Tucker Carlson Hosts Nazi Apologist Who Makes Heinous Claim About WWII
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson prefaced his latest podcast episode by lauding guest Darryl Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian,” and then looked on entranced in the video recording of it as Cooper argued Nazi Germany dictator Adolf Hitler wasn’t the “chief villain” of World War II.
Cooper, who has shared pro-Hitler posts on social media, argued on the podcast that then-British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was to blame for the war.
“I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War,” he told Carlson, adding that “maybe” he was being provocative. “Now, he didn’t kill the most people, he didn’t commit the most atrocities, but … he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.”
Carlson, who had encouraged Cooper to expound by arguing “it’s fair to ask” about this subject, went on to urge his guest to “make the case” for Churchill’s apparent crimes. Cooper claimed he doesn’t believe Hitler was part of “the good guys,” but then seemingly argued as much.
Cooper accurately stated that Hitler “launched a war” but then claimed the Nazi high command only ordered “the millions and millions of prisoners of war” killed out of pity — to save them from dying of starvation — as the Nazis were “completely unprepared to deal” with them.
He then claimed Hitler pushed for peace with Britain and France, while Churchill bombed Nazi Germany, “the purpose of which was to kill as many civilians as possible.”
Carlson, who was fired from Fox News in 2023, never corrected his guest in Monday’s episode.
German historian Michael Geyer, however — a professor emeritus of German and European history at the University of Chicago — notes that Cooper’s take is inaccurate.
“The question I’d have is whether it is worth engaging someone like him on any of his claims,” Geyer said. “You get from one distortion to the next, his Holocaust story being interesting because it is no longer outright denial (i.e., it never happened) but considered collateral damage.”
Former Rep. Liz Cheney was among those on social media who jumped to correct Cooper’s take on history.
“Actually, this is pro-Nazi propaganda, including, ‘Churchill was the chief villain of WW2’ and Hitler ‘didn’t want to fight,’” Cheney wrote Tuesday in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “No serious or honorable person would support or endorse this type of garbage.”
This isn’t the first time Cooper espoused a pro-Hitler ethos either.
In a since-deleted post from July on X, Cooper shared side-by-side images of Hitler in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and of a controversial moment from the recent Olympics opening ceremony in the city — and said the former is “infinitely preferable in virtually every way” to the latter.
He also recently implied in a post that Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed after attempting to assassinate former President Donald Trump earlier this year, went to hell — but Hitler didn’t. In June, Cooper argued that “a thousand years of tyranny is preferable” to geopolitical “anarchy.”
Carlson has elevated extremist opinions like these before, and notably regurgitated a baseless conspiracy theory in 2018 about South Africa engaging in a genocide against white farmers. The Fox News segment, while ludicrous, eventually reached then-President Trump.
The conservative pundit also famously used his airtime to promote the “great replacement” theory, which aims to convince white Christians that they’re being “replaced” by immigrants, people of color and non-Christians — and that this is being orchestrated by liberal elites.
“Tucker is a chameleon,” Melissa Ryan, whose CARD Strategies tracks online extremism and disinformation, told NPR in 2023. “He’s very good at reading the room and figuring out where the right-wing base is at and adapting to give them as much red meat as they want.”
