We Need to Talk about Tucker, Again

By Jeffrey Blehar

Wednesday, September 04, 2024

 

I thought I was done with Tucker Carlson after he got fired from Fox News because of his role in encouraging the “stolen/flipped votes” hoax after the November 2020 election, a cynical gambit that helped pave the way to both January 6 and a $787 million settlement bill for the cable network in its defamation-suit payout to Dominion Voting Systems. (Having labelled the man both a “merchant of lies” and a “betrayer of trust,” further commentary felt superfluous.) I was wrong.

 

Then I thought I was done with Tucker Carlson after he journeyed to Moscow in February this year, to preach with alarming zeal in a series of propaganda videos about how Putin’s Russia was vastly more humane and civilized than They Want You To Realize, especially compared with the filthy sinkhole that is America in 2024. He then went to an international conference in Dubai to publicly talk down American democracy as being morally comparable to violent authoritarian dictatorships. (A day later Vladimir Putin, in a persuasive counterargument, murdered opposition leader Alexei Navalny in prison.) My contempt for Carlson’s anti-American turn was such that I wanted no more of him.

 

I ignored him when he strongly hinted on a podcast that he believes “gray aliens” are possibly hyper-dimensional demons with whom the U.S. government has struck a Faustian bargain for access to advanced technologies and human dominion. I ignored him when he sympathetically interviewed Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, and an honest-to-goodness “Catturd.” I would not deign to publicly notice these embarrassments, even to mock them.

 

Now I am realizing, with a sense of resignation, that I am not done with Tucker Carlson at all, and will not be for a long time. For I cannot ignore Tucker Carlson when he goes “partway-Nazi.”

 

***

 

I choose my words carefully. Carlson’s post-Fox turn as a podcaster has found him diving like Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes into a career triangulated awkwardly somewhere between Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, and Art Bell from the old Coast to Coast A.M. On his iTunes page, he sells his show with this promise: “The only solution to ending the propaganda spiral is telling the truth. That’s our job. Every day. No matter what.”

 

It is a pitch both bold and old. Carlson’s “I’m just asking courageous questions and hosting dangerously honest discussions” schtick is nothing new to the world, or even to Tucker; it is the same one he crafted at Fox and drove full-speed into a wall. What he does is offer his platform and imprimatur of authority to a guest and then converse in a friendly manner with them for an hour or two about some taboo subject or other. As noted above, Carlson explicitly avows that his goal is to expose viewers and listeners to a truth often available only “outside the mainstream” — for only a fool would trust the mainstream media, right?

 

In an age where the mainstream media forfeited nearly all of its accumulated public trust during the first Trump era and is now flushing the rest away as it tries to prevent a second, this is a canny marketing angle. But as I said after his Russian trip, Carlson’s cynicism long ago curdled into something far more foul: the arrogance of a swindler increasingly consumed with contempt for how easily fooled his marks are.

 

So this Monday he had on a man named Darryl Cooper, whom he introduced to his audience as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” Cooper “work[s] in a different medium – on Substack, X, podcasts,” Carlson says. “But I’m a fan of yours because of the way you treat history, which is with relentless curiosity and honesty. . . . I want you to be widely recognized as the most important historian in the United States, because I think that you are.”

 

After this powerful endorsement, Cooper then proceeded to denounce Winston Churchill for 40 minutes as the real evildoer behind World War II, the ultimate cause of all its atrocities, a man whose refusal to simply let Hitler conquer Poland, France, and the Low Countries caused all those regrettable deaths on the Eastern Front — we are asked to believe that the hapless Germans were victims of their own success and didn’t know what to do with all those extra people they’d conquered. Also, Cooper argues, Churchill made Soviet domination possible.

 

I am grateful that Mark Wright took his time to unpack the insanity of this in his own piece, because Cooper’s account is violently counterfactual on matters as simple and unarguable as basic chronology. It is also transparently based from top to bottom on staggering self-impressed ignorance, if not intentional malice.

 

I suspect it is malice. Because as it turns out, Darryl Cooper has a history of Nazi-sympathizing statements, and this was known well before this interview. I don’t mean that in the sense of “oh he has some politically incorrect views,” I mean that in the honest-to-goodness “Hitler is in heaven now” sense of a “Nazi sympathizer.” He’s not exactly subtle about it, either. This guy popped up on my radar months ago as a member of the Nazi-apologist alt-right subgenre. I saw these tweets long before this week. Am I to believe that Tucker Carlson did not? For a man he described as the “most important historian in the United States,” and not a casual guest? I’m just asking questions, Tucker.

 

***

 

This story matters not just because of its intellectual and moral enormity — the shame it brings on Tucker Carlson as he further prostitutes his name and reputation for repugnant ends — but because of Carlson’s reach. Tucker may not reach as many eyeballs or ears as he once did on Fox News, but he gets plenty enough as it is — and in a younger demographic. Carlson’s podcast currently ranks No. 1 on iTunes and No. 9 on Spotify; Darryl Cooper’s podcast leapt from the lower reaches of the Top 100 on iTunes up to the top 10 and is at No. 16 on Spotify, on the back of his Carlson appearance alone. Those are huge traffic numbers.

 

And this is what Carlson wants his audience to hear. Maybe a number of listeners are tuning in merely to gawk at the freak show after it became a news story, but I’m more concerned about the effect on future generations of conservatives. Tucker Carlson speaks directly to them, and this is content he wants to feed them: increasingly insane (and vile) conspiracy theories broached as the “forbidden truth.” Only a fool thinks there will not be a knock-on effect down the road in the conservative movement, and soon.

 

Because Carlson doesn’t lack for access there, either. He interviewed Utah senator Mike Lee — a man who seemingly cannot stop making poor decisions online — on July 30, and Dr. Ben Carson the week before that. (They were in fine company following the month’s prior two guests, Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec.) Carlson also spoke in a prime-time slot at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He will be touring his show this month throughout the nation, with scheduled guest appearances in different cities by Vivek Ramaswamy, Charlie Kirk, recent Trump endorser Tulsi Gabbard, and none other than vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance himself.

 

I hope Vance enjoys answering questions from the media about why he’s joining a man who wants his viewers to give serious consideration to the possibility that the Nazis should have been allowed to invade Poland, liquidate its Jews and Poles, and repopulate it with Germans. (As a follow-up, ask Vance whether he thinks Hitler would have kept a promise not to invade the USSR.) Those questions might not be fair to Vance, but then again he would probably prefer answering those than telling people the truth: He will be there because that is where he thinks Republican voters are right now. And they are not in a good place if Tucker Carlson is their guide.