Noah Hickey

I hear Carlson a bit differently here. Yes, he's definitely suggesting he'd be fine with the Nazis winning. the war and defeating Britain. But what comes through for me is the profound intellectual and moral unseriousness. It's a kind of debater's nihilism that thinks any good sounding talking point is a good point. For instance, he says at least if Germany won, Britain would be speaking a "European language." That sounds clever to un-clever people. But it's moronic on its own terms (Would Tucker be okay with Americans speaking Spanish? That's a European language, too). It reduces the interests and issues involved in WWII down to a ridiculous single metric. It's childish bullshit, but it sounds sophisticated to the insipid and the ignorant and it thrills those who understand the trolling of it. And that's why this interview is representative of Tucker more broadly these days. He's at sea. Nothing really matters except "winning" the conversation, the moment, the clicks. He's embraced a kind of Nietzschean amoralism that thinks sowing doubt in any notions of right v wrong, good v evil, traditional patriotism v transgressive iconoclasm is self-rewarding. "Neocons" and their ilk think Putin is bad? I'll claim he's awesome with the dumbest arguments imaginable packaged like they're smart. Similarly, Tucker likes to traffic in the idea that Hitler should have won, not because Tucker's a big believer in Nazism. He's not a big believer in *anything* other than the bit itself. He likes the idea that the Nazis should have won, because he likes turning over turtles and being a dick for the amusement of people who celebrate dickishness. More specifically, he also likes it because the argument that it was a good thing we defeated the Nazis is inconvenient to him and his pet causes. That America and the UK were the good guys still has heft, substance, and authority, and Tucker's whole transvaluative approach is to burn down good things with weight and substance by elevating evil bullshit into seriousness to prove his own transgressive courage. Every argument is permitted and equally valid because all truths are equally just matters of opinion. The superior opinion isn't the one with the better facts or the better reasoning, it's just the one more confidently or sneeringly expressed. That's why this interview went badly for Tucker, because he ran into someone who actually knows true things and is confident in what he knows. This is also why Tucker spends most of his time talking to cranks, bigots, weirdoes, and hacks who are good at sounding like experts so long as their bullshit goes unchallenged. Tucker doesn't give a rat's ass about ideas or history. He cares about vibes and sowing moral doubt about what is good by hawking moral support for what is bad. The Holocaust becomes a triviality in that project, which in a very real way, is worse than denying it happened. He's denying it didn't really matter much if it did.