Conservatives are shocked — shocked! — that Tucker Carlson is soft on Nazis

On Monday, Tucker Carlson hosted an amateur historian named Darryl Cooper on his show to discuss the history of World War II. The result was an extended exercise in Nazi sympathizing with little pushback from Carlson, who called Cooper (who tweets under the handle @martyrmade) “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”

The interview poses a major test to the Republican Party. Though Carlson has been off of Fox News for over a year, broadcasting on Twitter/X instead, he remains influential in the party. He delivered a primetime speech at the 2024 RNC and reportedly played a major role in the JD Vance vice presidential pick. Now that he’s crossing the reddest of red lines — actively apologizing for Adolf Hitler — can the party cut ties?

The answer has been a resounding no. The Trump camp — which sets the tone for the entire party — has so far done nothing to distance itself from the increasingly toxic Carlson.

Vance, who has pre-taped a Carlson interview and is scheduled to speak with him at a live event in two weeks, refused to denounce Carlson after the Cooper fiasco — with a spokesperson saying in a statement  that “Senator Vance doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture.” A Trump campaign source told the Bulwark that while it’s “not ideal timing” for Vance to appear twice with Carlson before Election Day, “it is what it is.” (Donald Trump Jr. is also scheduled to attend.)

Nobody should be surprised the current GOP is failing this particular test. This is the party that renominated Trump after all that he’s done; if there are red lines left for them, it’s not obvious what they are.

What’s more interesting is the reaction among conservative-aligned commentators and intellectuals — many of whom are expressing shock at what Tucker had done.

“Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X. The writer Sohrab Ahmari, who wrote a tribute to his “friend” Carlson after his April 2023 firing from Fox, tweeted on Wednesday that he “can’t get over … the fact that Tucker saw fit to lend [Cooper] an uncritical platform.” (Elon Musk tweeted the Carlson interview approvingly — only to delete the tweet later.)

Such expressions of shock feel absurd. For Carlson’s entire run on Fox News, liberals had been warning that his show had become a vector for racist and neo-Nazi ideas — while people on the right dismissed those concerns as the woke PC police trying to silence a prominent conservative voice. 

The liberal position has now been proven correct — yet again. The only question is whether conservatives will learn a broader lesson about how far-right ideas infiltrate their movement — with their own tacit support.

Why liberals got Carlson right — and conservatives got him so wrong

When Tucker Carlson got a primetime spot on Fox News back in 2016, he immediately developed a fan base among the neo-Nazi right. They saw his bombastic style and his willingness to talk about race and immigration in ways many conservatives shied away from as a vehicle for bringing their own ideas into the mainstream.

“Tucker Carlson is literally our greatest ally,” Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, wrote in 2016. “I don’t believe that he doesn’t hate the Jews.” 

Carlson did quite a bit to merit this fan base. He worked assiduously to mainstream the idea of the “great replacement theory,” the white supremacist idea that mass immigration is a secret elite plot to replace the native-born whites with minorities. He took white nationalists’ false ideas about a “white genocide” in South Africa and brought it to then-President Donald Trump’s attention. He claimed that immigrants were making America “dirtier” and fearmongered about the alleged threat to America from “gypsies.”

The link between Carlson and the radical right was quite direct. In 2020, his head writer Blake Neff resigned after CNN reported that he had made racist and sexist comments on an anonymous web forum. In 2022, the New York Times reported that Carlson’s segments were at times directly inspired by stories published by racist and neo-Nazi websites.

Carlson got away with all of this by employing a very clever rhetorical trick. He would recast white nationalist talking points in nominally colorblind terms — giving his audience permission to think racist thoughts while still thinking of themselves as not racist.

When he talked about the “great replacement,” for example, he would always shy away from saying the problem was the race of the immigrants. Rather, it was they were pliant voters for the Democratic Party who would undermine everything that “legacy Americans” held dear.

“Everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it. Oh, you know, the ‘white replacement theory’? No, no, this is a voting rights question,” Carlson said in a 2021 segment. “I have less political power because they’re importing a brand-new electorate.”

This move provided just enough plausible deniability that both Fox and the broader conservative movement could hail Carlson as one of their brightest stars: not merely one commentator, but the highest-rated host on cable news. It wasn’t until texts surfaced in 2023 showing Tucker himself engaging in naked racism — praising the superior honor of “white men” — that Fox finally felt the need to cut ties.

Liberals easily saw through the charade: They knew who Carlson was and what he was doing the whole time. But conservatives took Carlson’s professions of innocence seriously, at least in public. They said that he was merely skewering the pieties of the left, not engaging in thinly veiled white supremacist apologia.

There’s no better example of this than a recent column by Jonathan Tobin, the former executive editor of Commentary magazine and current editor-in-chief of the conservative Jewish News Syndicate. 

In the column, Tobin expresses horror with Carlson’s interview with Cooper — saying it is “now incumbent on all decent people, and especially those on the right, to demand that Carlson no longer be treated as a mainstream figure.”

Yet in the very same column, he praises Carlson’s show on Fox as emblematic of mainstream conservative opinion:

During his seven-year run on Fox, Carlson built an enormous following. It might well be said that during the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, he became the tribune of contemporary conservatism with his articulate critique of the moral panic that swept the nation in the wake of the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers and the “mostly peaceful” riots that ensued. Though his soft spot for tinfoil-hat controversies was no secret, such as his fascination with UFO conspiracy theories, his main focus was on the issues that most conservatives and many centrists cared about, such as illegal immigration, critical race theory indoctrination, and corrupt liberal elites that seek to squelch opposition to their continued hold on power.

Despite everything, Tobin is still completely blind to what Carlson was doing on Fox. 

He seems to believe that Fox was effectively concealing Tucker’s true views, when in actuality it was helping him broadcast them in a slightly coded manner. This was so obvious that Carlson’s neo-Nazi fans openly bragged about it, and had been doing so since 2016. And yet Tobin singles out Carlson’s treatment of race and immigration — of all subjects! — as the areas where his Fox show best represented mainstream conservatism.

This is the problem in a nutshell. On the right today, you can say something extremely racist and get away with it so long as you say “I’m not a racist!” in the following sentence. Liberals have long pointed out the problem with this maneuver; in response, conservatives have accused them of acting like woke scolds.

Carlson’s descent into Holocaust revisionism has proven the problem with this permission structure. The question is whether any others will learn their lessons — or whether, like Tobin, they will continue to engage in a form of thinking that allows their movement to be penetrated by bigots.