Winston “Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War.” That was the verdict of revisionist historian Darryl Cooper in an interview by Tucker Carlson last year. Carlson told his viewers that Cooper “may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.”

The Holocaust, according to Cooper, happened only because the Nazis “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.” Faced with this apparently unforeseen consequence of invading Eastern Europe, “they just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead. … And one [Nazi official] actually says, rather than wait for them to all slowly starve this winter, wouldn’t it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?”

Despite these plainly absurd statements, Cooper’s stock has only risen. He later made similar comments on the Joe Rogan Experience, Spotify’s most popular podcast.

Meanwhile, popular conservative commentator Candace Owens claimed last year that Nazi doctor Josef Mengele’s experiments in Auschwitz were “bizarre propaganda.” Like Cooper, she has drawn moral equivalency between Nazis and Allies.

Then there are the more infamous anti-Semites. Men of influence like Kanye West and Andrew Tate notoriously laud the Holocaust and encourage similar bloodshed today. It can be easy to think of such figures as kooky hotheads that the average person doesn’t take seriously. But millions of people around the world do. Disenfranchised men look to figures like Tate as leaders in resisting feminism, while lapping up material claiming governments use World War ii to “psyop the populace” to believe “bad guy equals Nazi.”

These are some of the biggest names among conservative pundits. They are incredibly influential. The millions of people who follow them are considered an important component of President Donald Trump’s “base.” Their opinions carry weight.

This isn’t only about history. Talking about “nefarious Jewish influence” in the past naturally leads to discussions on the present, especially when it comes to foreign policy.

With Tucker Carlson, arguably the most prominent of the examples listed, the two big case studies are Israel and Ukraine.

Israel

America is tens of trillions of dollars in debt. It cannot afford another major war. The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were major losses that most don’t want repeated. These concerns lead people to want a more isolationist foreign policy.

What isn’t rational is blaming Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for America’s foreign policy debacles for the past 25 years.

When President Trump assisted Israel in striking Iran’s nuclear facilities in June (but before he used American firepower directly), Carlson said “years of funding and sending weapons to Israel, which Donald Trump just bragged about on Truth Social, undeniably place the U.S. at the center of last night’s events.” His conclusion: “Politicians purporting to be America First can’t now credibly turn around and say they had nothing to do with it.” In other words, President Trump betrayed the “America First” cause by assisting Israel.

Carlson often claims America keeps getting stuck in wars because of Netanyahu’s meddling. He interviewed Columbia University Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, who stated: “[T]hat call by Bibi [Netanyahu] for yet another war in the Middle East is yet another of these long-term deep state projects. This is an Israeli project primarily ….” Tucker agreed.

There is not a single quagmire that Israel pressured the U.S. to start. Israel opposed U.S. intervention in Iraq and Egypt. Netanyahu was in negotiations to normalize relations with Muammar Qadhafi’s Libya while President Barack Obama was encouraging the West to attack the country. Netanyahu has focused on Iran’s nuclear program for years. Iran’s leadership states it wants nuclear weapons as part of its war on the West. Concern about Iran’s nuclear program and wanting the president to end it is rational.

Yet Carlson has repeatedly claimed that stopping Iran serves no U.S. interest, that Iran has not tried to assassinate President Trump, that the Iranian nuclear threat is nonexistent, and that the only reason America is enemies with Iran is because of Netanyahu and the “Israel lobby” pulling the strings. All of this is demonstrably false. Yet Carlson interviewed Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and parroted these points, using Pezeshkian’s affirmations as underhanded proof of their validity.

Ukraine

Carlson has made similar statements about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish. There are legitimate questions about corruption in Ukraine, demonstrated by the recent story of Zelenskyy trying to neuter Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies, only to back down after heavy protests. It is entirely rational for an American or Western citizen to ask these kinds of questions and let the answers determine policy.

But Carlson has also made ludicrous charges, claiming Ukraine attacks its own infrastructure to blame it on the Russians, or calling Zelenskyy a dictator for declaring marshal law. These statements are easily disprovable. It appears they have less to do with Ukraine as a nation and more who is leading it.

In his first post-Fox show, Carlson called Zelenskyy “sweaty and rat-like” and “our shifty, dead-eyed Ukrainian friend.” Carlson is likely aware of the common anti-Semitic trope of the “rat-like, shifty-eyed Jew.”

He has also accused Zelenskyy of persecuting Christians in Ukraine. In 2022, he said the U.S. supporting Ukraine means the American taxpayer is “funding the destruction of Christianity in Ukraine.”

This was after Zelenskyy pushed for closing the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine. A Western nation shutting down a major faith like the Russian Orthodox Church should face criticism. But a majority of people in this Christian-majority country support the move. There are two main branches of Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine. The one with the most public support is the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, established by the Eastern Orthodox spiritual leader in 2019. The Russian Orthodox Church is based in Moscow and supports Russia’s invasion. Its head is almost certainly an ex-kgb agent. It is essentially an arm of the Russian state. It makes sense for Ukraine to curtail it while at war with Russia.

There is no way one could frame Zelenskyy as enacting “the destruction of Christianity in Ukraine,” unless one views him as a “rat-faced Jew” going after nonbelievers.

“Not all of the people watching Carlson will pick up on these tropes,” Stephen Daisley wrote for the Spectator, “but some will be only too familiar because they’re looking for them. For these people, talk of dead-eyed rats and shifty persecutors of Christians is more than obvious bait for Media Matters and the New York Times. To them it is a nod and a wink, a subtle salute to the fringe from the mainstream right. They will have come away from Tucker Carlson’s first Twitter monologue emboldened and hungry for more.”

Carlson has said similar things about Israel. He has openly claimed Israel is persecuting Christians. His interview last year with a Palestinian pastor was 40 minutes of declarations of this lie. He has even accused deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein of being a Mossad agent, and called his infamous island a trap organized by Israel.

He’s not the only one. Last year, Owens suggested in an interview with Piers Morgan that Israel’s sale of weapons to Azerbaijan to fight Armenia, a majority Orthodox Christian country, was connected to a “Christian holocaust.” Owens has even given credence to the “blood libel,” the medieval claim that Jews use the blood of Christian children in religious rituals.

Conspiracy

This is a concerning trend when taken together with other cultural factors. Polling suggests Holocaust awareness among Americans is disturbingly low.

A YouGov/Economist poll from 2023 suggested a third of American adults think Holocaust denial is not anti-Semitic. Of those ages 18 to 29, 20 percent think the Holocaust is a myth.

Another 2023 survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany suggested similar trends. The survey said 56 percent of Americans did not know 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust; 48 percent could not name a single Nazi concentration camp; only 2 percent had heard of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Many of the claims made by this branch of the “America First community” are rehashes of old conspiracy theories: that Jews are secretly enacting a Christian genocide, that a cabal of shadowy Jews causes all the world’s problems to kill everybody else, that Jews are the real puppet masters of the White House.

Last year, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 9,354 anti-Semitic incidents in America. It stated: “This represents a five percent increase from the 8,873 incidents recorded in 2023, a 344 percent increase over the past five years, and a 893 percent increase over the past 10 years. It is the highest number on record since adl began tracking anti-Semitic incidents 46 years ago.”

This doesn’t all come from the right. But it would be ignorant to pretend such right-wing rhetoric doesn’t contribute to the rise of anti-Semitism in America.

Many of the “alternative right” became famous fighting against covid lockdown and Democrat power grabs. The Trumpet has used some of their material extensively in covering these events.

But just because they discerned evil in Washington, D.C., doesn’t mean they are right about everything. In this case, they’re contributing to an evil trend—one that the Bible has a lot to say about.

The Bible

Jesus Christ said in John 4:22 that “salvation is of the Jews.” The Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 3:1-2: “What advantage then has the Jew, or what is the profit of circumcision? Much in every way! Chiefly because to them were committed the oracles of God” (New King James Version).

God promised that the Messiah would come from the tribe of Judah (Genesis 49:10). This was promised before Judah became a nation. Jesus Christ was born a Jew. He had a special relationship with the Jews in the first century, and He still has today. Revelation 5:5 calls Him “the Lion of the tribe of Judah.” Romans 3 shows it was through the Jews that God preserved His Holy Scriptures and the Sabbath day. The Jews may have rejected Christ as Messiah. But as the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 11, this does not negate them as being God’s people. God even says true Christians must become spiritual Jews to be saved (e.g. Romans 2:29).

The Bible also reveals the existence of a devil who hates and opposes God’s plan. The Bible calls the devil “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4). Revelation 12:9 states he deceives every person on the planet. The next verse calls him “the accuser of our brethren … which accused them before our God day and night.”

Satan influences civilization worldwide with his accusations against those God is involved with. This includes the Jews. Much of this, as the Trumpet has covered, comes from the English-speaking world’s radical leftist movements. Many of these movements are also responsible for very destructive domestic policies. But just because one side is an obvious evil doesn’t mean the other side is the safe zone. The solution to the world’s problems is not “Blame those evil Jews.”

“In nations across the world,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in our 2024 November-December print issue, “radicalism is on the march, problems are proliferating, and many, many people are frustrated and fed up. Maybe you are one of them. There are leaders who offer solutions and give people hope. Let me tell you: You must be careful about where you place your hope. Many of those ‘solutions’ are illusions!”

Mr. Flurry continued:

In some cases, people looking for relief from failed and dysfunctional politics are adopting ideas and supporting leaders or political parties that have serious problems of their own. Some are embracing doubtful, even dangerous political extremes. …

Time will prove that in each of these cases, and many more, people who are trying to escape from the frying pan are not jumping to safety but straight into the fire.

The blatant anti-Semitism on the right is a prime example of this, especially with its effects on the ground. The radical left’s poisonous ideas are an obvious threat. But it’s an embarrassment that so many think the solution is to turn to Holocaust deniers.

Where should one turn?

Jesus Christ said the truth sets us free (John 8:32). He also said that God’s Word is truth (John 17:17). The Prophet Jeremiah was inspired to write, “Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord” (Jeremiah 17:5).

“This one verse,” Mr. Flurry wrote, “explains why our world faces so many mountainous disasters: People are not trusting in God but in man. That ‘man’ may be a leader, or it may even be their own Satan-influenced human nature; most people trust themselves and follow their own mind. Here is a fundamental lesson man has not learned for 6,000 years: We are cursed if we follow a man.”

A pundit can be intelligent, polished and charismatic. But if his analysis is contrary to God’s Word, all he has is the opinion of a man. In this confused time, it is more important than ever to stick to the truth.

To learn more, read Mr. Flurry’s article “As Civilization Crumbles, Heed This Lesson.”