The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Tucker Carlson's History Lessons

Tucker Carlson is an intriguing guy. Sometimes we’ve praised him, sometimes we’ve criticized him. This time, he’s in for the latter courtesy of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.

Conservatives have rightly rebutted the false history offered by the New York Times that America’s founding wasn’t really in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence but instead was in 1619 — with the arrival of the first slaves. So why are some on the right now indulging their own false history of World War II and Nazi Germany?

That’s the question raised by Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with Darryl Cooper, a provocateur who offers a bizarre history of the Holocaust and Winston Churchill, among other things. Mr. Carlson presented Mr. Cooper to his millions of Twitter followers as an “honest popular historian,” but he’s closer to a crackpot.

The editors explain:

Mr. Cooper claims Churchill is the real villain of World War II because he opposed Adolf Hitler’s march through Europe. He also offered Mr. Carlson’s audience a novel theory about the Nazi slaughter of six million European Jews, which he attributes to an unfortunate miscalculation.

The Nazis “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 just threw these people into camps,” Mr. Cooper said. As a result, “millions of people ended up dead there.”

Yes, the Waffen-SS officers didn’t know what to do with all those people with yellow Stars of David they had rounded up. So they settled on putting them on railroad cars and sending them off to the gas chamber. That was some dilemma Himmler and Eichmann faced. This is Holocaust rationalization, if not denial.

Given the current climate of anti-Semitism, such ideas are even more troublesome. That said, there’s a difference between censorship and rebuking bad ideas.

Conservatives have long taken pride in recognizing that there is objective truth. The left thinks all ideas are relative, or constructs of one’s material conditions, as the Marxists say. Recognizing the truth means accepting that certain historical events really happened and are evil, such as mass murder by the Nazis and Communists. Moral or historical relativism has never been a conservative tenet.

It’s also a strange conservatism that runs Churchill out of its pantheon. As the Churchill biographer and historian Andrew Roberts has explained, blaming him because Britain went to war after Hitler invaded Poland gets the history egregiously wrong. Churchill wasn’t even Prime Minister yet and Britain had a defense pact with Warsaw. Churchill is one of the great leaders in Western democratic history.

They conclude:

We don’t like the habit, popular among Democrats and the press, of calling on political figures to denounce this or that statement by others. It tends to be a one-sided partisan demand made of Republicans.

But JD Vance and Donald Trump should be aware that the more Mr. Carlson traffics in nutty falsehoods, the more they will be asked about their association. Voters will make their decisions for many reasons, but one of them will be the political company they keep.

Wall Street Journal subscribers can read the whole thing here.