Hello and happy Saturday. Forgive me, as I might have been off the news the past few days: Football season kicked off (I was rooting for the Ravens and the Chiefs to lose), our kids are prepping for homecoming festivities, and I popped over to Athens (Ohio, not Greece!) for a belated birthday celebration with our oldest son. But is it me or did the news get extra weird this week?
On Monday, Tucker Carlson aired an interview with Darryl Cooper, a podcaster whom he described as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” In it, Cooper told Carlson that “Churchill was the villain of the Second World War.” Huh? He also blamed the Holocaust on the fact that Germany was “completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners. … They went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there.”
“Ended up dead”? If that leaves you with no words, don’t worry. Jonah’s got some in his Friday G-File:
It’s one thing to believe the propaganda before it was proven to be propaganda. It’s another thing entirely to retroactively believe the propaganda after it was decisively disproved by Hitler’s own words and deeds, not to mention voluminous documentation, and millions of corpses. That’s not what historians do, it’s what cranks and crackpots do. Which is why Tucker found a guy (the author of Twitter — A How to Tips & Tricks Guide) to do exactly that.
Carlson is, after all, the guy who made waves interviewing Vladimir Putin in February and marveling at the abundance and efficiency of Russian supermarkets back. So maybe we shouldn’t be that surprised by him platforming a guy who thinks Churchill was worse than Hitler.
Speaking of Putin and right-wing media personalities, the Justice Department on Wednesday unsealed an indictment against two employees of the Russian state-media network RT, accusing them of money laundering and illegally funding a U.S. right-wing media outlet.
The scheme was meant to spread views that are “often consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions,” prosecutors alleged. The indictment was accompanied by Treasury Department sanctions on many RT employees in a multi-agency effort to counter Russian influence ahead of the 2024 election.
The Russians allegedly gave Tenet Media $10 million, which the company—founded in 2022 by MAGA influencer Lauren Chen and her husband—used to pay right-wing YouTube personalities Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, and Benny Johnson. The influencers have all proclaimed that they didn’t know where the money was coming from, but given the eye-popping amounts—up to $100,000 per video—Nick wondered in Boiling Frogs (🔒) whether maybe they should have at least wondered:
Michael Brendan Dougherty asked the right question: “How can you take that amount of money and not ask more questions?”
I can think of two answers. One is extreme idiocy, which can’t be ruled out in this case. The other is willful blindness. If you’re getting a giant check of dubious origin each month, you might reason that ignorance as to that origin is bliss. It’s in your financial interest not to ask questions whose answers might create ethical or legal dilemmas.
After highlighting a video in which Tim Pool declared that Ukraine is a U.S. enemy, Nick touched on the chicken-and-egg question:
Fame, audience capture, and the perverse appetite for populist agitprop here in the U.S. would have incentivized Tim Pool to make videos like the one above even if Putin had never reached for his checkbook. I’m averse to any suggestion that this sort of content is being pushed on populist Republicans rather than eagerly demanded and lapped up.
And so a year that was weird even by the standards of the last decade continues to grow even weirder. Given Russia’s previous efforts to influence U.S. elections, this story is not going away anytime soon—and you can expect more from us on it. Thanks for reading, and have a good weekend. Go Bengals!
Who couldn’t use a little palate cleanser? A few weeks ago, Kevin traveled to Fargo, North Dakota, to take in a Nate Bargatze show. Bargatze has rocketed to fame in recent years by taking a slightly different tack than many of his fellow standup comedians: His shows are void of profanity, prurience, and politics. And in Fargo, Bargatze has found his people. “There’s a reason he was able to pack a statistically significant share of the population of Greater Fargo into the not-inexpensive seats of a sports stadium on a Sunday night,” Kevin writes. “There are a lot of funny guys out there who can go 50 minutes without saying words you don’t want your kids to hear. But they aren’t stacking them up to the rafters in the Fargodome.”
We all remember how the 2020 election finally ended: Late in the evening on January 6, 2021, members of Congress returned to the Capitol after it had been cleared of rioters and finished the election certification process that those rioters had been trying to prevent. But Donald Trump is once again the Republican nominee, and history gives us no indication that he would quietly accept a loss this time, either. John McCormack reports on how things might play out if that does indeed come to pass, noting that Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act in 2022 to avoid a repeat of January 6, and that Donald Trump the private citizen lacks the power that Trump the sitting president held over government agencies. On the other hand, he writes, “Intense post-election chaos could occur much earlier at the precinct, county, and state level.”
I’m already looking forward to the American semiquincentennial in 2026–some of my earliest memories are of my hometown’s celebration of our bicentennial, if you want to know how old I am. But we passed an important milestone this week on the way to our 250th anniversary: The First Continental Congress convened on September 4, 1774, bringing together 12 (of the original 13, Georgia skipped out) colonies that held disparate views on religion and culture but shared a growing frustration with the British monarchy. Thomas Sheppard retraces the timeline, from the Boston Tea Party on, that led to the meeting that “set in motion events that culminated in the dismemberment of the British Empire in North America.”
And here’s the best of the rest:
- Dispatch Politics has reported a couple of times on the Trump campaign’s outsourcing of voter outreach and canvassing efforts to third parties. One group, Turning Point Action, says it plans to send “hundreds” of paid staff to Arizona and Wisconsin to turn out voters, but some Republicans are skeptical that the group will deliver. “Big press releases, big tweets, lots of smoke, very little work,” one operative told David M. Drucker. “That’s my assessment.”
- Much has been made about Kamala Harris’ proposal to tax ultra-wealthy Americans’ unrealized capital gains as income, but the Tax Foundation’s Alex Muresianu points out something more concerning: We don’t really know how she’ll handle the looming expiration of the 2017 tax cuts.
- Donald Trump has been attacking President Biden’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan on the campaign trail. Fair enough, Kevin writes, labeling it “a fiasco, possibly the lowest moment in the generally feckless and incompetent administration of Joe Biden.” But he also reminds readers that the Trump administration negotiated the very deal that Biden carried out.
- We had a pretty busy week on the fact-checking front. We can confirm that the city government of Minneapolis is not issuing calls to prayer across the city, WNBA star Brittney Griner is not leaving the United States, and the “entire family” of Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz is not endorsing Donald Trump.
- And on the pods: On The Dispatch Podcast, Reason’s Nick Gillespie joins Sarah, Steve, and Jonah to talk about the election and whether conservatives and libertarians would actually be happier under a President Harris or President Trump. On Advisory Opinions, come for David French and Sarah’s fantasy football chat but stay for the First Amendment discussion: Can Section 230 keep up with the internet? On The Remnant, Jonah got stood up by David—maybe he was getting ready for The Dispatch fantasy football draft?—so he takes listener questions. It’s an AMA from the wild, wild West.
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