Former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson sparked backlash online after agreeing with Cornell University organic chemistry professor Dave Collum that Americans are learning World War II history "all wrong" and that the United States "should have sided with" genocidal German Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler.
Collum likened himself to Darryl Cooper, another Carlson guest who has branded Winston Churchill the “chief villain” of World War II. He went on to invoke General George S. Patton, claiming Patton had voiced the same view. In reality, Patton warned after the war that the U.S. had “fought the wrong enemy,” a reference to his concern about the Soviet Union rather than advocacy for Hitler.
Collum said:
“And it started when I read a book by Diana West, who would be good if you interviewed her. And it was, it’s this revisionist history of World War II. And you go, well, why would you want to read that? Well, it turns out, I think the story we got about World War II was all wrong.”
Carlson nodded along, saying:
"I think that's right."
Carlson also responded, "Certainly was" after Collum said he "read about FDR and FDR’s right-hand man was a Soviet spy," and to that, Collum said:
“Right. And therefore, we should have been, one can make the argument, we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin. Patton said that. And maybe there wouldn’t have been a Holocaust, right?"
"You know, but Stalin was awful by any metric and we weren’t his ally. The story is that there were a few missing American soldiers at the end of World War II in Russian territory. 15 to 20,000 were missing. And we left them there. And then you read about Pearl Harbor."
"We all sort of know the Pearl Harbor story is not what we were told, but I dug into that and you find out the Pearl Harbor. We knew to the morning that Pearl Harbor was going to get attacked. Stalin was going to be attacked. He wanted us to take the Japanese off his flank, and FDR’s right-hand man was okay with that because he was a Soviet spy, right?"
"Then I read about FDR and the Great Depression. You find out that every single penny he spent trying to help the forgot—Amity Shlaes, the forgotten man—was spent to buy votes, every last penny."
"He was a sociopath. And the only thing he could do was lie. He was a compulsive liar. His inner circle had to constantly cover for his lying. And the only thing he’s used for now is every time you want to grow government, you cite FDR. And so I read half a dozen books that sort of went at these different angles and wrote about it."
At no point did Carlson push back.
You can watch their exchange in the video below.
The clip soon caught the attention of the author of the widely read Substack "History Boomer," who criticized Collum's historical revisionism:
"Professor says we should have sided with Hitler, and Tucker is just nodding along. Dave Collum, btw, is a chemistry professor. Which is fine, but his expertise in history is, er, lacking."
"For example, no, we did not know Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked. Because we had broken the Imperial code, we knew an attack somewhere was imminent, and we put our fleet on full alert."
"Pearl Harbor was part of that alert, but they didn't take it seriously because they were so far from Japan. Everyone assumed the Philippines was the target."
You can see his post below.
The disgust was palpable.
Carlson is of course no stranger to platforming racists and historical revisionists, given his own affinity with white supremacists, such as the number of times he promoted the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory on Fox News broadcasts that quite literally influenced a racist mass shooter.
For instance, he sparked controversy in 2022 after interviewing Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania Law School professor who said that Black people and “Third World” immigrants hold “resentment and shame and envy” against Westerners because of their "outsized achievements and contributions.”
Wax, a controversial lecturer who has previously stated "all cultures are not equal," said the United States would be better with fewer Asians and has accused specific groups of not conforming to "bourgeois” and “free-market” cultural values, characterized this "resentment" as "unbearable."
