The parade of visitors to Tucker Carlson ’s log cabin studio has more nuts than a Payday peanut bar. Glenn Greenwald, the sour face of the horseshoe theory. Naomi Wolf, the Alex Jones of the Left , with her chemtrails and mind control. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), sniffing out Jewish subversion with the perverse glee of the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. All of them a few wrenches short of a set. All of them pushing half-truths and non-truths, promoted by Carlson, who tells you, “This is what they don’t want you to know.”
Old Tucker benefited from the short segments of the Fox format. Everything was compressed between the ad breaks. Tucker was compressed into a suit and tie. The need to sweeten the advertisers obliged Tucker to compress his conspiracizing about “neocons” to nudges and winks. New Tucker is swollen by the podcast format. He wears a checked shirt to show he’s no longer a corporate shill. He’s our Maine Man. Unbuttoned at last, he consorts with clowns and bigots.
The latest imbecile to visit Tucker’s virtual shed is Darryl Cooper. Cooper’s eccentric rambles through the thickets of history have won him virality on X. Unfortunately, the virality is akin to intellectual syphilis. Once you’ve convinced yourself that the truth is hidden, nay, occulted by dark forces, you can mask the worst symptoms of infection, but the mind rot is hard to cure. Cooper has convinced himself that Winston Churchill was a “terrorist” installed in power by “Zionists” and “financiers” so he could be the “chief villain” of World War II. Cooper also claims the Holocaust was an accident and that prewar Europe really did have what Hitler called a “Jewish problem,” rather than a problem with Jews.
Carlson introduced Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Cooper blew it by admitting that he’d prepared for his interminable podcast series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by reading six books and then recited a medley of baseless suppositions, false generalizations, and open “secrets” about the origins of World War II. Had Carlson attempted actual journalism, this tissue of lies would have disintegrated like cheap toilet paper. Instead, Carlson toggled between his customary facial expressions (frowning as if struck by a bolt of historiographical lightning, slack-jawed and mindblown as though he’s still following the Grateful Dead) and failed to question any of it.
In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In the kingdom of the illiterate, Mr. Six-Books is a regular Arnold Toynbee. If your “research” skips primary documents and foreign languages but convinces you that Hitler was misunderstood (he wasn’t), that Churchill was a “terrorist” (he wasn’t), that the Germans invaded Poland without a plan for what to do with prisoners of war (they didn’t), and that the Holocaust was accidental (it wasn’t), you might have an ax to grind — perhaps a double-headed ax with runic symbols. But why is Tucker fawning over a poor man’s Pat Buchanan?
The method to Carlson’s trashiness is his assault on foreign policy consensus. If, the theory goes, Americans can be convinced that World War II remains a just war, fought for freedom and democracy, they will consent to remain the world’s policeman. Hence the fiascos of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the military-industrial corruption of Washington, D.C., and the fervid conviction that a “neocon” cabal is pulling the strings. Only when Tucker has purged the policy temple of Woodrow Wilson’s children can America attain its original ideal of isolationism.
True, the cant of freedom and democracy masks the reality of imperial power politics. But the cant of freedom and democracy is another original American ideal. The issue isn’t whether the public is self-deluding. It’s whether its policymakers are. For isolationism is self-deluding, too, and unworkable in the way of all idealism. Isolationism wasn’t serious when George Washington warned about “foreign entanglements” in 1796. It wasn’t serious in the 1930s. It isn’t serious now. Neither is the false binary between world empire and isolationism. The dissenting opinion in American foreign policy is realist, not isolationist.
When armchair generals refight World War II in podcasts, they confirm that World War II still intervenes between us and the rest of history. Current policymaking is stupefied before its terrible shadow. Every crisis is Munich, every rival a Hitler. Carlson and Cooper don’t want to reduce the war’s scale in retrospect, only to reshape its image. The problem, for them anyway, is that the historical record shows that isolationism cannot contain aggressive antagonists, with the appeasement and isolationism of the 1930s the clearest proof of all. The solution, for them anyway, is to promote the false history of the Old Right and Pat Buchanan. That is self-pitying and provincial. It cannot secure America’s position in a realigning world. But it will make the hucksters rich. This is what Tucker doesn’t want you to know.
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