The Media Firestorm Over Holocaust Denial
For years, Tucker Carlson had been the highest-rated host on television, courageously covering the important, controversial topics that few others dared to touch. After his forced departure from FoxNews in April 2023, he soon launched an even bolder interview show on Elon Musk’s Twitter platform, now completely free of the timorous corporate oversight and time constraints that have always crippled network TV.
His most remarkable achievement came in February of this year, when he traveled to Moscow and conducted a two hour sit down interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, allowing many tens of millions worldwide to watch the unfiltered responses of one of the top global figures of our young twenty-first century. A media coup of such historic significance might have left Walter Cronkite green with envy during the heyday of network television, and with today’s cable news ratings in free fall, Carlson’s former TV colleagues could only sputter with envious rage and denounce their hugely successful competitor as “a Russian stooge.”
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Carlson’s September 2nd interview with Darryl Cooper was hardly in the same category, given the relative obscurity of his guest, an amateur historian and podcaster. I’d never heard of Cooper nor had most others, but the explosive subject matter of the discussion partly made up for that lack. The lead item was the Jonestown Cult that had perished in a notorious 1978 mass suicide, and perhaps a half-hour of the 140 minute session was devoted to that. But much of the remainder dealt with World War II, Adolf Hitler, and Winston Churchill, and the candid and controversial treatment of those momentous topics soon set off fireworks all across the Internet.
I don’t use Twitter myself, but within 24 hours that platform was apparently ablaze about the interview, with former Rep. Liz Cheney among many others Tweeting out her outrage, and ADL President Jonathan Greenblatt endorsing and amplifying her attack. Twitter owner Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, promoted the interview as “Very interesting. Worth watching” to his nearly 200 million followers but a blizzard of attacks soon forced him to delete that Tweet. By the 5th, the Washington Post had broken its own rules to publish an editorial denouncing both Carlson and his guest, as did a conservative columnist in the same publication, along with various other prominent commentators.
On September 6th, the New York Times heavily weighed in, publishing two very negative news stories as well as an opinion column on the swirling controversy, which was how I first learned about what had transpired. Although the history of World War II has been a topic of great interest to me, I was busy with my own work, so I merely glanced at the headlines and completely missed the dozen or two dozen other articles that soon appeared in a variety of different publications.
Most of those headlines were certainly explosive and easily explained the vast outpouring of heated words that soon blazed across social media and the rest of the Internet. The ones appearing in the Times were fairly typical of the rest:
- Tucker Carlson Welcomes a Hitler Apologist to His Show
- Tucker Carlson Criticized for Hosting Holocaust Revisionist
- Vance Declines to Denounce Carlson After Interview With Holocaust Revisionist
The term “Holocaust Revisionist” is usually little more than a euphemistic version of the much harsher term “Holocaust Denier,” and a large majority of the other articles adopted that latter formulation, both in their titles and in their text. Based upon all this news media coverage, the White House issued a statement fiercely attacking both Carlson and Cooper:
…[G]iving a microphone to a Holocaust denier who spreads Nazi propaganda is a disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans, to the memory of the over 6 million Jews who were genocidally murdered by Adolf Hitler, to the service of the millions of Americans who fought to defeat Nazism, and to every subsequent victim of antisemitism…. Hitler was one of the most evil figures in human history and the ‘chief villain’ of World War II, full stop…. The Biden-Harris administration believes that trafficking in this moral rot is unacceptable at any time, let alone less than one year after the deadliest massacre perpetrated against the Jewish people since the Holocaust and at a time when the cancer of antisemitism is growing all over the world.
Just over six years ago, I had published a very lengthy article analyzing the origins and history of that extremely controversial ideological movement, and towards the beginning I’d described the role it played in today’s world:
For decades, Hollywood has sanctified the Holocaust, and in our deeply secular society accusations of Holocaust Denial are a bit like shouting “Witch!” in Old Salem or leveling accusations of Trotskyism in the Court of the Red Czar.
Such sentiments remain just as strong, and according to the huge wave of media stories a real, live Holocaust Denier—something almost as rare as the fabled unicorn—had not only been featured on Carlson’s enormously popular podcast show, but had even been favorably highlighted by Elon Musk. Under these circumstances, the vast media furor that resulted was hardly unwarranted.
A few days later I finally had some time to watch the long interview, which has now attracted more than a million views on YouTube, while the Tweet separately providing the same video has been viewed nearly 35 million times.
Just as I had half-expected, what I actually saw was quite different than what most of the news coverage had suggested, once again completely affirming my belief in the total incompetence of our mainstream media.
Most of the writers had fiercely attacked Carlson for giving an admiring interview to a Holocaust Denier, yet when I carefully listened to the more than two hours of discussion, I heard not a single mention of that topic, nor any denial of the Nazi slaughter of Jews during World War II. It seemed that nearly all the journalists denouncing the show had just been too lazy to bother listening to what Cooper actually said, or perhaps too emotionally agitated to understand the plain meaning of his words.
A few of Cooper’s angry critics seemed to have avoided such a gigantic blunder and were properly circumspect. But anyone reading the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post, listening to CNN, or crediting the public statements issued by the White House would have been absolutely convinced that a fervent Holocaust Denier had been given a huge global media platform to promote his diabolical views.
As far as I could tell, virtually all the published reactions to the Carlson-Cooper discussion were intensely hostile, and this was true across every website and publication, whether written by liberals or by conservatives, running as news stories or as opinion columns.
However, the mission statement of our own publication is to provide “Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media,” and this unbalanced situation provided a perfect opportunity for us to fulfill that mandate. So within a few days we had published or republished three pieces providing a very different perspective on the controversy, each of them considerably more substantial than nearly all the heated but rather vacuous denunciations on the other side. The author of the first of these was actually a prominent Holocaust Denier, while the other two largely avoided that particular issue while expressing their strong support for Cooper’s views and being very encouraged by the enormous attention he had now received.
- Tucker Carlson’s Non-Denial Denialism of the Holocaust
Thomas Dalton • The Unz Review • September 6, 2024 • 2,100 Words - The Carlson-Cooper Podcast: A Major Step Forward
Kevin MacDonald • The Occidental Observer • September 7, 2024 • 3,900 Words - Blaming Churchill
Jim Goad • Counter-Currents • September 9, 2024 • 2,200 Words
Although the central focus of almost all the attacks on Cooper had been the belief that he was a Holocaust Denier, there seemed no evidence of this, or at least my cursory examination of his previous body of work found nothing. For example, in 2022 he had hosted an “Ask Me Anything” session on his Substack which provoked more than 600 Q&A comments, and when I did a CTRL-F for the word “Holocaust” nothing appeared. His English-language Wikipedia page seems to have disappeared and reading the German one in automatic translation merely provided a laundry-list of the media accusations but without any evidence that they were accurate.
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Indeed, after receiving the first wave of those angry denunciations and attacks, he almost immediately released a half-hour podcast entitled “My response to the mob” in which he recounted with considerable emotion some of the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust. He heavily cited the very mainstream scholarship of Prof. Timothy Snyder and also told the story of the notorious Babi Yar massacre of some 30,000 Jewish civilians near Kiev by the fiendish Nazis. Cooper’s actual World War II podcast series will not be released until next year, but given all of this material and his actual statements in the Carlson interview, there seems no particular reason to believe that his coverage of the Holocaust will differ significantly from the standard orthodox narrative.
The likely trigger for the apparently erroneous and almost deranged attacks against Cooper by so many journalists is not hard to understand. In his interview, he discussed the historical reality that the Germans had initially captured some three million Soviet POWs during the enormously successful initial stages of their Barbarossa invasion and lacking the necessary resources to feed them, a majority soon starved to death in the huge camps to which they were confined. Although Cooper severely blamed Hitler for not having properly prepared for such a situation, he also emphasized that their deaths were entirely unintentional.
I suspect that few of those agitated media pundits were aware of this unfortunate but solidly-established history of the Soviet POWs, and they instead automatically assumed that any mention of “millions of deaths” during World War II must necessarily refer to Jews, so the claim that those deaths were unintentional was seen as blatant Holocaust Denial. Combine that with Cooper’s argument that Churchill rather than Hitler was the main villain responsible for the war, and that mistaken conclusion appeared obvious. When most journalists are total ignoramuses, with hair-trigger reactions to any deviation from the usual narrative of the “Good War,” this sort of error can only be expected.
