The Biden administration is condemning Tucker Carlson for his two-hour interview with “a Holocaust denier who spread Nazi propaganda,” calling the sit-down “a disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans.”
Earlier this week, the former Fox News anchor hosted podcaster Darryl Cooper on his show. Cooper suggested in the interview that Nazi Germany’s mass murder of Jews was an accident and that the millions who were systematically murdered had just “ended up dead” at concentration camps because of poor planning.
“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,” White House senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement to CNN.
Bates went on to refute Cooper’s claim that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of World War II. “Hitler was one of the most evil figures in human history and the ‘chief villain’ of World War II, full stop,” Bates said.
He continued: “The Biden-Harris administration believes that trafficking in this moral rot is 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.”
Carlson, who said Cooper was “maybe the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” hit back at the White House on Thursday.
“The fact that these lunatics have used the Churchill myth to bring our country closer to nuclear war than at any moment in history disgusts me, and should terrify every American,” the far-right conservative said in a text message to CNN. “They’re warmonger freaks. They don’t get the moral high ground.”
Though Elon Musk touted the interview as “very interesting” and “worth watching” in a post on X that he later deleted, liberals and conservatives alike slammed Carlson for giving a platform to Cooper.
“Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” conservative analyst Erick Erickson wrote on X.
“He’s neither the best nor the most honest,” Erickson wrote in a follow-up post. “He’s a contrarian moral cretin who has turned his contrarianism into Nazi apologetics.”