Tucker Carlson’s Holocaust denier guest

Tucker Carlson on his X/Twitter show “went there” with one of his guests, Darryl Cooper, a rightwing ideologue, who indulged in blatant Holocaust denial talk. The Humanist Report podcast summarizes the sad episode: (1)

It's notable that MAGA-man and Orbán fan Tucker is doing this. Cooper’s approach in this segment is the kind of typical conspiracist-theory that vaccine opponents and climate deniers and many other use, the posture of just-asking-questions. Which point to an “inconvenient truth” or whatever. Variations on the pitch might include Mean Libruls, George Soros, and the Jewish Lügenpresse. And the podcast report above features examples of some of that general genre from people defending Cooper’s Holocaust denialism.

And Tucker gives a variation by defending Cooper’s right to free speech, which the US would challenge in this case. I like to define the American Jeffersonian concept of free speech as founded on the idea that things work out best if people are legally free to say any dang fool thing they want to say, as long as everyone else is free to say what a dang fool thing it is. But if calling a lie a lie, or calling a fraud a fraud, is taken to be “opposing free speech,” then the concept is completely empty.

But it's worth mentioning here that in some countries, including Germany and Austria and other EU countries, that Holocaust denial actually is illegal because it is understood to be a revival of Nazism, which in their view has been demonstrated to be historically incompatible with liberal democracy. At least in Austria’s case, Austria’s Independence Treaty of 1955 explicitly commits it to preventing any revival of the Nazi Party. (I’m inclined to think the Jeffersonian approach is preferable because it lets people tell a bit more easily who the Nazi-inclined characters are. And a downside of the German-Austrian approach is that calling someone a Nazi without being able to point to specific violations of the anti-Nazi laws could get the accuser sued.)

Republican Vice Presidential candidate and chronic weirdo J.D. Vance stepped up to the plate with this on Tucker’s Holocaust-denying guest:

"Agree or disagree with anything Tucker Carlson has to say, we believe in free speech and if you don't like an idea ... The best way to ensure that doesn't happen is to debate and push back against bad ideas, it's not to try and censor and suppress them." (2)

On this point, I would have to agree with the ADL's response to Vance's defense of Tucker promoting Holocaust denial trash:

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt rejected Vance's defense, saying "someone needs to explain to [Vance] that it's not 'guilt by association' when Tucker was slammed for laundering and legitimizing someone who engages in Holocaust denial and distortion. It's guilt by action. Don't dismiss it – condemn it."

To be fair to Mr. Hillbilly Elegy, he did squeeze this in: "obviously the Holocaust was a terrible tragedy, and it's something we have to make sure never gets repeated again in this country."

I'll be a bit generous here and assume that J.D. didn't mean to imply that the Holocaust took place in the United States. (I won't be generous enough to assume he was making some "postcolonial" point about the treatment of native peoples or captives imported from Africa.)

The dishonest Holocaust-denial narrative

But at least vaccine “skeptics” may be genuinely misinformed, though very often they are pushing some alternative medicine or diet-supplement grift. But while Holocaust denial has aspects of a grift and seeks to mislead people, it’s basically just anti-Semitic propaganda.

There are excellent histories of the Holocaust, including Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) and its expanded, three-volume 1985 revision remain solid sources for the basic facts involved. Hilberg’s book is often described as the first book-length treatment of the subject, although Wikipedia also cities two earlier books, Bréviaire de la haine (Harvest of Hate) (1951) by Léon Poliakov and The Final Solution (1953) by Gerald Reitlinger. (3) There are also books focused on debunking Holocaust-denial narratives, such as Deborah Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1993) and Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (2000).

Lipstadt’s criticism of the most famous Holocaust denier, David Irving, became the subject of a lawsuit brought in Britain by Irving, which he lost. It was also the subject of a 2016 theatrical film, Denial. The actual court case produced a decision that digs into the historical issues, which was required because Irving was claiming that Lipstadt had misrepresented his work. And for a judicial document, it’s remarkably readable for a general audience. (4)

Mark Greif summarized some of the most important arguments in the case for The American Prospect in 2001. He makes an important point distinguishing the kind of historical revisionism which offers new interpretations of historical events and deliberate falsification of history that tries to pass itself off as “revisionism”:

An open society, even at the best of times, depends on its past. So much of the body of stable opinion will be under threat at any given moment that society turns to history as to a court of appeal. That's why Holocaust denial is so intolerable to liberal cultures, and a test of how liberal principles respond to assault. Denial looks different from other forms of racial hatred. It doesn't resemble an opinion, as ordinary racism does, to be best countered with more free speech. It raids the store of facts. It mimics real historical revision, which changes the view of the past without harming the evidence. And it succeeds because it selectively misuses the most familiar mechanisms of proof, manipulating liberalism's natural skepticism and properly footnoting all its deceptions. It looks like sabotage. [my emphasis] (5)

Notes:

(1) Right-Wing Satire Site Mocks Tucker Carlson’s WWII Revisionism, Their Fans LOSE Their MINDS. The Humanist Report YouTube channel 09/04/2024. <https://youtu.be/r0ZKrP6Vlq4?si=GZAkHSCurvrxphaK> (Accessed: 2024-09-09).

(2) Samuels, Ben (2024): Trump's VP Pick J.D. Vance Defends Tucker Carlson for Platforming Holocaust Revisionism. Haaretz 09/07/2024. <https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2024-09-07/ty-article/.premium/trumps-vp-pick-j-d-vance-defends-tucker-carlson-for-platforming-holocaust-revisionism/00000191-ce17-d214-a393-cfbf72e10000> (Accessed: 2024-09-09).

(3) The Destruction of the European Jews. Wikipedia 11/22/2023. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Destruction_of_the_European_Jews&oldid=1186296580> (]Accessed: 2024-09-09).

(4) Irving v. Penguin Books Limited, Deborah E. Lipstat [2000] EWHC QB 115 (11th April, 2000). England and Wales High Court (Queen's Bench Division) Decisions. <https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2000/115.html> (Accessed: 2024-09-09).

(5) Greif, Mark (2001): The Banality of Irving. The American Prospect 12/19/2001. <https://prospect.org/features/banality-irving/> (Accessed: 2024-09-09).