SOHRAB AHMARI: Pseudo-Scholars and the Rise of the Barbarian Right.
Dubious charges of Nazism are a dime a dozen in U.S. political rhetoric, but I use the term advisedly—and literally: How else to describe Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Darryl Cooper? In it, the amateur historian argued that Winston Churchill was “the chief villain of the Second World War” and that the Nazi death camps were the result not of malice, but a logistical mishap: a failure to plan for the Wehrmacht’s oversupply of POWs. “Nazi Germany,” Cooper said, “launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners. [They] went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead.”
Carlson, a journalist I used to admire, hailed Cooper as the “best and most honest popular historian working in the United States today,” and lent him the same credulous, uncritical treatment he now seems to reserve for all the crackpots who frequently grace the podcast he hosts on X, the social media service formerly known as Twitter. As Cooper insinuated that unnamed “financiers” leaned on an indebted Winston Churchill to prolong the war, Carlson didn’t bother to ask, To whom, specifically, are you referring, Darryl?—like a curious journalist could be expected to do.
Long before he appeared on Carlson’s show, Cooper had made known his nutty views about the Jews as well as his sympathy for the Third Reich. In July, he declared that the Nazi takeover of France—which resulted in the deportation of 75,000 Jews to concentration and death camps—“was infinitely preferable in virtually every way” than the admittedly offensive drag queen “Last Supper” staged at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics in July.
Two months earlier, Cooper posted a rant on X in which he urged Christians to “reckon” with the fact that “no god in any religious tradition is as consistently brutal and bloodthirsty as the Yahweh of the Old Testament”—a rehash, in other words, of Marcionism: a second-century gnostic heresy that posited that the God of the Hebrew Bible is a capricious demon and not the God of Jesus. In 2019, Cooper agreed with an online interlocutor that “non-racist fascist” is a “decent description” of his politics.
As of this writing, Carlson’s interview with Cooper has garnered some 26 million views on X, boosted by Elon Musk, who called it “very interesting” and “worth watching.” (He later deleted the post.) The denizens of the Barbarian Right space seem to have gotten what they wished for out of the Cooper interview. “A lot of good points,” said one. “Only thing missing is naming the group behind the majority of subversions.” Another chimed in: “The mass migration into Europe and America is a Jewish-led operation.”
Exit question: Is J.D. Vance still going to hang out with Tucker Carlson, even now?