SPRINGTIME FOR TUCKER: The Tablet’s Park MacDougald gives the background on Tucker’s interview with “historian” Darryl Cooper (the basics of which you’ve already read in the Mediaite story I linked to yesterday, and Steve’s piece at the PJ Mothership this morning) and writes, “A newsletter is not the place to ‘debate’ a podcaster over the most written-about subject in human history. Instead, we think it’s better to think about this episode from a political perspective:”
Who benefits from putting a World War II revisionist on the most popular podcast in America two months before an election? Well, for one, Carlson himself. One way to understand the interview is as a play by Carlson to draw a line on the right, with himself and the other brave “truth-tellers” (like Candace Owens) on one side, and the “neocons,” “Zionists,” and other establishment hysterics on the other. Sure, it shrinks the conservative coalition, provokes pointless infighting, and gives ammunition to Democrats and various sub-Lincoln Project grifters who would love nothing more than to distract from nearly a year of donor-funded, pro-terror protests on the left by portraying Donald Trump supporters as a gang of Nazi apologists. But it also puts Trump on the spot: Will you denounce your loyal followers to please liberals and “Conservative, Inc.” talking heads who hate you? Either way, Carlson wins.
Carlson wins, that is, and Trump loses*. As Abigail Shrier observes on X:
Kamala benefits….as does Barack Obama. This is trivially true in the sense that two-party politics are inherently zero-sum, but consider also the specifics of Cooper and Carlson’s discussion of Churchill. The implication isn’t merely that, say, Churchill was an overrated leader or a bad diplomat. Rather, it’s that Churchill was pushed by “Zionist” financiers to drag the United States into a war that it had no business fighting (never mind that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was preparing for a war with Germany from the late-1930s on). Those Zionists, always trying to drag naive Americans off to war!
Of course, it’s easy to say this story evokes antisemitic tropes. But what in present-day American politics is it supposed to remind you of?
For help with that one, we can turn to Iranian agent, Obama ally, and Iran-deal salesman Trita Parsi, who felt that yesterday was an excellent time to turn the subtext into text by sharing a clip from Carlson’s previous interview, with Jeffrey Sachs:
Read the whole thing.
Related: We Need to Talk about Tucker, Again.
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.
More: “A decade ago it was no exaggeration to say that Limbaugh and Fox News, where Ailes presided, served as de facto assignment editors for populist right-wing media. Whatever the daily hobby horse was in their programming, that’s what talk radio and online commentators would be chattering about. Who’s the assignment editor now?”
* QED:
