Right-wing political commentator Tucker Carlson’s latest podcast episode featured a Cornell professor who suggested that there’s a good argument to be made for the United States backing Nazi leader Adolf Hitler during World War II instead of fighting the Nazis with Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union.
David Collum, a chemistry and chemical biology professor at the Ivy League school, told Carlson in an episode published on Wednesday that he read a book about the “revisionist history of World War II” and came away believing that “the story we got about World War II is all wrong, actually.”
“I think that’s right,” Carlson replied.
“One can make the argument [that] we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin,” Collum added. “Patton said that. And maybe there wouldn’t have been a holocaust, right? But Stalin was awful by any metric, and we weren’t his ally.”
In the episode, which can be viewed in full here, Carlson offered no pushback to Collum’s claim that a U.S.-Nazi alliance would have been preferable during World War II, or to the bizarre idea that the U.S. siding with Hitler would have somehow prevented the Nazi regime from murdering six million Jews.
The Nazis began instituting antisemitic laws in 1935, four years before the beginning of World War II and six years before the United States declared war on Germany. Jewish persecution intensified in 1937 and 1938 when Nazis began throwing people into concentration camps, and nearly 100 Jews were killed during the Kristallnacht pogrom. Hitler began creating concentration camps specifically for Jews in 1940, a year before U.S. troops joined its European allies to fight the Nazis. The largest mass murder of Jews under Hitler took place in 1942, just months after the United States had joined the fight.
As for Collum’s claim that Patton wanted to side with Hitler, there’s no historical record to back it up. While U.S. General George S. Patton believed that the Soviet Union would pose a major threat to the United States, he never advocated for siding with Hitler to fight Stalin. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill also said in the years following World War II that the Soviet Union was “in some ways more formidable than Hitler,” but he never suggested that it would have been better to fight Stalin alongside the Nazis.
Diana West, the author of the book that Collum credited for his revisionist take on World War II, said on Thursday that her book “does not argue for anything remotely like aligning with Hitler.”
IMPORTANT: Lest there be any confusion from clip below, my book #AmericanBetrayal does not argue for anything remotely like aligning with Hitler, and has ZERO to do with Darryl Cooper’s pro-Hitlerism. On the contrary, #AmericanBetrayal lays out the vast “occupation” of our… https://t.co/8G51ABb5RG
— @realDianaWest (@realDianaWest) August 21, 2025
The former Fox News host was blasted after clips of Collum’s comments began circulating on social media.
“So now we should’ve backed Hitler? Let’s see if these sh*t heads are denounced by any but a handful of us on radio or TV,” said conservative broadcaster Mark Levin.
Carlson responded to Levin, writing, “Settle down, Mark. Nobody endorsed Hitler.”
During his interview with Carlson, Collum also claimed that when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, “It wasn’t a war.”
“It was a police action,” Collum said. “And they weren’t killing people. They were moving troops across the border.”
Nearly 60 people were killed and 170 people were wounded on the first day of Russia’s invasion, according to Ukrainian authorities.
The Cornell professor added that it only became a war because “NATO wanted a war,” suggesting that the U.S.-European alliance was the aggressor in the conflict.
“And so, it morphed from being a police action, which I think Putin was trying to throw a fast ball past NATO’s chin and saying, ‘Back off on this whole NATO thing,’” Collum said.
“That’s correct,” Carlson replied.
