Liberals and conservatives alike have turned on Tucker Carlson after controversial podcaster and self-proclaimed historian Darryl Cooper claimed on Carlson’s show that “millions of people ended up dead” in Nazi concentration camps.
Cooper also painted U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill as the “chief villain” of World War II.
Carlson said on X that Cooper “may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States” when posting The Tucker Carlson Show Monday episode, which featured topics like Christianity and authoritarians like Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin.
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The episode went on to feature a series of easily debunked claims by Cooper, who previously achieved virality on the MAGA fringes with a lengthy Twitter thread in July 2021 which claimed to explain that the Jan. 6 insurrection happened because Democrats had lied about Trump.
Of Churchill, Cooper told Calson, “Now, he didn’t kill the most people, he didn’t commit the most atrocities, but I believe... that when you get into it and tell the story right and don’t leave anything out, you see that he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did,” Cooper told Carlson.
He went on to claim that didn’t mean he thought Adolf Hitler was the hero of the war. “That’s not the case,” he said.
But where Hitler went wrong, Cooper suggested, was by entering Germany into “a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners.”
Cooper appeared on the Carlson podcast as a “historian,” although his credentials are unknown.
The Tucker Carlson Podcast“They went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps,” he said. “And millions of people ended up dead there.”
Six million Jews did not “end up dead”—the Nazis systematically murdered them during the Holocaust.
Cooper is a podcaster who hosts the “Martyr Made” podcast, the popularity of which skyrocketed after the Carlson episode. The episode ranked at No. 2 among all Apple Podcasts on Tuesday afternoon—only behind Carlson’s.
Cooper said Churchill “wanted” to wage war despite Hitler’s attempts to broker peace, casting aside Hitler’s murderous oppression of Jews and other races. He described Churchill’s bombers’ actions throughout the war as “rank terrorism” in the killing of civilians. “They were wiping these places out, as gigantic-scale terrorist attacks, the greatest, you know, scale of terrorist attacks you’ve ever seen in world history,” Cooper said.
While some people praised Carlson’s discussion (“Very interesting. Worth watching,” wrote Elon Musk on X), others blasted Carlson for platforming someone who cast aside the Nazis’ actions.
“Actually, this is pro-Nazi propaganda, including, ‘Churchill was the chief villain of WW2’ and Hitler ‘didn’t want to fight,’” former congresswoman Liz Cheney wrote on X. “No serious or honorable person would support or endorse this type of garbage.”
“Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” conservative analyst Erick Erickson wrote on X.
“He’s neither the best nor the most honest,” Erickson wrote in a follow-up post. “He’s a contrarian moral cretin who has turned his contrarianism into Nazi apologetics.”
“This is just the same old Hitler apologetic,” Sohrab Ahmari, the founder of conservative magazine Compact, wrote on X. “Remarkably, there isn’t any historiography behind it. This “popular historian” just makes conclusory claims. Shameful.”
