Last summer, I left the Westminster Declaration for Free Speech drafting group, where I had worked alongside Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, Konstantin Kisin, Claire Fox, Toby Young, and others, because they refused to put Tucker Carlson, among others, on the list of potential signatories. While some in the group lauded his championship of free speech—remember this was 2023, a few months after the Twitter files—there was a worry he was too aligned with the right-wing fringe to win us broad cross-partisan support.
I thought everyone was a bit out of it to throw away the chance to include someone with actual reach, because that’s what a regular 4-million viewership on Fox unquestionably was. And while the Westminster Declaration received as much attention as a sack of rice falling over in China, despite the cordon sanitaire against “fringe” personalities such as Tucker, Joe Rogan and J.K. Rowling (I’m not kidding), maybe in this other respect—that Tucker was a bit shady on the issue of civil liberties—they were right.
Or so it seems.
What has happened is that Tucker has hosted a Holocaust-denying hobby historian on his show (no serious historian goes into a dialogue claiming he has “read 6 books” on an issue and thinking this would impress anyone), praised him as “the best and most popular historian in the United States”, and let him briefly rewrite the history of the Second World War. The “popular historian” dunked on Churchill (“I read about him, and he strikes me as a psychopath”, a “dedicated booster of Zionism”, “the real villain of World War 2”), said that the concentration camps, meticulously planned by the Germans for years to industrially exterminate European Jewish life, were only established “spontaneously”, because the Germans “were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of POWs”, and all in all gave the impression that Hitler was just horribly, horribly misunderstood. To all of this, Tucker furrowed his brow, nodded along earnestly, and doubled down on his usual exclamations of “wow!”, “incredible!”, and on that knowing “the elites don’t want you to know this!” smirk, like he has never seen a David Irving interview with Max Blumenthal before.
Tucker doubled down on that knowing “the elites don’t want you to know this!” smirk, like he has never seen a David Irving interview with Max Blumenthal before.
The conservative backlash against Tucker, however, from from The Babylon Bee’s satire to Konstantin Kisin’s (by the way excellent) reply, to several actual historians who found it necessary to “debunk” the hobby historian’s revisionism, was remarkable. One can sense that Tucker is no longer a hero throughout the conservative spectrum. But if he is no longer the conservatives’ hero, then whose is he?
Several individuals within the “dissident” sphere have already gone down this path. Think of Candace Owens (who makes Louis Farrakhan look like Simone Weil), the legitimately crazy Jackson Hinkle, Kim Iversen, Krystal Ball, and the openly antisemitic ex-martial arts fighter Jake Shields (not counting Nick Fuentes, who was always comfortable with being a Nazi). They have gone so far off the rails of any meaningful discourse that it would be ridiculous to try to make sense of, never mind refute them. And yet, X’s “Community Notes”, Niall Ferguson, and The Free Press, among others, have invested serious energy into “debunking” the lies of Tucker’s guest.
What is obviously crazy is that someone like Niall Ferguson feels called upon to offer the (previously) uncontroversial history of the Nazi genocide and defend the facts of World War 2 against someone nobody had ever heard of before yesterday. Ferguson should have known better than to boost the public persona of the basement historian and his Substack subscriptions (at least for a month), than to give the “maybe elites only want you to believe that Hitler was the bad guy!” irrationalism undue attention. If being pro-Hitler gives you leeway to pose as “anti-establishment”, the whole thing merits less, not more attention, not least because the historical Nazis preyed on this exact idea to get into power. (When the Sex Pistols were posing with swastikas, there was at least a cultural agreement that this was provocation for provocation’s sake). No one in their right mind takes Nick Fuentes, a midwit professional agent provocateur, seriously. Falling for these “anti-elite” hacks is not only lazy thinking, but also self-contradictory (yes, the Nazis were the actual elite, thank you).
If being pro-Hitler gives you leeway to pose as “anti-establishment”, the whole thing merits less, not more attention.
And yet, Tucker’s guest receives a serious treatment from prestigious historians. Two things can be learned from this, one more consequential than the other. First, Tucker is influential, with his shows garnering over 30 million views on X. In that sense, it is understandable that Ferguson wouldn’t have any of it. But it is just as obvious that Tucker is looking for a new audience, an audience that can make sense of his many contradictions.
Let me just pick out just one: the American question. On the one hand, we have heard a lot from Tucker on “American family values”, on “constitutional patriotism”, on honoring veterans etc. On the other hand, he takes every occasion to condemn the US government’s/intelligence censorship schemes and depict US foreign policy as the most evil in the world. Also, Tucker Carlson very obviously has cordial relations with Vladimir Putin. One may reconcile that contradiction by saying that Putin is what Tucker wants to see in an American leader, but all he gets is Bidens, Clintons, and Kamalas: a libtard perverted version of the same. Even Trump is not good enough, now considered “too moderate” by the former “alt-Right”, and not serious enough in deploying the MAGA version of Americanism (or whatever “Project 25” is).
But Tucker has a very specific, idealized, and ultimately un-American view of the United States’ self-understanding as a nation, one in which, as already with Buchanan-style paleo-conservatives, the spirit of the “Volk” is wholly divorced from its embodiment in the government and the state, and in which every government is by definition a traitor to the “People”’s cause. This is a view that only makes sense in a blood-and-soil context of “nationhood”, where the blood line coincides with citizenship: a vision precisely detrimental to the idea of America as the “land of the free”, starting with the founding fathers, a country proud of its Irish, Italian, German communities (and indeed partly founded upon them), of its inter-racial and inter-generational cooperation, and especially of a non-ethnic view of citizenship.
Tucker has an ultimately un-American view of the United State’s self-understanding as a nation, one in which, as already with Buchanan-style paleo-conservatives, the spirit of the “Volk” is wholly divorced from its embodiment in the government and the state, and in which every government is by definition a traitor to the “People”’s cause.
In other words: nothing is further away from Tucker’s vision than the universalism of a JFK-style democratic or a MLK Jr. civil-rights-for-all society, despite him often depicting the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. as beacons of wholesomeness. Tucker Carlson’s version of wholesomeness, pace his sailing shoes and all-American-boy style, is in fact much closer to the National Socialist blood-and-soil version of nationhood. Or the Putin one, for that matter. One thing is clear, however: “rootless” Jews can have no place in it. In that sense, Tucker would be very left-wing, very “woke”. This is the real horseshoe: Putin lovers and Columbia protestors.
So far, we haven’t heard much about Tucker’s take on Jews and Jewish life in the USA. But hosting a basement historian who has read “many, many books” so he can spout revisionist nonsense indicates that Tucker may very well go the way of Candace, or Jackson Hinkle, or that martial arts dude.
It may however also be the case that “Tucker Carlson’s entire schtick is nothing more than using morons and liars for clickbait while hiding behind his furrowed brow and the ‘I’m just asking questions’ routine”, as an X user put it. Time will tell if the outcome of this schtick amounts to anything less disgraceful than promoting a barbaric ideology.
