interviewed by Tucker Carlson.” Sorry, but not so obviously.
Those just weren’t Carlson’s guest’s view—they were, by extension, Carlson’s. He called himself a “follower of your [Cooper’s] work,” and praised Cooper for “the way you treat history with relentless curiosity and honesty.” Carlson spent time at the end of the podcast promoting Cooper’s website and thanked him for the conversation and “for your addition to the sum total of knowledge.”
It was no interview. What it was, was a two-hour ass-kissing. Carlson, as is his style with his “guests,” never questioned, challenged, nor critiqued Cooper’s outrageous claims and Holocaust denials. Besides nodding approval, or interjecting an “Oh, right,” Carlson was mostly silent—except for the occasional plug for his own X page or website.
Why then wouldn’t (or couldn’t) Vance disavow the entire interview, or Carlson , for that matter—or at least Carlson’s failure to confront Cooper’s crazy defense of Hitler and his Holocaust denial? Some have speculated that it’s because of Carlson’s outsized influence on the Republican Party. All things being unequal, I’m not so sure. Carlson needs Trump more than Trump, or the Trump campaign, needs Carlson. Trump won’t lose votes if he chastises Carlson—but Carlson certainly will lose viewers if he criticizes, or breaks with, Trump. If Trump calls Carlson to heel, as he has already done once, you can bet he’ll lay down at Trump’s feet. Yet, there’s been no rebuke.
Given that the Trump campaign has been using the Democrat’s “wanna have it both ways” stance on Israel and the Israeli-Hamas conflict to court Jewish and Zionist-inclined voters—you’d think they’d jump on the chance to distance themselves from Holocaust deniers. Instead, Democrats are using Carlson—and Trump and Vance’s refusal, so far, to repudiate him—against them. Every Jewish Democrat in the House of Representatives, for example, signed a statement “condemning Tucker Carlson for amplifying the views of a Holocaust denier and blasting Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), the Republican vice presidential nominee, for failing to denounce the interview.”
Carlson has the right to promote crazy, vile, antisemitic, and abjectly false, theories. But failure to condemn them, and their purveyors, is another matter. That’s not rejecting “guilt-by-association cancel culture,” that’s rejecting political and moral courage. Republicans like New York Congressman Mike Lawler, for example, told the news site Jewish Insider, "Platforming known Holocaust revisionists is deeply disturbing.” And the conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari, a Vance supporter, told the New York Times that Carlson, “a journalist I used to admire,” gave Cooper “the same credulous, uncritical treatment he now seems to reserve for all the crackpots who frequently grace the podcast he hosts on X.”
Vance is scheduled to appear on Carlson’s TCN podcast on September 21. “This poses an elementary political test for the Republican ticket,” the Washington Post’s editorial board rightly asks, “Will Mr. Vance keep his date with Mr. Carlson, thus lending his imprimatur to someone who lent his imprimatur to Mr. Cooper? If he does keep it, will he at least confront Mr. Carlson?”
We may not have to wait until September 21 to find out. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Kamala Harris bring it up at tonight’s presidential debate. Trying to force Trump to scold, or repudiate, Carlson would be must-see political TV. Will Trump become a Carlson denier? Yet one more reason to watch.