Tucker Carlson sharply criticized for hosting Holocaust revisionist

Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star turned podcaster, has come under fire for hosting a Holocaust revisionist on his show, drawing rebukes from conservative lawmakers as well as the White House.

The comments were made by podcaster Darryl Cooper on Carlson’s show “Tucker on X” on the social platform. Carlson, who has hosted the show since Fox severed ties with him in 2023, introduced Cooper as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”

Cooper, who has a podcast and newsletter called “Martyr Made,” proceeded to make a variety of false claims about the Holocaust and World War II, including that millions of people in concentration camps “ended up dead” merely because the Nazis did not have enough resources to care for them, rather than as a result of the intentional genocide that it was. Cooper also claimed that Winston Churchill, the British prime minister at the time, and not Adolf Hitler, was “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.”

As of Friday morning, the video had been viewed nearly 30 million times. Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, on Tuesday promoted Carlson’s interview as “very interesting” and “worth watching” but later deleted his post.

Carlson’s endorsement of Cooper has sparked considerable outrage from the Biden administration and among some conservatives.

Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., condemned the interview, saying in a statement to the Jewish Insider, “Platforming known Holocaust revisionists is deeply disturbing.”

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement, “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.”

Bates said the Biden administration condemned “trafficking in this moral rot” that was “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.”

Former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, have so far refused to distance themselves from Carlson, who is still an important figure in right-wing politics despite no longer having his platform on Fox. Carlson had a headline speaking slot at the Republican National Convention in July.

Carlson is scheduled to appear on Sept. 21 in Hershey, Pennsylvania, with Vance as his guest. In a statement Friday, Vance’s campaign said that he “doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture but he obviously does not share the views of the guest interviewed by Tucker Carlson.”

In response to inquiries from The New York Times on Friday, an adviser for Carlson declined to comment on the criticism of the interview but noted that Vance was still confirmed to join Carlson’s tour later this month and that the tour was “selling out at a record pace.”

Conservative columnist Sohrab Amari pushed back fiercely against Cooper’s views and observed that Carlson, “a journalist I used to admire,” gave Cooper “the same credulous, uncritical treatment he now seems to reserve for all the crackpots who frequently grace the podcast he hosts on X.” Erick Erickson, the conservative talk radio host, wrote on X this week, “Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are.”

In a post on X, Cooper said the “furor” over his interview with Tucker was “totally mendacious, claiming the literal opposite of what was actually said, too shameless to care that people can easily go see the video themselves.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.