BRENDAN O’NEILL: The shameful Nazi apologism of the Very Online right.

Forget that toothless crackhead who says he had sex with Barack Obama. Never mind the lowlife pimp who cosplays as a lifestyle guru, Andrew Tate. This week Tucker Carlson scraped even lower in the barrel of cranks to find a guest for his chat show on X. He had on Darryl Cooper, a historian, podcaster and – wait for it – apologist for Adolf Hitler. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve now reached the ‘Were the Nazis really the bad guys?’ stage of contrarian online blather.

Tucker’s chat with Cooper has caused a storm. As well it might. Also known as ‘Martyr Made’, Mr Cooper is a notorious historical revisionist. He has huge beef with Winston Churchill. Churchill, not Hitler, was the true villain of the Second World War, he says. He’s a giddy promoter of the myth that Hitler made a peace offer in 1940 but Churchill rejected it and insisted on plunging the world into war. Hitler the peacenik – who saw that coming down the pipeline of online bollocks?

What Cooper told Carlson was insane. Churchill was a ‘psychopath’ kept in power by Zionist interests, he said. As for all those poor Jews in the camps – they ‘ended up dead’ because the stretched Nazis lacked the time and resources to care for them, he insisted. Depicting the Nazis’ industrialised slaughter of the Jews of Europe as an accident, just a sad, regrettable byproduct of their being too busy, is sick. It’s a species of Holocaust denial. That Carlson nodded along to such rancid revisionism is shameful.

For the true measure of Cooper, consider what he said in a recent post on X, since deleted. Paris under the Nazis, he tweeted, was ‘infinitely preferable in virtually every way’ to the Paris of the Olympics opening ceremony. To drive home his fascistic point, he put a photo of Hitler and his henchmen surveying the spoils of Paris next to a screenshot of that plump drag queen who formed the centrepiece of the Last Supper pisstake at the opening ceremony. Look, I hated the opening ceremony, but – I can’t believe this needs to be said – Paris of 2024 is preferable in every way to the Paris that was conquered by the marauding inhuman racists of the Nazi regime. This is where we’re at, folks: having to explain that a drag queen on your TV is less bad than a Jew-murdering machine taking over your country.

Cooper’s shameless saluting of Nazi Paris cuts to the heart of the Hitler apologetics that have spread like a pox through the Very Online right. These people are in the grip of a deranged fantasy: that Europe in the Nazi era was better than the new Europe of genderfluidity, mass immigration, Islamist terrorism or whatever. They scurry like the abject moral cowards they are from the undoubted problems of the present into an utterly fictional past. A past where Hitler was a peacemaker, Europe was calm (until that rotter Churchill came along), and ‘Western civilisation’ remained intact. Overlooked – wilfully – is the war, savagery and unprecedented programme of extermination unleashed by the Nazis, all of which added up to the most violent and egregious assault on Western civilisation in history.

While Abigail Shrier and Tablet’s Park MacDougald wrote that they think Tucker is enjoying the Reich Stuff because secretly, he wants Kamala to win, Jonah Goldberg disagrees. In “Tucker’s 1945 Project,” he writes:

The only prominent “What is Tucker doing?” theory I disagree with is the idea that he’s trying to get Kamala Harris elected. The number of things Tucker could say—truthfully!—that could get Trump in Dutch is very long (including things he’s said to me). Choosing to boost Hitler apologetics to get Kamala Harris elected is some four-dimensional chess fantasy stuff. I do think causing headaches for Trump and J.D. Vance is a benefit for him, because forcing them to either kowtow or denounce him is a flex move. Vance has already made it clear he won’t criticize Tucker, which is a demonstration—in Tucker’s estimation—of his power.

No, the most likely explanation is that he likes Nazi apologetics, either on the merits or because of the reaction, or both.

So what’s to like? Again, I dismiss entirely the suggestion that he thinks he’s telling the truth. He might have convinced himself he believes it, but veracity isn’t the point. So what is appealing about the idea that the West took a wrong turn by opting to destroy Hitler? Giving antisemitism and Holocaust denial some lebensraum might be part of it, sure. I’m not trying to minimize the evil of that.

But I think that to the extent there’s an ideological project behind Tucker’s latest schtick, antisemitism isn’t the primary motivation. Sure, pissing off “the Jews” has its joys for him. But that’s probably gravy. Tucker is an acolyte of Patrick Buchanan and sees himself as the Buchanan of the 21st century. It’s worth recalling that Buchanan fell—or leapt—into the same intellectual bog Tucker is rolling in now. In 2008, Buchanan wrote Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. As bad as his argument was, it was far more serious than the nonsense spewed by Tucker’s “historian.”

Buchanan’s larger project, laid out in that book and several others, was to make the path America followed after World War II a “wrong turn.” In the postwar era, America turned its back on many of the things Buchanan thought made America “great.” Now, Buchanan’s version of greatness is saturated with just-so stories, nostalgia, dyspepsia, grievances, and a lot of correlation confused for causation. But in his telling, we became an “empire” and stopped being a “republic.” We admitted a lot of immigrants who had no business becoming Americans. Feminism, gay rights, Israel, free trade, civil rights, and other “problems” emerged in the postwar era. If “the past is a foreign country,” he liked that country better.

Buchanan was by no means entirely wrong in all of his criticisms of postwar America, but his fixation that it was all both entirely lamentable and entirely avoidable was entirely wrong. Buchanan changed as he got older (I was friendly with him, as were my parents). He got bitter and cranky. Tragically childless—no one tell J.D. Vance!—I think he was cut off from the best ambassadors of the country-that-is-the-present we can have in this life: our own children.

The advantage of Tucker’s 1945 Project is that it’s easier to sell than the similar Wrong Turn projects swirling on the right. The new right nationalists and postliberals have been peddling the idea that we took a “Wrong Turn” with John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, England’s Glorious Revolution, or the Enlightenment generally. It’s hard to sell the poorly educated or miseducated on that stuff, in part because most of them have no idea who John Locke was or what the Enlightenment was about. But everybody’s heard of Hitler and Churchill.

Not surprisingly, the left is enjoying Tucker’s election eve “1945 Project” immensely. Axios describes it as “MAGA’s media meltdown,” before concluding, “Trump won’t have issues turning out his base in November, regardless of the state of conservative media. The bigger question is which voices will fill the vacuum when Trump is eventually gone.”