The Revisionist

Who does Tucker Carlson think he’s Fooling?

Image via Tucker Carlson’s X account

I. Politics and Power

In state theory, a revisionist country is one that seeks to change the status quo balance of power between nations. In the context of the international system, to revise is not to ponder or to ask questions, but to alter power relations. 

What power is Tucker Carlson trying to revise? 

When Carlson decided last year to host on his new show a toothless former crackhead and convicted con artist who told unverifiable stories about having sex with Barack Obama, that was not a case of “following the leads” or considering alternative history. It was a political statement. Carlson’s interview took place the month after Tablet published a blockbuster interview¹ with Obama biographer David Garrow that exposed, as one detail in a lengthy expose, Obama’s confession in a letter to a college girlfriend that he had recurring fantasies of sex with men. A national media cycle ensued and at that point Carlson jumped in. 

The Tablet interview, like the biography that inspired it, was revisionist. It revised the standard account of Obama’s character and motivations in a way that challenged the reigning state ideology and its leader’s control over the Democratic party. Carlson, however, chose not to interview the Pulitzer-winning biographer Garrow or the journalist, David Samuels, who had done the work that put Obama back in the news. Instead, he gave a national audience to an unreliable and easy-to-dismiss ex-crackhead whose three-decade-long rap sheet is littered with crimes of deception like fraud and forgery. The lurid stories of drugs and gay sex aired on Carlson’s show were not flattering to Obama, but they merely insulted the former president; they did not challenge Obama’s power. 

It is an obvious lie that Carlson’s recent decision to promote a revisionist podcaster’s claim that Winston Churchill is the chief villain of the Second World War has anything to do with “history” or “free speech.” Carlson did not rise to become the most popular media personality in the U.S., by engaging in scholarly inquiries or by remaining oblivious to the political implications of his own segments. 

So what was the point?

One theory holds that Carlson aired the show so close to the presidential election because he wants Donald Trump to lose and expected to cause a scandal that would hurt his campaign. This may overstate the case. Rather than trying to sabotage Trump (and certainly there are more effective ways if that was the intention) it’s more likely that Carlson, the most influential Trump-aligned media figure in the country, is trying to establish a new normative politics for the Trumpist movement. 

If Trump wins, Carlson will have made it so the White House is intimately connected with someone who advocates greater sensitivity to the German cause in WW2. Having placed Trump and his associates in a compromising position—condemn him now and make him a martyr or refuse to do so and signal tacit acceptance—Carlson gains leverage to pursue other goals and a unilateral power to dictate what is acceptable within Trumpist politics. If, on the other hand, Trump loses, then Carlson’s “brave” willingness to reject the sinister postwar consensus and “ask questions” sets him up as a successor and voice of the true, suppressed MAGA movement.

This is not so far-fetched in light of the private texts Carlson sent disparaging Trump in the months around the 2020 election that were later made public in the lawsuit against Fox. For instance, these are the messages Carlson texted to his staff on Jan 4, 2021.

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait.”

“I hate him passionately.”

“No,” say people who know Carlson, “he is not so calculating as all that.” And they offer an alternative explanation for his revisionist turn. They say that at heart Carlson is still a prep school kid and a dilettante. He chases new ideas and attitudes and then gets bored and moves on. These very qualities made him stand out as a magazine journalist with a flair for profiles of rogues. But something changed after Carlson was fired by Fox. His impishness and lack of discipline, which once seemed inseparable from his willingness to challenge the establishment, became more erratic and embittered. With new funding sources backing him, the independent Carlson’s revamped show on X left one media ecosystem but entered another, where it focused on new villains—villains he avoided naming but began to circle. In this view, Carlson is not a calculating Machiavellian plotting against Trump by promoting cryptofascist memes. He’s only following his undisciplined instincts and that latest thing to catch his attention. In which sense, it might be true to say that Carlson is just having conversations. Freed from the restrictions imposed by a corporate boss, his conversational instinct is to keep insinuating that there is an arch-villain behind every evil, one who he is too coy or too cowardly to name.

Perhaps both versions contain elements of truth. What is glaringly obvious is that none of this has anything to do with the subjects it is supposed to be about, such as “history,” “censorship,” “freedom of speech,” and “Winston Churchill.” To pretend that what is going on here is a “historical debate about WW2” is to prop up a fiction on a level with other obvious and destructive lies such as: Joe Biden is running the US government. 

It follows, unfortunately, that the well-intentioned efforts to correct the historical record by debunking the revisionist claims risk reifying the political aim of the phony debate. No one who needs to be convinced that Churchill was not worse than Hitler will be swayed by a recitation of historical evidence.

As part of their charade, Carlson and his guest, whom he introduced as “the most important popular historian” in the US, discussed the Weimar period in Germany as if it were a forbidden subject. One of the great books on the period is Walter Laqueur’s Weimar: A Cultural History. Laqueur describes a culture on the interwar German right that was unmoored and undisciplined. Beset by defeat, humiliation, rapid social and economic change, the Weimar right turned against reality by spurning primary distinctions. This made it prone to indulging blatant fraud and chicanery, which it confused for wisdom and bravery. It was “fragmented,” Laqueur writes, by “right-wing sectarians [who] were profoundly convinced, like some sixteenth century alchemists or astrologers, that they had discovered the philosopher’s stone.” 

Carlson’s revisionist has also unearthed that philosopher’s stone that explains all things. It can be distilled to a simple formula: The Nazis were not so bad and the Zionists are the real Nazis. Contained within this meme, an entire implicit worldview can be gleaned. For instance, why do decent Western people believe the absurd Churchill fairytale and accept the wicked slander about Germany’s guilt in WW2? Because they have been tricked into believing it by The Zionists. And look! When you peel things back it was the Zionists who started the war in the first place by financing Churchill. See how it all fits together? 

What is the point of this in relation to the American political scene in 2024?

It appears that Carlson wants to revise Trumpism, a movement he exerts real influence over, by turning his followers against those members of the Trumpist coalition, Jewish and Christian alike, who support the designated enemy, “Zionism.” It must infuriate Carlson and his revisionist guest that Donald Trump himself continues to uphold the will of the majority of Republican voters—for now still the majority of American citizens—by supporting the nation of Israel. I suspect they believe that Trump, like the mass of his followers, is suffering from a kind of false consciousness that causes him to misunderstand his own movement. True Trumpism will repudiate Israel. No one is saying that Israel has to be destroyed; it will be enough for now to see the Zionists humbled. To make America great, it is necessary to sever the “Judeo-Christian” tentacles and their hold over Western historical consciousness and American foreign policy.   

But the American right that wants to revise the US-Israel relationship is in deep denial. It cannot confront the fact that its real challenge comes not from the Israel lobby (which despite its legendary omnipotence, couldn’t even shut down campus protests) but from American voters. Unlike the “based” intelligentsia trying to educate them, Trump supporters in particular remain attached to the broad concept of a Judeo-Christian heritage with all its implications for Jewish-Christian relations, the moral lessons of the second world war, and the state of Israel.

Do normal American voters care about the Churchill revisionism debate? No, and neither Carlson’s interview nor anything his revisionist guest said will have any effect on the popular vote, but that is not their aim. Carlson is not appealing to the reason and common sense of voters by making an argument about the US-Israel relationship. Rather, he is engaging in a more modern form of mass persuasion by repeatedly airing certain memes so that they can ramify through public discourse and by propping up characters like Candace—”I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man”—Owens.  

The revisionist exercise of power avoids direct argumentation in favor of coy innuendo, emotional narrative, and in-group messaging. It introduces memes—Zionist Financiers—to activate ideological cadres and digital swarms while also making gestures of reasonableness (not all Zionist financiers) that they know will have no effect on the swarm but provide the revisionists with a way to deny the obvious meaning of their own actions. The swarm is not a bloc of voters, it is the ultimate pressure group. It harasses and terrorizes both normal people and powerful decision makers who are equally susceptible to its tactics, in an effort to impose by digital force a new consensus.

The current status quo balance of power within the Trumpist coalition is surprisingly broad and inclusive. Whatever one thinks of Trump, his support has risen among minority voters who are defecting to his Republican party in record numbers. Many analysts expect historically high levels of Jewish support for the GOP candidate in this year's election. 

Odd, then, that at the very moment when Trumpism becomes the new home of a broad civic American party, there should be the rise of a highly visible campaign of demonization against American Jews. A number of the leading figures in this campaign, the European atheist pimp reborn as a Muslim America-first spokesman and other wild-eyed charlatans, have been guests on Carlson’s show over the past year. Their attacks on “Zionism” and “Frankism” get louder the closer we get to the election. 

Carlson’s revision follows the strategic model of the Obama-era Democratic party. It aims to make Trumpism more fragmented and sectarian. The Democratic party-state pioneered the imposition of purity tests on its members. A Jew who wishes to also be a “good Democrat” finds their provisional acceptance in the party conditioned on first disavowing Zionism. The revisionist right, visibly frustrated by Trumpism’s refusal to accept the Obamaite view of Israel as the main obstacle to world peace, now seeks to import this model.

Some revisionists may believe their memes about Zionist financiers and Jewish domination are mere instruments to achieve particular goals. Perhaps they see no other way to reform US policy. It doesn’t matter. Sectarianism, as I wrote in another context in 2017, has a logic of its own.

Once you condone and normalize forms of collective guilt and racial original sin you can’t keep them from spreading. It doesn’t matter how many graduate seminars you hold, how many diversity consultants you hire, how many “dear white men” explainers you roll out. It doesn’t even matter if you don’t really mean it and you’re only denouncing those white cis males because it’s a form of social currency among your rich white friends. Once you start to traffic in blood myths you can’t keep them quarantined and they will poison your multiethnic democracy.²

II. History

A number of smart and reasonable people have rallied to support the revisionist podcaster who appeared on Carlson’s show. They insist that he is being smeared and that a fuller accounting of his output reveals an intelligent and sensitive mind. 

One popular defense holds that despite the glaring moral symmetry between the revisionist’s charity toward Hitler’s forces and his dogmatic hostility to the Israeli army, and despite his repeated public attacks on Jews as demonic, if one only listened to his lengthy podcasts, his enlightened attitude would become so apparent as to invalidate any notion that he is motivated by crass prejudice. 

Here the revisionist’s defenders are making a category error that conflates the performance of emotional affect with principles and beliefs. They are enacting what Alasdair MacIntyre describes in After Virtue as the ‘emotivist’ bias of the modern world, which elevates feeling over truth and confuses the subjective feeling of experience with reality. There is no reason to doubt that the revisionist is a talented storyteller who can give his narratives a roundedness that makes them resonant and effective. But the ability to engender sympathetic emotional responses is not the same thing as an idea, much less the truth of a given matter. Nor is general intelligence any indication of genuine historical knowledge. 

The kind of person who rises in the present public arena is a skillful manipulator of feelings. This describes quite well Carlson’s revisionist guest whose public persona over the past year has been emotive to the point of being histrionic. Wielding moral suasion in a felicitous style, he has pushed a large audience into imagining arguments and knowledge where there is mostly atmospherics, ideology, and emotional blackmail. This is what makes it funny to see the revisionist’s defenders scold his critics for being intemperate. The person they are defending specializes in manipulative hyperbole.  

The best account so far of the revisionist controversy was written by Matthew Walther³ and deals with the subject of history. While history is a subject (that is, a place) it is also a profession and a discipline that was once obliged to follow certain rules, which tended to become corrupt and self-serving but also imposed standards that kept out certain kinds of nonsense. Only now the historical profession has collapsed along with every other domain of expert knowledge. Walther writes that the Churchill controversy is “symptomatic of a larger problem: the epistemic gulf between the current consensus—however broadly defined—of practicing historians on any given subject and the attitudes of the ordinary person of general education. This holds true, as far as I can tell, across all subject areas.” 

The collapse, in other words, is not only professional but social and epistemic; it affects how we acquire knowledge and form the shared basis of truth. The slow accretion of historical fact in a process of claim, counterclaim, and review, which has been fundamental to the advance of Western civilization is, for the moment, dead. It cannot survive in the crosscurrents of ideological sectarianism and despair. In a word, it cannot survive the Internet.

The infinite Now of the digital world has no patience for history. It revives a culture of orality that thrived in the Middle Ages before being wiped out by the printing press. Memes such as “the future is female;” “white tears;” “It’s ok to be white;” and “my grandmother is older than Israel” are medieval technologies impervious to print-age liberal reason. The swarms mobilized by the memes are more similar to medieval mobs than to the “masses” of the twentieth century. The culture of orality transposed into a planetary communications network leads to all-consuming propaganda war, which accurately describes the real conditions of both society and historical debate in the present moment.

1. The Tablet interview: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/david-garrow-interview-obama

2. The quote is taken from this essay:

3. I’m referring to this article: https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-rise-of-post-literate-history/