By Yair Rosenberg
Wednesday, September 03, 2025
“The story we got about World War II is all wrong,” a
guest told Tucker Carlson on his podcast two weeks ago. “I think that’s
right,” replied Carlson. The guest, a Cornell chemistry professor named David
Collum, then spelled out what he meant: “One can make the argument we should
have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin.” Such sentiments might sound shocking
to the uninitiated, but they are not to Carlson’s audience. In fact, the notion
that the German dictator was unfairly maligned has become a
running theme on Carlson’s show—and beyond.
Last September, Carlson interviewed a man named Darryl
Cooper, whom he dubbed “the most important popular historian working in the United
States today.” Cooper’s conception of honest history soon became clear: He
suggested that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill might have been “the
chief villain of the Second World War,” with Nazi Germany at best coming in
second. The day after the episode aired, Cooper further downplayed Hitler’s
genocidal ambitions, writing on social media that the German leader had sought peace with
Europe and merely wanted “to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish
problem.” He did not explain why the Jews should have been considered a
“problem” in the first place.
“What is it about Hitler? Why is he the most evil?” the
far-right podcaster Candace Owens asked in July 2024. “The first thing people would say is: ‘Well, an
ethnic cleansing almost took place.’ And now I offer back: ‘You mean like we
actually did to the Germans.’” A repeat guest on Carlson’s show, Owens defended
him after his conversation with Cooper. “Many Americans are learning that WW2
history is not as black and white as we were taught and some details were
purposefully omitted from our textbooks,” she wrote on X.
These Reich rehabilitators are not fringe figures.
Carlson’s show ranks among the top podcasts in America. He spoke before
President Donald Trump on the final night of the 2024 Republican National
Convention, and his son serves as a deputy press secretary to Vice President J.
D. Vance, who owes
his office in part to Carlson’s advocacy. Owens has
millions of followers on YouTube, Instagram, and X, and over the past six
months, she has been interviewed by some of the nation’s most popular
podcasters, including the comedian Theo Von and the ESPN personality Stephen A.
Smith. Her output has attained sufficient notoriety that she is currently being
sued by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte,
over her repeated claims that the French first lady was actually born a man.
Cooper, the would-be World War II revisionist, publishes the top-selling history
newsletter on the entire Substack platform.
Why does a potent portion of the American right seek to
rehabilitate Hitler? The Nazi apologetics are partly an attention-seeking
attempt at provocation—an effort to signal iconoclasm by transgressing one of
society’s few remaining taboos. But there is more to the story than that.
Carlson and his fellow travelers on the far right correctly identify the Second
World War as a pivot point in America’s understanding of itself and its
attitude toward its Jewish citizens. The country learned hard lessons from the
Nazi Holocaust about the catastrophic consequences of conspiratorial prejudice.
Today, a growing constituency on the right wants the nation to unlearn them.
***
Before World War II, the United States was a far more
anti-Semitic place than it is now. Far from joining the conflict to rescue
Europe’s Jews, the country was largely unsympathetic to their plight. In 1938,
on the eve of the Holocaust, Gallup found that 54 percent of Americans believed that “the persecution of
Jews in Europe has been partly their own fault,” and that another 11 percent
thought it was “entirely” their fault. In other words, as the Nazis prepared to
exterminate the Jews, most Americans blamed the victims.
The same week that the Kristallnacht pogrom left
thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses in ruins, 72 percent of Americans
opposed allowing “a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come
to the United States to live.” Months later, 67 percent opposed a bill aimed at accepting child refugees from Germany; the idea
never
made it to a congressional vote. Many Americans
worried, however illogically, that fleeing Jews might be German spies, a vanishingly
rare occurrence. Those with suspicions included
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who suggested in 1940 that some refugees could be engaged in espionage under
compulsion from the Nazis, “especially Jewish refugees.”
This climate of paranoia and hostility had deadly
consequences. In 1939, the U.S. and Canada turned away the M.S.
St. Louis, which carried nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees. The ship was forced
to return to Europe, where hundreds of the passengers were captured and killed
by the Germans. Restrained by public sentiment, Roosevelt not only kept the
country’s refugee caps largely in place but also rejected pleas to bomb the Auschwitz concentration camp and the railway tracks
that led to it. When the United States finally entered the war, it did so not
out of any special sense of obligation to the Jews but to defend itself after
the attack on Pearl Harbor.
That indifference to the Holocaust was immediately
dispelled when the Allied Forces liberated several of the Nazi camps where millions
of Jews had been murdered. Entering the gates of these
sadistic sites, American service members came face-to-face with unspeakable
Nazi atrocities—rotting piles of naked corpses, gas chambers, thousands of
emaciated adults. Denial gave way to revulsion. “I thought of some of the
stories I previously had read about Dachau and was glad of the chance to see
for myself just to prove once and for all that what I had heard was
propaganda,” Sergeant Horace Evers wrote to his family in May 1945. “But no it wasn’t propaganda at all
… If anything some of the truth had been held back.”
Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied
Forces in Europe and future U.S. president, personally went to Ohrdruf, a
subcamp of Buchenwald and the first Nazi camp liberated by American troops. “I
made the visit deliberately,” he cabled to Washington, “in order to be in position to give first-hand
evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to
charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” Eisenhower then requested
that members of Congress and prominent journalists be brought to the camps to
see and document the horrors themselves. “I pray you to believe what I have
said about Buchenwald,” the legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow told his listeners after touring the camp. “I reported what I saw
and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.”
Two-thirds of Europe’s Jews had been murdered. American
soldiers, drafted from across the United States, returned home bearing witness
to what they had encountered. “Anti-Semitism was right there, it had been
carried to the ultimate, and I knew that that was something we had to get rid
of because I had experienced it,” Sergeant Leon Bass, a Black veteran whose
segregated unit entered Buchenwald, later testified.
In this way, the American people learned firsthand where rampant anti-Jewish
prejudice led—and the country was transformed.
Americans began to understand themselves as the ones
who’d defeated the Nazis and saved the Jews. Slowly but surely, anti-Semitism
became un-American. But today, those lessons—like the people who learned
them—are passing away, and a wave
of propagandists with a very different agenda has
arisen to fill the void they left behind.
***
Over the past few years, Tucker Carlson and his
co-ideologues have begun insinuating anti-Semitic ideas into the public
discourse. The former Fox News host has described Ben Shapiro, perhaps the most prominent American Jewish
conservative, and those like him as foreign subversives who “don’t care about
the country at all.” He has also promoted a lightly sanitized version of the white-supremacist “Great
Replacement” theory that has inspired multiple anti-Semitic massacres on American soil. Candace Owens
has accused Israel of involvement in the 9/11 attacks and the JFK
assassination, and claimed that a Jewish pedophile cult controls the world.
(Like many pushing such slanders, she has apparently discerned that replacing Jews with Israel or Zionists grants
age-old conspiracy theories new legitimacy.) In March, an influencer named Ian
Carroll—who has a combined 3.8 million social-media followers, and whose work
has been shared by Elon Musk—joined Joe Rogan, arguably the most popular
podcaster in America, to expound without challenge about how a “giant group of
Jewish billionaires is running a sex-trafficking operation targeting American
politicians and business people.”
Before America entered World War II, reactionaries such
as the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and the Catholic radio firebrand Father
Charles Coughlin inveighed against the country’s tiny
Jewish population, accusing it of controlling America’s institutions and
dragging the U.S. to war. “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their
large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and
our government,” Lindbergh declared of American Jews in 1941. “Why is there persecution in Germany
today?” asked Coughlin after Kristallnacht. “Jewish persecution only followed
after Christians first were persecuted.” For these men and their millions of
supporters, behind every perceived social and political problem lay a sinister
Jewish culprit.
The 21st-century heirs of Lindbergh and Coughlin seek to
turn back the clock to a time when such sentiments were seen by many as
sensible rather than scandalous. These far-right figures have correctly
ascertained that to change what is possible in American politics, they need to
change how America talks about itself and its past. “The reason I keep focusing
on this is probably the same reason you’re doing it,” Carlson told Darryl
Cooper, the amateur Holocaust historian. “I think it’s central to the society
we live in, the myths upon which it’s built. I think it’s also the cause of the
destruction of Western civilization—these lies.”
Carlson couches his claims in layers of intellectual
abstraction. Others are less coy. “Hitler burned down the trans clinics,
arrested the Rothschild bankers, and gave free homes to families,” the former
mixed martial artist Jake Shields told his 870,000 followers on X last week. “Does this sound like the
most evil man who ever lived?” The post received 44,000 likes. (Shields has
also denied that “a single Jew died in gas chambers.”) “Hitler was right
about y’all,” said Myron Gaines, a manosphere podcaster with some 2 million
followers across platforms, referring to Jews last year. “You guys come into a
country, you push your pornography, you push your fuckin’ central banking, you
push your degeneracy, you push the LGBT community, you push all this fuckin’
bullshit into a society, you destroy it from within.” These influencers are
less respectable than Carlson, but their views are precisely the ones that more
presentable propagandists like him are effectively working to mainstream. After
Carlson’s guest last month suggested that the U.S. “should have sided with
Hitler,” Shields reposted the clip.
Had Carlson and his cohort attempted their revisionism 20
years ago, they would have encountered a chorus of contradiction from real
people who had experienced the history they sought to rewrite and know where
its conspiratorial calumnies lead. But today, most of those people are dead,
and a new generation is rising that never witnessed the Holocaust firsthand or
heard about it from family and friends who did.
Late last year, David Shor, one of the Democratic Party’s
top data scientists, surveyed some 130,000 voters about whether they had a “favorable” or
“unfavorable” opinion of Jewish people. Hardly anyone over the age of 70 said
their view was unfavorable. More than a quarter of those under 25 did. The
question is not whether America’s self-understanding is changing; it’s how far
that change will go—and what the consequences will be.
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