The White House has condemned Tucker Carlson for a recent viral interview he conducted with a historian.
On Monday, the independent broadcaster released an interview with podcaster Darryl Cooper, whom Carlson referred to as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States."
The viral episode, which is approaching 30 million views on X, has resulted in Cooper's Martyr Made podcast topping the iTunes charts and surpassing Carlson's podcast.
During the wide-ranging two-hour interview, Cooper offered a heterodox view of Winston Churchill.
“I think maybe I'm being a little hyperbolic maybe, but … I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War,” Cooper said. “He didn't kill the most people. He didn't commit the most atrocities. … He was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.”
In a statement issued to CNN, the Biden administration's senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said “giving 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,” Bates said. “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.”
First on @CNN: The White House is condemning Tucker Carlson's "Nazi propaganda" interview as a "disgusting and sadistic insult." Here's my full story: https://t.co/FaRTSxjaPn In response, Carlson criticized the White House's statement. “The fact that these lunatics have used the Churchill myth to bring our country closer to nuclear war than at any moment in history disgusts me, and should terrify every American,” he wrote in a text message to the outlet. “They’re warmonger freaks. They don’t get the moral high ground.” Though Cooper has not directly addressed the White House's statement, he mentioned the controversy over the interview in a Thursday evening X post. "The furor over my Tucker interview is a straight replay of the Very Fine People hoax," he wrote. "Totally mendacious, claiming the literal opposite of what was actually said, too shameless to care that people can easily go see the video themselves."
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) September 5, 2024
You know, Germany, look, they, they put themselves into a position, and Adolf Hitler is chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the East, in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth, that they were gonna have to handle. They went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there. Elon Musk initially reposted the interview and commented, “Very interesting. Worth watching.” He has since deleted the post following backlash from other users on X. Former lawmaker Liz Cheney slammed the episode as “pro-Nazi propaganda.” “No serious or honorable person would support or endorse this type of garbage,” she wrote on X. On Wednesday, the episode received a community note on X that read: “Civilian deaths in eastern Europe were not as a result of the Germans being overwhelmed by refugees but rather as a result of a pre planned strategy of Reinhard Heydrich's einsatzgruppen. This is extensively documented in letters, orders, eyewitness reports and photos.” The note included a link to a Wikipedia page on Einsatzgruppen. Cooper followed up his comments about Churchill with a long thread on Tuesday that provided additional information to support his argument. At the time of reporting, seven of the 54 entries in thread had received community notes.Well, and the next thought that comes into their head ... is that, oh, you're saying Churchill was the chief villain. Therefore, his enemies, you know, Adolf Hitler and so forth were the protagonists, right? They're the good guys. If you think he's a villain, that's not the case. That's not what I'm saying.
Cooper then argued that components of the traditional narrative of World War 2 have become akin to modern American mythology.
