‘No enemies to the right’ approach is getting worse among talking heads and leaders | Opinion

A question for elected Kansas and Missouri Republicans: Are there any limits?

Are there any ideas you won’t — or shouldn’t — entertain? Any right-wing figures you won’t embrace? Is there anything that’s wrong to do in the service of owning the libs?

I’m skeptical.

Take Tucker Carlson. Here’s a man whose lies and demagoguery were too toxic for Fox News.

And he’s gotten worse, if anything, since getting fired from his TV gig last year. In recent weeks, Carlson has made fresh headlines for promoting the ideas of Darryl Cooper, a revisionist “historian” who makes the case that maybe the Nazis weren’t so bad after all — that their campaign of murder was just a big world-historical oopsie.

Adolf Hitler and his minions “launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners. … They went in with no plan for that and just threw these people into camps,” Cooper said on Carlson’s online show. As a result, “millions of people ended up dead there.”

That’s pernicious, passive-voice Nazi-justifying nonsense. The kind of thing that deservedly used to be way, way out of bounds in American discourse.

But that’s not a problem for Carlson. He called Cooper “best and most honest popular historian working in the United States today,”

Is it ever too much?

Which was too much for many (but not all) of Carlson’s former friends on the right.

At The Spectator, Ben Domenech accused Carlson of “whackadoo revisionism.” In The Washington Free Beacon, Andrew Roberts decried the “intellectually vacant yet preening snideness” of Cooper and Carlson. And at The Wall Street Journal, commentator William Galston called on Donald Trump to “disavow” Carlson for providing a “a friendly platform for Holocaust denial.”

When Carlson came to Kansas City last week, though, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey posted a picture of the two men smiling together.

“Great to have @TuckerCarlson in Kansas City,” Bailey wrote on X.

I miss shame.

Are scandals over now?

Bailey isn’t the only regional Republican with a “no enemies to the right” outlook. Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas just went on “The Benny Johnson Show” a few days after Johnson’s company — Tenet Media — was implicated in a federal indictment as having unwittingly taken money from Russian propagandists.

It’s a scandal. The kind of things politicians used to stay away from, at least for a few days or weeks or months until it all blew over. Now? No big deal.

I blame Donald Trump, of course.

Trump is responsible for a lot of nastiness over the last decade, but one of his worst legacies is inculcating in the GOP — and perhaps the broader culture — a “never apologize, never surrender” approach to politics that refuses to admit error of any sort.

There’s us. And there’s them. Apologies are signs of weakness that “they” will use against you. Contrition is vulnerability.

Shame? Embarrassment? It doesn’t even exist.

If you’re in the tribe, though, everything’s cool. No apologies are needed. The only sin is squishiness.

Which is how we end up with Trump taking Laura Loomer — who has promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories — to a 9/11 anniversary ceremony last week.

The problem with this approach, of course, is that “right” and “wrong” cease to be considerations about how we conduct ourselves publicly. All that’s left is power, and what you’re willing to do and say to get it.

We call that “moral relativism.” Republicans used to hate it, I’m told.

So there will be no distancing or disavowals from Bailey or Marshall, or from the Trump campaign. J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, still plans to share the stage with Tucker Carlson later this month. Vance “doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture,” the campaign said in a statement.

Here’s the thing: We should be fine saying that Nazis were bad. We might at least pause when we find out a dictator’s money is funding our favorite pundits. And we should think twice before supporting Kansas and Missouri politicians for whom there are no apparent red lines.

Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. Formerly a journalist at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.