Tucker Carlson has often been the subject of commentaries on this site, some quite negative, although I have tended toward his defense while calling attention to some of his blind spots, mostly involving race and Jewish influence. However, quite simply, Carlson has been by far the edgiest voice among mainstream conservatives. This interview marks a major step forward and has resulted in outrage from some of the usual suspects such as from the Biden Administration, the ADL (J.D. Vance sought to “distance the candidate from the interview). Among the “numerous columnists” (according to CNN) who condemned the interview was Jewish activist and New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg. Two things particularly angered Goldberg. First:
This clever rhetorical formulation, familiar to various strands of right-wing propaganda, flatters listeners for their willingness to reject all they’ve learned from mainstream experts, making them feel brave and savvy for imbibing absurdities. Cooper proceeded, in a soft-spoken, faux-reasonable way, to lay out an alternative history in which Hitler tried mightily to avoid war with Western Europe, Churchill was a “psychopath” propped up by Zionist interests, and millions of people in concentration camps “ended up dead” because the overwhelmed Nazis didn’t have the resources to care for them. Elon Musk promoted the conversation as “very interesting” on his platform X, though he later deleted the tweet.”
I don’t have the background to comment on Hitler’s attempts to avoid a war or the beginnings of concentration camps, but of course we do know that Churchill’s profligacy and chronic indebtedness was funded by wealthy Jews who desperately wanted war with Hitler, as the articles by Horus and other accounts clearly show. The relevant passage in the interview is very brief but Goldberg fastened upon it and, at least to my hearing, Cooper seems uncomfortable discussing it. Needless to say, Goldberg does not attempt a rebuttal for any of these points or give any citations to people who could.
On Carlson’s website the interview is titled “The Fall of Europe” and subtitled: “Darryl Cooper: The True History of the Jonestown Cult, WWII, and How Winston Churchill Ruined Europe.”
The offending material starts with a comment on Jewish involvement in Bolshevism based on Churchill’s famous article from 1920 advocating that Jews embrace Zionism rather than Bolshevism but noting that many Jews got caught up in it, and Cooper agrees. Here are the relevant parts of Churchill’s article:
International Jews
In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort [i.e., Jews who are nationalists in the nations they reside in] rise the schemes of the international Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all. of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus—Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kim (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Kmma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer. Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown. a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy ot the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and hare become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.
Terrorist Jews.
There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very, great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff. And the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek, all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing,
So Churchill was aware of the evils of Bolshevism and the intensive Jewish involvement in it but cooperated with the Jews financing his lifestyle in order to destroy Hitler whose crimes paled in comparison with those of the Bolsheviks, at the very least in the 1930s. Needless to say, Goldberg and her ilk never refer to Jewish domination of the Soviet Union in the decades after the Revolution.
The following machine translation has been edited to try to make sense out of a mess (Tucker needs to hire an editor), but you get the idea.
Darryl Cooper: Churchill wrote a kind of infamous now article called Zionism Versus Bolshevism. And he [Churchill] basically makes the case — which was which was true to a large extent that all of Eastern Europe — that the Pale of Settlement, which is where the vast majority of Jews lived other than the United States, which is where a lot of them had had traveled to that area had become so engulfed by a revolutionary spirit that all of the young Ashkenazi Jews who were over there were getting swept up into it. It was the 60s here on steroids, right? [Perhaps suggesting Jews were deeply involved in the 1960s counter-cultural revolution throughout the West — which they were.] And in a much more serious and destructive way. And this is 1920. So shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Basically, the point of his paper is he says, these people who over there they’re all going one direction or the other. They’re going to be Bolsheviks. They’re going to be Zionists. We want them to be Zionists, you know? And so we need to support this. And so that was early on. There was an ideological component of it. But then as time goes on, you know, you read stories about Churchill going bankrupt and needing money. Getting bailed out by people who shared his interests, you know, in terms of Zionism, but also, his hostility. Just, just. You know, I think his hostility, to put it this way, I think his hostility to Germany was real. I don’t think that he necessarily had to be bribed to have that feeling. But, you know, I think he was, to an extent, put in place by people, the financiers, by a media complex that wanted to make sure that he was the guy who, you know, who was representing Britain in that conflict for, for the, for a reason. And you know, Churchill’s a… Again, it’s so hard. Because like, you know, especially in a short interview like this where you have this guy. Who? I mean, he’s an Abraham Lincoln-, George Washington-, Martin Luther King-like type figure in the sort of Western consciousness, right?
Tucker [00:57:09] Yes.
Darryl Cooper [00:57:10] And so people have so many assumptions in built-in triggers, like when it comes to this guy, that it’s hard to talk about it because you’re always thinking about the triggers that you’re setting off and your listeners. And I don’t say that in a way of like, I don’t want to offend anybody. No, no, I understand it’s that it’s, you know, you know, that things are going to be misunderstood. And so this is why I do 30, our podcast.
Tucker [00:57:31] Well, it’s just it’s interesting because I, you know, as a follower of your work, I don’t see you as hostile to the West. I see you actually as a product of the West and as a defender, really of the West for its values. You know, in your approach, in your open mindedness, rigor, you know, belief in accuracy and honesty and those are Western notions. And yet Churchill has been positioned and has been and really is accepted as like the defender of the West over the last 100 years.
Darryl Cooper [00:58:02] Yeah.
Tucker [00:58:03] And so maybe that’s and I wonder why that is. I don’t I mean, people can certainly take issue with any factual claims you’re making. I assume they’re all right. They’re consistent with what I think I know to be true. But why do you think Churchill has been presented in a way, in the way that he has?
In other words, Tucker has long known this about the roots of World War II, Jewish involvement in it, and Churchill’s role in producing this disaster.
Darryl Cooper [00:58:22] Well, it’s it has to do with what you said earlier, right? Neville Chamberlain versus Churchill has been the binary model that has served as the chief rhetorical device for every conflict we’ve wanted to get into since then. Yes. You know, the entire Cold War. And then even after the Cold War, in the global war on terror is if you appease them, you’re Neville Chamberlain. Hitler’s the, rather, Churchill’s the one who saw all along where this was headed and was trying to warn people this, you know, Cassandra. And finally, because nobody listened to him, the war ended up breaking out and we were forced to, like, go stamp out this threat. And now it’s a….much bigger threat than it ever would have been if we just …
Tucker [00:59:05] Put a listing, say, if we had strangled it in its
Darryl Cooper [00:59:07] Crib and it’s justified every conflict, you know, really, since the Second World War, everybody’s the new Hitler, right? It’s you know, it really did become the founding myth of the of the global order that we’re all living in now. Right?
* * *
The other big problem for Goldberg (also predictable):
Toward the end of their conversation, Carlson and Cooper discussed how the “postwar European order” has enabled mass immigration, which has, in Carlson’s telling, destroyed Western Europe. “So why not have a Nuremberg trial for the people who did that?” asked Carlson. “I don’t understand. I mean, that’s such a crime.”
“Well,” Cooper responded, “we have to win first.”
Goldberg’s column ends there. For the Michelle Goldbergs of the world, the worst thing that could happen would be for people to realize that Western cultures and peoples are in the process of suicide and that Jews are influential advocates of this process. Here’s the relevant transcript edited for clarity because the machine transcription is a mess:
Tucker Carlson: “I just can’t get over the fact that the West won and is completely destroyed in less than a century. … Somehow the United States and Western Europe won. That’s the conventional understanding. And both now look like they lost a World War. So, like, what the hell was that? Like, there’s something very, very heavy.
Darryl Cooper [02:08:46] Yeah. I mean, it’s all the things that we have been talking about. [Presumably a reference to Jewish involvement in Bolshevism, Hitler’s campaign against Bolshevism, the Jewish-financed campaign against Hitler and its ensuing media-and academic-manufactured mythology, as well as the 1960s counter-cultural revolution, massive non-White immigration, and multiculturalism.] And probably some things that, you know, we only talk about privately, but we can see the results of it. I mean.
“We only talk about privately. A revealing statement. It’s pretty clearly a reference to the disastrous consequences that await anyone who dares to question the consensus and an oblique reference to Jewish power that is so instrumental in suppressing ideas that they don’t like, especially any ideas that seriously discuss Jewish power.
Tucker [02:08:58] Yeah. So that’s that’s the real question. If they were trying to achieve that destruction that you’re talking about, if they if they were trying, they couldn’t have done it more directly or more effectively, you know. And so, there are trends in forces. There are things that drive people, you know, like incentives to drive people that they’re not aware of. There’s a lot of things going on.
So no clear reference to Jewish influence, but he’s certainly right about incentives that are so attractive to so many non-Jews, particularly politicians and others with aspirations to power, that smooth the way for traitorous behavior by so many White people. I have argued that the Jewish motive is quite clear: They feel safer in a multicultural, non-White majority country as an antidote to what happened in White, Christian Germany beginning in 1933.
Tucker around 2:05: So when can just tie a bow in [your] World War Two project? … I think it’s like it’s central to the society we live in, the myths upon which it’s built. I think it’s also the cause of like the destruction of Western civilization and these lies.
Absolutely right.
I should also mention a tidbit from an Alex Berenson blog — Berenson being the Covid dissident who was on Tucker’s Fox News show several times. Berenson:
And just weeks ago, when I heard that Tucker said on a podcast that my “indispensable quality is bravery,” I was genuinely thrilled. 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.)
So Cooper is definitely on page with the idea that World War II has led to the disastrous consequences we see in the contemporary West in terms of cultural degradation and, on the basis of the above, on being colonized by the Third World. Of course, Berenson (and the rest of the critics) never bother to consider the consequences to the people and culture of the West as a result of the World War II mythos being so entrenched in the West, much less give any serious analysis of the Jewish role in establishing and maintaining it.
This interview is a big step forward in bringing these ideas into the mainstream. One wonders if Carlson did it in hopes of influencing the looming election in which immigration and multiculturalism are definitely on the minds of a great many voters. (Carlson is doing a 16-date cross-country tour in September, including a show with J.D. Vance on September 21.) Perhaps he understands that there is not much time left and that we have to make a stand against the onslaught we are facing. And a necessary part of taking a stand would be to change the public’s attitudes on the origins of World War II and on Jewish power and influence.
Of course, there will be consequences, but in retrospect, Tucker getting fired from Fox News is definitely a big positive. He never could have said anything like this on Fox. It’s not clear what the powers that be can do to Carlson, but for the ADL and the rest of establishment media figures, this is Armageddon — a battle they can’t afford to lose. They will pull out all the stops to prevent it from becoming mainstream in conservative circles.
But some people are just too big to completely bury and his alliance with Elon Musk and Musk’s ownership of X is a big plus. Any conservative who is remotely paying attention realizes that the formidable power of the Jewish community is firmly aligned with the Democrats as it has been for decades.
We’ll see. It will be a nice test of Jewish power. Believe me, they won’t take this standing down.
Here’s Goldberg’s screed:
Tucker Carlson and the Heterodoxy-to-Holocaust Denial Pipeline
This week Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star who now hosts one of America’s top podcasts, had an apologist for Adolf Hitler on his show. Darryl Cooper, who runs a history podcast and newsletter called Martyr Made, considers Winston Churchill, not Hitler, the chief villain of World War II. In a social media post that he’s since deleted, Cooper argued that a Paris occupied by the Nazis was “infinitely preferable in virtually every way” to the city on display during the opening ceremony of the recent summer Olympics, where a drag queen performance infuriated the right. On his show, Carlson introduced Cooper to listeners as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”
Over the course of a wide-ranging two-hour conversation, Cooper presented the mainstream history of World War II as a mythology shrouded in taboos intended to prop up a corrupt liberal political order. The idea that Nazi Germany represented the epitome of evil, argued Cooper, is such a “core part of the state religion” that we have “emotional triggers” preventing us from examining the past dispassionately.
This clever rhetorical formulation, familiar to various strands of right-wing propaganda, flatters listeners for their willingness to reject all they’ve learned from mainstream experts, making them feel brave and savvy for imbibing absurdities. Cooper proceeded, in a soft-spoken, faux-reasonable way, to lay out an alternative history in which Hitler tried mightily to avoid war with Western Europe, Churchill was a “psychopath” propped up by Zionist interests, and millions of people in concentration camps “ended up dead” because the overwhelmed Nazis didn’t have the resources to care for them. Elon Musk promoted the conversation as “very interesting” on his platform X, though he later deleted the tweet.
Some on the right found Carlson’s turn toward Holocaust skepticism surprising. “Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” Erick Erickson, the conservative radio host, wrote on X. But Carlson’s trajectory was entirely predictable. Nazi sympathy is the natural endpoint of a politics based on glib contrarianism, right-wing transgression and ethnic grievance.
There are few better trolls, after all, than Holocaust deniers, who love to pose as heterodox truth-seekers oppressed by Orwellian elites. (The wildly antisemitic Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust named its journal “An Inconvenient History: A Quarterly Journal for Free Historical Inquiry.”) Those who deny or downplay the Holocaust often excel at mimicking the forms and language of legitimate scholarship, using them to undermine rather than explore reality. They blitz their opponents with out-of-context historical detail and bad-faith questions, and they know how to use crude provocation to get attention.
Long before 4Chan existed, the disgraced Holocaust-denying author David Irving urged his followers, in an early 1990s speech, to break through the “appalling pseudo-religious atmosphere” surrounding World War II by being aggressively tasteless. “You’ve got to say things like: ‘More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz,’” he said.
Until quite recently, American conservatives mostly maintained antibodies against Irving-style disinformation. Right-wing thought leaders generally shared the same broad historical understanding of World War II as the rest of society, felt patriotic pride at America’s role in it and viewed Hitler as metaphysically wicked. Rather than recognizing the way right-wing politics, taken to extremes, could shade into National Socialism, they would hurl Nazi comparisons at the left, as the conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg did in his 2008 book “Liberal Fascism.”
Goldberg’s approach was dishonest, but it was representative of a broad antifascist consensus in American politics. Cooper is, in fact, correct that abhorrence of Nazism has helped structure Western societies. If we could agree on nothing else, we could agree that part of the job of liberal democracy was to erect bulwarks against the emergence of Hitler-like figures.
For parts of the contemporary right, however, the social consensuses undergirding liberalism are artificial and even tyrannical. After all, the “Matrix”-derived metaphor of being “red-pilled” implies a realization that all you’ve been told about the nature of reality is a lie, and thus everything is up for grabs. And once you discard all epistemological and moral guardrails, it’s easy to descend into barbarous nonsense.
Candace Owens, another anti-woke right-wing celebrity who has lately become Hitler-curious, has also come to question received wisdom about the shape of the earth. “I’m not a flat-earther,” she said in July. “I’m not a round-earther. Actually, what I am is I am somebody who has left the cult of science.”
Obviously, not every red-pilled conservative ends up arguing, as Owens did, that Hitler gets a bad rap. But the weakening of the intellectual quarantine around Nazism — and the MAGA right’s fetish for ideas their enemies see as dangerous — makes it easier for influential conservatives to surrender to fascist impulses. When they do, they pay no penalty in political relevance, because there’s no conservative establishment capable of disciplining its ideologues.
Carlson has just embarked on a national tour with special guests at each stop. In addition to Alex Jones, he’s scheduled to appear with the vice-presidential nominee JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr.
Ultimately, Holocaust denial isn’t really about history at all, but about what’s permissible in the present and imaginable in the future. If Hitler is no longer widely understood as the negation of our deepest values, America will be softened up for Donald Trump’s most authoritarian plans, including imprisoning masses of undocumented immigrants in vast detention camps.
Toward the end of their conversation, Carlson and Cooper discussed how the “postwar European order” has enabled mass immigration, which has, in Carlson’s telling, destroyed Western Europe. “So why not have a Nuremberg trial for the people who did that?” asked Carlson. “I don’t understand. I mean, that’s such a crime.”
“Well,” Cooper responded, “we have to win first.”