Why make it harder for Jews open to voting Republican for once by openly boosting Carlson?

Photo: Shutterstock/ Aleksandr Dyskin

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ucker Carlson recently introduced Darryl Cooper to his podcast audience as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” Impressive praise for someone with no academic credentials, no published works of history, and who describes himself as a “non-racist fascist.”

And particularly so, as in the course of a two-hour discussion, during which Carlson failed to push back even once, Cooper had some rather astounding things to say, such as that Churchill was the “real villain” of World War II, and that he bears primary “responsibility for the war becoming what it did, something other than an invasion of Poland.”

So alarmed were they by the wide and young audience for Cooper’s charges that three of the most eminent contemporary historians set about to refute them in short order: Andrew Roberts, who is, along with Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s leading biographer; Victor Davis Hanson, the author of numerous books on warfare from the Peloponnesian Wars to the great world wars of the previous century; and Niall Ferguson, the author of 16 works of history and formerly a professor of history at both Oxford and Harvard.

They find that Cooper’s analysis fails the basic test of chronology, that he appears to have never read Mein Kampf; and that most of his arguments are recycled from Nazi apologists, if not from Joseph Goebbels himself.

First to chronology. The German armies invaded France and the lowland countries — Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg — in May 1940. Churchill was not yet prime minister. So it can hardly have been his bellicosity that provoked Hitler. And it was Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who guaranteed the security of Poland in 1939, at a time when Churchill was not even a member of the cabinet. That guarantee put Hitler on notice that Britain would fight to defend against the expansion of his war aims. Hitler, in Hanson’s words, knew that the Nazis had shocked the world with their “pre-civilizational brutality” in Poland, including widespread bombing of civilians to spread terror and death, and the Western nations would not be lured into any further deals with him. He restarted the war in Europe in May 1940 in order to consolidate his control of the continent before turning east toward Russia.

On not having read Mein Kampf. Hitler’s turn eastward was part of his plan from the beginning. He sought Lebensraum (lit. living space) on land liberated from the inferior Slavic people, as he explained at length in Mein Kampf.

Cooper attempts to mitigate the severity of the Nazis’ treatment of Soviet POWs. He claims that they were totally unprepared by the huge numbers of Soviet troops captured or surrendering, and thus had to improvise with makeshift camps that provided neither shelter nor food.

In the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa, Ferguson estimates that German troops may have summarily executed up to 600,000 Soviet troops. The chief of the German army general staff Franz Halder wrote in his diary that the Russian population would have to be disposed of during the first winter to save the cost of feeding and maintaining them. By the end of that first winter, two million Soviet POWs were dead. Over the course of the war, three million died in captivity.

That treatment was not some sort of unforeseen accident. In a series of orders issued prior to Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, Hitler explicitly described the operation as a “war of extermination,” and he prospectively exonerated all German soldiers from any culpability for their actions toward the enemy. At Nuremberg, many senior German officers argued that they had opposed Hitler’s vision of total war, writes Hanson, but none denied receiving the orders or claimed to have resisted implementing them.

Ferguson adds that the last time he read excuses like those offered by Cooper for the behavior of the Wehrmacht toward captured POWs, they came from “old Nazis” in the ’80s and ’90s, when the full extent of their atrocities was first revealed.

Tellingly, neither Cooper nor Carlson mentioned the Nazis’ industrialized murder of six million Jews, though Cooper did allow that Churchill’s alleged villainy did not mean that he had killed more people or directed more atrocities than Hitler. Mention of the Jews would have blown the preposterous claim that the treatment of Russian POWs was a result of poor planning. The Germans created elaborate rail systems to transport Jews to extermination camps: So they were obviously not caught off guard by the sheer number they killed.

But something of Cooper and Carlson’s attitudes to Jews can be surmised by the former’s accusation that Churchill’s Zionism and antipathy toward Germany owed at least in part to various Jewish financiers and corporate media, who had helped place him in power. But as Andrew Roberts noted, the newspapers were almost uniformly hostile to Churchill until he was chosen as prime minister. More importantly, Churchill was both a Zionist and an anti-Nazi with every fiber of his being. True, his friend Bernard Baruch had absorbed some of his losses on the stock exchange in 1929, but Baruch was himself not a Zionist. Another Jewish friend left him a large sum in his will. But a will is self-evidently a poor way to convey a bribe.

COOPER’S REAL COMPLAINT seems to be that the wrong side, in the end, won the war. After Dunkirk, he says, the war was over, and Hitler was in command of the European continent. Britain had no means of reversing that result, and Churchill should have just acknowledged reality and explored peace negotiations with Hitler.

In short, the very thing that caused the late Charles Krauthammer to call Churchill the greatest person of the 20th century, the one absolutely “indispensable” person but for whom history would have been completely different, is what causes Cooper to villainize him. “Take away Churchill in 1940,” argued Krauthammer in a 2015 speech at Hillsdale College, “and Britain would have settled with Hitler — or worse. Nazism would have prevailed. Hitler would have achieved what no other tyrant, not even Napoleon, had ever achieved: mastery of Europe. Civilization would have descended into a darkness the likes of which it had never known.”

Even at a distance of nearly a century, Churchill’s speeches to Parliament, summarizing in elegant detail the progress of the war, still have the power to cause the heart to soar. The third of his classic addresses during the Battle of France, June 18, 1940, memorably concluded: “But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ ”

For this, Cooper labels him a warmonger “who kept the war going when he had no way to fight it,” and who engaged in rank terrorism on “the greatest scale in world history” against German civilians. The latter is a bit rich, given that by time that the RAF started bombing in Germany, the Luftwaffe had already terrorized Polish civilians, destroyed much of Warsaw, as well as the center of Rotterdam, and bombed London and Britain’s other population centers. The Nazi blitz struck at London for 56 out of 57 days in late 1940, and continued against British cities until the following May, killing 40,000 civilians and destroying or damaging two million homes.

Nor was Britain left defenseless after Dunkirk, as Cooper asserts. The Royal Navy, which had successfully blockaded Germany during World War I, was still the strongest in the world, and served as the major deterrent to an amphibious German invasion of Britain. And the RAF would soon triumph over the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain.

Hitler’s fear of Britain’s fighting capacity forced him to withhold about 30 percent of his air and ground forces from Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, which may have had a decisive impact on the ultimate failure of Hitler’s eastern campaign.

THAT COOPER thinks the wrong side won is not surmise. He posted on X a juxtaposition of two photos of Paris — one of Hitler and his top generals in 1940 with the Eiffel Tower in the background, and the other of the blasphemous opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympics — and summarizes the matter thus: “The picture on the left [a triumphant Hitler] was preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right.” The millions of Jews who would die at Hitler’s command do not, it would appear, enter into the calculation.

Carlson seems to be of a similar bent. In the interview, he asks rhetorically how Churchill can be credited with saving Western civilization if there are girls begging for drugs in London today. He appears to believe that there was some bygone era of perfection in the West or Christendom, and that if that ideal is not met, then nothing has been achieved.

That has led him on more than one occasion to fall into the fallacy “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” as was evident in his fanboy interview of Vladimir Putin. If Putin is opposed to the alternative lifestyle movement, Carlson reasons, then he should be viewed favorably, even if his political opponents prove particularly vulnerable to being poisoned or dying in prison. Few raised in the democratic West, however, would be willing to trade our freedoms in favor of a dictator who would rescue us from woke degeneration, though Cooper and Carlson might be.

WHY DOES THIS MATTER? For one thing, Tucker Carlson is widely considered one of the most influential right-wing voices in America, particularly among young listeners whose knowledge of history in general, and of World War II in particular, can be assumed to be minimal.

He sat in the same box with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance at the Republican convention. Finally, J.D. Vance is slated to participate in the Tucker Carlson Live tour in Hershey, Pennsylvania on September 23.

That participation by Vance is political malpractice of a type increasingly common in the Trump campaign. Another of Tucker’s guests on that tour is the infamous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. That alone should have been enough to alert Vance to stay far away from such a freak show.

Moreover, Trump is making a big pitch for the Jewish vote. And there are signs that Jews are more open to switching their traditional alliances after October 7 and nearly a year of pro-Palestinian riots on campuses and elsewhere. They do not agree with Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz that the rioters are doing so, in his words, “for all the right reasons,” but because they are celebrating Jewish deaths and want to see Israel destroyed.

So why make it harder for Jews open to voting Republican for once by openly boosting Carlson, a figure given to dark mutterings about attacks on Christian Americans and a marked lack of sympathy for Israel? (See Issue 1021, “J.D. Vance — Good for the Jews?”)

By providing Cooper a platform and then failing to push back in any fashion, Carlson performed two wrongs. The first was the right-wing version of the New York Times 1619 Project, an effort to destroy one of those points of national pride that once unified us — in this case, the target was the heroism of “the greatest generation” and the justice of their cause. The second and even worse wrong was giving a megaphone to an apologist for Hitler, who sought to wipe out the entire Jewish People.

So far, the only thing heard from Vance about his appearance with Carlson on September 23 is that he does not believe in “guilt-by-association cancel culture,” but he obviously does not share the views of Carlson’s guest. Followed by a reiteration that “there are no stronger supporters of our allies in Israel or the Jewish community in America than Senator Vance and President Trump.”

But Carlson did not just associate with Cooper; he promoted his views with his effusive praise of Cooper as a historian and by failing to push back against him at any point.

Were Vance just appearing with someone with a different stance on tariffs than that of the Trump campaign, no one would object. But by appearing with Tucker Carlson, he risks legitimizing what the great historian of anti-Semitism once called “the lethal obsession.”

That should not happen.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1029. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)