Hating Jews. under the guise of hating the colonialist apartheid genocidal oppressor State of Israel, has become the new fashion accessory of the righteous left. The hard right was caught off guard, finding itself outflanked in its hatred of Jews (who have their own space laser and will not replace them). What to do? Open a new Overton Window!
This week Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star who now hosts one of America’s top podcasts, had an apologist for Adolf Hitler on his show. Darryl Cooper, who runs a history podcast (and newsletter) called “Martyr Made,” considers Winston Churchill, not Hitler, the chief villain of World War II. In a social media post that he’s since deleted, Cooper argued that a Paris occupied by the Nazis was “infinitely preferable in virtually every way” to the city on display during the opening ceremony of the recent Summer Olympics, where a drag queen performance infuriated the right. On his show, Carlson introduced Cooper to listeners as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”
As a result of Carlson’s podcast, not to mention Cooper’s twitter rantings, a new discussion arose about whether Hitler was really the bad guy in World War II, and whether the true villain is none other than Winston Churchill. After all, if we’ve learned nothing else from the left, isn’t revisiting historical truisms the hip thing to do?
Over the course of a wide-ranging two-hour conversation, Cooper presented the mainstream history of World War II as a mythology shrouded in taboos intended to prop up a corrupt liberal political order. The idea that Nazi Germany represented the epitome of evil, argued Cooper, is such a “core part of the state religion” that we have “emotional triggers” preventing us from examining the past dispassionately.
And, indeed, those inclined to defenestrate themselves through the newly-opened Overton Window have take the leap.
I got a call the other evening asking me whether the Overton Window has really shifted so far to the right that a debate about Hitler being the good guy was now within the realm of serious discussion. My immediate response was “no, it’s not.” And yet here it is in a column by the New York Times millennial pixie?
For parts of the contemporary right, however, the social consensuses undergirding liberalism are artificial and even tyrannical. After all, the “Matrix”-derived metaphor of being “red-pilled” implies a realization that all you’ve been told about the nature of reality is a lie, and thus everything is up for grabs. And once you discard all epistemological and moral guardrails, it’s easy to descend into barbarous nonsense.
Why would she even consider addressing such nonsense?
Ultimately, Holocaust denial isn’t really about history at all, but about what’s permissible in the present and imaginable in the future. If Hitler is no longer widely understood as the negation of our deepest values, America will be softened up for Donald Trump’s most authoritarian plans, including imprisoning masses of undocumented immigrants in vast detention camps.
To be fair, the hook to Trump isn’t exactly a huge stretch, given that the proponents of “Hitler was the good guy” kinda dig The Donald and, to be even more fair, his scheme to round up “illegal aliens” and put them in camps does seem a bit too familiar for comfort.
But there is nothing to be taken seriously about the discussion any more than the childish rants begging the question of genocide being committed by Israel. We take the latter seriously not because there is a legitimate discussion to be had. It’s ahistorical nonsense and there is nothing to discuss when any discussion is premised on woke fantasy.
There is similarly nothing to discuss when the former, from Carlson to the desperately-seeking-attention Hitler-curious Candice Owens, just asks questions about whether Hitler, who not only tried to solve the “Jew problem,” but killed millions of non-Jews as well for being “less than Aryan,” was really the good guy. That some are willing to engage with this “question” as if it comes in through the Overton Window does not mean that it is now within the realm of legitimate political discussion.
It’s not. It never will be. Sometimes history gets it indisputably right. Most of the time, history gets it right. But even within those times when history gets it right, it’s impossible to get it more right than Hitler was the bad guy in World War II. There is nothing further to discuss.