Less than a month ago, I devoted an entire segment to making it clear that some events and ideas, like anti-Semitism, are so vile that they must be confronted and addressed immediately, or the impact of engaging with them will be so deeply tainted that it will undermine our side's ability to win on any front.
I’m used to disappointment (as any conservative quickly learns), but I never thought “altering Hitler” would be on my bingo card of regrets for the 2024 election. This debate has now reached a level where even Tucker Carlson, perhaps the most influential voice in our movement since the death of Rush Limbaugh, is involved.
Even rebels need guardrails to keep them from becoming what they initially opposed. This is the central warning of everything Orwell wrote.
To be clear, I like and respect Tucker both personally and professionally. I strongly encouraged him to host a leadership summit for presidential candidates in Iowa in 2023. We spoke at the same event in 2022, and he is one of the few colleagues in this industry I have gone out of my way to take a photo with. He is also the only primetime Fox News personality to have featured me on his show, and is the reason my 2021 book, “The Faucian Bargain,” hit #1 overall on Amazon for the second time.
But I simply cannot understand why, just eight weeks before a crucial election, he would be so keen to accept an argument that suggests Churchill was the real villain – that Hitler was simply misunderstood – especially when our opponent has spent the last eight years trying to position our candidate as “literally Hitler”.
What good is a conversation like “Hitler was terrible” doing, especially when we have to win an election, which is the biggest platform for our movement?
It's one thing to host a conversation, but quite another to play along with it. Tucker made no bones about the ease with which the claims of the cheesy “historians” he used to speak for this debate were refuted. The conversation included one of the stupidest statements I've heard in my career, from so-called historian Darryl Cooper: “[Churchill] Although they have not killed the most people or committed the most atrocities…”
Please stop. Don't continue. Just… stop.
You know what's a good rule of thumb for determining who the villain of a story is? Usually, it's Commit the most atrocities!
So Cooper the “historian” can't even stand up to his own interrogation, let alone that of others. George W. Bush, who once made the cosmically self-contradictory claim that he would “suspend free-market principles in order to save the free market,” comes calling and says he wants to recover what's left of his motor function.
Many of us first learned of this brilliant historian, Victor Davis Hanson, through Tucker Carlson, who appeared on Fox News many times before Tucker Carlson was unjustly fired. Write a detailed rebuttal At the beginning of the conversation, which Tucker hosted, Hanson felt it necessary to confront the “staggering number of erroneous theories” that Cooper had presented without refutation, given the large audience to which Tucker had introduced him. Hanson did just that, thoroughly and in detail.
I get it. I don't want to replace the old gatekeepers with new ones. But we all need guardrails. That's not the same as gatekeepers. Tucker, like all of us in this industry, wouldn't be hosting a “just ask” conversation about the mainstreaming of pedophilia or “actually child pornography.” This shows that some guardrails already exist, and for good reason.
The question then becomes, what are they and who decides what they should be?
Do I think Tucker is a wink-and-nod anti-Semite? No. Do I think he's checking off things that he feels the mainstream media, no matter how inflammatory, won't let through their increasingly narrow, culturally Marxist Overton window as a middle finger to the establishment? Yes. And that's why he's earned all the popularity he currently has.
Even insurgents need guardrails to keep them from becoming what they initially opposed. This is the central warning of everything Orwell wrote. Tucker runs the risk of jumping on the negative labels (e.g., racist, anti-Semite, fascist, Nazi) that he and our critics are eager to apply to his critical voices.
Again, as someone who respects and likes Mr. Tucker, I would like to make the following suggestions publicly:
One great way to demonstrate that you are skeptical of the post-war agreements and decades of pro-Zionist U.S. foreign policy without actually being anti-Semitic is to host a two-way “just ask” dialogue. I recommend best-selling author Jonathan Cahn, a Messianic Jew and one of the country's most successful Christian authors, who is well versed in the theme of spiritual warfare that Tucker has emphasized in recent years. Jonathan is also very pro-Israel and obviously very Jewish.
I would love to hear these two great thinkers debate for an hour. Wouldn't you agree? I think it's entirely fair to debate whether apocalypticism, which is still relatively new (in church terms), should play a role in influencing American foreign policy, as Kahn sees it. And I think we can do that without having to retroactively install Hitler and thus exposing our entire movement to the possibility of confirming our enemies' worst slanders.
Platforms like iTunes are already wary of hosting right-wing content, despite their huge audiences, so there's no need to further fuel the censorship frenzy.
If you're really just going to “ask questions,” ask them from multiple angles: after all, Overtonists don't want to welcome “Actually Hitler” any more than they would like an outspoken Messianic Jew like Kahn.
