The Biden administration on Thursday denounced Tucker Carlson after he hosted a guest on his show this week who suggested the Holocaust happened by accident, calling the interview “a disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans”, CNN reported.
Carlson hosted Darryl Cooper, a podcaster whom he said “may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” for a two-hour discussion.
During the show, Cooper claimed that Nazi Germany’s mass murder of Jews was an unintended consequence.
Then-British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Cooper claimed, was the “chief villain of the Second World War” and “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.”
White House senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement to CNN that “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.”
The administration’s statement specifically refuted Cooper’s claim to Carlson that 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. “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.”
Reached for comment on Thursday, Carlson sharply criticized the White House and told CNN, “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. They’re warmonger freaks. They don’t get the moral high ground.”
Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan condemned the interview with Cooper and wrote on X, "Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper engaged in one of the most repugnant Holocaust denial displays of the last years. Antisemitic, ahistorical and deranged, an affront to the victims and to the pursuit of truth. Decent persons should condemn this display of bigotry and malevolence."
Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), denounced Carlson’s interview with Cooper as “truly revolting.”
“The Nazis’ extensive network of concentration, forced labor, and death camps was part of Hitler’s deliberate plan to exterminate the Jewish people. Inmates didn’t just ‘end up dead’ and they did not ‘surrender,’” he said.
Carlson was ousted from Fox News in 2023, and later relaunched his show on Twitter "soon". His departure from Fox News came shortly after parent company Fox Corp settled for $787.5 million a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems, in which Carlson played a starring role.