For years, Tucker Carlson had been the highest-rated host on television, courageously covering the important, controversial topics that few others dared to touch. After his forced departure from FoxNews in April 2023, he soon launched an even bolder interview show on Elon Musk's Twitter platform, now completely free of the timorous corporate oversight and time constraints that have always crippled network TV.

His most remarkable achievement came in February of this year, when he traveled to Moscow and conducted a two hour sit down interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, allowing many tens of millions worldwide to watch the unfiltered responses of one of the top global figures of our young twenty-first century. A media coup of such historic significance might have left Walter Cronkite green with envy during the heyday of network television, and with today's cable news ratings in free fall, Carlson's former TV colleagues could only sputter with envious rage and denounce their hugely successful competitor as "a Russian stooge."

Carlson's September 2nd interview with Darryl Cooper was hardly in the same category, given the relative obscurity of his guest, an amateur historian and podcaster. I'd never heard of Cooper nor had most others, but the explosive subject matter of the discussion partly made up for that lack. The lead item was the Jonestown Cult that had perished in a notorious 1978 mass suicide, and perhaps a half-hour of the 140 minute session was devoted to that. But much of the remainder dealt with World War II, Adolf Hitler, and Winston Churchill, and the candid and controversial treatment of those momentous topics soon set off fireworks all across the Internet.

I don't use Twitter myself, but within 24 hours that platform was apparently ablaze about the interview, with former Rep. Liz Cheney among many others Tweeting out her outrage, and ADL President Jonathan Greenblatt endorsing and amplifying her attack. Twitter owner Elon Musk, the world's wealthiest man, promoted the interview as "Very interesting. Worth watching" to his nearly 200 million followers but a blizzard of attacks soon forced him to delete that Tweet. By the 5th, the Washington Post had broken its own rules to publish an editorial denouncing both Carlson and his guest, as did a conservative columnist in the same publication, along with various other prominent commentators.

On September 6th, the New York Times heavily weighed in, publishing two very negative news stories as well as an opinion column on the swirling controversy, which was how I first learned about what had transpired. Although the history of World War II has been a topic of great interest to me, I was busy with my own work, so I merely glanced at the headlines and completely missed the dozen or two dozen other articles that soon appeared in a variety of different publications.