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In early September, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star turned podcaster, hosted the podcaster “historian” Darryl Cooper on Carlson’s show “Tucker on X” on the social media platform.   Carlson, who has hosted the show since Fox severed ties with him in 2023, introduced Mr. Cooper as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”  It is rather appalling that such a major media figure would stoop so low and honor a man with such a perverted view of history.  Both Carlson and Cooper are peddling deceit and lies and calling it “history.”  Let me explain.

William Galston of the Wall Street Journal pointedly summarized Cooper’s distortion of history:

• Mr. Cooper has said that the Nazis “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.” As a result, “millions of people ended up dead there.” Savor the phrase “ended up dead there.” The Holocaust was a terrible accident, the consequence of poor planning—this from the man whom Mr. Carlson said may be “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.”
• Holocaust denial was only part of Mr. Cooper’s effort to rewrite the history of World War II. He has called Winston Churchill a “psychopath” and the “chief villain” of the war, who rejected Hitler’s proposal to reach “an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.”
• According to Cooper, the reason for Churchill’s unaccountable resistance to Germany’s Führer was that Britain was pushed into war “by people, the financiers, by a media complex, that wanted to make sure that [Churchill] was the guy who was representing Britain in that conflict.” And Cooper knows why: Churchill went bankrupt and was bailed out by “people who shared his interests in terms of Zionism.”

Andreas Koureas  of The National Interest brilliantly debunks Cooper’s distortions and perversions:

• ??Cooper calls Churchill “the chief villain of the Second World War,” viewing him as “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.” Such reasoning makes little sense, given the chronology of events. When Great Britain issued its guarantee of Poland’s independence in April 1939, Churchill was out of office. Chamberlain was PM when Great Britain declared war on September 3, 1939.  Hitler’s Directive No. 6 for the Conduct of the War ordered planning for the invasions of France and the Low Countries in October 1939. Even on the date that Germany launched these invasions (10 May 1940), Churchill was not made premier until that evening—after all attacks were initiated.  Cooper’s claims about the timeline of the conflict are erroneous. His subsequent point that Churchill wanted to go to war because “the long-term interests of the British Empire were threatened by the rise of a power like Germany” is ridiculous, as the British Empire had no borders with Germany.
• Cooper says, “Churchill wanted a war.” This is also untrue since Churchill did his utmost throughout the 1930s to wake up the world to the fact that she was walking herself into another global conflict. He certainly favored diplomatic talks instead of war but recognized that diplomacy could only be effective if the Western powers were armed. As he told the House of Commons in March 1934, “false ideas have been spread about the country that disarmament means peace. “Writing for the Evening Standard in April 1936, he professed, “there may still be time. Let the States and people who lie in fear of Germany carry their alarms to the League of Nations at Geneva.” For Churchill, the avoidance of war was not merely a case of Britain and France ditching appeasement. It required worldwide commitment from many nations, who could then pressure Germany at the League of Nations,  I desire to see the collective forces of the world invested with overwhelming power. If you are going to depend on a slight margin, one way or the other, you will have war. But if you get five or ten to one on one side, all bound rigorously by the Covenant [of the League of Nations] and the conventions which they own, then you may have an opportunity of a settlement which will heal the wounds of the world. Let us have this blessed union of power and of justice: ‘Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him.’

During one wartime meeting, Roosevelt asked Churchill his thoughts on the name of the global conflict. Winston responded, “The Unnecessary War.”

• Nonetheless, Cooper continues by wrongfully claiming that Hitler “felt [he] had to invade to the east” out of fear of a direct Soviet threat or plan to capture Romanian oilfields. If one reads Mein Kampf, Hitler demanded German living space (or lebensraum) to the east. That was his actual reason.  Cooper then claims that Germany invaded Russia “with no plan to care for the millions of civilians and POWs” and “millions of people died because of that.” The Nazis planned these murders. One example was their starvation policy—Hungerpolitik—which was devised prior to Operation Barbarossa. Food exported from captured Soviet territory was to feed German soldiers, with widespread famines predicted. This aligned with Nazi racial theory that deemed inferior Slavs as “useless eaters” to be liquidated with poor rations.  That Cooper tries to imply that the Germans were concerned with not being able to feed Soviet POWs is genocide denial. For reference, seven months after the invasion of the USSR, some 3.3 million POWs were murdered by starvation, death marches, exposure, mass executions, and more.

• Cooper accuses Churchill of “demonizing [Neville] Chamberlain” in 1940. Never mind that Chamberlain brought Churchill into his war cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty on September 3, 1939. Churchill also kept Chamberlain in his own cabinet. The day after Churchill became Prime Minister, he asked Chamberlain to be Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Council.  They worked closely together, and Churchill took great interest in Chamberlain’s well-being throughout his battle with cancer. He pressed Chamberlain not to overexert himself. After his surgery, Churchill wrote to him, “I have greatly admired your nerve and stamina under the cruel physical burden which you bear. Let us go on together through the storm.”  Though Chamberlain resigned from his posts due to his failing health, Churchill sought the King’s permission to keep Chamberlain supplied with the Cabinet Papers. After Chamberlain died in November 1940, Churchill gave a beautiful eulogy.
• Cooper continues by saying he resents Churchill as “he kept this war going when he had no way to go back and fight this war. All he had were bombers.” Churchill was, by 1940, “going through and starting what eventually became just the carpet bombing; the saturation bombing of civilian neighborhoods.” He accuses Churchill of launching these “gigantic scaled terrorist attacks” as it was the “only means that they had to continue fighting at the time.”  In 1940–41, the Bomber Command focused on targeted campaigns to hamper the German war economy, such as “oil supplies, communications and industry.” If one reads through the war cabinet papers, each week an updated resume was circulated on the Naval, Military and Air Situation. They clearly line out which targets were bombed. For example, the August 8–15 papers reference bombing attacks on key German infrastructure—including airframe factories, oil plants and aluminum works.  Given its small size, Bomber Command could not afford to waste its time on a policy of urban bombardment. As the Chiefs of Staff Committee recognized on September 7, 1940, “Our program of air expansion cannot come to fruition until 1942.” It was not until the summer of 1941 that Churchill and the war cabinet seriously discussed using aerial bombardment against German cities as the primary purpose.  This was after Germany had engaged in a relentless eight-month bombing campaign against the United Kingdom, known as the Blitz. In addition to targeting infrastructure and the British war economy, much of this bombing was indiscriminate—designed to break British morale by inflicting as much damage and destruction as possible. The result was over 43,000 civilian deaths and a further 71,000 civilians seriously injured.  Nonetheless, Bomber Command did not engage in the policy of concentrated, widespread aerial bombing of urban cities until . . . However, a simple analysis of the difference in tonnage dropped disproves Cooper’s ridiculous assertion of Britain committing supposed “gigantic scaled terrorist attacks” in 1940–41. Between June and October 1940, the RAF dropped a total of 6,000 tons of bombs against their fascist enemies. From March to June 1941, this had almost doubled to 12,000 tons. Germany, in contrast, dropped about 41,000 tons of bombs on Britain during the Blitz.

What has been the response to Carlson’s interview with Cooper?

1. Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, responded with the unadorned truth: “Tucker Carlson and his guest Darryl Cooper engaged in one of the most repugnant forms of Holocaust denial of recent years. These far-fetched conspiracy theories are not only dangerous and malevolent, they are antisemitic.”
2. Former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, have so far refused to distance themselves from Mr. Carlson, who is still an important figure in right-wing politics. [Carlson had a headline speaking slot at the Republican National Convention in July.]
3. The Wall Street Journal editorially observed that “As he often does, Mr. Carlson defended his interview as merely giving a forum for contrarian ideas. But Holocaust rationalization isn’t contrarian. It’s false history, and dangerous to the extent it might influence the young and uneducated to believe it.  It’s all the more worrisome given the outbreak of antisemitism on the American left. Anti-Israel protesters, including some in Congress, are trucking in slogans that treat Jews as oppressors and call for the destruction of the Jewish state. The Nazis also believed and promoted anti-Jewish conspiracies. American conservatives should be a bulwark against this ethnic hatred.  A favorite resort of Mr. Carlson these days is to claim that critics are trying to “cancel” him. It’s true the left often does censor legitimate dissenting ideas, as it did during the pandemic. But critics of Mr. Carlson’s interview are rebutting his nonsense, not canceling him. He can’t spread bad history and expect it to go unchallenged.”

“Conservatives have long taken pride in recognizing that there is objective truth. The left thinks all ideas are relative, or constructs of one’s material conditions, as the Marxists say. Recognizing the truth means accepting that certain historical events really happened and are evil, such as mass murder by the Nazis and Communists. Moral or historical relativism has never been a conservative tenet . . . But JD Vance and Donald Trump should be aware that the more Mr. Carlson traffics in nutty falsehoods, the more they will be asked about their association. Voters will make their decisions for many reasons, but one of them will be the political company they keep.”

See William A. Galston, “Trump Must Disavow Tucker Carlson” in the Wall Street Journal (10 September 2024); Wall Street Journal editorial “Tucker Carlson’s History Lessons” (10 September 2024); Katie Robertson, “Tucker Carlson Criticized for Hosting Holocaust Revisionist” in the New York Times (6 and 17 September 2024); and Andreas Koureas, Debunking Tucker Carlson’s Darryl Cooper Interview” in The National Interest (11 September 2024).