Liberals and conservatives alike turned against Tucker Carlson after controversial podcaster and self-proclaimed historian Darryl Cooper claimed on Carlson’s show that “millions of people died” in Nazi concentration camps.
Cooper also portrayed British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as the “main 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 he The Tucker Carlson Show Monday episode, which dealt with topics such as Christianity and authoritarians such as Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin.
The episode featured a series of easily refutable claims from Cooper, who had already gained viral attention in July 2021 with a long Twitter thread on the fringes of the MAGA movement. In it, he stated that the January 6 insurrection took place because Democrats lied about Trump.
Of Churchill, Cooper told Calson: “Well, he didn’t kill the most people, he didn’t commit the most atrocities, but I think … if you look into it and tell the story properly and don’t leave anything out, you’ll see that he was primarily responsible for making the war what it became,” Cooper told Carlson.
He further claimed that this did not mean that he considered Adolf Hitler to be the hero of the war. “That is not the case,” he said.
Hitler’s mistake, however, according to Cooper, was that he led Germany into “a war in which the country was totally unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war and local political prisoners.”
Cooper appeared on the Carlson podcast as a “historian,” but his qualifications are unknown.
The Tucker Carlson Podcast
“They had no plan for it and just put people in camps,” he said. “And millions of people died there.”
Six million Jews are not “dead” – the Nazis systematically murdered them during the Holocaust.
Cooper is a podcaster who hosts the podcast “Martyr Made,” which skyrocketed in popularity after the Carlson episode. The episode ranked No. 2 on all Apple Podcasts on Tuesday afternoon – behind only Carlson’s.
Cooper said Churchill “wanted” to wage war despite Hitler’s attempts at peace and ignored Hitler’s murderous oppression of the Jews and other races. He described Churchill’s bombing actions throughout the war as “absolute terrorism” in killing civilians. “They wiped out these places, with terrorist attacks of gigantic proportions, the biggest terrorist attacks the history of the world has ever seen,” Cooper said.
While some people praised Carlson’s discussion (“Very interesting. Worth watching,” Elon Musk wrote on X), others sharply criticized Carlson for giving a platform to someone who rejects the actions of the Nazis.
“This is actually pro-Nazi propaganda, including the claim that ‘Churchill was the villain of World War II’ and ‘Hitler didn’t want to fight,'” former Congresswoman Liz Cheney wrote on X. “No serious or honorable person would support or condone this nonsense.”
“I didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become a mouthpiece for Nazi apologetics, but that’s what he is,” wrote conservative analyst Erick Erickson on X.
“He is neither the best nor the most honest,” Erickson wrote in a follow-up post. “He is a recalcitrant moral idiot who has turned his spirit of contradiction into Nazi apologetics.”
“This is just the same old Hitler excuse,” Sohrab Ahmari, the founder of the conservative magazine Compact, wrote on X. “Remarkably, there is no history behind it. This ‘popular historian’ is just making conclusions. Shameful.”
