To The 'Populists' Here, Not the 'Conservatives'

[Kathianne]

I know where Gunny, fj1200, myself fall on the following regarding Carlson. Would like to hear why his play is good or bad in others opinions. (I think it's a sure path to get Harris in office.) It would be a good idea to get to site as much will not c & p:

https://instapundit.com/670758/







September 4, 2024
SPRINGTIME FOR TUCKER: The Tablet’s Park MacDougald gives the background on Tucker’s interview with “historian” Darryl Cooper (the basics of which you’ve already read in the Mediaite story I linked to yesterday, and Steve’s piece at the PJ Mothership this morning) and writes, “A newsletter is not the place to ‘debate’ a podcaster over the most written-about subject in human history. Instead, we think it’s better to think about this episode from a political perspective:”


Who benefits from putting a World War II revisionist on the most popular podcast in America two months before an election? Well, for one, Carlson himself. One way to understand the interview is as a play by Carlson to draw a line on the right, with himself and the other brave “truth-tellers” (like Candace Owens) on one side, and the “neocons,” “Zionists,” and other establishment hysterics on the other. Sure, it shrinks the conservative coalition, provokes pointless infighting, and gives ammunition to Democrats and various sub-Lincoln Project grifters who would love nothing more than to distract from nearly a year of donor-funded, pro-terror protests on the left by portraying Donald Trump supporters as a gang of Nazi apologists. But it also puts Trump on the spot: Will you denounce your loyal followers to please liberals and “Conservative, Inc.” talking heads who hate you? Either way, Carlson wins.


Carlson wins, that is, and Trump loses*. As Abigail Shrier observes on X:






Kamala benefits….as does Barack Obama. This is trivially true in the sense that two-party politics are inherently zero-sum, but consider also the specifics of Cooper and Carlson’s discussion of Churchill. The implication isn’t merely that, say, Churchill was an overrated leader or a bad diplomat. Rather, it’s that Churchill was pushed by “Zionist” financiers to drag the United States into a war that it had no business fighting (never mind that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was preparing for a war with Germany from the late-1930s on). Those Zionists, always trying to drag naive Americans off to war!


Of course, it’s easy to say this story evokes antisemitic tropes. But what in present-day American politics is it supposed to remind you of?


For help with that one, we can turn to Iranian agent, Obama ally, and Iran-deal salesman Trita Parsi, who felt that yesterday was an excellent time to turn the subtext into text by sharing a clip from Carlson’s previous interview, with Jeffrey Sachs:


Read the whole thing.


Related: We Need to Talk about Tucker, Again.


Carlson also spoke in a prime-time slot at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He will be touring his show this month throughout the nation, with scheduled guest appearances in different cities by Vivek Ramaswamy, Charlie Kirk, recent Trump endorser Tulsi Gabbard, and none other than vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance himself.


I hope Vance enjoys answering questions from the media about why he’s joining a man who wants his viewers to give serious consideration to the possibility that the Nazis should have been allowed to invade Poland, liquidate its Jews and Poles, and repopulate it with Germans. (As a follow-up, ask Vance whether he thinks Hitler would have kept a promise not to invade the USSR.) Those questions might not be fair to Vance, but then again he would probably prefer answering those than telling people the truth: He will be there because that is where he thinks Republican voters are right now. And they are not in a good place if Tucker Carlson is their guide.


More: “A decade ago it was no exaggeration to say that Limbaugh and Fox News, where Ailes presided, served as de facto assignment editors for populist right-wing media. Whatever the daily hobby horse was in their programming, that’s what talk radio and online commentators would be chattering about. Who’s the assignment editor now?”


* QED:

[Kathianne]

More on Carlson, I used to like him, but not for a couple years before he parted ways with FOX.

https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2024/09/04/wednesdays-final-word-n3794065

[revelarts]

Ok so I'm just wondering, who are the "populist" here?
I've been on the board for a while. I don't think my POV has changed with any "popular" or so called "populist" ideas or candidate.
I know they haven't.
Foreign policy & war, I have similar views to George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Pat Buchanan, & Ron Paul
Social Issues, I'm probably more conservative than most here.
I'm a stricter constitutionalist than most here. Not sure that strict constitutionalism is viewed as populist... Or "conservative" since it often means more freedoms and less "law & order" type restrictions and less "safety" tools for the govt. And less powers in the hands of the CiC, whoever that might be.

But concerning the Tucker Carlson interview I haven't listened to it so I'd rather not judge it based on reports.
3rd rail subjects often don't get the most objective treatment in 2nd hand reports... from any side.

I'd hope that Tucker wasn't promoting the POV described but maybe, seeing the rise in this type of thinking on the right, he's using the platform to clarify and push back.
I know some folks prefer not to let such things get the light of day. But times are weird. & many people are realizing they have been lied to about so much for a long time that nearly everything is up for reexamination. I hope and pray God does not allow folks to go over the deep end into NEW(old) BS after they've let go of some of the real lies.
Bottom line many people are open to a lot things now, that 20 years ago they would not have considered. Add to that that many on the right see the lefts media & educational proganda machines working against them 24/7. So some people are more open to those who offer "alternatives", & who share some of their other values... and attributes.

precarious times.

But, optics wise, for the wider public I think it's a stupid move. I can't imagine people who lean left or still generally trust media & academia will be able to process this in any type of objective or neutral way AT ALL. It will just reinforce all the worse they've heard about Tucker & the right.
Kamala might still LOVE BLM or love aspects of Louis Farakhan's work but she'd be stupid to meet with them publicly during the campaign.

I've listen to a few of Tuckers podcast & interviews since he's left FOX and it seems he's on journey of discover. Politically, spiritually and otherwise. Not sure where he's going to end up. But based on what I've heard from him in the recent past I wouldn't assume the worse of Carlson.
But I think it's a stupid move right now if he generally wants to HELP Trump.

[fj1200]

Did someone say populists?
:bluegun::gunner2::gunner3::gunner4::sniper:

:grumpy1:

[Kathianne]

Did someone say populists?
:bluegun::gunner2::gunner3::gunner4::sniper:

:grumpy1:

Might be the wrong word, though most seem proud of it. Looking at those that consider 'conservatives' the same as 'RINOs,' much like Carlson has for a long time now.

[fj1200]

Might be the wrong word, though most seem proud of it. Looking at those that consider 'conservatives' the same as 'RINOs,' much like Carlson has for a long time now.

I won't argue the point but only say that up is down and down is up with mostly fealty to the buffoon as the reason for it.

[Kathianne]

I won't argue the point but only say that up is down and down is up with mostly fealty to the buffoon as the reason for it.
I agree. Those not voting for Trump or very reluctantly as yours truly, are not going with Trump worship. I think it's more a case of hoping the piece of wood we're grabbing at after the ship sunk in the middle of raging seas, keeps up afloat.

Sad, but true.

[Kathianne]

Churchill was the worst person in WWII. Now that is something.

[Gunny]

Churchill was the worst person in WWII. Now that is something.Churchill had his issues. Most war time leaders do. Note that after leading the UK through the war, they dumped him most ricky-tick right after.

He was the right man for job at the time. Conspiracy theories 80 years later doesn't change that fact one bit.

We aren't the target audience for selling revisionist history. The young are. I believe you posted recently quite a lengthy thread on our revisionist, populist education system.

Just remember, The NAZI's, National Socialist German Worker's Party, are right wing :rolleyes:

[Kathianne]

Here we go:

https://www.thefp.com/p/victor-davis-hanson-the-truth-about

[Gunny]

Here we go:

https://www.thefp.com/p/victor-davis-hanson-the-truth-aboutHave to subscribe.

[Kathianne]

Have to subscribe.

No, just click on 'maybe later' or continue reading

[Gunny]

No, just click on 'maybe later' or continue reading:laugh2:

[Kathianne]

:laugh2:

Really Gunny, it's not paywalled. I can c&p when I get home.

[Kathianne]

His response to the Carlson/Cooper garbage


Victor Davis Hanson: The Truth About World War IIGermany and its fascist allies started the war. They felt empowered to do so not because of supposed Allied aggression, but because of Western appeasement and isolationism.


By Victor Davis Hanson


September 5, 2024


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In a recent and now widely seen Tucker Carlson interview, a guest historian named Darryl Cooper casually presented a surprising number of flawed theories about World War II. He focused his misstatements on the respective roles of Winston Churchill’s Britain and Adolf Hitler’s Germany—especially in matters of the treatment and fate of Russian prisoners, the Holocaust, the systematic slaughtering of Jews, strategic bombing, and the nature of Winston Churchill.


Because of the size of the audience Carlson introduced him to, and because of the gravity of Cooper’s falsehoods, his assertions deserve a response.


On the Treatment of Russian Prisoners


It is simply not true, as Cooper alleges, that Hitler’s Wehrmacht was completely surprised and unprepared for the mass capitulation of the Red Army and some two million Russian prisoners who fell into German hands in summer 1941.


The virtual extinction of these POWs in the first six months of the war was a natural consequence of a series of infamous and so-called “criminal orders” issued by Hitler in spring 1941 to be immediately implemented in his planned “war of extermination” in the East.


The edicts variously targeted for elimination prominent Soviet officials, intellectuals, Jews, and commissars. Just as importantly, Hitler exempted German soldiers from any criminal liability in what was expected to be the mass killing of Russians and Jews in general.


In Mein Kampf, during the lead-up to the war, and even through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact years, Hitler had planned eventually to invade Russia, destroy the Soviet Union, put an end to what he called Jewish Bolshevism, and annex and then eventually resettle almost all of European Russia. In part he was encouraged by the German success in briefly absorbing much of Western Russia in late 1917 and early 1918.


Accordingly, Hitler and his planners envisioned a quick Russian campaign. Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, believed that Operation Barbarossa, which began on June 22, 1941, had essentially been won in its first eleven days. Halder matter-of-factly wrote in his diary that the Russian population would have to be disposed of during that first winter to save Germans the effort of feeding and maintaining them.


Hitler further assumed the liquidation of Soviet-style Marxism was inseparable from the destruction of all the Jews in the East, whose wartime persecution began in Poland just days after the German invasion in September 1939 and well before any Allied response.


True, some of the invading Wehrmacht officers may have been disturbed at the sheer mass of captives and Germans’ inability to offer even the bare essentials of humane treatment. But they quickly learned from Berlin’s doubling down on earlier eliminationist directives that they were not to worry about the millions of doomed Russian prisoners or the murders of Jews, given their deaths were consistent with prior Führer directives for the future resettling of western Russia.


At Nuremberg and after the war, many veteran generals of the Eastern Front claimed they privately opposed Hitler’s orders of total war that entailed liquidation of communists and Jews and assumed the mass death of Russian POWs. But very few could prove that they had not received such orders or had bravely opposed their implementation.


Who Was Responsible for Starting World War II?


As for Cooper’s claim that the Allies were to blame for starting a world war, nothing could be further from the truth. Hitler may have been frustrated that Britain and France declared war on him after his unprovoked invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. But he had been warned by some advisers that the two allies would be finally forced to war, given that he had broken almost all his prewar promises to them about ceasing his serial territorial acquisitions.

[Kathianne]

This is behind paywall, but give the gist. I get notices from FP, thinking of subscribing, but have too many right now:


Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more
Niall Ferguson: History and Anti-History
Podcasts are not reviving history, as is often claimed these days. They are mostly drowning it in a tidal wave of blather, at best sloppy, at worst mendacious.
Niall Ferguson
Sep 5
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Podcasts are not reviving history, as is often claimed these days. They are mostly drowning it in a tidal wave of blather. Niall Ferguson for The Free Press.
According to Cooper, the “official story” about the rise of Hitler is as follows. Once upon a time, Germany was a “sophisticated, cultural superpower.” But then, after the First World War and the Weimar Republic “they all turned into demons for a few years, and now they’re fine again.” But that’s not what really happened.(Universal Images Group via Getty Images)


According to Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper is “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” I had never heard of Cooper until this week and was none the wiser when I went to look for his books. There are none.


According to Wikipedia, “he is author of Twitter — A How to Tips & Tricks Guide (2011) and the editor of Bush Yarns and Other Offences (2022).” These are scarcely works of history. It turns out that, as Carlson put it in his wildly popular conversation with Cooper, this historian works “in a different medium—on Substack, X, podcasts.”


The problem, as swiftly became apparent on Carlson’s podcast, is that you cannot do history that way. What we are dealing with in this conversation is the opposite of history: call it anti-history.


True history proceeds from an accumulation of evidence, some in the form of written records, some in other forms, to a reconstitution of past thought, in R.G. Collingwood’s phrase, and from there to a rendition of Leopold von Ranke’s was eigentlich gewesen: what essentially happened. By contrast, Darryl Cooper offers a series of wild assertions that are almost entirely divorced from historical evidence and can be of interest only to those so ignorant of the past that they mistake them for daring revisionism, as opposed to base neo-Nazism.


Podcasts are not reviving history, as is often claimed these days. They are mostly drowning it in a tidal wave of blather, at best sloppy, at worst mendacious.


I could see early on where this conversation was going. It’s the moment when Cooper offers his appraisal of the Jonestown mass suicide of 1978 as microcosm. A microcosm of what? Of the civil rights movement, of course.


Here’s Cooper: ...

[fj1200]

Cooper is a microcosm of why social medias are evil, why stupid people having a platform is evil, why stupid people finding that garbage is evil... A microcosm of why I don't watch videos, why I don't follow twitter... If you can't put into written word your thoughts and evidence of a subject then it likely is not worth the electrons that pollute the internet.

Social media is a populists favorite place to be because there is little requirement to have any clue what you're talking about.

[Kathianne]

Cooper is a microcosm of why social medias are evil, why stupid people having a platform is evil, why stupid people finding that garbage is evil... A microcosm of why I don't watch videos, why I don't follow twitter... If you can't put into written word your thoughts and evidence of a subject then it likely is not worth the electrons that pollute the internet.

Social media is a populists favorite place to be because there is little requirement to have any clue what you're talking about.

I don't follow podcasts and such, mostly due to my hearing, it's just too much work for me. I don't 'follow Twitter' but do have notices when some of the folks I 'follow' such as Hanson, Musk, Herridge, etc., posts. Mostly not anything, but sometimes it is. LOL!

[fj1200]

I don't follow podcasts and such, mostly due to my hearing, it's just too much work for me. I don't 'follow Twitter' but do have notices when some of the folks I 'follow' such as Hanson, Musk, Herridge, etc., posts. Mostly not anything, but sometimes it is. LOL!

Someone with a brain and a body of work posting is completely different than someone with neither posting. :cool:

[Gunny]

Really @Gunny (http://www.debatepolicy.com/member.php?u=30), it's not paywalled. I can c&p when I get home.This would be me laughing at me. I saw "subscribe" and went no further. :)

[Gunny]

Cooper is a microcosm of why social medias are evil, why stupid people having a platform is evil, why stupid people finding that garbage is evil... A microcosm of why I don't watch videos, why I don't follow twitter... If you can't put into written word your thoughts and evidence of a subject then it likely is not worth the electrons that pollute the internet.

Social media is a populists favorite place to be because there is little requirement to have any clue what you're talking about.Hear ya :clap:

[Kathianne]

Interesting round-up:

https://instapundit.com/671192/


BRENDAN O’NEILL: The shameful Nazi apologism of the Very Online right (https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/06/the-shameful-nazi-apologism-of-the-very-online-right/).


Forget that toothless crackhead (https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/09/09/the-return-of-the-paranoid-style/) who says he had sex with Barack Obama. Never mind the lowlife pimp who cosplays as a lifestyle guru, Andrew Tate (https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/08/07/stop-making-excuses-for-andrew-tate/). This week Tucker Carlson scraped even lower in the barrel of cranks to find a guest for his chat show on X. He had on Darryl Cooper (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/tucker-carlson-darryl-cooper-interview-biden-b2607997.html), a historian, podcaster and – wait for it – apologist for Adolf Hitler (https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/tucker-carlson-nazi-darryl-cooper-rcna169809). Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve now reached the ‘Were the Nazis really the bad guys?’ stage of contrarian online blather.

Tucker’s chat with Cooper has caused a storm. As well it might. Also known as ‘Martyr Made’, Mr Cooper is a notorious historical revisionist. He has huge beef with Winston Churchill. Churchill, not Hitler, was the true villain of the Second World War (https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2024/09/what-tucker-carlsons-spin-on-world-war-ii-really-says/679713/), he says. He’s a giddy promoter of the myth that Hitler made a peace offer in 1940 but Churchill rejected it and insisted on plunging the world into war. Hitler the peacenik – who saw that coming down the pipeline of online bollocks?

What Cooper told Carlson was insane. Churchill was a ‘psychopath (https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-pushing-nazi-apologias-and-holocaust-denial-he-addressed-rnc-just)’ kept in power by Zionist interests, he said. As for all those poor Jews in the camps – they ‘ended up dead (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/06/opinion/tucker-carlson-holocaust-denial.html)’ because the stretched Nazis lacked the time and resources to care for them, he insisted. Depicting the Nazis’ industrialised slaughter of the Jews of Europe as an accident, just a sad, regrettable byproduct of their being too busy, is sick. It’s a species of Holocaust denial. That Carlson nodded along to such rancid revisionism is shameful.

For the true measure of Cooper, consider what he said in a recent post on X, since deleted. Paris under the Nazis, he tweeted (https://x.com/lionel_trolling/status/1831005658465898652), was ‘infinitely preferable in virtually every way’ to the Paris of the Olympics opening ceremony. To drive home his fascistic point, he put a photo of Hitler and his henchmen surveying the spoils of Paris next to a screenshot of that plump drag queen who formed the centrepiece of the Last Supper pisstake at the opening ceremony. Look, I hated the opening ceremony (https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/27/paris-olympics-a-smug-spectacle-of-wokeness/), but – I can’t believe this needs to be said – Paris of 2024 is preferable in every way to the Paris that was conquered by the marauding inhuman racists of the Nazi regime. This is where we’re at, folks: having to explain that a drag queen on your TV is less bad than a Jew-murdering machine taking over your country.

Cooper’s shameless saluting of Nazi Paris cuts to the heart of the Hitler apologetics that have spread like a pox through the Very Online right. These people are in the grip of a deranged fantasy: that Europe in the Nazi era was better than the new Europe of genderfluidity, mass immigration, Islamist terrorism or whatever. They scurry like the abject moral cowards they are from the undoubted problems of the present into an utterly fictional past. A past where Hitler was a peacemaker, Europe was calm (until that rotter Churchill came along), and ‘Western civilisation’ remained intact. Overlooked – wilfully – is the war, savagery and unprecedented programme of extermination unleashed by the Nazis, all of which added up to the most violent and egregious assault (https://www.highpointnc.gov/2111/World-War-II#:~:text=World%20War%20II%20was%20the,the%20Sovi et%20Union%20and%20China.) on Western civilisation in history.



While Abigail Shrier and Tablet’s Park MacDougald wrote that they think Tucker is enjoying the Reich Stuff because secretly, he wants Kamala to win (https://instapundit.com/670758/), Jonah Goldberg disagrees. In “Tucker’s 1945 Project,” (https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/gfile/tuckers-1945-project-2/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Tucker%20s%201945%20Project&utm_campaign=The%20G-File_Free%20Subscribers%20Only_Tucker%20s%201945%2 0Project) he writes:


The only prominent “What is Tucker doing?” theory I disagree with is the idea that he’s trying (https://twitter.com/CarolineGlick/status/1831692783570038932) to get (https://x.com/AbigailShrier/status/1831356045194887384) Kamala Harris elected. The number of things Tucker could say—truthfully!—that could get Trump in Dutch is very long (including things he’s said to me). Choosing to boost Hitler apologetics to get Kamala Harris elected is some four-dimensional chess fantasy stuff. I do think causing headaches for Trump and J.D. Vance is a benefit for him, because forcing them to either kowtow or denounce him is a flex move. Vance has already made it clear he won’t criticize Tucker, which is a demonstration—in Tucker’s estimation—of his power.

No, the most likely explanation is that he likes Nazi apologetics, either on the merits or because of the reaction, or both.

So what’s to like? Again, I dismiss entirely the suggestion that he thinks he’s telling the truth. He might have convinced himself he believes it, but veracity isn’t the point. So what is appealing about the idea that the West took a wrong turn by opting to destroy Hitler? Giving antisemitism and Holocaust denial some lebensraum might be part of it, sure. I’m not trying to minimize the evil of that.

But I think that to the extent there’s an ideological project behind Tucker’s latest schtick, antisemitism isn’t the primary motivation. Sure, pissing off “the Jews” has its joys for him. But that’s probably gravy. Tucker is an acolyte of Patrick Buchanan and sees himself as the Buchanan of the 21st century. It’s worth recalling that Buchanan fell—or leapt—into the same intellectual bog Tucker is rolling in now. In 2008, Buchanan wrote Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. As bad as his argument was, it was far more serious than the nonsense spewed by Tucker’s “historian.”

Buchanan’s larger project, laid out in that book and several others, was to make the path America followed after World War II a “wrong turn.” In the postwar era, America turned its back on many of the things Buchanan thought made America “great.” Now, Buchanan’s version of greatness is saturated with just-so stories, nostalgia, dyspepsia, grievances, and a lot of correlation confused for causation. But in his telling, we became an “empire” and stopped being a “republic.” We admitted a lot of immigrants who had no business becoming Americans. Feminism, gay rights, Israel, free trade, civil rights, and other “problems” emerged in the postwar era. If “the past is a foreign country (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Past_is_a_Foreign_Country),” he liked that country better.

Buchanan was by no means entirely wrong in all of his criticisms of postwar America, but his fixation that it was all both entirely lamentable and entirely avoidable was entirely wrong. Buchanan changed as he got older (I was friendly with him, as were my parents). He got bitter and cranky. Tragically childless—no one tell J.D. Vance!—I think he was cut off from the best ambassadors of the country-that-is-the-present we can have in this life: our own children.

The advantage of Tucker’s 1945 Project is that it’s easier to sell than the similar Wrong Turn projects swirling on the right. The new right nationalists and postliberals have been peddling the idea that we took a “Wrong Turn” with John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, England’s Glorious Revolution, or the Enlightenment generally. It’s hard to sell the poorly educated or miseducated on that stuff, in part because most of them have no idea who John Locke was or what the Enlightenment was about. But everybody’s heard of Hitler and Churchill.



Not surprisingly, the left is enjoying Tucker’s election eve “1945 Project” immensely. Axios describes it as “MAGA’s media meltdown,” (https://www.axios.com/2024/09/06/trump-carlson-maga-media-rupture) before concluding, “Trump won’t have issues turning out his base in November, regardless of the state of conservative media. The bigger question is which voices will fill the vacuum when Trump is eventually gone.”



https://instapundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/drunk_republican_don_draper_tucker_carlson_wwii_09-06_2024.jpg