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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.”
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.
Read full text: https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-tucker-carlson-darryl-cooper-and-holocaust-denial/