C'mon, Tucker!

I know you hate American support for Ukraine and want more isolationist foreign policy, but you only hurt your case when you play footsie with Nazi apologists.

Oh, I hate having to write this one.

I like Tucker Carlson. As I’ve said before, during Covid, “we had a certain ride or die relationship.” He stood by me even after the rest of Fox News panicked over my mRNA skepticism. (Haven’t seen me on there much since he left, have you?)

And just weeks ago, when I heard that Tucker said on a podcast that my “indispensable quality is bravery,” I was genuinely thrilled.

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(Doesn’t matter how brave I may or may not be. Without your support I’m nothing.)

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Which is why it hurt to hear Tucker playing footsie on his incredibly popular podcast this week with Darryl Cooper, a historian who is a Nazi apologist and - at best - walks to the edge of Holocaust denial.

To take a recent example, Cooper posted on X that the Nazi occupation of Paris was “infinitely preferable” to the (admittedly idiotic and offensive) opening ceremony of the Olympics in July. The Nazi occupation of Paris led to over 70,000 French Jews being sent to gas chambers. (Cooper later deleted the post.)

This week, Tucker posted a two-hour long interview with Cooper in which Cooper called Winston Churchill the “chief villain” of World War 2, arguing that Churchill forced the war by rejecting Hitler’s overtures for peace in 1940.

Incredibly, Cooper then said the death camps the Nazis built after they invaded Russia resulted mostly from poor planning:

When they went into the east in 1941, they 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. They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there.  

Huh?

Cooper looks to be deliberately eliding the difference between Russian prisoners of war, who both died from German neglect and were deliberately killed, and the Jews who were targeted, rounded up, and herded into camps. In any case, his version of history is provably untrue in any number of ways.

To note just three: the Nazis opened the first concentration camp on German soil in 1933, long before they invaded Russia. With the 1938 Kristallnacht massacre, Germany began sending Jews to camps simply for being Jews. And during the war the Nazis spent significant resources to deport Jews from Western and Eastern Europe to death camps. They “just threw these people into camps” the same way that Hunter Biden “just likes the smell of cocaine.”

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(It’s not funny because it’s not true.)

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So why - assuming he’s not an antisemite, and I sure hope he isn’t - would Tucker associate with Cooper’s repugnant Nazi apologia? Some of his opponents argue he’s trying to stay relevant and will do anything for attention. I don’t think so. Fox or not, he’s plenty relevant, both politically and culturally.

Let me offer another possible explanation: Tucker hates American support for Ukraine and believes the United States is provoking Russia into a potential nuclear war. Let’s assume he really believes this deeply, and it’s not clickbait.

Tucker wants to go back to a pre-World War 2, America First policy. He correctly views World War 2 as the end of American isolationism. And he thinks to defeat the interventionist foreign policy consensus, he must argue World War 2 was not the triumph for liberty and justice Americans have been taught to believe.

Oh the irony.

It used to be the left that insisted the Allies were no better than the Axis; I still remember senior year in high school, my wannabe-socialist history teacher sneering, “Oh, so World War 2 was the good war, and Vietnam is the bad war?”

Yes. Pretty much. (Though we’ve had more bad wars since.)

The Nazi apologist/revisionist version of World War 2 aims either to deny the Holocaust entirely or put it on Churchill; if that meanie hadn’t made Hitler invade Russia the Jews would still be dancing the hora every night in their shtetls!

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(Let’s have a party!)

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Unfortunately, this view of World War 2 is exactly backwards - and forces its proponents to justify or ignore all kinds of terrible behavior, ultimately including the killing of six million Jews.

Yes, the Allies committed terrible atrocities during the war - American firebombing raids, the atomic bomb on Nagasaki (whatever you think of the first bomb, the second bomb was intended primarily to show the Soviets we had more than one), the mass rapes the Russian army committed as it rolled to Berlin.

But if you want to know the truth about World War 2, ask the losers.

The United States brutalized Japan and Germany, yet those nations and their citizens held no rancor towards us after the war. There were no insurgencies in occupied Germany and Japan, and they have remained loyal American allies to this day. Of course, their friendship came in part from their fear of Russia (and, for Japan, China).

Still, their willingness to put the atrocities we committed behind them suggests a deep national understanding in both countries that they were the aggressors - and that their atrocities were far, far worse. Yes, atrocities, like infinities, can be ranked. And the Imperial Japanese Army and Unit 731 were right up there on the all-time list with the Wehrmacht and the SS.

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(There are no jokes or cute lines to be made about Unit 731.)

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For 50 years after World War 2, leftists tried to revise its history, claiming that Britain had fought it to protect colonialism, or the United States had provoked Japan in a fight for control of the Pacific and East Asia.

They lost. And they did serious damage to their political standing along the way. The conservative call for freedom and a muscular foreign policy was an essential part of Republican dominance from Eisenhower through Reagan, and even the tragedy of Vietnam couldn’t undo it.

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(To get you the truth, I’ll bite the hands that feed me, from Tucker to Elon. I just can’t help it.)

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Then the Cold War ended, and the world got complicated.

The rise of China, Islamic fundamentalism, the slow decline of Europe, and now the resurgence of Russia may mean that the United States would be better off pulling back and accepting a more multipolar world, one where it does not try to export democratic capitalism at all costs.

Maybe the world needs to sort itself without American leadership. Maybe all our efforts at hegemony are only backfiring now.

Maybe. I don’t think so, but maybe.

Here’s what I do know.

Trying to rewrite the history of World War 2 will only backfire for the right as it once did for the left. If Tucker wants to win the battle against an interventionist American foreign policy, he needs to find a way to fight it that doesn’t include apologizing for the Nazis.