Tucker Carlson, having decided he has provided enough cover for contemporary adversaries such as the Kremlin and Hamas, has pivoted to defending Imperial Japan. In the telling of the commentator, the Allied powers of World War II were not just unjustified in dropping the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, but they were outright “evil.”

“I love by the way that people on my side — I’ll just admit it, on the Right — have spent the last 80 years defending dropping nuclear bombs on civilians,” Carlson said on the latest episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast. “Like, are you joking? That’s just prima facie evil. If you can’t — ‘Well, if we hadn’t done that, then this, that, the other thing, that was actually a great savings’ — no. It’s wrong to drop nuclear weapons on people, and if you find yourself arguing that it’s a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil. It’s not a tough one, right? It’s not a hard call for me. So, with that in mind, why would you want nuclear weapons? It’s like just a mindless, childish sort of exercise to justify, like, ‘Oh no, it’s really good because someone else could get’ — how about, no? How about spending all of your effort to prevent this from happening.”