Dear Reader, (especially those of you shredding the gnar before Sunday service)
I realize I am late to this, but I am also on vacation so I think I should at least be able to write about what I want to write about. So, let’s do a deep, deep dive on crop rotation in the 14th century.
Just kidding.
Tucker Carlson’s latest jackassery is to suggest you’ve been spoon-fed a load of guff about … checks notes … Adolf Hitler.
I understand that in an age of hot takes and “well, ackshuallies … ” there aren’t a lot of taboos left to violate, not many places where the “don’t go there” sign hasn’t been torn up. When enough people are addicted to alcohol and the normal supply runs out, watch your mouthwash, cans of Sterno, and Aunt Helen’s rum cake, because the addicts will come for that. And when the supply of plausible “you’ve been lied to” hot takes runs dry, don’t be surprised when the dealers start selling you prison toilet wine with a fancy label. “Hey man, did you hear? Most frogs in the United States are now gay.” The next dealer has something even better. “All those aliens among us? You’ve been sold a bill of goods, man. They’re not aliens. They’re interdimensional demons—and the U.S.government has struck a deal with them.”
Not your cup of tea? Okay. How about: Hitler wasn’t really the bad guy, it was Winston Churchill. Oh yeah, that’s the stuff. Put that straight into my veins.
Now, I get it. Someone out there is going to say, “Hey, aren’t you the guy who wrote the book with the smiley face with the Hitler mustache on the cover?”
Yeah, that’s me (it was a reference to a George Carlin bit, as I explain on page 2). But, you know what? I never disputed that Hitler was a bad guy. You know why? Because Hitler was a very bad guy. Even if you take the Holocaust out of the equation—something I do not think morally serious people can ever do, except to make a specific point—Hitler was still a really bad guy. He ordered the murder of countless Germans, including hundreds of fellow Nazis, political opponents, and tens to hundreds of thousands of Lebensunwertes Leben—“lives unworthy of life.” Ever the stickler for etymology, he revived the view that Slavs were, in fact, slaves. The crowd that bleats about America’s “forever wars” and decries “imperialism” should have the baseline consistency to deplore the invasions and annexations of most of Europe.
I resent having to argue that Hitler was bad because it means I took the bait. And, yes, I know Tucker and his pet didn’t quite say Hitler was the good guy, they just floated the idea that the “real” bad guy was Winston Churchill, which is almost worse because it’s part of an attempt to undermine America’s and the allies’ moral standing. A lot has already been written about this nonsense. I don’t think I can improve much on Niall Ferguson’s take about this ahistorical claptrap.
But I would add a point or two. First, it’s true that in the early 1930s Hitler fashioned himself as a champion of peace—he needed to while he prepared for war. Virtually every serious historian agrees that it was pure propaganda. But it was successful. Its purpose was to buy Hitler time to consolidate power and remilitarize. Germanophiles in America and the U.K. either wanted to believe the Germans didn’t actually want war—or wanted everyone else to. People make mistakes when they don’t have all the facts. Lots of decent people were soft on Germany and Hitler in the 1930s in part because they were desperate not to repeat the folly and carnage of the First World War. Wanting to give Hitler’s Germany the benefit of the doubt so as to avoid a replay was a mistake, but an understandable one.
But it’s one thing to believe the propaganda before it was proven to be propaganda. It’s another thing entirely to retroactively believe the propaganda after it was decisively disproved by Hitler’s own words and deeds, not to mention voluminous documentation, and millions of corpses. That’s not what historians do, it’s what cranks and crackpots do. Which is why Tucker found a guy (the author of Twitter — A How to Tips & Tricks Guide) to do exactly that. This goofball takes Hitler’s propagandistic lies and gambits at face value, then Tucker tells everyone: Don’t take my word for it, this guy is a great historian. This is like meeting a ditch digger at a bar who says that drinking raw elk milk will enlarge your penis and, because you either desperately want it to be true or you want other people to believe it’s true, you go around telling people the ditch digger is America’s most important doctor.
What’s Tucker doing?
Does Tucker want to believe it’s true or does he simply want you to believe it’s true? Or does truth not even enter into the transaction? Maybe he just wants the attention, money, and perverse admiration of know-nothings, goobers, bigots, and cranks that comes with controversy? Is he like the Joker and just screwing with people for fun? Or is he, as Nick Cattogio compellingly suggests, trying to burn down all established norms and knowledge because he thinks he can be a powerful warlord in the new illiberal wasteland where the “courage” to spread intoxicating lies is the new standard of “leadership”? My answer to all of these questions is, to one extent or another, “yes.”
It doesn’t matter that Tucker doing all those things raises contradictions, because contradictions only matter when one is trying to discover the truth. But when the goal is to make all lies plausible and create personality cults around passionate liars, contradictions are the point.
Vladimir Putin spews contradictory lies all the time, but he doesn’t care because, for him, truth is a meaningless fiction or a luxury for fools. When the standard of objective truth no longer matters, power becomes a new kind of subjective truth. Some of you may recall my longstanding gripes with philosophical pragmatism—which was ultimately a faux philosophy of power—and Bertrand Russell’s critique: “In the absence of any standard of truth other than success, it seems evident that the familiar methods of the struggle for existence must be applied to the elucidation of difficult questions, and that ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.” This is Putin’s version of truth-seeking. Saying that Stalin was an ally of Hitler or that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is lawless butchery may be objectively true, but that doesn’t matter if Putin can have you jailed or killed for saying it. The barrel of a gun becomes the ultimate arbiter of truth.
Of course, Tucker isn’t Vladimir Putin, but he is an apologist for him and his approach to questions of fact. He’s also a practitioner of Steve Bannon’s Putinesque “flooding the zone with s–t.” Contradiction fuels chaos, and chaos—moral, intellectual, political chaos—is Tucker’s preferred medium.
The only prominent “What is Tucker doing?” theory I disagree with is the idea that he’s trying to get Kamala Harris elected. The number of things Tucker could say—truthfully!—that could get Trump in Dutch is very long (including things he’s said to me). Choosing to boost Hitler apologetics to get Kamala Harris elected is some four-dimensional chess fantasy stuff. I do think causing headaches for Trump and J.D. Vance is a benefit for him, because forcing them to either kowtow or denounce him is a flex move. Vance has already made it clear he won’t criticize Tucker, which is a demonstration—in Tucker’s estimation—of his power.
No, the most likely explanation is that he likes Nazi apologetics, either on the merits or because of the reaction, or both.
So what’s to like? Again, I dismiss entirely the suggestion that he thinks he’s telling the truth. He might have convinced himself he believes it, but veracity isn’t the point. So what is appealing about the idea that the West took a wrong turn by opting to destroy Hitler? Giving antisemitism and Holocaust denial some lebensraum might be part of it, sure. I’m not trying to minimize the evil of that.
But I think that to the extent there’s an ideological project behind Tucker’s latest schtick, antisemitism isn’t the primary motivation. Sure, pissing off “the Jews” has its joys for him. But that’s probably gravy. Tucker is an acolyte of Patrick Buchanan and sees himself as the Buchanan of the 21st century. It’s worth recalling that Buchanan fell—or leapt—into the same intellectual bog Tucker is rolling in now. In 2008, Buchanan wrote Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. As bad as his argument was, it was far more serious than the nonsense spewed by Tucker’s “historian.”
Buchanan’s larger project, laid out in that book and several others, was to make the path America followed after World War II a “wrong turn.” In the postwar era, America turned its back on many of the things Buchanan thought made America “great.” Now, Buchanan’s version of greatness is saturated with just-so stories, nostalgia, dyspepsia, grievances, and a lot of correlation confused for causation. But in his telling, we became an “empire” and stopped being a “republic.” We admitted a lot of immigrants who had no business becoming Americans. Feminism, gay rights, Israel, free trade, civil rights, and other “problems” emerged in the postwar era. If “the past is a foreign country,” he liked that country better.
Buchanan was by no means entirely wrong in all of his criticisms of postwar America, but his fixation that it was all both entirely lamentable and entirely avoidable was entirely wrong. Buchanan changed as he got older (I was friendly with him, as were my parents). He got bitter and cranky. Tragically childless—no one tell J.D. Vance!—I think he was cut off from the best ambassadors of the country-that-is-the-present we can have in this life: our own children.
The advantage of Tucker’s 1945 Project is that it’s easier to sell than the similar Wrong Turn projects swirling on the right. The new right nationalists and postliberals have been peddling the idea that we took a “Wrong Turn” with John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, England’s Glorious Revolution, or the Enlightenment generally. It’s hard to sell the poorly educated or miseducated on that stuff, in part because most of them have no idea who John Locke was or what the Enlightenment was about. But everybody’s heard of Hitler and Churchill.
The one problem with selling people on the idea that everything went ass-over-tea-kettle with World War II is that you have to say the 1950s were the beginning of the bad times, rather than the last years of the good times. The standard conservative complaint is that Happy Days was awesome—who didn’t like the Fonz?—and the damn hippies ruined everything. That’s basically Donald Trump’s vision of American Greatness. The upside of saying World War II was the fons et origo of our problems is that it lets you open a can of whup-ass on American global leadership, free trade, the U.N., Israel, immigration, feminism, civil rights, etc. It’s a way of saying the original America Firsters warned us about all of this. I have no idea if Tucker has thought all of this through to that extent, but he’s on a path of discovery toward this theory.
What amazes me is how unoriginal all of this is. The new right is simply taking the techniques of the radical left and retrofitting them to a right-wing narrative. In A Peoples’ History of the United States, Howard Zinn explicitly sides with the victims, the losers—in a crass political and economic sense. He writes:
Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish- American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America.
There’s a place for this in history. But for Zinn and the radical left, the losers aren’t just worthy of sympathy, the losers are always right. The marginal and marginalized always have the better argument, the powerless are always the victims of the powerful. Being a winner is proof you’re the villain of the story. This oppressor-oppressed garbage is the motivating passion behind so much of the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas garbage of the left, and increasingly segments of the new right.
For most of my life, the radical left owned this space (except for a few marginal right-wing cranks) and this technique in their denunciations of “American Empire,” “neoliberalism,” even anti-globalism (which was still a major neo-Marxist obsession well into the early 2000s). But now, the radical right wants in on the action. The left used to make wild claims on behalf of the white working class, but now thanks in part to the left’s obsession with race, the white working class has moved to the cultural right, and it’s the new right’s turn to attack the “American regime,” “American empire,” “neoliberalism,” etc.
The specifics of the argument vary here and there, but strategy is the same: Take things that normal Americans are, and should be, proud of and say they’re bad. They use the same Nietzschean and Foucauldian analysis to reduce everything to victims and oppressors, to sow distrust of elites and power, to demonize “the system,” only this time instead of fomenting righteous grievance on behalf of sexual or racial minorities or persecuted Communists, the righteous victims are Christians, heterosexuals, white men, etc. Proclaim that our enemies are actually the good guys, and we’re the baddies. “Hitler was misunderstood” is the new right’s version of the old left’s “Stalin was misunderstood.” It’s the same game, just with different jerseys.
Various & Sundry
Canine Update: Pippa loves Lake Michigan. I mean loves. If spaniels had suicide bombers, they’d be told that their paradise would be Door County, Wisconsin. Every morning, she basically says to me, “Human, there is a large pile of hundred dollar bills on the beach. I will take you there. But we must hurry!” I know she’s lying but I can’t blame her. If she had her druthers, she would fetch sticks out of the drink until she collapsed on the sand. And then she would demand a blood transfusion and B12 shots so she could do it some more.
Zoë likes it here, too. But she’s more interested in patrolling the backyards of the houses in town, looking for rabbits and chipmunks, which she has been led to believe are full of Renard’s Cheese. Though she really liked the Black Hills of South Dakota. Still, this whole trip has really shown how much Zoë has mellowed. She is happily lying down next to me on our little patio while I type. When she was younger she would have disappeared on me and I would have had to chase her down and pry a critter out of her maw. It makes me a little sad, but it’s also really nice having a loyal companion who comes when you call her without much drama.
Reports from home are that Gracie is just fine. We’ve had two different house sitters since we left, and Gracie has trained them both nicely. She lets them tap on their keyboards while she snuggles next to them or monitors their movements. She’d love it here, too. But she would not be well-suited to van life, and I shudder to think of the logistics of driving with a litter box.
Anyway, we leave here in the morning for Michigan. We’re gonna check out Traverse City, have dinner with friends in Grand Rapids, then make our way to Ohio for a speech, and then home, sweet home. Thanks for all the suggestions for places to stop to eat, camp, or exercise the beasts. Keep ‘em coming.
The Dispawtch
Owner’s Name: Perry Lane
Why I’m a Dispatch Member: My husband and I became members when our daughter, Wendy Lane Cook, joined the staff. We are enjoying the various points of view and especially enjoy the G-Files and the quadruped updates!
Personal Details: We are city people who have retired to the Texas Hill Country. We enjoy our horses, cats, chickens, and dog, as well as the many species of wild animals who are part of our lives.
Pet’s Name: Molly
Pet’s Breed: Border Collie
Pet’s Age: 2
Gotcha Story: We got Molly soon after we lost our beloved Abby to epilepsy. She has been a challenge, as many who have Border Collies will understand. Extremely intelligent but very willful. Now that she is 2, we think we have turned the corner. She will be a great dog in a year or two more!
Pet’s Likes: Molly has never met a person whom she doesn’t love, and she is especially enthusiastic about Wendy! She also likes playing with her cats and herding her horses. She loves riding in the Gator to help her dad with farm chores. Playing chase the ball is her favorite game, and she loves her agility classes, where I try to keep up with her. Running in the hills behind our house is a favorite daily activity. So Molly has a busy life!
Pet’s Dislikes: Molly doesn’t like water, unfortunately, since we live on a river. She doesn’t like thunder and retreats to my closet when she hears it.
Pet’s Proudest Moment: She has recently conquered the teeter in agility and now loves to go on it.
Moment Someone (Wrongly) Said Pet Was a Bad Dog: She has been called neurotic, but she is a pretty normal example of her breed.
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