Tucker Carlson is probably the most prominent figure in “the emerging coalition of conspiracy theorist, cranks, and the craven” whom the Hudson Institute’s Rebeccah Heinrichs identifies in her Free Press column “The Right’s 1939 Project.” It is a long column that warrants reading in its entirety. Here she comes to her thesis:
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Many have tried to make sense of this emerging coalition of conspiracy theorists, cranks, and the craven. Some have called it “woke right.” Still others have rightly described it as the meeting of the horseshoe—the strange reality wherein Marjorie Taylor Greene praises Zohran Mamdani.
I believe this emerging movement can best be understood as the 1939 Project—a decentralized, right-wing, online analogue to the left’s 1619 Project. While differing in content and cultural context, both initiatives aim to radically revise Americans’ understanding of their national story, their cultural mores, and conversational guardrails in order to seize power.
The 1619 Project, launched by The New York Times, argued America’s 1776 founding was subordinate to the arrival of African slaves in 1619. Slavery was portrayed as not merely tragic but foundational to America. America, in other words, should not be celebrated for its exceptionalism in ending slavery, but condemned for being like most other countries that allowed it at all.
The 1939 Project is similar in its ambitions and revisionism. It seeks to discredit America’s role in World War II and the postwar international order it shaped, replacing it with a dark vision of America sitting atop a globalist empire run by shadowy “warmongers”—including Winston Churchill himself.
The year 1939 is fitting: It marks the start of a global war the Nazis in Germany would start and America would help win—a victory this movement resents profoundly.
The year 1939 is meant to replace the national identity marked by 1945, the year the United States, with its allies, liberated Europe from Nazi tyranny, dropped the atomic bombs to end Japanese imperialism, ended the war, stopped the genocide of the Jewish people, and saved the free world. It is the year the United States, along with its allies, declared “Never Again” to the antisemitism that was tolerated by “decent” people—until the Nazis murdered millions of Jews and others.
Please read the whole thing here.
