08/09/2025
The United States learned hard lessons from the Holocaust about the catastrophic consequences of conspiratorial prejudice—but now, Yair Rosenberg argues, a growing constituency on the right wants the nation to unlearn them.
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“One could make the argument we should have sided with Hi**er,” a Cornell chemistry professor named David Collum said on Tucker Carlson’s podcast last month. “Such sentiments might sound shocking to the uninitiated, but they are not to Carlson’s audience,” Rosenberg writes. “In fact, the notion that the German dictator was unfairly maligned has become a running theme on Carlson’s show—and beyond.”
Over the past few years, Carlson and his co-ideologues have begun insinuating anti-Semitic ideas into the public discourse. “These Reich rehabilitators are not fringe figures,” Rosenberg explains. Carlson’s podcast ranks among the top shows in the country. Candace Owens—who, in 2024, asked on her podcast, “What is it about Hi**er? Why is he the most evil?”—has millions of followers.
“The N**i apologetics are partly an attention-seeking attempt at provocation,” Rosenberg argues. But they also “correctly identify the Second World War as a pivot point in America’s understanding of itself and its attitude toward its Jewish citizens.” Before World War II, “the United States was a far more anti-Semitic place,” Rosenberg writes. “As the N**is prepared to exterminate the Jews, most Americans blamed the victims.” This shifted when N**i camps where millions of Jews had been murdered began to be liberated. Dwight D. Eisenhower visited one such camp, and requested that prominent journalists see and document the horrors. Americans, Rosenberg continues, “began to understand themselves as the ones who’d defeated the N**is and saved the Jews.”
Today, that narrative is once again changing. Such revisionism once would “have encountered a chorus of contradiction from real people who had experienced the history they sought to rewrite,” Rosenberg writes. “But today, most of those people are dead.” Now “the question is not whether America’s self-understanding is changing; it’s how far that change will go—and what the consequences will be.”
📸: Bettmann / Getty