Even by the standards of the American far right, Tucker Carlson’s airing of Holocaust-revisionist views on his popular show on the platform X seemed to hit a new low.
On an episode that streamed September 2, Carlson gushed at his guest Darryl Cooper, introducing him as the “most important popular historian working in the United States today.” In the 140-minute-long conversation that ensued, Cooper made the case that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of the Second World War and was most responsible for “war becoming what it did.” Cooper clarified in tweets following the episode that Adolf Hitler had desperately wanted peace with Britain and had even been ready to “work with the other powers to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.” On the show itself, Cooper claimed that Nazi concentration camps were born of a humanitarian impulse to prevent suffering, because prisoners of war were too numerous to feed, so it was “more humane to just finish them off quickly.”
This is, of course, rank historical falsification and outright Nazi apologia. By ignoring the fact that Nazi Germany targeted people with Jewish ancestry for extermination and mass-murdered them on this basis, Cooper engages in a form of Holocaust denial. And the concentration camps and killing centers weren’t the only sites of the Holocaust. Of the 6 million Jews murdered by Nazi Germany, up to 2 million were killed in what is often called the Holocaust by bullets, by marauding “deployment groups” (Einsatzgruppen) that were an integral part of the German invasion of Eastern Europe. With the help of the local accomplices, these death squads often rounded up the entire Jewish population and murdered most of them as their very first act upon entering a town.
These and other Nazi crimes have been subject to decades of documentary research and widespread historical consensus. To hear Holocaust denial in 2024 is sickening. But within a certain milieu, such revisionism has been quietly flourishing for a while.
The way Carlson introduced the man he said he was a “fan of” was instructive in this respect. To those who closely follow the work of historians, Cooper’s is not a familiar name. I was initially embarrassed not to know it. After all, I received a Ph.D. in history from an American university a year ago. How did I not know an alleged contender for the title of the country’s “best” historian?
A quick search cleared things up. Cooper isn’t actually a historian in any conventional sense. He has published no books and barely any major articles in the popular or academic press. He doesn’t appear to have ever conducted original historical research. Before he appeared on Carlson’s show, there was no Wikipedia article about him, which suggests that even his internet fame was limited to certain corners.
What Cooper does have is a Substack with more than 100,000 subscribers as well as a popular podcast. His followers on X include not just Carlson but the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Senator J. D. Vance, who has praised Cooper’s political commentary before. In other words, within a certain crowd, Cooper was already a known quantity.
This crowd includes the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. That Carlson picked X to host his show was not accidental. He started the episode by complaining about being “censored” by tech companies, but he is clearly welcome on Musk’s platform. In fact, Musk initially praised the Carlson-Cooper interview as “very interesting” and “worth watching” before deleting his own post and appearing to backtrack.
Rest in the link above!
