Tucker Carlson and the Beer Hall Putz
The logical conclusion of the “redpill” mentality that’s increasingly prevalent on the right.
WHO KNEW THAT TUCKER CARLSON, of all people, would turn out to be a uniter in our hopelessly polarized age? Yet the former Fox News pundit-turned-X podcaster has briefly succeeded in bringing together practically the entire political spectrum, from MSNBC to the Free Beacon, in outrage at one of his recent episodes: a two-hour interview with amateur “historian” Darryl Cooper. Cooper argued, among other things, that Winston Churchill was the true warmongering villain of World War II while Adolf Hitler basically just wanted peace. Well, peace and “an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem,” as he later clarified on Twitter.
I’m not going to try to rebut Cooper’s laughably bad history, which has been ably debunked by Thomas Weber in the Atlantic, Andrew Roberts in the Free Beacon, Victor Davis Hanson and Niall Ferguson in the Free Press, military blogger Patrick Fox on X, and others. The fact that Cooper’s World War II narrative relies heavily on taking Hitler at his word when he professed to be a man of peace speaks for itself, and I’m not sure any rebuttal is even needed beyond Mel Brooks’s immortal “All I want is peace!” Hitler skit from To Be or Not to Be. (“A little piece of Poland,/A little piece of France. . . .”) And then there’s Cooper’s claim that the poor beleaguered Nazis didn’t really mean to kill millions of people in concentration camps, they just didn’t have the resources to handle such a large number of prisoners. He is deliberately coy on whether he means only the prisoners of war on the Eastern Front or the Jewish Holocaust victims as well, but in any case, that’s straight-up warmed-over David Irving. Grossly, the actual David Irving showed up in Carlson’s X thread whining about not being credited:
But the real issue isn’t Darryl Cooper, who got two hours of airtime and millions of viewers thanks to Carlson (with a boost from X owner Elon Musk, who promoted the interview as “Very interesting. Worth watching” but then chickened out and deleted the tweet). The issue is Carlson, who didn’t simply “talk to” Cooper, as he dismissively claimed on Charlie Kirk’s show a few days later, but touted him as possibly “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” In the Charlie Kirk interview, Carlson also laughed off the backlash as “hysteria” over a “difference of opinion” and cackled maniacally at the notion that Cooper, who might have “eccentric views,” was “some kind of a Nazi.” He didn’t bother to tell his audience, or Kirk’s audience, about some of the specifics of Cooper’s eccentricities: for instance, the assertion that the Nazi occupation of France was “infinitely preferable in virtually every way” to a tacky drag show at this year’s Paris Olympics. Or the obsessive hatred of Judaism and the claim that “God sent the Romans to destroy the leprous temple and put an end to the Israelite religion for all time.” Or the Hitler-is-actually-in-heaven witticism:
Yeah, it’s totally hysterical that anyone would think this guy was a Nazi.
Carlson is the issue not just because he’s got a massive audience; it’s because he’s a prominent figure in the Trumpified, MAGA-fied Republican party. He had a prominent speaking slot at the Republican National Convention. He has reportedly grown close with members of Donald Trump’s inner circle, including Donald Trump Jr. Carlson reportedly lobbied for JD Vance, a frequent guest on his show, to be selected as Trump’s running mate and helped arrange a meeting between Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (who appeared on Carlson’s show a couple of weeks before Cooper to spout his own inane conspiracy theories). And on September 21, Carlson is scheduled to appear onstage with Vance in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Vance, it should be noted, has pointedly refused to join in the outrage over Carlson’s chat with Cooper; a spokesman for the vice presidential candidate told the Washington Post that 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.” That’s pretty weak sauce, especially when Vance is more than happy to cancel Liz Cheney for her endorsement of Kamala Harris.
In July, notorious MAGA influencer Candace Owens was dropped from a Trump fundraiser with Don Jr. after concerns about her antisemitism—which had rapidly progressed from “just asking questions” to suggesting, as Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) summed it up, “that the real victims of WWII were not the Jews but the Germans and the real villains not the Axis but the Allies.” Carlson has just held a two-hour lovefest with a guy who is articulating more or less the same view, and has coyly suggested that his guest may or may not be wrong. But so far, at least, that doesn’t seem to be enough to get tossed off the Trump train.
WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF Carlson’s flirtation with Holocaust revisionism? In the Free Press, Sohrab Ahmari (attempting to don a new centrist hat in his latest political pivot) describes Carlson’s praise of Cooper as a manifestation of the “Barbarian Right,” more or less overtly racist and preoccupied with racial hierarchies. The “Barbarian Right,” writes Ahmari, is characterized by the conviction that one is championing facts and ideas suppressed by the establishment—things they don’t want you to think and to know. Its distinctive features also include “revulsion for the mildly egalitarian conservatism that took hold across the West in the postwar period,” a conservatism that accepted the civil rights movement and that “marginalized Jew-haters.” Indeed, Ahmari notes, Carlson’s interview of Cooper shows “how far the Barbarian Right will go in seeking to delegitimize the actually existing American order.”
It’s an accurate observation, but the rot goes beyond the hardcore racialist right. The “redpill” mentality which holds that everything you’ve been told by the “establishment” and the “elites” is a lie—and of which World War II revisionism and Holocaust denial are arguably the logical conclusion—has become fairly standard in right-wing and “heterodox” circles. So has distaste for the “actually existing” American and Western order. Here’s a startling example: In July 2021, Tablet, the Jewish online magazine which in the past several years has increasingly drifted from pluralistic centrism toward nationalist/populist conservatism, published an article, based on its author’s viral Twitter thread, in defense of Donald Trump’s “stolen election” lie. Its argument: Whatever the evidence with regard to alleged election fraud, Trump supporters have every reason to believe, especially after Russiagate, that “the Regime” and its subservient media are rotten through and through and cannot be trusted. Its author? None other than Darryl Cooper.
The rush to condemn Carlson’s promotion of Cooper by many people to the right of center, from the Babylon Bee’s Seth Dillon to radio host Erick Erickson to Ahmari and others at the Free Press to National Review authors and editors has been laudable. But some of this pushback had overtones of alarm at the fact that trends these same outlets and authors had condoned and even normalized had now crossed a red line. In a Newsweek column, conservative writer Daniella Greenbaum Davis acknowledged as much:
It is on those of us who have, for too long, closed our eyes to the madness among our own ranks, to ensure this chaos of conspiracy does not spread to the mainstream, any more than it already has.
And indeed, for a long time, many of Carlson’s current detractors, not only “closed [their] eyes” to his peddling of conspiracy theories and bigotry but engaged in active apologetics for it. As I noted in The Bulwark more than a year ago after Carlson was booted by Fox News, Bari Weiss wrote a fairly appreciative Free Press post about him at the time—acknowledging that she found his views on Ukraine and immigration repugnant, but also stressing “how important he was (and is)” and praising him for challenging COVID lockdowns and telling the truth about Black Lives Matter riots and “the alliance between Big Tech and the government.”
Yet, as Zack Beauchamp points out in Vox, Carlson’s racism has long been hidden in plain sight—in “Great Replacement Theory” rhetoric that relies on supposedly race-neutral arguments about the dilution of native-born Americans’ voting power, in claims that immigrants make America “dirtier,” and in segments literally inspired by material on white supremacist or neo-Nazi websites. To this, one might also add that Carlson’s dive into antisemitic waters should also have been entirely unsurprising—even aside from the Jew-hating subtext of “Great Replacement” paranoia, which typically sees a Jewish conspiracy behind mass migration and the “importing” of Third World migrants into the United States and Europe. The Anti-Defamation League, which denounced Carlson’s promotion of “Great Replacement Theory” in May 2022, compiled numerous examples of Carlson’s fan base using overtly hateful language to blame immigration on Jews; finding such examples on X today is depressingly easy.
But Carlson himself has peddled far more thinly veiled antisemitism. Back in 2019, writing in Tablet magazine, the conservative writer Liel Leibovitz blasted the “overt, dangerous anti-Semitism” of a segment in which Carlson extolled rabid Jew-hater Henry Ford as a model of civic-minded and patriotic capitalism in contrast to Jewish hedge-fund proprietor Paul Singer, portrayed as a rapacious financier “feeding off the carcass of a dying nation.” In June 2023, Jewish groups—and a number of media outlets, from the left-of-center Israeli paper Haaretz to the right-of-center British Spectator—wrote about the barely disguised antisemitic innuendo in Carlson’s broadsides against Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in his debut X show. Carlson described Zelensky, who is Jewish, as “sweaty and rat-like,” “shifty,” “dead-eyed,” and “a persecutor of Christians.” (The reference was to curbs on a Moscow-affiliated branch of Orthodox Christianity.) And at the end of last year, Carlson raised some eyebrows by accusing right-wing Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro and other pro-Israel commentators of caring much more about Israel than about America’s problems. Appearing on the “anti-establishment” YouTube show Breaking Points, Carlson not only reiterated the charge but invoked the theme of the Jew as interloper with no real American roots and no commitment to America:
They don’t care about the country at all, and . . . that’s kind of their prerogative, but I do because I have no choice, because I’m from here, my family’s been here hundreds of years, I plan to stay here. Like I’m shocked by how little they care about the country . . . including the person you mentioned [i.e. Shapiro].
And this guy does a fawning interview with a Nazi apologist? Who’d have thunk it!
NOW, DAVIS AND OTHERS THINK Carlson should be banished from polite conservative society. Jewish News Syndicate editor-in-chief and former Commentary executive editor Jonathan Tobin, a Trump supporter, even writes that Carlson must be “put in his place”—that is, disinvited from campaign events—and rebuked by Trump and Vance, even if it upsets some of the base. Tobin concedes that this goes against Trump’s instinct, which is to “refuse to do what conventional wisdom tells him he must.” But this should be an exception, Tobin pleads: “This is not some made-up controversy contrived by the left to trip Trump up. Carlson’s actions and statements are a direct threat to his campaign and a frightening effort to mainstream the hatred of Jews.” (Along the way, Tobin also falsely asserts that “President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have refused to unreservedly condemn . . . pro-Hamas and antisemitic mobs.”)
But the fact is, when you mainstream someone—whether Trump or Carlson—whose appeal rests in large part on the gleeful trashing of established norms, “No, no, not that norm!” is a difficult position to maintain. As the meme goes, “I never thought the leopards would eat my face.”
For a while now, both Trump himself and pro-Trump commentators have been arguing that Jews who vote for Democrats are dangerously deluded not only because of Israel but because of “anti-Zionist” antisemitism spiking in the Democratic party’s left wing. The progressive antisemitism is very real. But given that the chances of Trump and Vance disavowing Carlson are slim to none, the case for the Jewish-friendly GOP looks increasingly wobbly.
There is a lesson here for conservative punditry as well. When you condone or normalize hate, free-floating grievance and conspiracy theory, it usually turns out that the oldest hatred isn’t too far behind.