The Anti-Liberal Right Builds a Usable Past
On Tucker Carlson’s diabolical motives
Like many other pundits, I’ve spent a number of days now thinking about just what the hell Tucker Carlson thinks he’s doing.
In case you snoozed through the past week, the former Fox News political talk-show host who now peddles his wares on Twitter/X last week offered up a two-hour-and-eighteen-minute interview with a self-trained historian named Darryl Cooper, whom Carlson described as maybe “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” As of Sunday evening, their conversation had been viewed nearly 34 million times—roughly ten times the nightly viewership of Carlson’s old show on Fox—and Cooper’s own “Martyr Made” podcast had risen to become the most popular podcast in the United States.
Over the course of the conversation, Cooper blamed World War II on Winston Churchill and described the Holocaust as the unintentional byproduct of the German military finding itself overwhelmed with prisoners of war as it pushed eastward in its invasion of the Soviet Union. Lacking the food and other resources required to sustain these prisoners, the Nazis had no choice but to engage in mercy killings on a vast scale. That’s how so many Jews ended up dying during the war that Churchill decisively brought about—not because the Nazi ideology of eliminationist anti-Semitism was wedded to ruthless state power by Adolf Hitler and the senior leadership of his fascist government.
Such statements made during the interview, as well as similarly “revisionist” claims about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Jonestown cult, and other topics, have led to widespread denunciation of Carlson. I’ve appreciated a number of these criticisms, especially those of Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times, John Podhoretz on the Commentary podcast (which includes an apology to America for hiring Carlson 29 years ago at The Weekly Standard), and Jonah Goldberg (no relation to Michelle) in his column for The Dispatch.
I was especially pleased that both Podhoretz and the latter Goldberg referred to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States in trying to make sense of Carlson’s motives—their point being that Carlson, like Zinn from the left, seems to be eager to promulgate a highly tendentious account of history in order to advance a political aim. Another way to put it is to say that Carlson is attempting to construct a usable history for the far right and promote it to a mass public, in much the same way as what Zinn did for the far left when he first published his very popular book in 1980.
I think this is exactly right—though it’s important that we not leave it at this, because doing so will keep us from appreciating just how diabolically shrewd Carlson is proving himself to be in his current propagandistic project.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Notes from the Middleground to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.