Senator JD Vance, the running mate of former President Donald J. Trump, has declined to denounce the right-wing talk-show host Tucker Carlson for praising and airing the views of a Holocaust revisionist who falsely claimed that the Nazis’ destruction of European Jewry was not an intentional act of premeditated genocide.
Mr. Vance is scheduled to appear onstage Sept. 21 with Mr. Carlson in Hershey, Pa. Mr. Carlson no stranger to controversy, but his recent interview with Darryl Cooper, whom he described as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” has faced particularly fierce blowback.
The Nazis’ “final solution” for the Jewish population of Europe was meticulously planned, documented and pursued even after the tide of World War II had turned and Germany’s defeat was assured. Yet Mr. Cooper, in an interview with Mr. Carlson shared on the social media site X earlier this week, falsely claimed the Holocaust was an accident of history, perpetrated by a German military overwhelmed with prisoners of war.
After the German army swept through Eastern Europe, he said, “they went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there.”
Mr. Cooper went on to say that Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, “was the chief villain of the Second World War” for declaring war on Germany after the Nazis invaded Poland.
In a statement to The Jewish Insider, a Vance campaign spokesman wrote, “Senator Vance doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture but he obviously does not share the views of the guest interviewed by Tucker Carlson. There are no stronger supporters of our allies in Israel or the Jewish community in America than Senator Vance and President Trump.”
The statement continued, “As Senator Vance and President Trump stand steadfastly in support of our allies in Israel, radical Kamala Harris continues to cater to the antisemitic Hamas wing of her party.”
Jewish voters have found themselves squeezed and courted by both parties, even as antisemitism has been stoked by fringes on the political left and right. Protests against the war in Gaza have veered into open bigotry at times, and Republicans, led by Mr. Trump, have sought to link the angriest anti-Israel voices to the Democratic Party.
“And I say it constantly, if you had them to support and you are Jewish, you have to have your head examined,” Mr. Trump said of Democrats on Thursday in a video address to a gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas. “They have been very bad to you.”
Republicans, however, have embraced conservative personalities who have used antisemitic tropes and associated with avowed antisemites. Mr. Trump dined two years ago at his Palm Beach mansion with a white supremacist, Nick Fuentes, and the entertainer Kanye West shortly after Mr. West said he was “going to go death con 3 on Jewish people.”
Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative thinker and an ally of Mr. Vance, wrote at length on the issue and posted on social media, “I can’t get over this. The claims made. The fact that Tucker saw fit to lend this guy an uncritical platform.” He added, “This sector of the right is sinister. I’ll stop saying ‘they’ve lost their minds.’ No, it’s worse than that.”
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