Question Everything But...

In early July, Stonetoss published this political cartoon:

Source: "Book Squirm" by Stonetoss.

I don't know what prompted the cartoon, but it seemed rather prescient. On September 2, Tucker Carlson released a video of an interview he conducted of Darryl Cooper, an amateur historian and podcaster of no particular note as far as I can tell. Or he would have been of little note but for the Streisand Effect. For there was an immediate flood of opinion pieces from both the Left and the Right criticizing Carlson and/or Cooper, with little of it actually addressing Cooper's ideas, but rather going straight into ad hominem attacks on Carlson and his audience. I was particularly perturbed because of the number of criticisms posted at or linked through Instapundit. It seemed curious to me that a website and its pundits that normally pride themselves on defending freedom of speech were suddenly and viciously attacking Carlson for interviewing someone with a different take on certain aspects of World War II.

    I have only watched a short (probably 5 minute) segment of the 2 hour interview, but from what I saw and read in the tsunami of articles that followed, the critic's objections revolved around two of Cooper's assertions:

1. That Germany was logistically (food and otherwise) unprepared for the number of prisoners they took in the first several months of their invasion of the Soviet Union; and, faced with the prospect of millions of these prisoners starving or freezing to death during the winter, took the pragmatic step of executing them rather than letting them suffer (much as you might put down a dog). I don't know if Cooper actually described this as an "accident" but it has been transformed by those hating on Carlson and Cooper as Cooper explaining away the Holocaust as an accident.
   
2. That Winston Churchill was the real villain of World War II because, Cooper argues, he pushed the UK into the war and then, later, rejected peace overtures from Hitler, thereby unnecessarily extending the war and causing additional millions of deaths. 
   

There are valid arguments to be made against Cooper's arguments--Ron Unz provides a detailed rebuttal (as well as addressing failures of some of Cooper's critics)--but for the most part, the critics didn't do that. Rather, as alluded to earlier, many of them--including so-called conservatives who normally defend free speech--simply resorted to calling Carlson and his viewers stupid and/or made arguments that boiled down to "how dare he question the established narrative!"

     Although I found the sudden love for censorship from conservative pundits very curious, I ultimately decided not to write about it. That is, until I saw this article in the New York Post: "Hitler’s AI translated speeches go viral on TikTok – with one video topping 1M views – in troubling trend: report."  The problem, as the article indicates, is that "Misguided TikTokers are using AI to translate Adolf Hitler’s speeches into English – and racking up millions of clicks on the under-fire platform, according to a watchdog media report." This, apparently, violates a TikTok prohibition on “promoting (including any praise, celebration, or sharing of manifesto) or providing material support to … individuals who cause serial or mass violence, or promote hateful ideologies.”

    Obviously, there is a certain amount of hypocrisy involved here as no doubt you could probably find countless videos promoting Marxism (the bloodiest ideology ever seen), pushing racial hate (in the guise of DEI and CRT), supporting the abuse of children (i.e., transgenderism), and so on. And although they were together responsible for 100,000,000 deaths, I doubt that speeches from Lenin, Stalin, or Mao would be banned.

    But the removal of the Hitler speeches is rooted in the same condescending attitude that accompanied the attacks on Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper: the attitude that the rubes are too stupid to be permitted to listen to certain ideas.

    This is how you get to a world where 15% of internet traffic is cat videos and memes.