All 24 Jewish members of the U.S. House of Representatives released a joint statement on Monday denouncing former Fox News host Tucker Carlson for hosting Darryl Cooper, a historian, on his podcast.
The Congress members said as Jews, they were “appalled” that Carlson would host and promote a “Nazi apologist and Holocaust denier.”
“Cooper made deeply troubling statements, including that the United States was on the ‘wrong side’ in the Second World War, and falsely claiming that millions of Jews in concentration camps ‘ended up dead’ only because the Nazis did not have the resources to care for them,” the Jewish House members stated.
Carlson hosted Cooper, the presenter of the history-focused podcast Martyr Made, on Sept. 2 for a two-hour-long interview about Israel and Palestinian-controlled areas, contemporary Europe and World War II.
Cooper described Winston Churchill as the “chief villain” of the war and suggested that the Nazis didn’t intend to kill millions of civilians.
“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,” Cooper said on Carlson’s podcast. “They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead.”
Yad Vashem issued a statement on Friday condemning those comments as Holocaust denial.
In previous posts, Cooper has also described Israel’s war against Hamas as a “terrorist attack” against Palestinians in Gaza.
The House Democrats criticized Carlson on Tuesday for hosting and praising the podcaster.
“Not only did Carlson provide a platform for Cooper’s ignorance and hate to millions of viewers, he also promoted Cooper by calling him ‘the most important popular historian in the United States,” the group of lawmakers said.
“The normalization of Nazism is unacceptable and dangerous, and must be forcefully condemned,” the House members said. “Americans deserve to know that their leaders will rebuke the cancers of antisemitism and Nazism whenever and wherever they appear.”
The group also criticized Elon Musk for calling the interview “very interesting” and Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, who is scheduled to join Carlson’s live tour in Pennsylvania on Sept. 21.
“Acceptance of hateful ideologies by people in power puts Jews and other targeted minorities across the world at great risk,” the Democrats stated.
