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THE MAGA INFLUENCERS REHABILITATING HITLER  
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Yair Rosenberg
September 3, 2025
The Atlantic
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_ A growing constituency on the right wants America to unlearn the
lessons of World War II. _

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The story we got about World War II is all wrong,” a guest told
[[link removed]] Tucker
Carlson on his podcast two weeks ago. “I think that’s right,”
replied Carlson. The guest, a Cornell chemistry professor named David
Collum, then spelled out what he meant: “One can make the argument
we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin.” Such sentiments
might sound shocking to the uninitiated, but they are not to
Carlson’s audience. In fact, the notion that the German dictator was
unfairly maligned has become a running theme on Carlson’s show
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beyond.

Last September, Carlson interviewed a man named Darryl Cooper, whom
he dubbed
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important popular historian working in the United States today.”
Cooper’s conception of honest history soon became clear: He
suggested that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill might have
been “the chief villain of the Second World War,” with Nazi
Germany at best coming in second. The day after the episode aired,
Cooper further downplayed Hitler’s genocidal ambitions, writing
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that the German leader had sought peace with Europe and merely wanted
“to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.” He did
not explain why the Jews should have been considered a “problem”
in the first place.

“What is it about Hitler? Why is he the most evil?” the far-right
podcaster Candace Owens asked
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2024. “The first thing people would say is: ‘Well, an ethnic
cleansing almost took place.’ And now I offer back: ‘You mean like
we actually did to the Germans.’” A repeat guest on Carlson’s
show, Owens defended him after his conversation with Cooper. “Many
Americans are learning that WW2 history is not as black and white as
we were taught and some details were purposefully omitted from our
textbooks,” she wrote
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These Reich rehabilitators are not fringe figures. Carlson’s show
ranks among the top podcasts in America. He spoke before President
Donald Trump on the final night of the 2024 Republican National
Convention, and his son serves as a deputy press secretary to Vice
President J. D. Vance, who owes his office
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part to Carlson’s advocacy. Owens has millions of followers on
YouTube, Instagram, and X, and over the past six months, she has been
interviewed by some of the nation’s most popular podcasters,
including the comedian Theo Von and the ESPN personality Stephen A.
Smith. Her output has attained sufficient notoriety that she is
currently being sued
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French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, over her
repeated claims that the French first lady was actually born a man.
Cooper, the would-be World War II revisionist, publishes
the top-selling history newsletter
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Substack platform.

Why does a potent portion of the American right seek to rehabilitate
Hitler? The Nazi apologetics are partly an attention-seeking attempt
at provocation—an effort to signal iconoclasm by transgressing one
of society’s few remaining taboos. But there is more to the story
than that. Carlson and his fellow travelers on the far right correctly
identify the Second World War as a pivot point in America’s
understanding of itself and its attitude toward its Jewish citizens.
The country learned hard lessons from the Nazi Holocaust about the
catastrophic consequences of conspiratorial prejudice. Today, a
growing constituency on the right wants the nation to unlearn them.

Before World War II, the United States was a far more anti-Semitic
place than it is now. Far from joining the conflict to rescue
Europe’s Jews, the country was largely unsympathetic to their
plight. In 1938, on the eve of the Holocaust, Gallup found
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54 percent of Americans believed that “the persecution of Jews in
Europe has been partly their own fault,” and that another 11 percent
thought it was “entirely” their fault. In other words, as the
Nazis prepared to exterminate the Jews, most Americans blamed the
victims.

The same week that the Kristallnacht pogrom left thousands of
synagogues and Jewish businesses in ruins, 72 percent of
Americans opposed
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“a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United
States to live.” Months later, 67 percent opposed
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bill aimed at accepting child refugees from Germany; the idea never
made it
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a congressional vote. Many Americans worried, however illogically,
that fleeing Jews might be German spies, a vanishingly rare
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Those with suspicions included President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
who suggested
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1940 that some refugees could be engaged in espionage under compulsion
from the Nazis, “especially Jewish refugees.”

This climate of paranoia and hostility had deadly consequences. In
1939, the U.S. and Canada turned away the M.S. St. Louis
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which carried nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees. The ship was forced to
return to Europe, where hundreds of the passengers were captured and
killed by the Germans. Restrained by public sentiment, Roosevelt not
only kept the country’s refugee caps largely in place but also
rejected pleas
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Auschwitz concentration camp and the railway tracks that led to it.
When the United States finally entered the war, it did so not out of
any special sense of obligation to the Jews but to defend itself after
the attack on Pearl Harbor.

That indifference to the Holocaust was immediately dispelled when the
Allied Forces liberated several of the Nazi camps where millions of
Jews
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been murdered. Entering the gates of these sadistic sites, American
service members came face-to-face with unspeakable Nazi
atrocities—rotting piles of naked corpses, gas chambers, thousands
of emaciated adults. Denial gave way to revulsion. “I thought of
some of the stories I previously had read about Dachau and was glad of
the chance to see for myself just to prove once and for all that what
I had heard was propaganda,” Sergeant Horace Evers wrote
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his family in May 1945. “But no it wasn’t propaganda at all … If
anything some of the truth had been held back.”

Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in
Europe and future U.S. president, personally went to Ohrdruf, a
subcamp of Buchenwald and the first Nazi camp liberated by American
troops. “I made the visit deliberately,” he cabled
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Washington, “in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence
of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to
charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” Eisenhower
then requested that members of Congress and prominent journalists be
brought to the camps to see and document the horrors themselves. “I
pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald,” the
legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow told
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listeners after touring the camp. “I reported what I saw and heard,
but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.”

Two-thirds of Europe’s Jews had been murdered. American soldiers,
drafted from across the United States, returned home bearing witness
to what they had encountered. “Anti-Semitism was right there, it had
been carried to the ultimate, and I knew that that was something we
had to get rid of because I had experienced it,” Sergeant Leon Bass,
a Black veteran whose segregated unit entered Buchenwald,
later testified
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way, the American people learned firsthand where rampant anti-Jewish
prejudice led—and the country was transformed.

Americans began to understand themselves as the ones who’d defeated
the Nazis and saved the Jews. Slowly but surely, anti-Semitism became
un-American. But today, those lessons—like the people who learned
them—are passing away, and a wave of propagandists
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a very different agenda has arisen to fill the void they left behind.

Over the past few years, Tucker Carlson and his co-ideologues have
begun insinuating anti-Semitic ideas into the public discourse. The
former Fox News host has described
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perhaps the most prominent American Jewish conservative, and those
like him as foreign subversives who “don’t care about the country
at all.” He has also promoted
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lightly sanitized version of the white-supremacist “Great
Replacement” theory
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has inspired
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anti-Semitic massacres on American soil. Candace Owens has accused
Israel of involvement in the 9/11 attacks and the JFK assassination
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and claimed that a Jewish pedophile cult controls the world. (Like
many pushing such slanders, she has apparently discerned
that replacing
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age-old conspiracy theories new legitimacy.) In March, an influencer
named Ian Carroll—who has a combined 3.8 million social-media
followers, and whose work has been shared
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Musk—joined Joe Rogan, arguably the most popular podcaster in
America, to expound without challenge about how a “giant group of
Jewish billionaires is running a sex-trafficking operation targeting
American politicians and business people.”

Before America entered World War II, reactionaries such as the famed
aviator Charles Lindbergh and the Catholic radio firebrand Father
Charles Coughlin
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against the country’s tiny Jewish population, accusing it of
controlling America’s institutions and dragging the U.S. to war.
“Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership
and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our
government,” Lindbergh declared
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American Jews in 1941. “Why is there persecution in Germany
today?” asked
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after Kristallnacht. “Jewish persecution only followed after
Christians first were persecuted.” For these men and their millions
of supporters, behind every perceived social and political problem lay
a sinister Jewish culprit
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The 21st-century heirs of Lindbergh and Coughlin seek to turn back the
clock to a time when such sentiments were seen by many as sensible
rather than scandalous. These far-right figures have correctly
ascertained that to change what is possible in American politics, they
need to change how America talks about itself and its past. “The
reason I keep focusing on this is probably the same reason you’re
doing it,” Carlson told
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amateur Holocaust historian. “I think it’s central to the society
we live in, the myths upon which it’s built. I think it’s also the
cause of the destruction of Western civilization—these lies.”

Carlson couches his claims in layers of intellectual abstraction.
Others are less coy. “Hitler burned down the trans clinics, arrested
the Rothschild bankers, and gave free homes to families,” the former
mixed martial artist Jake Shields told
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followers on X last week. “Does this sound like the most evil man
who ever lived?” The post received 44,000 likes. (Shields has
also denied
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single Jew died in gas chambers.”) “Hitler was right about
y’all,” said
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Gaines, a manosphere podcaster with some 2 million followers across
platforms, referring to Jews last year. “You guys come into a
country, you push your pornography, you push your fuckin’ central
banking, you push your degeneracy, you push the LGBT community, you
push all this fuckin’ bullshit into a society, you destroy it from
within.” These influencers are less respectable than Carlson, but
their views are precisely the ones that more presentable propagandists
like him are effectively working to mainstream. After Carlson’s
guest last month suggested that the U.S. “should have sided with
Hitler,” Shields reposted
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Had Carlson and his cohort attempted their revisionism 20 years ago,
they would have encountered a chorus of contradiction from real people
who had experienced the history they sought to rewrite and know where
its conspiratorial calumnies lead. But today, most of those people are
dead, and a new generation is rising that never witnessed the
Holocaust firsthand or heard about it from family and friends who did.

Late last year, David Shor, one of the Democratic Party’s top data
scientists, surveyed
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130,000 voters about whether they had a “favorable” or
“unfavorable” opinion of Jewish people. Hardly anyone over the age
of 70 said their view was unfavorable. More than a quarter of those
under 25 did. 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.

_Yair Rosenberg
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writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Deep Shtetl
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the intersection of politics, culture, and religion._

* Hitler
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* MAGA
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* influencers
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* WWII
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* The Holocaust
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