The meme above appeared this morning in Powerline’s usually amusing and occasionally brilliant “The Week in Pictures.” It was also used to illustrate “Tucker Carlson’s bad history,” an excellent essay by The Washington Examiner’s Dominic Greene on the same topic as the recent EA post about Tucker’s slobbering endorsement of a Hitler apologist and Holocaust denier.

Greene wrote in part,

The latest imbecile to visit Tucker’s virtual shed is Darryl Cooper. Cooper’s eccentric rambles through the thickets of history have won him virality on X. Unfortunately, the virality is akin to intellectual syphilis. Once you’ve convinced yourself that the truth is hidden, nay, occulted by dark forces, you can mask the worst symptoms of infection, but the mind rot is hard to cure. Cooper has convinced himself that Winston Churchill was a “terrorist” installed in power by “Zionists” and “financiers” so he could be the “chief villain” of World War II. Cooper also claims the Holocaust was an accident and that prewar Europe really did have what Hitler called a “Jewish problem,” rather than a problem with Jews.

Carlson introduced Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Cooper blew it by admitting that he’d prepared for his interminable podcast series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by reading six books and then recited a medley of baseless suppositions, false generalizations, and open “secrets” about the origins of World War II. Had Carlson attempted actual journalism, this tissue of lies would have disintegrated like cheap toilet paper. Instead, Carlson toggled between his customary facial expressions (frowning as if struck by a bolt of historiographical lightning, slack-jawed and mindblown as though he’s still following the Grateful Dead) and failed to question any of it.

In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In the kingdom of the illiterate, Mr. Six-Books is a regular Arnold Toynbee. If your “research” skips primary documents and foreign languages but convinces you that Hitler was misunderstood (he wasn’t), that Churchill was a “terrorist” (he wasn’t), that the Germans invaded Poland without a plan for what to do with prisoners of war (they didn’t), and that the Holocaust was accidental (it wasn’t), you might have an ax to grind — perhaps a double-headed ax with runic symbols. But why is Tucker fawning over a poor man’s Pat Buchanan?

I’ve answered that question (Short version: Because Carlson is a principle-free, self-promoting asshole) and so does Green, but it was that meme that Green included in his essay that bothered me. He used it, I suppose, to criticize Carlson. Is this the meme’s intent?

I don’t see it that way at all. I interpret the meme as saying “Oh, let’s not divide ourselves over trivial bickering; what’s important is winning the election, and squabbling among ourselves is pointless and self-destructive!” And, in turn, I see that reaction to an unfortunately influential pundit embracing anti-Semitism, historical revisionism that seeks to exonerate one of history’s greatest villains and smear Winston Churchill, one of the true heroes of the 20th Century, as the equivalent of the despicable “Move On” effort during Bill Clinton’s exposure <cough> during Monica Madness.

The President of the United States lying under oath, in court, misleading a grand jury, lying outright to the American people and using his office and White House employees to execute a cover-up is a matter that must occupy the full attention of the government, the news media and the public if the nation is to maintain any values at all or have a government worthy of trust. “Moving on” in the case of Clinton—and that’s essentially what the public did: the man was a serial sexual predator while President, he disgraced the office, his proclaimed feminism was a sham, and the Democrats still treat him like an icon, most recently at their 2024 convention—corrupted his party, the women’s movement and the nation. “Moving on” in the case of Tucker Carlson is less destructive only because he’s just a Machiavelian aspiring Father Coughlin, not President of the United States.

Slapping down an unscrupulous historian who slimes the history of World War II along with the victims of the Final Solution, Winston Churchill, and the Americans who died saving civilization from the Nazis isn’t an “argument,” it’s an ethical obligation.

And any group that includes the likes of Tucker Carlson in the collective “we” can “include me out,” as Sam Goldwyn would say.

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