The case against Darryl Cooper
A warning to the Right about the man Tucker Carlson called “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.”
Earlier this week, Tucker Carlson announced that he will once again be hosting podcaster Darryl Cooper on The Tucker Carlson Show, this time for a live primetime interview about the Jeffrey Epstein case. In a reply to Tucker’s announcement post on X, I said the following:
Darryl Cooper is a Nazi, and you’re setting what’s left of your reputation on fire for not only choosing to platform him, but praising him like this.
This admittedly provocative reply has gotten over 46,000 impressions and received over 1,000 likes. In response, I’ve gotten a lot of nasty replies, many of them undeniably antisemitic. (I’m not Jewish, but if you defend Israel or attack Nazism or antisemitism, you’re going to receive antisemitic comments.)
I did have several people ask me, many of them seemingly in good faith, why I called Cooper a Nazi. One person even kindly DM’d me and said something to the effect of “Hey, I followed you recently, and I like most of what you say, but I’m not sure about this one. Can you explain why you called him that?”
First, I don’t call someone a Nazi lightly. Unfortunately, a lot of people completely brush off the term because for the last decade, the American Left has been calling everyone one inch to their right a Nazi. When I use the term, I mean specifically that the person I’m calling a Nazi holds reverence or sympathy for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. I think Cooper meets that criterion. Here are just a few examples that support the claim.
Last year, someone on X asked Cooper the following question:
In your read of history, do you believe a united continental Europe under Nazi/Hitler rule would have been a better outcome than what actually transpired? | I assume far less innocent people would have died, but in your opinion, would that have been the better outcome in totality?
Cooper replied:
I can't imagine anything worse happening than what did happen.
Now I’m not here to claim that we couldn’t imagine a better postwar outcome than what happened. For example, I think we can all agree that it would have been better for Eastern Europe to have remained independent of the Soviet Union, but most of us are nonetheless glad that the result of WWII was that Hitler and the Nazis were defeated, and Western Europe was freed of their oppression. Not Cooper. His reply makes it clear that he doesn’t believe that a Hitler-dominated Europe would have been a worse outcome than the actual result of the war.
In a 2019 reply on X, Cooper said:
Democracy is a disease. Tyranny is the cure.
While this wasn’t a post directly relating to Nazi Germany, it demonstrates the contempt Cooper has for democracy and the value he finds in authoritarianism.
About a year ago, Cooper posted on X:
If you're having a bad day, just remember that the Trump shooter is currently wandering around Hell looking for Hitler while the two guys Kyle Rittenhouse dropped figure out how to break the news to him.
In case Cooper’s meaning is not clear, he’s saying that Hitler isn’t in Hell, as most would believe, but that he’s in Heaven.
In yet another post, he posted two pictures. On the right was the blasphemous “Last Supper” depiction from the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics. On the left was a photo of Hitler and his entourage with the Eiffel Tower behind them after France fell to the Nazis. Along with those two photos, Cooper posted:
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.
In another post on X last summer, Cooper posted a photo of himself driving a tractor while holding a coffee mug with what looks like a Nazi eagle insignia on it with the caption, “Guten morgen, fellas.” He also tagged the account of the man he bought the mug from. Journalist Jordan Schachtel did some digging and had this to say about the seller of that mug:
The man who runs the group, called the "three seven mafia," describes himself as "openly Nazi," believes the Holocaust is a mere "mythology," and openly worships Hitler.
Just last month, a man named Corey J. Mahler, who is openly a white nationalist and admirer of Hitler, posted the following on X:
The American Right is, by any reasonable metric, now openly National Socialist.
Mahler was celebrating this, not condemning it. In response, Darryl Cooper quoted the post and inserted a GIF of the Joker from The Dark Knight saying, “I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.” Cooper later claimed he didn’t know who Mahler was, which I find hard to believe since Cooper follows Mahler’s podcast cohost on X.
When I’ve brought some of this up in the past, I’ll often get a reply saying, “He’s just joking,” or “He’s being misunderstood.” But here’s the thing, there is nothing that I have ever posted online that would lead anyone to mistakenly conclude that I have sympathy for Hitler and the Nazis. With Cooper, I’ve just provided several posts in which he certainly comes across as sympathetic to (if not supportive of) Hitler’s regime.
Nevertheless, Cooper has received effusive praise from libertarian and dissident Right figures such as Dave Smith, Scott Horton, Tucker Carlson, and Joe Rogan. In his most recent podcast episode, Dave Smith mockingly said this of Cooper’s first appearance on Carlson’s show, “…he made this, you know, essentially he made this shocking claim that maybe Winston Churchill mishandled things and played a role in leading to the catastrophe that was World War II.”
Assuming you could ignore all of the Nazi postings from Cooper on X, if all Cooper said on Tucker’s show was that “maybe Winston Churchill mishandled things and played a role in leading to the catastrophe that was World War II” I don’t think most people would have objected to it, at least so strongly. Maybe Allied leaders could have done something in the interwar years to stop the rise of Hitler in Germany and prevent Hitler’s conquests and atrocities. But that’s not what Cooper said. What he actually said was, “Maybe I'm being a little hyperbolic. Maybe. But I told him that I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War.” Cooper followed up that controversial appearance with a long thread of posts on X where he reasserted the claim but changed it to “a chief villain,” but dropped claims that he was “maybe” being hyperbolic. Nearly every post in that thread had a Community Note linked to evidence against the claims Cooper made.
Tucker Carlson clearly doesn’t care what you think of him or of Cooper. In fact, he seems to feed off of the hate he receives. In his teaser trailer for the upcoming Cooper appearance on his show, Tucker tripled down on his praise of Cooper, saying:
We are honored to welcome back the most august historian in America, a man of such immense gravity, wisdom, and insight that he makes Herodotus look like a TikTok influencer. The man, of course, is our friend, Darryl Cooper.
Cooper isn’t even the worst example of the rising re-examination of WWII and Nazi Germany on the right. There’s a lot of open support for Hitler that is far more explicit than anything Cooper has said, and with it, rising antisemitism. It’s like an old evil that lay sleeping for decades is being reawakened. But Cooper is incredibly influential. And he’s providing a lot of material for these demented freaks online who believe that WWII is nothing more than a myth created by Jews to dominate the global order and destroy the West. (This is literally the kind of thing these people say.)
Douglas Murray spoke to this trend to Dave Smith on the Joe Rogan Show when talking about Cooper and others in the dissident right podcast sphere when he said, “What are you watering?” Unfortunately, what Tucker and Cooper are watering is a distortion of history that undermines the evils of Nazism and Hitler. And the right needs to actually say, “This is wrong” and stamp out the flames of this evil rhetoric before it ignites a bigger conflagration.
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