CLEVELAND — A few years ago, I met a friend for lunch, which produced a conversation that time and circumstance would eventually sear into my brain.
I can pinpoint the year at 2019, because it was the summer after a heavily armed antisemitic racist had burst into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill area on Oct. 27, 2018, and started shooting. Before police could subdue him, he had killed 11 mostly elderly congregants, including several Holocaust survivors. Three other congregants and four police officers were wounded.
As we talked, my friend, who is Jewish, brought up the horrific attack. She spoke of how the increasing antisemitism in the country was making her and many of her friends feel unsafe and newly wary in a way she hadn’t experienced before.
I all but scoffed in response. Widespread antisemitism in the United States? Ridiculous, I thought.
Of course, I’m not Jewish, but that didn’t stop me from thinking that she was overdramatizing the issue. I remained confident that cultural antisemitism, certainly in this country, was a thing of the past.
How was the Tree of Life shooting any different, I asked, than when a crazed shooter attacks a Christian church, or a school, or a workplace, or a mall? Outrages like that have happened in many places, not just against Jews.
She patiently tried to explain the difference, citing history and the cold chill that went through her whenever she read about an antisemitic insult spray-painted on a wall or written or shouted. It wasn’t just generic crudity. It felt personal.
I listened politely, but privately remained unconvinced.
Then came last Oct. 7.
The barbarism committed against Israeli families and music festival attendees by Hamas terrorists was the most heinous attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust. Almost as stunning – to me, at least, but assuredly not to my friend – was the resulting avalanche of vicious antisemitism that descended on Jewish students and others at many of our elite college campuses and across the land all through the fall, and continues today.
And as I remembered that long-ago lunch conversation, I flushed with shame and embarrassment. I could not have been more wrong. I just didn’t know what she knew. I had never had to feel that fear.
I thought about that again earlier this week, when I read about former Fox commentator Tucker Carlson and a guest he had on his podcast that streamed Sept. 2.
The guest’s name is Darryl Cooper, gushingly introduced by Carlson as a paragon of historical research and analysis. “I want you to be recognized,” said Carlson, “as the most important historian in the United States, because I think you are.”
In a two hour and 19 minute conversation that ranged from the Jonestown Cult through the reasons for World War II through the civil rights movement and up to today’s political leaders, Cooper had some stunning things to say, including the following appalling conclusions:
As he was describing Winston Churchill – not Adolf Hitler – as the chief villain of the war, he spoke of the conundrum the Nazis faced in dealing with all the prisoners they had gathered.
“They launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth, that they were going to have to handle,” he told Carlson. “They went in with no plan for that. And they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there.”
He spoke of letters from the commandants of these camps that said, “We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food … rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?”
So, Cooper wants us to believe, the Holocaust was just a big miscalculation on the Nazis’ part in the fog of war, and the final solution for all their “political prisoners” was an effort to be humane, so they “ended up dead.”
If you’ve never heard of “the most important historian in the United States,” don’t be embarrassed. He’s a podcaster who reads a lot of books and comes to some bizarre conclusions, nothing more.
But it’s critical that we resist the urge to simply write him off as a nut job whose unhinged ideas are not worth disputing, especially because we are living in a time when, according to an Economist survey, one-fifth of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 believe the Holocaust was a myth, and another 30% said they aren’t sure.
This all bears on where I started this column:
Being fired by Fox did not make Tucker Carlson go away. He remains, as a New Yorker story proclaimed last year, “the most influential voice in right-wing media, without a close second.”
His audience is huge. When he moved from Fox to Twitter (now X), his first show was seen more than 120 million times. His show has slightly more than three million subscribers. This one drew 34.3 million views, 55,300 likes and more than 13,000 reposts on X, and many others on YouTube.
Cooper’s podcast audience is more modest, but he does have more than 100,000 subscribers on Substack. His followers on X include Elon Musk and vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.
Those are disturbing numbers, even if they include some viewers who write it all off as nonsense, and they support my long-ago lunch partner’s ongoing concern.
And they are a call to action for us all.
This kind of thing is unacceptable. Anyone who reads or hears antisemitic garbage like what Cooper was spewing and remains silent is guilty of dereliction of duty to themselves, their Jewish friends, and the country at large.
I remember my outrage last October when I saw a video of a lone Jewish student at Harvard University being bullied and harassed by a gang of anti-Israel protesters simply for walking down a sidewalk, as hordes of fellow students hurried past without interceding. We need to stand up to bullies, not ignore them.
The unearned popularity of Tucker Carlson with many millions of people on the right doesn’t demand physical action, but it does mean we need to stand up against his lies and misdirections, and to dispute them at every opportunity.
Most importantly, it’s also a call for Donald Trump, JD Vance and the Republican leadership to stand up and be counted. Tucker Carlson was a featured speaker at the recent GOP National Convention. He is a trusted member of Trump’s inner circle. They should all be ashamed.
Vance contented himself by saying, through a spokesperson, that he “doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture but he obviously does not share the views of the guest interviewed by Tucker Carlson.”
But those were not just the guest’s views. They were also Carlson’s. He said, on that show, of Cooper’s comments: “They’re certainly consistent with what I think I know to be true.”
With that statement, Carlson forfeited any claim to be taken seriously, by Republicans or anyone else – as if he hadn’t already. The views he was supporting and promulgating to millions were not simply opinions. They were distortions of unassailable historical fact, minimizing one of the most horrifying mass murders in human history.
So Vance needs to say and do far more. He is scheduled to be a part of Carlson’s monthlong speaking tour when it arrives in Hershey, Pennsylvania, next Saturday. If Vance decides to participate, that action will speak louder than his above words.
Mom always said that you’re judged by the company you keep.
Your move, Donald Trump and JD Vance.
Ted Diadiun is a member of the editorial board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.
To reach Ted Diadiun: [email protected]
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