(This is an abridged version of an essay that originally appeared in the American Thinker newsletter that subscribers receive every Friday night. If you would like more unique content like this, subscribe here.) 

Conservatism, particularly the new and vibrant populist MAGA variant, is in danger of becoming ahistorical; that is, lacking knowledge of the historical record to a point where we no longer know what happened in the past and cannot act on the lessons embodied by that experience.

This has already happened to the American Left, which stumbles from one crusade to the next without any clear understanding of how any of it fits into a broader historical context, whether it involves their own history, that of the U.S., or that of the world as a whole. This is awfully strange, considering that the forces of history, as embodied in the “historical dialectic,” play such a key role in Marxism itself.

This ignorance makes the left ineffective, but we conservatives must not lurch through the twilight with no idea of where we’re going because we don’t know where we’ve been. However, as Tucker Carlson’s historical ramblings show, we are at risk.

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Carlson has worked up a theory about the origins and course of WW II in which the criminal monster Winston Churchill is “the chief villain of the Second World War,” as opposed to the mild, misunderstood Adolf Hitler, who merely wanted to carve off a chunk of Poland. He bases this on the polemics of Darryl Cooper, a self-styled historian and YouTube influencer. Since influencers know everything, there was no need for Carlson to familiarize himself with any of the massive body of WW II scholarship, and he appears not to have done so. He has been widely criticized by a number of historians, among them Victor Davis Hanson.

Cooper is the latest expression of a school of WW II revisionism that began in the 1980s in Germany, naturally enough, with the Historikerstreit (Historian’s Conflict), a public debate as to how WW II, Adolf........

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