Last year Tucker Carlson devoted the October 9 episode of his X show to the Hamas/Israel war. He opened by searching for “the wise path forward” and asking what we should “do next in this chaotic moment.”
For some reason, he didn’t directly answer his own question. We were to infer, however, that it’s none of our business. It might be best to avert our eyes.
“War begets more war,” he advised. Such mindless shibboleths were to guide us on the “wise path forward.” John Lennon was unavailable to confirm.
I have wondered for a while what was going on with Carlson. It struck me as something very dark. Tucker’s musings put me in mind of Charles Lindbergh’s descent before the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor. I couldn’t help but think back to the “Anti-Semitism for Ye, but not for me” episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News.
In last year’s November 15 episode of his X show Tucker Carlson served as the medium for the madness of Candace Owens in her dispute with Ben Shapiro. Owens has continued her own descent into medieval anti-Semitism, but you didn’t need a weather man to know which way her wind was blowing.
For some reason, Israel leaves Carlson cold. He prides himself on keeping cool about Israel’s ordeal. With Owens he minimized and brushed it off as “a foreign tragedy.” In retrospect, Carlson’s “analysis” reminds me of Neville Chamberlain’s characterization of Hitler’s claim on the Sudetenland in 1938: “A quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.”
Speaking of which we arrive at the latest step in Carlson’s descent into the Lindberghian mire (to put it charitably). It comes in his two-hour exploration of “whackadoo revisionim,” as Ben Domenech puts it (also charitably), with Darryl Cooper.
Who, you may ask, is Darryl Cooper? According to Carlson, he “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.”
Ooh! How daring can you get?
Carlson’s interview with Cooper is posted here on X. Some 23.8 million viewers have watched some part of it. Elon Musk has retweeted it. You too can lose brain cells tuning in, as I did yesterday, only to “learn” that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of World War II — in the hushed tone of “now it can be said.” David Irving, call your office!
Isaac Schorr plucks some quotable quotes from Cooper’s comments in the Mediate story ”Tucker Carlson Starstruck By Historian Who Calls Churchill, Not Hitler, the ‘Chief Villain’ of WW2 and Casts Holocaust as Accident” that give a sense of the Cooper/Carlson historical phantasmagoria. There is much more that could and should be said. Given his audience and the reach of that interview, I hope some serious historians such as Andrew Roberts and Victor Davis Hanson will say it. In the meantime, I present Carlson as Exhibit A of a descent into willfully ignorant stupidity in the service of a bad cause.
