Tucker Carlson: Climate Denier to Holocaust Denier is a Short Leap

When the term “climate denier” first began to be used, there was a lot of harrumphing and faux outrage on the right wing, precisely because the term was so close to “holocaust denier”, and connoted so much malice and ignorance on the part of the “denier”.
But as time has gone on, the close relationship between climate denial, vaccine denial, election denial, and yes, holocaust denial, has only become clearer. Deliberately motivated disinformation aimed at creating a population confused about what is fact, and what is fiction, is fundamental fascist playbook.

Now, well known climate denier Tucker Carlson, spun off from Fox News for his role in spreading misinformation leading to a breathtakingly expensive legal judgement, continues to platform and elevate ever more odious characters from the fringe neo-nazi right wing, most recently a “historian” so outrageously misleading and vile that even Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal had to call it out.

Wall Street Journal:

..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.

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.
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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.

Washington Post:

The ultimate issue is not what this episode says about Mr. Carlson; spreading toxic nonsense is par for his course these days, unfortunately. The issue is Mr. Carlson’s influence in the Republican Party, which gave Mr. Carlson a prime speaking opportunity at its national convention in July as well as a prestigious seat in former president Donald Trump’s row at that event. It was Mr. Carlson who, by many accounts, urged Mr. Trump to pick Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) as his running mate. In turn, Mr. Vance is scheduled to appear onstage with Mr. Carlson when the latter’s live tour reaches Hershey, Pa., on Sept. 21.