There is an alarming phenomenon playing out on the online right, perpetuated by some of its most influential and popular voices: the embrace of anti-American, anti-Western, and antisemitic “brave truth telling.” Figures like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have gleefully championed the idea that everything you were taught in school is a lie, and that the perennially evil “they” are keeping the real information from you.
There is no limit to how fantastical and false this style of broadcasting can get. Mainstream actors on the right must draw the brightest lines possible between themselves and the increasingly deranged band of conspiracy theorists.
The latest upset is Tucker Carlson’s promotion of a David Irving-style pseudo-intellectual Holocaust denier on his show (or, as Tucker puts it, “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States”). The Nazis, this guest explains to a fascinated Carlson, didn’t want to kill the Jews. They were merely “completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners… They just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead there.”
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My great-great-grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz. In the last letter they sent to my Omi (their daughter and my great-grandmother), before they were deported to the camps, they wrote, “where we are, the living envy the dead.” Another one of my relatives was shot by the Nazis for daring to bury some of their Jewish victims, and then was strung up for all in the ghetto to see, a warning to leave the victims where they lay to inspire fear, not to be buried like human beings.
My grandmother is a Bergen-Belsen survivor. When she was liberated in April of 1945, she was malnourished and had typhus. She barely survived the Nazi killing machine. Her father, for whom my father is named, was murdered by the Nazis in 1944. So, I take great issue with Carlson platforming a guest who claims that the Nazis were anything milder than sociopathic murderers.
Darryl Cooper explained elsewhere that Churchill is the “chief villain” of World War II because, among his other alleged wrongdoings, he would not come to the table and consider Hitler’s reasonable overtures to work out “an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.”
Normal people can see the absurdity of the claim here because most of them know the truth: that the Jews and other victims of the Holocaust were murdered as part of Hitler’s Final Solution, the most well-documented genocide in history.
But Carlson sat through the interview bright-eyed and engaged. His descent into performative kookery and fringe madness has been ongoing for some time but seems to have finally—one must hope—hit its nadir.
By all accounts, Carlson is a smart, thoughtful student of history. Friends and former colleagues have expressed a high degree of doubt that he actually believes most, if any, of the strangest ideas he has recently platformed. This leaves only the most cynical explanation: that he has abdicated any and all responsibility he may have once felt to leverage his platform to educate the public. Instead, his lodestar seems now to be the pursuit of as much fame—or rather infamy—as possible.
Whatever his motives, Carlson’s conduct now demands social sanction and exclusion from polite society, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement writ large. This is obviously no small ask, given that Carlson is arguably the most well-known and, in many ways, articulate advocate of the conservative world. But even for those conservatives who have abandoned their founding principles to become “America-firsters,” surely there is nothing American about recasting the Nazis as the misunderstood victims of World War II.
This is uncomfortable for me to write, because I owe a lot to Tucker.
In 2018, I quit my job as a columnist at Business Insider, after they un-published a published piece I wrote expressing my utterly banal view that actors can play roles of identities different from their own. It was a hot topic at the time, but this was also at the apex of the cancellation era, and people were being shut down for far more benign thought crimes. Faced with the non-choice between meeting with a Pravda-esque “culture check” committee before filing any column or resigning in protest, I chose to walk. I was a nobody, and I had no plan whatsoever.
During that vulnerable period, Carlson gave me my 15 minutes of fame, putting me on his show a few times, and letting me tell my story to millions of Americans who became concerned, like I was, about the hostile takeover of our newsrooms by an activist class bent on miseducating and misinforming the public. Ironically, that is now exactly what Carlson is doing.
Among young conservative media circles, I’ve heard countless tales of up-and-coming reporters and producers who feel like they owe their start to Tucker.
For these reasons, or perhaps for different ones, plenty of conservatives have been too slow to condemn Carlson and relegate him to the fringes, as the movement did with Milo Yiannopoulos several years ago. It is long past time for that same action to be taken here.
In promoting a Holocaust denier, Carlson has decided to embrace the most cretinous sort of weirdo on the internet, and so he should be consigned to live among them.
It is on those of us who have, for too long, closed our eyes to the madness among our own ranks, to ensure this chaos of conspiracy does not spread to the mainstream, any more than it already has.
Daniella Greenbaum Davis is a writer living in New York
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.