Michelle Goldberg takes on the latest rad fad on the authoritarian right: Hitler apologia and holocaust denial. You knew it was coming, right? She is responding to (yet another) right wing “influencer” and alleged historian named Darryl Cooper and his embrace by none other than Tiucker Carlson.
Some on the right found Carlson’s turn toward Holocaust skepticism surprising. “Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” Erick Erickson, the conservative radio host, wrote on X. But Carlson’s trajectory was entirely predictable. Nazi sympathy is the natural endpoint of a politics based on glib contrarianism, right-wing transgression and ethnic grievance. . . .
For parts of the contemporary right, however, the social consensuses undergirding liberalism are artificial and even tyrannical. After all, the “Matrix”-derived metaphor of being “red-pilled” implies a realization that all you’ve been told about the nature of reality is a lie, and thus everything is up for grabs. And once you discard all epistemological and moral guardrails, it’s easy to descend into barbarous nonsense.
Candace Owens, another anti-woke right-wing celebrity who has lately become Hitler-curious, has also come to question received wisdom about the shape of the earth. “I’m not a flat-earther,” she said in July. “I’m not a round-earther. Actually, what I am is I am somebody who has left the cult of science.”
Obviously, not every red-pilled conservative ends up arguing, as Owens did, that Hitler gets a bad rap. But the weakening of the intellectual quarantine around Nazism — and the MAGA right’s fetish for ideas their enemies see as dangerous — makes it easier for influential conservatives to surrender to fascist impulses. When they do, they pay no penalty in political relevance, because there’s no conservative establishment capable of disciplining its ideologues.
Carlson has just embarked on a national tour with special guests at each stop. In addition to Alex Jones, he’s scheduled to appear with the vice-presidential nominee JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr.
Whitewashing Hitler is an interesting move for a pro-Russia, pro-Putin acolyte like Carlson. Does he know anything about Russian history, specifically what went down between it and Nazi Germany? He might want to bone up a little bit on that.
On the other hand, for all I know Putin is now a Hitler apologist too and all that mass death and destruction is water under the bridge. It would be a bit surprising if so. Russians usually have pretty long memories. But maybe the allure of der Führer has him in its grip as well.
