There are some Republican voters who are sympathetic to their party’s ultra-nationalist turn and don’t believe the party’s attitudes toward issues like immigration and crime are the products of racial animus. But over and over again right-wing leaders and thinkers reveal that white supremacism is an engine of this movement.
The latest example comes via an episode of “The Tucker Carlson Show” released this week, in which the former Fox News host interviews podcast host and newsletter writer Darryl Cooper. Carlson, arguably the most influential right-wing nationalist commentator in America, said Cooper “may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” But Cooper has made clear that his intellectual project regarding World War II includes Holocaust revisionism.
In the Carlson interview, Cooper deems British Prime Minister Winston Churchill the “chief villain” of World War II and calls him “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.” Cooper also framed the slaughter of millions of people, most of them Jewish, as a logistical failure. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, he said, entered Germany into “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 they just threw these people into camps,” he added. “And millions of people ended up dead there.”
Cooper’s account is as offensive as it is inaccurate. They didn’t accidentally end up dead. Hitler deliberately sought out and executed the systematic murder of six million Jews with an explicit goal of elimination. And while it’s clear that Churchill committed plenty of indefensible war crimes, describing him as the chief villain of World War II says all that needs to be said about Cooper’s political sympathies. It is obscene that one needs to point out Hitler’s genocidal villainy. But it’s important to take note of it to understand how Carlson is helping mainstream Nazi apologists.
Michael Geyer, a professor emeritus of German and European history at the University of Chicago, told HuffPost that Carlson’s interview takes a different tack toward questioning the Holocaust than overt denial. “You get from one distortion to the next, his Holocaust story being interesting because it is no longer outright denial (i.e., it never happened) but considered collateral damage,” he said.
This is far from the first time that Cooper has suggested sympathy for Nazism. In the past he has, among other things, explicitly described Hitler’s value system as desirable compared to other political systems, and he has also blamed the British for not negotiating with Hitler over a “solution to the Jewish problem.”
X CEO Elon Musk boosted the Carlson episode, writing, “Very interesting. Worth watching.” After receiving criticism, Musk deleted the post and subsequently posted a Community Notes link with corrections to Cooper’s argument. Still, he’d already boosted the post to his tens of millions of followers with an uncritical attitude toward its claims. That’s alarming.
More disturbing, still, is the discovery that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, followed Cooper on X, at least as recently as Wednesday, as reported by The New Republic and other outlets. Vance is reportedly planning to join Carlson at a live event later in September with Carlson. Neither following Cooper on X nor appearing at an event with Carlson means Vance endorses any of Cooper’s views. But they do serve as clear evidence that white supremacist intellectual currents are running through the mainstream of right-wing nationalism, and that they are a part of the conversation that runs all the way to the top of the Republican Party.
It is impossible to disentangle MAGA from a project of racial domination. The casual mainstreaming of Cooper’s views, alongside Trump’s Hiterlian rhetoric describing immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country,” are the neon-lined sign posts that illustrate that right-wing nationalism is animated by a virulent ethnic chauvinism. There is no way someone can remain a part of this movement and seriously claim to reject racism.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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