The New Pseudohistorians: Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and the New Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial

“These people are frauds and they are grifters and they do not deserve your time.” That’s conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro at the December 2025 Turning Point USA conference anchored by the conservative student organization’s new leader, Erika Kirk, who took over after her husband Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

Who are these frauds and grifters Shapiro is referring to? It was two of his fellow conservatives and (former) friends: Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, who he went on to describe as “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.”

Owens, in fact, was Shapiro’s colleague at The Daily Wire until the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, when she suggested that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had prior knowledge of the attack and—in 9/11 conspiracism parlance—Let It Happen On Purpose (LIHOP) for political reasons, which include the “ethnic cleansing” of Gazans that was the “real holocaust.” She left the organization five months later to start her own independent show. 

Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination she has accused Erika Kirk of somehow being connected to or orchestrating his murder—most likely connected to Israel and the Jews, of course—but before this incident Owens was already trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories, alleging Jewish involvement in 9/11 and the assassination of JFK, hinting that Jeffrey Epstein might have been involved in the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad (and, of course, that he was murdered in prison) and referencing “a cabal of Jews in Hollywood” she thinks control Kanye West (Ye), after the rapper tweeted he was going “death con 3 on Jewish people.”

Owens also blamed the move to ban TikTok on “powerful Jews” like the Anti-Defamation League, accused George Soros (who is Jewish) of funding the Black Lives Matter movement to destabilize the United States, described Israel as an “occult nation” that shields “child abusers,” and has her doubts about the Holocaust when suggesting that Josef Mengele’s medical experiments were so extreme that “it sounds like bizarre propaganda” because “it would be a tremendous waste of time and supplies.”

Then there is Owens’s conspiracy theory of who was really behind the Atlantic Slave Trade—the Jews, of course—to which I responded on X by calling her “the Louis Farrakhan of our time” for repeating the lies from the Nation of Islam’s 1991 book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews (that claimed “monumental Jewish culpability” in the evils of the Atlantic slave trade that Farrakhan called the “Black African Holocaust”), followed by my assessment of her loose association with the truth and her probable motivation (anti-Semitism). In response, Owens repeated her assertion that “Jews enslaved black people” and instructed me to apologize or, in common social media parlance, shut the fuck up (STFU). Five million views later Owens doubled down on her choice options for me (“Say sorry, or STFU”), apparently believing that (1) I’m Jewish (I’m not) and (2) I use unspecified “Hollywood movies” and “classroom brainwashing” (presumably Schindler’s List and the classroom materials produced after the film’s release) to brainwash people into believing the crimes of my ancestors onto White men (Jews are not White?).

For younger readers unfamiliar with Louis Farrakhan, he’s the Candace Owens of the 1990s, famous for his Million Man March on Washington, DC, in 1995 in which he regaled his audience (numbering 600,000 according to the National Park Service) for two and a half hours about how adding a “1” to the “pregnant number 9” results in the number 19, which is the sum of the 3rd President Thomas Jefferson and the 16th President Abraham Lincoln whose monuments are on the mall over which Farrakhan looked, “each one of which is 19 feet high,” and how adding the number “1” to the 555-feet height of the Washington Monument and “we get 1555, the year that our first fathers landed on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, as slaves.”

Then there is Farrakhan’s conspiracy theory about international bankers (guess who?) that orchestrated the New World Order to control the media, Hollywood, and the Zionist Occupied Government that runs the United States. Jews are “bloodsuckers” responsible for the slave trade, plantation slavery, sharecropping, and Jim Crow, and so it is no coincidence that Jewish building owner Larry Silverstein was involved in 9/11 in a plot to collect insurance money for the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings that fateful day. There is so much numerological nonsense and anti-Semitic codswallop from Louis Farrakhan that we published a cover story in Skeptic in 1996 with the Nation of Islam minister on the cover, but the point here is to imagine what his influence would be if he had a podcast audience of millions, and tens of millions more consuming clips on social media platforms!

As for the claim that Jews enslaved Black people, its partial veracity is instructive. Yes, a handful of Jews participated in the slave trade. But historians estimate that Jews owned roughly 1.25 percent of enslaved people in the Southern United States in 1860—a figure in proportion to their tiny share of the population (0.2–0.4 percent). And as with other activists who claim that the Atlantic slave trade was orchestrated by Whites who profited exclusively from the practice, Farrakhan and Owens fail to mention from whom Whites and Jews (and everyone else) purchased African slaves—from Black slave traders on the continent.

I have defined pseudohistory as the purposeful distortion of the past for present political or ideological reasons. First among equals in this new pseudohistory is the podcaster (and former Fox News host) Tucker Carlson, whose substantial audience matches and sometimes exceeds that of Owens. He traffics in the same anti-Semitic tropes on a daily basis, and featured on his show the podcaster and blogger Darryl Cooper, whom Carlson described as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”

Cooper, in fact, has no formal training as a historian and attended undergraduate college for only three semesters before joining the Navy where he served as an electronics technician. Nevertheless, Carlson uncritically entertained Cooper’s ahistorical conspiracism about who was really “the chief villain of the Second World War”—none other than Winston Churchill. Cooper described the British Prime Minister as a “psychopath” and warmonger who cajoled Hitler into an unwanted war with the West even though he, Churchill, knew that Hitler only ever wanted to combat Russian Communism by invading the USSR after, you know, annexing Austria, the Sudetenland, Bohemia, Lithuania, and Czechoslovakia, and then invading Poland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Norway, Yugoslavia, and Greece.

As for the Holocaust, Cooper is echoing David Irving and other pseudohistorians and Holocaust deniers when he claims that the camps were built to house all the prisoners of war captured in the early and successful days of the good and necessary war against the Russians and, says Cooper, “were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead.”

Ended up dead. I wonder how that happened? Oh, maybe those gas chambers with the Zyklon-B blue staining on the bricks gives us a clue? And has Cooper never heard of the Holocaust by Bullets? This is the millions of Jews, gypsies, and other ethnic groups in Poland, Ukraine, and other territories murdered by the Einsatzgruppen—the special police battalions that followed the Wehrmacht into these conquered lands, going through every city, town, and village, rounding up Jews and others, and murdering them one at a time or lining them up in front of pits they were forced to dig and shooting them all at once.

For example, in a report from Einsatzgruppe A during the winter of 1941–1942, 2,000 Jews were killed in Estonia, 70,000 in Latvia, 136,421 in Lithuania, and 41,000 in Belarus. On November 14, 1941, Einsatzgruppe B reported an additional 45,467 shootings, and on July 31, 1942, the governor of Belarus reported 65,000 Jews were killed the previous two months. Einsatzgruppe C estimated they had killed 95,000 by December 1941. Finally, Einsatzgruppe D reported on April 8, 1942, a total of 92,000 killed, for a grand total of 546,888 dead, or half a million plus in less than one year.

On some level they must know they are lying.

As for the rest of his so-called revisionism about the Second World War, Darryl Cooper is cribbing from political commentator (and one-time POTUS candidate) Patrick Buchanan’s 2008 book Church, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, which denies that the Second World War pitted freedom against tyranny. Instead, these new deniers assert that the U.S. allies of Britain and the USSR were the most imperial and tyrannical (respectively) nations on earth. Here is Mark Weber, the head of the Institute for Historical Review (the leading Holocaust denial organization), in a lecture I attended in Orange County at which David Irving also spoke:

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Britain ruled over the largest colonial empire in history, holding more millions of people against their will than any regime before or since. America’s other great wartime ally, the Soviet Union, was, by any objective measure, the most tyrannical or oppressive regime of its time, and a vastly more cruel despotism than Hitler’s Germany.

The myth holds that in World War II we witnessed the triumph of good over evil, whereas in reality, Weber says, the Allies’ goodness was indistinguishable from their opponents’ evil:

In fact, the record of Allied misdeeds is a long one, and includes the British-American bombing of German cities, a terroristic campaign that took the lives of more than half a million civilians, the genocidal “ethnic cleansing” of millions of civilians in eastern and central Europe, and the large-scale postwar mistreatment of German prisoners.

Deniers have long drawn the moral equation of Auschwitz = Dresden, Treblinka = Hiroshima. David Irving, for example, made the equivalency argument in his 1971 book Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden. Calling the attack on Dresden “the worst single massacre in European history,” Irving asks, “Is there any parallel between Dresden and Auschwitz?” His answer has the nuance of a moral sledgehammer: “To my mind both teach one lesson: that the real crime of war and peace alike is not Genocide—with its implicit requirement that posterity reserve its sympathy and condolences for a chosen race—but Innocenticide. It was not the Jewishness of the victims that made Auschwitz a crime, but their innocence.”

The Allies may have killed innocents on the road to victory, but the killing stopped the moment the Germans and the Japanese were defeated. The genocide of Jews by Germans ended on VE day, and the genocide of Chinese by Japanese ended on VJ day. Auschwitz and Nanking were no more. The Allies killed in order to stop the killing by the Axis, and for no other reason. The Axis killed for geography, for political control, for economic power, for living space, for racial purification, and for pleasure, and the killing would have gone on and on were it not for the Allies. Anyone unable to see the difference should have their license to practice history revoked.

Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are obviously bright and gifted public commentators who fully understand the dynamics of the new media landscape and are using it to great success, as measured by clicks and eyeballs (and, by extension, subscriptions and advertising revenue), but on some level they must know they are lying. I am only one of many who have bombarded them with such facts and statistics to correct their many false claims. So what is going on here? 

Are Candace and Carlson just performatively punking us all into talking about them to keep the spotlight on their shows (and here I am writing about them!), or are they purposefully deceitful in service of deep anti-Semitic hatred of all things Jewish (including and especially Israel)? I don’t know. No one knows what is in someone else’s mind (the “other minds problem”), but based on their words and actions, which is all any of us have to go on with other minds, anyone who would join a Fair Play for Candace and Carlson Committee needs a reality check with history.

Candace and Carlson are bad actors with no principles beyond, perhaps, a coordinated effort to increase their audience size through outrageousness, a strategy proven to work wonders in the age of social media—studies show that social media algorithms prioritize emotionally charged and outrageous content that, in an autocatalyzing feedback loop, contributes to the growth and profitability of the platforms that most employ the strategy, which drives more eyeballs to the sites, which generates more clicks, which produces more revenue …

Don’t think for a moment that the process is intellectually neutral and that the questioners are innocent inquisitors just curious about the world.

Now, let’s address the verisimilitude of the claims themselves, for that is how their millions of followers respond to such criticisms—“what if they’re right?!” They’re not right. They’re wrong. And none of these claims are new. I’ve heard them all before, starting in the early 1990s with the emergence into public consciousness of the Holocaust deniers, most notably David Irving, who Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Darryl Cooper are channeling in the “Just Asking Questions” (called “JAQing off”) mode. Cooper cites Irving’s controversial book Hitler’s War, which didn’t deny the Holocaust but suggested Hitler was unaware of it. To highlight the method, I posted a series of JAQs on X, explaining that “I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, but …” followed by a series of questions right out of the deniers’ playbook:

• How many bodies could the crematoria at Auschwitz incinerate in a day? I’m not saying the Holocaust never happened, I’m just asking how those death figures could be real … 
• I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. I’m just wondering why the lock on the door in the gas chamber at the Mauthausen concentration camp doesn’t lock? Wouldn’t the Jews have just pushed open the door and escaped?
• I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. I’m just asking where is the order from Hitler to exterminate the Jews?
• I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. I’m just asking why the Zyklon-B levels on the bricks at Auschwitz are not as high as they are for the delousing gas chambers to kill lice? Wouldn’t it take more gas to kill people than lice? Just curious. Asking for a friend.
• I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. I’m just asking why there are no holes in the ceilings of the gas chambers at Auschwitz where the SS allegedly poured the Zyklon-B pellets into the room to gas the Jews?
• I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. I’m just asking why no one will debate me on national television on the specifics of the Holocaust? What’s wrong with just asking questions and debating all sides of an issue?

Because these were individual posts on X, many of my followers thought I’d lost my mind. So I followed up explaining that these and many other such talking points are refuted in my book Denying History, co-authored with Holocaust historian Alex Grobman, and addressed point-by-point in my lecture on Holocaust Denial.

I also highly recommend the book by Richard Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust and the David Irving Trial, in which the preeminent historian of Nazi Germany poignantly captures the difference between negligence and deception: 

There is a difference between, as it were, negligence, which is random in its effects, i.e., if you are a sloppy or bad historian, the mistakes you make will be all over the place. They will not actually support any particular point of view … On the other hand, if all the mistakes are in the same direction in the support of a particular thesis, then I do not think that is mere negligence. I think that is a deliberate manipulation and deception.

One JAQ claim is especially instructive for understanding what deniers like David Irving—channeled by Candace, Carlson, and Cooper—are up to. It concerns the gas chambers at Auschwitz–Birkenau, about which Irving offered a memorable one-liner during his libel trial against historian Deborah Lipstadt, whom he sued for calling him a Holocaust denier: “No Holes. No Holocaust.” Here is the syllogistic logic of this claim:

• Eyewitness accounts after the war reported that SS guards poured Zyklon-B pellets into induction ports on top of the subterranean gas chambers.
• If you go to Auschwitz–Birkenau and examine the gas chambers you will not find induction port holes on the gas chamber ceilings.
• If those eyewitness accounts are false, maybe other eyewitness accounts are false.
• Maybe the Holocaust is not what we think it is.
• Maybe the Holocaust never happened.

Alex Grobman and I devote a long section of our chapter on Auschwitz–Birkenau in our book to this issue (and how, precisely, the Nazis gassed people at the death camp), so let me here briefly refute the claim that if there are no holes in the gas chamber ceilings at Auschwitz then the Holocaust never happened, starting with the state of the gas chamber ruins today, which the Nazis destroyed on the eve of the Soviet army liberation of the camp in January 1945. Below are my own black-and-white photographs (Figures 1 and 2), showing one of the possible induction port holes, along with an aerial photograph (Figures 3 and 4) of the ruins of one of the crematoria from the site museum archives.

Figure 5 (below) is a ground-level photograph of one of the crematoria at Auschwitz–Birkenau (note the tall chimney in the background) showing the four induction ports on ceiling of the gas chamber. Figure 6 (below) is an aerial photograph of Crematoria 2 and 3, revealing the shadows cast by the four induction ports on each of the two gas chamber ceilings. 

The deniers’ rebuttal to this clear refutation of their claim is that the photographs were doctored after the war to fit the eyewitness testimony of the war crimes committed at the death camp, so Alex and I went to the archives at Yad Vashem in Israel and reviewed the original photographs to see with our own eyes that they were not doctored. In the case of the aerial photographs, these came from B-17s on a bombing run to destroy the industrial factory at Auschwitz III (Buna), and we spent hours scrolling through thousands of images in a filming run that mostly included farms, villages, and empty landscape. We also had the aerial images examined by an expert on aerial photography at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who confirmed that they had not been doctored in any way.

They are unprincipled actors with an agenda and should be denounced as such.

The point of this exercise is to highlight the consequences of “just asking questions.” It takes a few minutes to ask such questions, whereas it can take days, weeks, months, and even years to refute them in detail with evidence and sources. 

Yes, of course, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are free to ask any questions they like, and we are free to refute their lies and distortions of the truth—that is what it means to live in a free society. But don’t think for a moment that the process is intellectually neutral and that the questioners are innocent inquisitors just curious about the world. They are unprincipled actors with an agenda and should be denounced as such. That some conservatives refuse to do so is understandable (who likes to admonish friends?), but in a counterfactual test, would they demur to comment if liberal public commentators refused to reproach anti-Semitic comments and conspiracism by prominent liberal figures? Everyone knows the answer. And everyone knows that everyone knows the answer (common knowledge), so I stand with Ben Shapiro and his concluding remarks at the Turning Point USA conference: “Friendship with public figures who say or do evil things is not an excuse for silence on the matter.”

Amen, brother.