On Monday, Tucker Carlson hosted an amateur historian named Daryl Cooper on his show to discuss World War II history. The result was Nazi sympathies are an extended practice With little pushback from Carlson, who calls Cooper (who tweets under the handle @martyrmade) “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”
The interview is a big test for the Republican Party. Although Carlson has been away from Fox News for more than a year, broadcasting instead on Twitter/X, he remains influential in the party. He delivered A primetime speech at the 2024 RNC and said game A major role JD Vance elected vice president. Now that he is crossing the reddest of red lines – actively apologizing for Adolf Hitler – can the party cut ties?
The answer has been a resounding no. The Trump camp — which sets the tone for the entire party — has so far done nothing to distance itself from the increasingly toxic Carlson.
Vance, who pre-taped an interview with Carlson and is scheduled to speak with him at a live event in two weeks, Carlson refused to condemn After Cooper’s failure — with a spokesman said in a statement That “Senator Vance does not believe in a culture of crime-by-association cancellation.” A source from Trump’s campaign Bulwark said While appearing twice with Carlson before Election Day isn’t “ideal timing” for Vance, “it is what it is.” (Donald Trump Jr. will also be in attendance.)
It should surprise no one that the current GOP is failing this particular test. This is the party that nominated Trump after all; If there are red lines left for them, it’s not clear what they are.
More interesting is the reaction among conservative-aligned commentators and intellectuals—many of whom are expressing shock at what Tucker did.
“Didn’t Expect Tucker Carlson to Become an Outlet for Nazi Apologies, But Here We Are,” Radio Host Eric Erickson wrote in X. Author Sohrab Ahmari, who Wrote a tribute to his “friend” Carlson tweeted, following his April 2023 firing from Fox on wednesday that he “could not get over … the fact that it seemed appropriate to lend money.” [Cooper] A critical platform.” (Elon Musk tweeted approval of Carlson’s interview — only to later delete the tweet.)
Such expressions of shock seem absurd. For Carlson’s entire run on Fox News, liberals warned that his show had become a Vector of racist and neo-Nazi ideas — while those on the right dismissed those concerns as the woke PC police trying to silence a prominent conservative voice.
The liberal position has now been proven correct — once again. The only question is whether conservatives will learn a broader lesson about how far-right ideas infiltrate their movement — with their own tacit support.
Why liberals got Carlson right — and conservatives got him so wrong
When Tucker Carlson landed a primetime spot on Fox News in 2016, he immediately built a fan base among the neo-Nazi right. They saw his bombastic style and his willingness to talk about race and immigration as a vehicle for bringing their own ideas into the mainstream that many conservatives shunned.
“Tucker Carlson is literally our greatest ally,” Andrew Anglin, publisher of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, wrote in 2016. “I don’t believe he doesn’t hate Jews.”
Carlson did a lot to deserve this fan base. He worked tirelessly The mainstream concept of “great substitution theory,” The white supremacist idea that mass immigration is a secret elite plot to replace native-born whites with minorities. He took the white nationalists’ false notion of a “white genocide” in South Africa and brought Drawing the attention of then President Donald Trump. He claimed that immigrants are “making America.”dirty“And fearful of alleged threats against America.”Gypsy“
The link between Carlson and the radical right was quite direct. In 2020, its head writer Blake Neff resigned CNN reported That he made racist and sexist comments on an anonymous web forum In 2022, The New York Times reported that Carlson’s parts were intermittent directly inspired By stories published by racist and neo-Nazi websites.
Carlson gets away with all this by employing a very clever rhetorical technique. He would restate white nationalist talking points in nominally colorblind terms—allowing his audience to think racist thoughts while still pretending not to be racist himself.
When he talked about the “Great Replacement,” for example, he always said the problem was the race of the immigrants. Rather, they were docile voters for a Democratic Party that would undermine everything “legacy Americans” hold dear.
“Everybody wants to make a racial issue out of it. Oh, you know, the ‘white replacement theory’? No, no, it’s a franchise question,” Carlson said In a 2021 segment. “I have less political power because they are importing brand new voters.”
The move provided enough plausible deniability that both Fox and the broader conservative movement could hail Carlson as one of their brightest stars: not just a commentator, but the highest-rated host on cable news. It wasn’t until the release of texts in 2023 that showed Tucker himself engaging in blatant racism — extolling the superior honor of “white men” — that Fox finally felt the need to cut ties.
Liberals easily saw through the charade: they knew who Carlson was and what he was doing the whole time. But conservatives took Carlson’s profession of innocence seriously, at least in public. They said he was simply decrying the piety of the left, not engaging in white supremacist apologetics.
There is no better example A recent column by Jonathan TobinFormer executive editor of Commentary magazine and current editor-in-chief of the conservative Jewish News Syndicate.
In the column, Tobin expressed dismay at Carlson’s interview with Cooper—saying that “now all decent people, and especially people on the right, are demanding that Carlson no longer be considered a mainstream figure.”
still in Very similar columnHe praised Carlson’s show on Fox as a symbol of mainstream conservative opinion:
During his seven-year run on Fox, Carlson built a huge following. It could be said that during the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, he became the tribune of contemporary conservatism with his outspoken critique of the moral panic that had gripped the nation in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. and the “mostly peaceful” riots that ensued. Although his soft spot for tinfoil-hat debates was no secret, such as his fascination with UFO conspiracy theories, his main focus was on issues that most conservatives and many centrists cared about, such as illegal immigration, the persuasion of critical race theory, and the corruption of liberal elites. seeks to suppress opposition to their continued hold on power.
Despite everything, Tobin was still completely blind to what Carlson was doing at Fox.
He believes Fox was effectively concealing Tucker’s true views, when in fact it was helping him broadcast them in a slightly coded manner. It was so obvious that Karlsson’s neo-Nazi fans openly bragged about it, and have been doing so since 2016. And yet Tobin Carlson’s treatment of race and immigration – all things singular! — where his Fox shows best represent mainstream conservatism.
This is the problem in a nutshell. Today on the right, you can say something extremely racist and as long as you say “I’m not racist!” In the following sentences. Liberals have long pointed out the problem with this strategy; In response, conservatives accused them of acting like a wake-up call.
Carlson’s descent into Holocaust revisionism attests to the problem with this permissive framework. The question is whether anyone else will learn their lesson — or, like Tobin, will they engage in a mindset that allows their movement to infiltrate fanatics.
