The twisted path to Holocaust denial

Cartoon from mainstream right wing magazine The Federalist

Michelle Goldberg points out that Tucker Carlson platforming Holocaust denier/minimizer (a distinction without any real difference) Darryl Cooper is a practically inevitable consequence of getting on the right wing contrarian train:

Some on the right found Carlson’s turn toward Holocaust skepticism surprising. “Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” Erick Erickson, the conservative radio host, wrote on X. But Carlson’s trajectory was entirely predictable. Nazi sympathy is the natural endpoint of a politics based on glib contrarianism, right-wing transgression and ethnic grievance. . . .

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.

Candace Owens, another anti-woke right-wing celebrity who has lately become Hitler-curious, has also come to question received wisdom about the shape of the earth. “I’m not a flat-earther,” she said in July. “I’m not a round-earther. Actually, what I am is I am somebody who has left the cult of science.”

Obviously, not every red-pilled conservative ends up arguing, as Owens did, that Hitler gets a bad rap. But the weakening of the intellectual quarantine around Nazism — and the MAGA right’s fetish for ideas their enemies see as dangerous — makes it easier for influential conservatives to surrender to fascist impulses. When they do, they pay no penalty in political relevance, because there’s no conservative establishment capable of disciplining its ideologues.

Carlson has just embarked on a national tour with special guests at each stop. In addition to Alex Jones, he’s scheduled to appear with the vice-presidential nominee JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr.

I wonder if the question of whether or not Nazism is actually bad is going to end up on the curriculum at the fearlessly heterodox University of Austin, Bari Weiss’s elaborate publicity stunt that just opened for business? (Check out the people who are lending their names, no doubt for valuable consideration, to this classic reactionary centrist enterprise in softening up the intellectual landscape for just a little light authoritarianism).