(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Last Friday evening, while wrapping up my workday, I had something of an out-of-body experience.
I received a phone call from none other than Tucker Carlson.
It was in response to a rather mundane matter that I had earlier reached out to him about, but that made it all the more surreal and extraordinary.
Somehow, in between counseling former President Donald Trump on whom to pick as his vice president, conducting some of the most provocative interviews anywhere to be found, planning a nationwide tour for the month of September, and enjoying the spoils of fame and fortune with his family, he was willing to offer up his valuable time to a stranger over a matter from which he had nothing to gain.
It underscored, to me, that the Carlson whom millions of viewers see on television is not some affected persona but his authentic, true self.
Carlson has no delusions about the substantial role he plays in directing the thoughts of a large swath of the American populus, nor of the charmed existence that he was born and bred into as part of the nation’s “elite” ruling class. Yet, deep in his being, he feels the need to humble himself, to remind himself that he is one of many participating in the shared experiences of humanity, life and existence.
FINDING FAITH
During our conversation, Carlson casually brought up his faith—something only recently attained after an Episcopal upbringing that regards religion as more ceremonial than heartfelt.
I already knew about this epiphany of his, having been present at an April 2023 speech he delivered for the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary—one that would take on added significance after he was, just days later, fired from his top-rated prime-time show at Fox News.
By some accounts, it was Fox head Rupert Murdoch’s disdain of Carlson’s newfound piety that provoked it. (I have articulated my own view that it had more to do with the influence of certain globalist elements that objected to his skepticism of the war in Ukraine.)
At any rate, Carlson’s speech at the Heritage Foundation was, undoubtedly, deeply jarring and unsettling to any who expected the typical pomp and puffery.
“When the Treasury secretary stands up and says, ‘You know what you can do to help the economy? Get an abortion’—That’s like an Aztec principle basically … What you’re watching is not a political movement. It’s evil,” Carlson said in the speech.
“… If you’re telling me that abortion is a positive good, what are you saying?” he asked. “Well, you’re arguing for child sacrifice.”
MARTYRS FOR A CAUSE
Once again, days after my second firsthand encounter with him, it appears Carlson is back in the center of another publicity maelstrom for making people uncomfortable.
The latest controversy concerns his newly released interview with Darryl Cooper, a Substack blogger and host of the “Martyr Made” podcast, who first came into the spotlight after a viral tweet-thread explaining the cause/effect dynamic between the routine gaslighting, two-tiered justice and overt hostility that Democrats had undertaken throughout much of the 2020 election cycle, and the primal scream, in response, of the Jan. 6 uprising at the U.S. Capitol.
I think I've had discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to extract a general theory about their perspective. It is also the perspective of most of the people at the Capitol on 1/6, and probably even Trump himself. 1/x
— Martyr Made (@martyrmade) July 8, 2021
Carlson—who had read Cooper’s epic thread on air shortly after it was posted—introduced him in an X post promoting the interview as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.”
The far-left Daily Beast, by contrast, called him a “Nazi apologist.”
The thrust of Cooper’s argument, which he also laid out in the form of an X thread, was that Winston Churchill—who, along with Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, would become one of the great heroes of World War II for having led the Allied forces to victory—was, in fact, the chief instigator of the war.
Time for a Churchill thread? Time for a Churchill thread. Let's do this.
Why I think Churchill was a chief villain of World War 2. /0
— Martyr Made (@martyrmade) September 3, 2024
Adolf Hitler, meanwhile, was, relatively speaking, a political neophyte who found himself out of his depth due to the globalist machinations that sought to turn him first into a warmonger, then a dictator and, finally, a genocidal maniac.
He entered Germany into “a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners,” Cooper told Carson.
“They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps,” he added. “And millions of people ended up dead there.”
Understandably, it drew backlash—including from a gaggle of NeverTrump RINO neocons such as former Rep. Liz Cheney.
“No serious or honorable person would support or endorse this type of garbage,” said the daughter of the architect of no less than two major U.S. wars, maybe more.
Actually, this is pro-Nazi propaganda, including, “Churchill was the chief villain of WW2” and Hitler “didn’t want to fight.” No serious or honorable person would support or endorse this type of garbage. https://t.co/1jkGxvCfBI
— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) September 3, 2024
“Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” wrote radio host Erick Erickson, who went on to denounce Cooper as “a contrarian moral cretin.”
He's neither the best nor the most honest. He's a contrarian moral cretin who has turned his contrarianism into Nazi apologetics. https://t.co/7wds3bcZK0
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) September 3, 2024
In a show of solidarity that may have been just as unwelcome as the criticism, Candace Owens stepped into Carlson’s and Cooper’s corner, insisting that they were making a lot of salient and entirely rational points.
Of course, the result of the media attacks against Tucker Carlson will be that more people will watch his sit down with Daryl Cooper than would have watched before.
We are now at the point in our Orwellian nightmare where the Ministy of Truth is attempting to ban the learning…
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) September 3, 2024
HONORING THEIR SACRIFICE
With respect to the validity and accuracy of Cooper’s research, I plead agnostic.
My heart tells me there is no room for nuance in matters like the Holocaust. Yet, my head says there is a strong probability that, over the course of some 80 years, our views on the root causes of World War II have been so warped, programmed and conditioned into favoring an Allied narrative that we can no longer begin to grasp what we haven’t been told about it.
Those like the late Hoover Institution scholar Anthony Sutton who have dared to challenge the prevailing dogma about Western warmongering have been drowned out, discredited and neutralized because they lacked the level of influence and access to a large audience that Carlson now has.
My gut tells me that the same processes that began revising the story of Jan. 6 within hours after the events unfolded were likely at work then, as well, in a time when a more limited access to unfiltered media made wartime propaganda a far more effective tool.
Wanting to examine every possible facet of what happened, in order to develop a clear picture that approaches the “Truth,” is not to marginalize those who forfeited their lives due to the unthinkable atrocities of the Third Reich. Indeed, it is the only way to honor and respect their memory.
If Cooper is, in some ways, correct, if the so-called good guys bear the bulk of the responsibility for engineering the war—and, by extension, the Nazi genocide we now know as the Holocaust—then the odds of it happening again, with even more devastating results, seem greatly amplified.
EVIL, EVIL EVERYWHERE
But adding Carlson into the mix, with his newfound mysticism, is where things begin to get really profound.
His view of “evil” is not that it is some extrinsic, readily isolated entity that can be defeated through brute force, an iron will, and a lot of blood, sweat and tears.
Rather, it is an intrinsic quality that lies dormant within us, waiting to be nurtured by the proper conditions.
As the postwar allegory Lord of the Flies suggests, the thin veneer of moral codes, laws and social constructs that keep us “civilized” can quickly entropy into humankind’s natural, id-driven state without the proper guidance and sense of purpose.
💥 Tucker Carlson Suggests That Evil Resides Where There Is Weakness: 💥
"It's weak men and women who are instruments of evil. The weaker the leader, the more evil that leader will be. So it's, and unfortunately, we've reached a time in American history where every leader is… pic.twitter.com/zhqb7zsZVh
— Red Pill USA (@Red_Pill_US) May 13, 2024
Thus, the evil that purportedly perished in 1945, inside a bunker beneath Berlin’s Gertrud-Kolmar-Straße, still latently resides all around us.
Consider all the daily atrocities that we have allowed ourselves to brush aside as collateral damage: Do the scope and context of one’s pain and suffering confer a greater or lesser degree of significance on it than the Holocaust? Not to the victim.
What made Anne Frank’s life more notable, or her death in the Bergen–Belsen concentration camp more tragic, than the rape and torture of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray at the hands of illegal immigrants? Or that an unnamed victim who dies quietly in obscurity, arguably making it all the more tragic?
It is imperative that we approach the evils that confront us with clear eyes, understanding that it is not an us versus them dichotomy that keeps evil at bay; it is us versus ourselves.
To do so, we must continue asking uncomfortable questions and challenging our own belief systems, as Carlson has consistently done, and be ready for where the inquiry may lead us.
While we cannot all carry the burden Carlson has to usher masses of people to the light, it is our shared obligation as fellow members of humanity to see to it that we, ourselves, and those around us are fully awoken, lest what happened before should happen again.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
