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What the Actual Frak?! Tucker Carlson Brings on a World War II Revisionist (WATCH)

Aaron Walker
Aaron Walker  |  8:45 PM on September 03, 2024
AP Photo, File

Yesterday, Tucker Carlson dropped his latest version of the his occasional ‘show’ on Twitter/X and this guest was a ‘special’ one:

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We will readily admit that we didn’t listen to all of it. We used the timeskip feature to jump to World War II and stopped when there were only about a few minutes left in the whole thing, but that was enough to be pretty horrified by what we heard. Besides being a law geek, this author is a history geek and Cooper’s analysis was nothing less than awful.

Now, we aren’t saying he necessarily lied. We didn’t detect specific lies, but sometimes revisionism is nothing more than reinterpreting agreed-upon facts. As we said several about a year ago in a radically different context:

Let us give you a historical example of this phenomenon. In 1915, one of the early silent movies had a scene where a white politician told a black man ‘you are the equal of any man here’ in the post-civil-war South. Later in the movie, the same politician ‘delivers his edict that the blacks shall be raised to full equality with the whites.’ You, a modern reader, might think ‘wow, that’s a surprisingly enlightened attitude coming from whoever made this movie.’ Except you’d be wrong. The movie was Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith, easily one of the most racist movies this author has ever heard of, where the Ku Klux Klan are depicted as heroes. This advocate of equal opportunity among the races, Austin Stoneman, is depicted as a villain.

Stoneman is a pretty blatantly fictionalized version of the historical figure Thaddeus Stevens (who is one of [this author’s] ‘constitutional heroes’). Stoneman is depicted as a physically disabled, hard-core advocate of equality of opportunity between the races, who shared a secret love with his black housekeeper. In 2012—nearly a century later—Spielberg’s Lincoln included a non-fictionalized version of Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones (perfect casting). Spielberg (and Jones) depicted Stevens as … a physically disabled, hard-core advocate of equality of opportunity between the races, who shared a secret love with his black housekeeper. Griffith and Spielberg didn’t actually disagree on many of the facts, but rather how their morality processed them. So, Griffith saw Stevens’ advocacy of equality of opportunity as evil; Spielberg saw it as good. And while historians are not sure Stevens had a romantic relationship with his black housekeeper (both were unmarried), Griffith saw it as a case of a man improperly influenced by his lust, while Spielberg saw it as love that transcended racial barriers and gave fuel to his righteous crusade for equality between the races. They didn’t disagree on the facts very much: They disagreed on how to interpret them, morally.

The same can be said with Cooper’s dumb analysis. He’s not lying as far as we are aware of—although we are not as versed in World War II history as we are on other subjects, so we are open to being told that Cooper was factually wrong on some points. But his interpretation of the facts are simply bizarre.

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We will focus mainly on his condemnation of Winston Churchill. He complains that Churchill wanted to go to war with Hitler. We aren’t 100% sure that is true, but bluntly, if it is true, that’s a good thing. Hitler needed to be stopped and the real tragedy of World War II is that Hitler wasn’t stopped sooner.

He argued that the Germans wanted peace after the invasion of Poland. How do we know this? Well, because they said so, in pamphlets dropped over England. You know, because such pamphlets couldn’t be dishonest propaganda. *eye roll* And Hitler was upset that all those countries declared war on him after he invaded Poland.

Of course, on some level Hitler probably wanted a sort of peace, but not a real peace. The best term we have heard for it is the Arabic word hudna which is used to describe a false peace where one seeks a cease fire, so it can rebuild its military capacity and continue the war when it thinks it is strong enough. It’s the kind of peace Hamass is seeking. We aren’t aware of any German word that matches that meaning, but that describes the only kind of peace Hitler ever wanted.

Because the truth Cooper was omitting was that Hitler had expanded over and over again and had been repeatedly warned by multiple countries that if he didn’t stop, it would be war. At Munich, Hitler got everything he wanted in exchange for peace, and he broke the agreement with Neville Chamberlain, anyway. That is what led to multiple countries allying with Poland and threating Hitler with war if he invaded that country. They had had enough and Hitler kept pushing.

And when Poland was invaded, it wasn’t Winson Churchill that declared war, but rather Chamberlain. Cooper acts like we should have listened to Chamberlain and kept Britain out of the war, but Chamberlain himself didn’t agree. Of course, a few months later, Parliament said more or less, ‘let’s have a guy in charge who had Hitler’s number earlier’ and made Churchill their Prime Minister, but there was broad agreement on the issue of whether war was necessary. Chamberlain and Churchill agreed on this point.

Also, Cooper seems to think that Chamberlian’s peacemaking approach was discredit by propaganda, but as we just pointed out, Chamberlain’s approach was discredited by reality. Even Chamberlin admitted it was time to go to war, and the British decided that it was time for new leadership.

Cooper also attacks Churchill for wanting to have the U.S.S.R. and America join the fight, but Britain was fighting for its life and it was very touch and go for a while between the Battle of Britain (in the skies) and the Battle of the Atlantic (in the seas). No rational person would begrudge anyone for seeking help. For instance, we don’t think Zelenskyy deserves our aid in his war against Russia, but we aren’t mad at him for asking. In any case, America and the U.S.S.R. didn’t get into the war because Churchill asked nicely. They got involved because they were attacked: The U.S.S.R. was attacked by Germany, and we hope every America remembers the attack that got us into World War II.

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And there is one particular bit that has gotten a lot of attention:

We will be charitable to Cooper (though maybe we shouldn’t) and say that he wasn’t definitely talking about the Holocaust. But if that wasn’t what he was talking about, he didn’t speak very clearly. Indeed, if we assume he isn’t just a bigot or something weird like that, we think he is at best naïve, taking professions of peace as honest. Early on, he says something like that Germans wanted the same things we do. Well, that is a naïve viewpoint that ignores a lot of real-world evidence to the contrary. Jeffrey Epstein’s clients, for instance, wanted several things that most normal people didn’t and so did Jeffrey Dahmer. And asking what ordinary Germans thought about the war becomes less and less useful as Nazi censorship became more and more severe. Ordinary Germans weren’t given the facts necessary to form an opinion independent of the government.

As for Tucker going along with this, and praising Cooper, we will say we are deeply disappointed but we will offer this limited defense (or maybe you would call it an excuse). Carlson is right to say that the ‘this guy is the next Hitler’ argument is used too much. We see it deployed, for instance, against Putin and while Putin is a violent dictator and we would never want to live under his rule, we haven’t seen evidence that he is like Hitler in the sense that he will keep conquering and conquering without end. Obviously, the left goes to the reductio ad Hitler (reduction to Hitler) argument way too easily. So, Carlson is sick of the reductio ad Hitler argument so he seems to be way too open to the argument of ‘you know what? Not even Hitler was as bad as people say he was!’ But on the off chance that Carlson is reading this, take a step back, dude. Hitler really was that bad. And the way to deal with bogus ‘everything is Hitler’ arguments is to point out how it really doesn’t apply, not to pretend Hitler wasn’t one of the most evil people to have ever walked this earth.

And maybe we are being too kind. We report, you decide.

This comes out very strongly in this article:

While Mediaite isn’t our favorite site these days, we can attest to the accuracy of this passage:

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Cooper’s claims followed Carlson’s profession to be ‘highly distressed by the uses to which the myths about World War Two have been put in the context of modern foreign policy — particularly the war in Ukraine.’

‘You know, Churchill’s the good guy, Neville Chamberlain’s the bad guy. You know it’s just, it’s too pat, it’s too, obviously, quite banal. But it also has justified, like, the killing of millions of people since the end of the Second World War. And so I do think it’s fair to ask like ‘What really was going on?’ So for example, I’m American, I’m not English so I don’t have any weird motive in asking this but how would you assess Winston Churchill?’ Carlson asked Cooper.

So, as you can see, Tucker seems to be reacting as much to the misuse of the warning from History presented by World War II as World War II itself.

On to reactions:

And Mr. Coleman makes a good point. Hitler was evil and his national socialist movement deserves to be pinned on the current socialist movement:

We haven't had a chance to watch it, but we trust Mr. Coleman enough to think it is worth watching.

In the next post, Coleman talks about holocaust deniers and links to a book about one of them. But, unfortunately, he uses a naughty naughty word, so we will just quote him (with mild censorship):

And if you're a fan of adjudicated Holocaust denier David Irving or encounter someone who relies on him or similar ‘just asking questions’ b———t artists, this from @RichardEvans36 is the antidote 

Telling Lies About Hitler

He links to Amazon where it is selling Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial, by Richard J. Evans. But all things considered maybe don’t buy it from Trump-hating Amazon which biases their systems against him. We haven’t read the book, but we suspect it is about the infamous defamation suit where Irving sued various people for basically calling him a Holocaust denier. This case was filed in England, where truth is a defense that you affirmatively have to prove (a legal rule we disagree with—we prefer the plaintiff to be required to prove falsity). Irving then argued that this was defamatory because he claimed the Holocaust didn’t actually happen, and … unless we are missing some subtlety, that sounds like an admission that he is a Holocaust denier. Seriously, he really seems to be arguing ‘yes, I am a Holocaust denier and that’s a good thing!’ and we legitimately don’t know why the case was allowed to go on. Even if we pretend he could prove the holocaust didn’t happen (and obviously it did happen, so he couldn’t), how does him being right in that hypothetical turn him into something other than a holocaust denier? But for some reason, everyone involved decided to fight on those terms and prove the holocaust actually happened, which is strange, legally, but we suppose that is good as a way to strike a blow against holocaust denial in the legal system without trampling anyone’s freedom of speech.

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Indeed, look who showed up to praise this interview?

In any case, back to the awesome Ron Coleman:

Everyone could go on and on, Ron.

And this seems like a subtweet:

Coucy is just mad because he actually knew Winston Churchill and shared cigars with him.

(We're joking, obviously.)

To be fair to Cooper, he did acknowledge there were other serious villains in World War II. And look, Hitler wasn’t the only villain in World War II. Stalin might have been an ally of convenience, but he was arguably just as bad if not worse. But we have never seen any convincing evidence that Churchill was a villain. He wasn’t perfect, either, but he was more on the side of the angels than not.

The Twitter/X post is allegedly from the official account of Cooper’s podcast, but we can’t verify that he sent that.

We admit we laughed at that.

That’s what we said!

Also, for the record, we never heard of Cooper before yesterday, either, so we are very open to evidence that we are being entirely too kind to him.

This ‘history is written by the winners’ cliché is only true in countries where there isn’t freedom of expression. So, you could make the case in Germany itself—where being a Nazi is essentially outlawed—but you can’t make that case in America.

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Sadly, Musk joined in:

It is indeed deeply fascinating, in a slow-motion-video-of-a-train-wreck sort of way.

As we said, we couldn’t verify the first screencap, but the second is real:

Is he trying to say Hitler wasn’t in Hell? Because if there is a Hell, and there are better and worse parts of it, we are pretty sure Hitler is roasting in the worst part of it.

And while searching his feed for the word ‘Hitler’ we found this gem:

Of course, the ‘Reichstag fire,’ is a reference to when an arsonist or arsonists attacked the German legislative building. The Nazis claimed a communist did it, but the popular belief is that the Nazis did it to justify the crackdown that followed.

So, he seems to be saying that the Israelis faked October 7, 2024, but this is coming from a podcast where a guy basically tried to argue Hitler wasn’t so bad? So if he wasn't so bad, then why would he believe the fire was a false flag operation? We suppose it is possible to thread that needle, but it suggests very confused thinking on Cooper’s part.

By attacked, he means ‘criticized’ and the reason why is because if you make a stupid argument, you should expect to be criticized. Truly, if you make any argument you should expect to be criticized, but even more so when the argument is stupid.

Finally:

We tend to put more stock in confronting this kind of idiocy so we can discredit it. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as they say. But if you read our article and decided life is too short to waste your time on actually listing to this discussion with Cooper, we would understand.

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Tags: HISTORY TUCKER CARLSON WORLD WAR II

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