Tucker Carlson hosted Darryl Cooper, a controversial World War II historical revisionist and host of the Martyr Made podcast as a guest on his online show, and in a since-deleted X post, Elon Musk called Cooper’s interview “Very Interesting. Worth Watching.” Referring to Musk, Mark Cuban — the only sensible tech entrepreneur of Musk’s ilk — had some things to say about it.
Sharing Musk’s since-deleted post, Cuban wrote on X, “Delete your account,” after Musk suggested people should listen to the Cooper interview on X. And Cuban wasn’t the only person to push back on Cooper’s dubious views on history, either. Also in an X post, Liz Cheney, a conservative former politician, and anti-Trump advocate, wrote of Cooper on Carlson’s program, “Actually, this is pro-Nazi propaganda, ‘Churchill was the chief villain of WW2’ and Hitler ‘didn’t want to fight.’ No serious or honorable person would support or endorse this type of garbage.”
Cooper’s “distorted truths”
Explaining what Cooper had to say about World War II and major historical figures like Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, Cooper called Churchill the “villain” of World War II. To Cooper’s credit, at least, he added this didn’t mean he thought Hitler was the hero.
There were also alarming similarities between what Cooper said about Hitler invading Poland and Putin-apologists, who these days claim Putin never wanted an all-out war when he invaded Ukraine, and that Western policies made the Russian-Ukraine war worse, as they did in World War II, according to Cooper’s view of history.
Meanwhile, in his X post, Australian author and entrepreneur Eric Douglas Gribble called the Carlson-Cooper interview which Musk found “interesting,” a “distorted truth.” Gribble went on to add the following, referring to several other points Cooper made to Carlson:
To call the camps that the British placed German and Italian nationals in during WW2 concentration camps is a disgrace. These people were well looked after. Also, he failed to mention tht the U.S. interned Japanese nationals exactly the same way after Pearl Harbour. It has become trendy to beat up on anything to do with Britain, however if you compare Britain with what everyone else was doing at that point in time, the British were more enlightened.”
Carlson hosted a “Nazi apologist”
Finally, Hitler’s biggest mistake, Cooper told Carlson, was starting “a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners.”
This brings up one of Cooper’s most egregious claims on Carlon’s podcast; he conflated Nazi Germany’s systematic extermination of 6 million Jewish people, homosexuals, and other racial, social, religious, and ethnic minorities with “poor planning.” Germany, Cooper said, “went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there.”
On that note, Republicans Against Trump also shared their thoughts on X, writing “Tucker Carlson just hosted a Nazi apologist to explain why Hitler wasn’t so evil and how Winston Churchill was the real ‘bad guy.’ This is a reminder that Tucker Carlson got a major speaking slot at the Republican Convention and speaks regularly with Donald Trump. Vote accordingly.”
Cooper’s response
According to the Independent, Cooper shared his own since-deleted X update on the controversial Carlson interview, in which he insisted he was not defending the Third Reich or its leaders. Instead, he added, of all “the belligerent leaders, Churchill was the one most intent on prolonging and escalating the conflict into a world war of annihilation.”
Cooper added in part, “We can be skeptical of Hitler’s motives for offering peace again and again, and for holding back against British civilians despite months and months [of] provocations, but the fact is that Germany was offering peace, and by all accounts sincerely wanted it.” This is also the same “historian,” though, who allegedly shared and then deleted a picture of Hitler and the Eiffel Tower and suggested during the Paris Olympics that Nazi-occupied Paris was preferable to the state of the city today, so keep that in mind when listening to what Cooper has to say.