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Tucker Carlson "Goes There"

Unpopular Front returns from its vacation hiatus. Thanks for bearing with me and I do hope everyone had a nice summer. Just as a reminder, When the Clock Broke is still available for purchase wherever good books are sold. And, if you have not already done so, you might also consider opting for a paid subscription: at 5 dollars a month it’s less than most drinks at coffee shop these days. Once again, I appreciate all your support!

Today I’ll be talking about—you guessed it—the Nazis! Namely, America’s number one fash curious talk show host: Tucker Carlson. This week Carlson had on Daryl Cooper, who goes by the online moniker “Martyr Made,” an amateur historian with a Substack and a podcast. Carlson’s post gushes, “Darryl Cooper may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States. His latest project is the most forbidden of all: trying to understand World War Two.” Cooper presents himself as thoughtful, measured and soft spoken, but he is clearly a propagandist of an insidious sort.

When Carlson asks him about his WWII project, Cooper says that we’re soon reaching a great enough historical distance where the old “taboos” are less forceful and a more “honest look at everything went it on” during the era is possible. He then says, “We spent the last 70 years, in Europe’s case, literally throwing people in jail for looking into the wrong corners, right?” Okay, one moment, please: what exactly is illegal in Europe? Well, it’s Holocaust denial. Honest people can dispute the wisdom and justice of such laws, but we can see what’s really being discussed here sotto voce. Cooper goes on to prattle on about how there’s no sophisticated, nuanced, or objective looks at the interwar period and the coming of the Nazi regime, just demonization of Germans. He then talks about how you supposedly can’t talk how “the Weimar culture lead to something like the National Socialists and why the people who embraced that movement did embrace it.’ This is, of course, total bullshit: There is a ton of very detailed scholarship on the rise of the Nazis. But notice a couple things here: he says specifically “the Weimar culture” suggesting the degeneration or decadence of Weimar was the reason for the Nazi ascendancy. To me the big tell is saying “National Socialists:” in my experience, people who say “National Socialist” instead of “Nazi” are usually Nazis or their sympathizers. But we don’t need to rely on subtle cues, because what Cooper goes on to say is not subtle at all:

You know, Germany, look, they put themselves into a position in Adolf Hitler’s chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that 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. You know, you have, you have like letters as early as July, August 1941 from commandants of these makeshift camps that they’re setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people they’re rounding up and they’re… so it’s two months after, a month or two after Barbarossa was launched, and they’re writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, “We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people.” And one of them actually says, “Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?”

That’s not what happened. This is a lie. The war in the east was a war of extermination from the beginning. Before the invasion of the Soviet Union began, Hitler issued the Commissar Order instructing his troops to summarily execute “Bolsheviks.” By July 1941, Einsatzgruppen units following the invasion forces began carrying out mass killings of Jews. What Cooper is doing is a classic Holocaust denial technique to shift the topic of mass deaths to inadvertency rather than intent. We don’t even have to get into his polemic against Churchill, whom he calls “the chief villain” of World War II. Again, this is standard Nazi apologia, to present Hitler, the aggressor, as a sincere seeker of peace and Churchill as the bloodthirsty warmonger. Sir Winston had many faults, but the one thing that must be said for him is that from early on he was very clear about what Hitler and the Nazis represented. If there was any remaining question about what Cooper’s politics are, it’s totally answered by this now deleted Tweet about the Paris olympics opening ceremony.

Elon Musk tweeted out Tucker’s show and said it was “very interesting” and “worth watching.” He’s since deleted the post, but, in general, “X” has become completely inundated with antisemitic propaganda in the last few months.

I have very little patience for the right wingers who now profess to be shocked by Tucker’s decision to air this kind of material. He’s clearly been going this way for some time. Several years ago, his former friend and Weekly Standard colleague Andy Ferguson told me Carlson was becoming “the Father Coughlin of the 21st century.” That comment proved prophetic. (I guess Elon Musk is the Henry Ford, then.) And R. Derek Black, the son of KKK wizard Don Black and a former member of the White Nationalist movement once told me this about his old Fox program: “From the perspective of my family, he’s making the same points they’ve been trying to make their entire lives, but much better; he’s found a wider audience, and the ideal method of expression for many of the same ideas.” This has been true for years. The doubters and skeptics are either stupid or dishonest or both. I feel like I’m starting to sound like Walter Winchell, but the fact remains that the American right is absolutely lousy with Nazis and Nazi sympathizers.