On Monday, Carlson published a two-hour interview with Darryl Cooper, the right-wing host of the history podcast Martyr Made. Previewing their discussion on X, Carlson wrote: “Darryl Cooper may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States. His latest project is the most forbidden of all: trying to understand World War Two.”

Carlson praised his guest at the top of their discussion, comparing him favorably to popular historians like Jon Meacham and Anne Applebaum, whom he described as “the dumbest people in the country” who are also “dishonest political actors.”

“For those people who aren’t familiar with who you are, I want people to know who you are, and I want you to be widely recognized as the most important historian in the United States, because I think that you are,” he added. (On his Fox show in 2021, Carlson praised Cooper for a “really smart” thread validating Trump supporters who claim the 2020 presidential election was stolen.)

Cooper explained to Carlson and his audience his view that legitimate German grievances are treated too unsympathetically by historians and that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was “the chief villain” of World War II because he continued the conflict rather than admitting the Germans had triumphed in Western Europe in 1940. His argument effectively excises the Nazi ideology and the resulting genocidal slaughter of European Jews.

Cooper has repeatedly demonstrated “a strange fondness for Adolf Hitler,” as Mediaite documented, including posting side-by-side a photo of Adolf Hitler and other Nazis marching in front of the Eiffel Tower and a photo of a drag performance during the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony with the comment, “This may be putting it too crudely for some, but the picture on the left was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right” (he later deleted the post).

For his part, Carlson has long been a favorite of neo-Nazis due to his extensive history of bigoted and extremist rhetoric.

“Throwing people in jail” for “taboo” views of WWII

DARRYL COOPER: And I told the students at the University of Vienna, I said, over the next couple of decades, we’re going to get to a point where the interwar period and the second World War are far enough away that people can actually start taking a more honest look at everything that went on, and it is going to be the most fruitful place that any aspiring historian can dive into, because we’ve spent the last 70 years, I mean, in Europe’s case, like literally throwing people in jail for looking into the wrong corners. So, there’s so, and even—

TUCKER CARLSON: Particularly in Austria.

COOPER: Right, right, and so even in the United States—

CARLSON: Which was an invaded country, so I’m not exactly sure why it’s so important.

COOPER: Yeah.

CARLSON: Well, I mean—

COOPER: It’s a big topic.

CARLSON: (LAUGHS)COOPER: I mean, even in the United States, where you’re not going to go to jail necessarily for doing that, you might have your life ruined and lose your job.

CARLSON: You might absolutely go to jail in this country.

COOPER: Nowadays you might, yeah.

Carlson and Cooper were unusually cagey about what taboo opinions could result in jail time, but they seem to be talking about Holocaust denial, which is prosecuted in Austria and several other European countries. They later proceeded to do some, albeit without mentioning the word.

“They just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there”

The thesis Cooper presented is that people have been engrained with “emotional triggers” which prevent them from contradicting the “state religion’s version” of World War II, and that a more accurate version of events can be had by treating the Nazi worldview of victimhood more sympathetically.

DARRYL COOPER: The one rule is that you shall not do that, you shall not look at this topic and try to understand how the Germans saw the world, like how the whole thing, from the first World War on up to the very end of the war, how these people might have genuinely felt like they were the ones under attack, that they were the ones being victimized by their neighbors and by all these, by the Allied powers. You know and you can handle that with a sentence, you know, you can wave it off and say well they’re justifying themselves or they’re rationalizing their evil or whatever you want to say, but again that’s — I think we’re getting to the point where that’s very unsatisfying for people.

Churchill, who served as prime minister of the United Kingdom from May 1940 through July 1945, emerges in Cooper’s view as “the chief villain” of the war.

“He didn’t kill the most people, he didn’t commit the most atrocities, but I believe,” he explained, “when you really 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, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.”

Cooper presented the atrocities perpetrated by Nazi Germany as committed less out of malice than incompetence:

DARRYL COOPER: Germany, look, they put themselves into a position — and Adolf Hitler’s chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it — that when they went into the east in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners, and so forth, that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there.

You know, you have, you have, like, letters, as early as July, August 1941 from commandants of these makeshift camps that they’re setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering, or people they’re rounding up, and they’re — so it’s two months after, a month or two after [Operation] Barbarossa was launched, and they’re writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, we can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people, and one of them actually says rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn't it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?

Cooper later reiterated that “at the end of the day, you launched that war with no plan to care for the millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war that were going to come under your control, and millions of people died because of that.”

In fact, the Nazis planned for their invasion to trigger mass starvation as local food stocks were redistributed to Germans. “Approximately 7 million Soviet civilians, Jews and gentiles alike, died as a consequence of Der Hungerplan,” according to the Nobel Peace Center.

Moreover, there is something missing from Cooper’s narrative that the Nazis may have been correct that “they were the ones under attack,” and that the death camps that followed their invasion of the Soviet Union were something of an unfortunate accident in which “millions of people ended up dead”: Jews.

Cooper ignores Hitler’s virulent hatred of Jewish people; the entire slew of Nazi race laws implemented to punish them after he rose to power; his movement’s increasingly apocalyptic propaganda about them; the “Final Solution” its leaders laid out in January 1942 to eradicate the entire people from the continent; and the systemic deportations of Jews from western European countries to concentration and death camps in central and eastern Europe.

Why Churchill “wanted a war” and “wanted to fight Germany”

Having erased the historical mass murder of European Jews, Cooper went on to suggest they were to blame for the war’s expansion.

He argued that when Churchill became prime minister in May 1940 and then evacuated British forces from Dunkirk as western and northern Europe came under Nazi control, the war was effectively already over and the Germans had won. But Churchill refused to give up in the face of German peace proposals because he “wanted a war, he wanted to fight Germany,” and continued the fight in hopes of eventually convincing the Americans to join the Allies.

When Carlson asked Cooper why Churchill had done that, Cooper offered a series of motives. He said that Churchill might have been seeking “redemption” after he was “humiliated” as First Lord of the Admiralty in World War I. He also described Churchill as a “psychopath,” a “drunk,” and “very childish in strange ways.”

But then Cooper turned to how Churchill was “such a dedicated booster of Zionism from early on in his life.” He argued that this was in part because Churchill hoped Zionism would be a bulwark against eastern European Jews becoming communists. But Cooper continued that there was more to this than the “ideological component”:

DARRYL COOPER: But then as time goes on, you know, you read stories about Churchill going bankrupt and needing money, getting bailed out by people who shared his interests, you know, in terms of Zionism, but also his hostility, just — you know, I think his hostility to — put it this way: I think his hostility to Germany was real. I don’t think that he necessarily had to be bribed to have that feeling. But, you know, I think he was, to an extent, put in place by people, the financiers, by a media complex that wanted to make sure that he was the guy who, you know, was representing Britain in that conflict, for a reason.

In short, Cooper told Carlson’s audience that Churchill was in hock to Zionist financiers who had him “put in place” as prime minister because they knew he was a warmonger who would reject Nazi pleas for peace and ensure widespread death and destruction.

Carlson responded to Cooper’s theory by praising him as a “defender of the West or its values” and touting his adherence to “Western notions” like “rigor” and “honesty.”

“An acceptable solution to the Jewish problem”

Cooper appeared to walk back some of his most incendiary remarks after Carlson’s show circulated on X and triggered a firestorm.

A poster asked Cooper on Tuesday morning:

Darryl, am I right to take the following 2 inferences from your statements? (I'll state them worst-case.)

1. Death camp exterminations arose, in part, out of a German urge to be humane and compassionate.

2. Churchill was installed by Jewish financiers because Jewish interests were at stake in Germany.

He highlighted two of Cooper’s comments to Carlson that led him to ask that question and added that “the notion that there was a humanitarian motive to the Holocaust, or that Churchill took the world to war to serve, or manipulated by, Jewish interests” seemed like “high-octane anti-semitic jet fuel.”

Cooper responded to the poster by stating in part that he wasn’t trying to suggest the Nazis were humane, only that “evidence that the reports warning Churchill of starvation conditions that would soon lead to mass death among the weakest and most vulnerable were backed up on the ground,” and that he does not “think the evidence, at least that I’ve seen, justifies thinking Churchill was installed by Zionists.” The post, it its entirety:

1. I was trying to make the point that, even under the most generous interpretation of Germany’s actions, they were responsible for what happened to the people they took into custody. If every excuse was true, they were still responsible. If I’d have been more cogent at that point in the interview, I’d have gotten to my actual point, which was about Churchill - namely, that he was fully apprised of the fact that the hunger blockade was creating starvation conditions across the continent, and that prisoners, Jews, etc would be at the bottom of list to receive what food was available, yet he still refused any consideration of relief, even brokered through neutral nations to ensure the food was distributed to non-German civilians only - a provision to which Germany agreed at one point. The letter from the camp commandant about finishing people off who would starve n in the winter (he really does ask, in the letter, wouldn’t it be more humane?) is real, but I did not intend it as proof of German intentions, but as evidence that the reports warning Churchill of starvation conditions that would soon lead to mass death among the weakest and most vulnerable were backed up on the ground. You could probably tell I got visibly uncomfortable during much of that section. I wasn’t as well prepared as I’d have been if I had finished the podcast on the topic, and I knew I was jumping around and being incomplete.

2. No, I don’t think the evidence, at least that I’ve seen, justifies thinking Churchill was installed by Zionists. He was installed by the vehemently pro-war, anti-German faction, some of whom were wealthy British Jews, most of whom were not. It’s true that when Churchill was facing bankruptcy and the loss of his family estate in in the late ‘30s, he was bailed out by a wealthy Jewish banker (among others), but I’m not aware of any proof that this affected his views - he was always a warmonger, and had been a Zionist at least back to 1920. The pro-Zionist press in Britain - some of which was controlled by Jews, some not - revived Churchill’s reputation and helped him get elected, sure, but Churchill’s views were already in place, and the table had been set so that a pro-war shift coming after the invasion of Poland was inevitable.

The poster replied that Cooper seemed to be avoiding a core aspect of why the Nazis were bad (emphasis in the original):

Look, I don't have the knowledge (but I intend to get it) to debate this stuff. But the question put another way is: What are we getting wrong about the Holocaust? I'm not clear if you agree that the Germans intended (and created an infrastructure) to eradicate the Jews because they were Jews. It's weird that such a basic point is still in the fog.

Cooper had not replied to that response as of posting time. But on Tuesday night he posted a long thread detailing why “Churchill was a chief villain of World War 2.” In that thread, Cooper downplayed “Churchill's dependency on Zionist/Jewish interests,” acknowledging he “was unclear about it in the Tucker interview.” He also commented: “My contention is not that the Third Reich was peaceful, or that Germany did not kill Jews. Germany dishonored itself by its conduct on the Eastern Front.”

In that thread, Cooper also claimed that “a young Adolf Hitler's fantasies about lebensraum [living space] were born of watching his people starve in the streets.” And, chillingly, he complained that Hitler “was ignored” by Churchill when he proposed “work[ing] with the other powers to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.”

People “we only talk about privately” caused “the destruction” of the West

Carlson and Cooper went on to discuss their simpatico views on a variety of topics, from mass immigration to the United States (Carlson: “Clearly, the point of it now is to tear the place down”) and Europe (Cooper: “Those people are in the process right now of forever losing the only spot of land that they have on this Earth”) to the civil rights movement (Cooper: It was used by people seeking “a wedge issue to spark revolution in one sense or another” and bring about the “disintegration of the country”) to Trump, Viktor Orban, and Vladimir Putin (Carlson: “They’re all kind — you know, in the 1984, -5, -6, context they would be sort of moderate, maybe conservative Democrats, liberal Republicans. Like, they’re not at all what people claim they are”).

Toward the end of the discussion, they tied together their discussions of World War II and modern immigration to the United States and Europe. Carlson commented that he “can’t get over the fact that the West wins” the war “and is completely destroyed in less than a century” due to immigration.

“Somehow, the United States and Western Europe won — that’s the conventional understanding — and both have now look like they lost a world war,” he added. “So, like, what the hell was that? Like, there’s something very, very heavy.”

Cooper replied by indicating that shadowy forces he and Carlson can “only talk about privately” were responsible for the “destruction.”

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah, I mean, it’s all the things that we have been talking about and probably some things that, you know, we only talk about privately, but we can see the results of it. … So the real question is if they were trying to achieve that destruction that you’re talking about, if they were trying, they couldn’t have done it more directly or more effectively.

When you put this together with Cooper’s call for more sympathy for the plight of 1930s Germany, you end up with a justification for a resurgence of Western fascism. That argument is now being spread to a massive audience by someone who has the ear of the GOP presidential nominee and a major role as a kingmaker in that party.