What Happened to Tucker Carlson?

I have, on a couple of occasions, drawn your attention to Tucker Carlson’s regrettable interview with a Nazi apologist named Daryl Cooper. Considering how many followers Carlson has, Republican candidates will be having a problem deciding whether or not to associate with him. 

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal editorial page offered its judgment about Carlson and Cooper. Considering that its views were the same as mine, I am happy to pass them along to you.

Of course, it is not merely that Carlson invited Cooper to expound on his podcast. Carlson vouched for Cooper as a popular historian. 

The Journal explained:

Mr. Carlson presented Mr. Cooper to his millions of Twitter followers as an “honest popular historian,” but he’s closer to a crackpot.

What does Cooper argue?

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.

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.

True enough and fair enough. No serious commentator should give it air time.

Now Carlson has been defending himself on the grounds that he likes to give space to unpopular ideas. And yet, we are not dealing with an unpopular idea. But this is Holocaust rationalization, and it is not merely unpopular. It is dangerous, the Journal suggests, because the young and the naive might believe it.

And, besides. The American and the international political left has recently been embracing anti-Israeli anti-Semitism. 

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.

Now Carlson is complaining that he is being canceled. To which the Journal responds that people are rebutting his ideas, not canceling him.

For example:

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.

And finally, to echo a point I have made:

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.

The issue is currently lying dormant. But, most assuredly it will come up in the course of the campaign. It will most especially come up if JD Vance sits down for an interview with Tucker Carlson.