Our usual rule about commenting on the ultraright conspiracy theories and apologies for various authoritarians that Tucker Carlson emits is: the less said the better. If editorial writers responded to every inflammatory or false remark he made, or repeated, there would be no time or space for them to do anything else. Also, Mr. Carlson thrives on mainstream media criticism, and we’re reluctant to play that game.
By the Editorial Board
Every rule has an exception, though. There needs to be one for Mr. Carlson’s interview Monday of a revisionist World War II historian — one Darryl Cooper, whom Mr. Carlson introduced as the “best and most honest popular historian working in the United States today.” At that, Mr. Cooper used Mr. Carlson’s show on X to explain, with no opposition from Mr. Carlson, why Britain’s Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of that conflict and to imply that German atrocities on the Eastern Front stemmed from a failure to plan for all the prisoners Adolf Hitler’s troops captured.
Another of our rules — and we won’t make an exception in this case — is not to re-litigate the basic facts and morality of World War II and the Holocaust. Suffice it to say that the only major point Mr. Cooper definitely got right was that the democratic West drew lessons from those horrific mid-20th century events — the need to resist, not appease, tyranny and to sustain a vital political center — that were foundational to the postwar political order. This obscure right-wing “historian” just thinks that those were not necessarily the right lessons, as he told Mr. Carlson. His project, abetted by Mr. Carlson, would seem to be delegitimizing liberal democracy and the U.S. position in the world, as we’ve known them in the postwar period, through a spurious attack on their basis in history.
This is someone who wrote Tuesday on X that Churchill is blameworthy in part because, after Hitler invaded Poland (85 years, almost to the day, before Mr. Cooper’s interview with Mr. Carlson aired), Britain ignored the führer’s offer to “give back the parts of Poland that were not majority German, and [to] work with the other powers to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.”
The ultimate issue is not what this episode says about Mr. Carlson; spreading toxic nonsense is par for his course these days, unfortunately. The issue is Mr. Carlson’s influence in the Republican Party, which gave Mr. Carlson a prime speaking opportunity at its national convention in July as well as a prestigious seat in former president Donald Trump’s row at that event. It was Mr. Carlson who, by many accounts, urged Mr. Trump to pick Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) as his running mate. In turn, Mr. Vance is scheduled to appear onstage with Mr. Carlson when the latter’s live tour reaches Hershey, Pa., on Sept. 21.
This poses an elementary political test for the Republican ticket: Will Mr. Vance keep his date with Mr. Carlson, thus lending his imprimatur to someone who lent his imprimatur to Mr. Cooper? If he does keep it, will he at least confront Mr. Carlson? Encouragingly, some prominent conservative intellectuals and Republican elected officials have denounced the Carlson-Cooper show, demonstrating both intellectual integrity and the principle that the best approach to such odious expression is not suppression or censorship but “counterspeech.”
Mr. Vance’s spokesman told us that the senator “doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture but he obviously does not share the views of the guest interviewed by Tucker Carlson.” The GOP ticket rejects antisemitism, he added. As for where Mr. Vance will be and what he’ll do on Sept. 21 — stay tuned, apparently.
Next to the one Mr. Carlson got, one of the warmest rounds of applause for any speaker at the GOP convention in Milwaukee greeted 98-year-old World War II U.S. Army veteran William Pekrul, who landed with U.S. troops in France in 1944 and later fought at the Battle of the Bulge. Mr. Pekrul told delegates that, if Mr. Trump wins the presidency again, “I would go back to reenlist today. I would storm whatever beach my country needs me to.”
They cheered Mr. Pekrul seemingly oblivious to the irony that Mr. Trump’s slogan — “America First” — was also the name of a political movement that opposed any U.S. intervention in Europe after the invasion of Poland until Germany’s declaration of war against the United States the day after Pearl Harbor. Mr. Pekrul and millions of other Americans sacrificed mightily, alongside their British allies, to liberate Western Europe from the Nazi dictator for whom Mr. Cooper made excuses on Mr. Carlson’s show. Question: If Churchill was a “villain” then what does that make Mr. Pekrul?
