Veteran conservative pundit Victor Davis Hanson tore into former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson after Carlson questioned whether the United Kingdom “benefitted” from defeating Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany in World War II.
Carlson raised the question last week during an interview with Jacob Rees-Mogg, a member of the Conservative Party in the U.K. The bizarre exchange instantly went viral.
On the Tuesday episode of his podcast for The Daily Signal, Hanson said Carlson made pathetic and ahistorical points throughout the conversation.
“It was painful to watch,” Hanson said. “Because I used to know Tucker and I liked him — I still like him. But obviously, something’s happened to him.”
Hanson argued that Carlson’s interpretation of the war was “completely wrong” and that he failed to grasp why it was essential for Winston Churchill to stand up to Hitler. He also said Carlson repeatedly got easily checkable figures wrong, such as the number of people killed in certain battles, and downplayed how serious a threat Nazi Germany posed to the West by 1940.
“Tucker was highly emotional, spewing out all sorts of misinformation,” Hanson said, noting that Carlson’s performance looked especially bad next to Rees-Mogg’s “sober” delivery.
During the interview, Rees-Mogg argued that Hitler would have seized as much territory as he could. Carlson countered that Hitler’s case rested on land that had once belonged to Germany and was handed to Poland under the Treaty of Versailles.
“I’m certainly not here defending Hitler,” Carlson said. “I’m just saying the idea that Hitler just randomly rolled into Poland is a lie and everyone believes it because they know nothing about the actual facts.”
Carlson went on to claim the U.K. had nothing to do with the dispute and that the British destroyed their empire and their country fighting a war they “still pretend was a good idea, but it wasn’t.”
Rees-Mogg called the conflict “the classic good-versus-evil” and said Britain “did the right thing.”
When Carlson pressed whether the U.K. is a better and healthier country as a result, Rees-Mogg said that otherwise, “we’d all be speaking German.”
“Who cares?” Carlson replied.
“I do,” Rees-Mogg answered.
Carlson then quipped that many people in Britain can’t speak English, so it “would be nice” to have at least a European language spoken there. Rees-Mogg responded that he saw no advantage to speaking German and that the British want to speak English.
Hanson said Carlson failed to understand that Britain had little choice, since the Nazis would have taken over the island had the U.K. not fought back. He also accused Carlson of acting childish throughout the debate.
“Almost everything he said in that interview was false,” Hanson said. “Once again, he has these little quips, and then he starts chuckling and trying to make fun of this guy, Rees-Moggs, but he really knew history… I don’t know any fair-minded person that didn’t think that severely damaged Tucker’s reputation. He couldn’t laugh his way, or fudge facts, out of that.”
Hanson added, “And one of the subtexts, again, if you listen to it very carefully, the subtext is: the Jews, the Jews, the Jews.”
The criticism is notable given that Hanson was one of Carlson’s go-to guests during his time as a star at Fox News. Hanson has since been baffled by Carlson’s content after leaving the network, saying last week that Carlson has “done a lot of strange things” since his exit.
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