Tucker Carlson Hates the West

When Churchill becomes the chief villain of World War II, as a Carlson guest claimed, it makes you wonder just what Tucker wants.

Churchill Statue in Parliament Square, London. Personal image.

I’ve often heard the saying that “World War II was the last just war” (I would update that to include Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Hamas), but if any conflict embodied St. Augustine’s just war theory it was World War II. Truly it was the ultimate clash between the evil of the Axis versus the democracies of the Allied powers.

One of the great men of that dark time was Sir Winston Churchill, then the Prime Minister of Great Britain, whose brilliance and bulldog tenacity kept his little nation from falling to Hitler’s juggernaut.

Churchill’s address to the House of Commons in June, 1940, still ranks as one of the greatest speeches of all time. He declared:

“… we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender …”

World War II British Spitfire. Imperial War Museum, London. Personal image.

Consider that occurred one and one-half years before the United States entered the war. Truly things looked bleak for Great Britain at the time. Yet with Churchill at the helm, the Brits prevailed.

Enter a World War II Revisionist

Earlier this week Tucker Carlson hosted Darryl Cooper, whom Carlson called “the best and most honest historian,” on an episode of his subscription The Tucker Carlson Show. Cooper, mind you, doesn’t appear to have any academic credentials as a historian. But he regurgitates pro-Nazi revisionism and Holocaust denial which apparently constitute genius in Tucker World.

Here’s what Cooper had to say about Churchill:

“I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War. Now, he didn’t kill the most people, he didn’t commit the most atrocities, but I believe and I don’t really — I really think that when you get into it and tell the story right and don’t leave anything out, you see that he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.”

Why? He should’ve let Hitler have his way, conquer Britain, and then use his Wehrmacht to confront and defeat the communist Russians. But no — Churchill had to spoil the party and, you know, defend his nation.

As Jeffrey Blehar wrote at National Review:

… 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 … Also, Cooper argues, Churchill made Soviet domination possible.

But what about the Holocaust? The dead civilians the Reich left in their wake?

Cooper has an answer to that, too. He does blame the Germans, but only because they failed to see that their military successes would bring about too many prisoners for them to handle. The poor Nazis — victims of their own success!

“You know, Germany, look, they put themselves into a position [and] Adolf Hitler’s chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the east in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners, and so forth that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there. You know, you have, you have like letters as early as July, August 1941 from commandants of these makeshift camps that they’re setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people they’re rounding up and they’re- so it’s two months after, a month or two after Barbarossa was launched, and they’re writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, “We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people.” And one of them actually says ‘Rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?’”

“Finish them off quickly:” homeless children of the Warsaw Ghetto. Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

Shades of Holocaust denier David Irving. Or WWII revisionist Pat Buchanan.

But Tucker Carlson is “just asking questions.”

Right. In July, at the start of the Paris Olympics, Cooper posted this image at X. He deleted it, but as we know, the Internet is forever. And this tells you all you need to know about Tucker Carlson’s “best and most honest historian:”

Was the LGBTQ mockup of the Last Supper painting offensive? As a Christian, I found it contemptible. But none of those drag queens and lesbians brought about the deaths of millions, either.

Backlash to Carlson and Cooper

Tucker Carlson, unfortunately, has a stalwart following among many on the far right. Yet this episode of The Tucker Carlson Show engendered a swift backlash among many traditional conservative writers.

Like Mark Antonio Wright, executive editor at National Review:

Cooper’s revisionist history is simply folly.

And Ben Domenech, editor of The Spectator World:

The version of history Carlson chose to host and promote about World War Two is as deep as a 4chan thread and just as insightful. It is based on the aim of deceit, but with the arrogance of someone who absorbs history by osmosis. Why read a book? A podcast summary works just fine.

Even Stephen Green at PJ Media, typically a more hard-right website, wondered:

Seriously, What the Hell is Wrong With Tucker Carlson?

The backlash among conservatives at X was, let’s say, more caustic.

From Bonchie at Red State and David Marcus from Fox News:

And from Seth Dillon, CEO of the satire site Babylon Bee:

So What the Hell Is Wrong with Tucker Carlson?

To be honest, when Carlson first took over Bill O’Reilly’s spot at Fox News, I enjoyed his program. He was funny, and clever, and even when he said things that made me wonder what did he just say? I would tell myself, well, he has a point.

Until he didn’t.

It started with his UFO obsession. Then his deliberate misinterpretation of the Covid VAERS report, along with a host of conspiracy theories.

The final straw for me came when Russia invaded Ukraine in February, 2022. Carlson trotted out retired Army colonel Douglas MacGregor as a military “expert,” even though Macgregor is a Russian shill, who was likely bitter about not getting his much-deserved Army promotion and proceeded to agitate for the adversary in response. And was, more often than not, wrong.

After that, Tucker Carlson’s TV program became anathema to me.

Moreover, Carlson has never had a bad word to say about Vladimir Putin, but instead has called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — who is Jewish — “rat-like,” a centuries-old antisemitic trope.

We have also written at this Substack how Tucker Carlson listened with rapt attention to the likes of Alexander Dugin, Vladimir Putin’s muse. And of course, there was Carlson’s fluff interview of Putin himself, as well as his fawning over the city of Moscow as being “so much nicer than any city in my country.”

But Carlson has also ventured into the Israel-Palestinian conflict, granting a platform to a pro-Hamas Palestinian pastor. That interview with Rev. Isaac Munther was a hit piece on the nation of Israel. As Stephen Green wrote:

Carlson chose to interview Isaac to find out how the Jewish State of Israel treats Christians. Isaac is a priest who neither lives nor works in Israel and who uses the loaded phrase "Occupied Palestine" as his location on his Twitter/X profile. He is a Palestinian Christian from Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem, where Christian ministers serve at the mercy of the Palestinian Authority.

So what the hell is wrong with Tucker Carlson?

In short, he hates the West, and that includes not only the United States and Europe, but western-looking nations like Ukraine and Israel.

Nick Catoggio, aka “Allahpundit,” scrutinized Carlson’s mindset at The Dispatch. Using Reagan’s famous “three-legged stool” paradigm, Catoggio wrote:

There’s a new stool, the first leg of which is represented by postliberal ideologues. That’s the Tucker faction, the group that wants to rip out the liberal Western order by the roots. Pluralism, feminism, democracy—it’s all got to go if Christian white men are to regain their pride of place as rulers of the West. Carlson seems to believe that his audience has been “programmed” to respect liberal values and can be reprogrammed to admire authoritarianism.

Admire authoritarianism? Any cursory assessment of 20th century history shows the disaster it brought. From fascism to Nazism to communism — all had ushered in calamities across the globe.

As for Carlson’s hardcore fan base: perhaps a diligent review of history and subsequent self-reflection is in order here.

Tenor.com.

I understand the animus that traditional people have toward political and institutional leaders who have fostered radical progressive agendas, be it race and intersectionality theory, gender activism, or unchecked immigration. Organic backlash is already occurring at the ballot box and in the streets — not only here in the United States, but in Great Britain as well.

Let democracy play itself out naturally — through peaceful means. We’ll muddle through the idiocracy from both camps of the “Woke Left” and the “Woke Right,” as the brilliant Konstantin Kisin calls them. I’m old enough to remember the unrest of the 1960’s, which in many ways resembles the current zeitgeist. We will survive.

Meanwhile, a pox on Tucker Carlson and his cohort of cranks. Rather, we should consider the words of the philosopher Russell Kirk, who stated that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time. And that includes giants like the great Sir Winston Churchill.