The Podcaster Asking You to Side With History's Villains

New York Times

13-04-2025

All of a sudden, everyone was coming for Darryl Cooper.
There were the newspaper columnists, the historians, the Jewish groups: 'Repugnant,' said the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum, in a statement. Even the Biden White House released a statement, calling him 'a Holocaust denier who spreads Nazi propaganda.'
So it was time for Mr. Cooper, one of the most popular podcasters in the country, to do what he does best: hit record.
In a special episode of his history program, 'Martyr Made,' Mr. Cooper addressed the controversy, which had exploded out of his Sept. 2 appearance on 'The Tucker Carlson Show,' the podcast started by the former Fox News host. At first, Mr. Cooper — a gifted historical storyteller but not a trained historian — defended the claims he had made on Mr. Carlson's show: One, that Winston Churchill was the 'chief villain' of the war, not, by implication, Adolf Hitler. And two, that millions had died in Nazi-controlled Eastern Europe because the Nazis had not adequately planned to feed them.
But then he pivoted. He admitted he had been 'hyperbolic' about Mr. Churchill and said he had not meant to imply the Holocaust was the result of logistical problems. Then he read harrowing testimony from a survivor of the infamous 1941 massacre of Ukrainian Jews at Babi Yar, at one point becoming so overwhelmed that he had to collect himself.
This emotional ventriloquism is a big part of Mr. Cooper's approach and appeal.
On TikTok, a fan praised him as 'one of the best historians of our time because he tries to go out of his way to understand the perspective of everyone involved in a situation.'
Or, as Joe Rogan put it when he had Mr. Cooper on his show in March: Mr. Cooper's work inhabits extreme positions in an attempt to understand the psychology behind them. The critics, who Mr. Rogan suggested were 'paranoid' Jews, were overreacting, missing the point.
These critics have probably helped make Mr. Cooper bigger than ever. He has the most subscribed-to history newsletter on Substack, one spot ahead of the eminent economic historian Adam Tooze's. In the wake of the Rogan interview, 'Martyr Made' was the seventh-most popular podcast on Spotify, just after Mr. Carlson's, though it has since fallen. Mr. Cooper's followers on X include Vice President JD Vance and David Sacks, President Trump's artificial intelligence and crypto czar. This year, a guest on The New York Times Opinion's 'Ezra Klein Show' — a fairly reliable barometer of the elite liberal mood — recommended 'Martyr Made' as a good window into right-wing thinking.
All of which makes Mr. Cooper a man of this second Trumpian moment: an idiosyncratic autodidact with no formal affiliations who has built a huge audience by promising his listeners ostensibly forbidden histories, a self-fashioned 'brave truth-teller' willing to challenge elite consensus, said Nicole Hemmer, a historian at Vanderbilt University who has written about the history of right-wing media.
His project syncs up with the radical skepticism ascendant on the American right, which is currently upending decades of institutional wisdom around public health, education and international trade. And in its outlook, if not its politics, this skepticism rhymes with the 'woke' left's, promising deeper realities concealed by a dying power structure.
To his detractors, Mr. Cooper is a fascist, sloppily peddling old debunked arguments. To his supporters, he is pure of heart, merely asking uncomfortable questions about our national mythology.
'The Western order is coming apart,' Mr. Carlson said in an interview. 'This whole postwar structure is going away and we need to rethink it. Darryl is a threat to that.'
The question is, what kind of a threat?
Establishing His Style
As befits a self-taught outsider, Mr. Cooper, 43, is far from a tweedy professor holed up in the archives of a university. He has said he lives in northern Idaho, where public records indicate that he and his wife own a log home set on more than 30 acres.
On X, Mr. Cooper has posted about hobbies that include mixed martial arts and a tabletop strategy board game about World War II. In broadcasts, he gives the impression of a sturdy, slightly nerdy ex-military man, which, it turns out, is what he is.
(For this story, Mr. Cooper agreed to answer questions only by email because, he wrote, he had gotten himself into trouble with 'poorly worded and incomplete verbal interview answers lately,' a reference to his appearance on 'The Tucker Carlson Show.' He published his answers on his Substack on March 23, writing that he had been a 'victim of press smears in the past.')
Born in California and raised by a single mother, Mr. Cooper had a peripatetic childhood, attending 30 to 40 schools from K-12, he said in the email interview. Much of the time, he had his nose in a book, his way of 'maintaining some consistency as we moved from place to place.'
He read his way, too, through a 10-year career in the Navy, after attending only three semesters of college. When he finished his service, he said he went to work for the Department of Defense as a consultant for foreign buyers of the Navy's Aegis Weapons System. His job took him around the world.
In 2014, a war in Gaza broke out. Mr. Cooper found himself curious about it, but realized he did not know much about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict beyond what he called the 'American pop culture version of events.' So he went on a reading binge. As he went through stacks of books about early Zionism and Mandate Palestine, a friend recommended that Mr. Cooper start a history podcast like 'Hardcore History,' Dan Carlin's epic, dramatic podcast about wars ancient and modern.
Mr. Cooper was a fan. And Mr. Carlin gave him another model, too — like many online personalities, he was not a trained expert in the field he was expounding on, but an extremely well-read enthusiast.
The next year, Mr. Cooper released the first episode of a 30-hour show he called 'Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem,' which established the 'Martyr Made' template.
The show begins with a visceral description of what he thought it would be like to be a European Jew living through a pogrom — intended to make the audience, regardless of their political leanings, understand the conditions from which Zionism was born.
Over the next six episodes, Mr. Cooper ping-pongs between Zionist and Palestinian perspectives, condensing reams of academic history into a sweeping story about a tragic cycle of revenge, reading first-person accounts along the way. (Sometimes, he does voices.)
The show is critical of Zionism, and Mr. Cooper has been outspoken on X about his disgust with the Israeli government's conduct in its current war in Gaza, a stance that has won him some fans on the left. Mr. Cooper has said he is proud to receive correspondence from both Israelis and Palestinians who say they are more sympathetic to the other side after listening to his program.
Over the next few years, shows about Jonestown, the American labor wars and Jeffrey Epstein followed. The plain-spoken Mr. Cooper refined his approach, weaving anecdote, digression, testimony and historical analysis into hourslong narratives.
The nearly eight-hour final episode of the Jonestown series is, among other things, a panoptic account of urban disorder and left-wing politics in the 1970s, and features a dizzying array of references, including to the anticolonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon and the filmmaker Terrence Malick.
In an era in which much political content preaches to the choir, and comes in rabid, bite-size chunks, a long-form history podcast may seem like an absurdly cumbersome way to push a message. But Mr. Cooper has done just that. According to Substack's public leaderboard, Mr. Cooper's newsletter has tens of thousands of subscribers, who each pay $5 a month. This means, at the very least, he is making approximately $50,000 a month, minus the platform's 10 percent cut. (And that does not include whatever Mr. Cooper makes in revenue from various streaming platforms.)
'If he weren't good at it, I'd be less worried,' said Patrick Wyman, a trained historian and the host of the podcast 'Tides of History.'
Courting Controversy
Mr. Cooper's first real brush with national attention came in 2021, when he posted a widely shared Twitter thread about the psychology behind right-wing election denialism. In it, Mr. Cooper attributed Trump supporters' skepticism of mainstream media to their feeling misled by the national press over sensational — and never substantiated — accounts of President Trump's alleged collusion with the Russian government.
The series of posts demonstrated Mr. Cooper's gift for asking one side to inhabit the seemingly incomprehensible mind-set of the other. It was also, critics said, tendentious and sloppy.
What Mr. Cooper did portray accurately was a kind of nihilism taking root in American life, the loss of even the idea of a shared truth. In this contested space, conditions were ripe to make people believe new, once-fringe ideas.
On his podcast, Mr. Cooper moved methodically, pointing to sources and research. On social media, he played the role of provocateur. Aware of his own reputation as a right-winger, Mr. Cooper sometimes trolls his critics, who have pored over his accounts for signs of his flirtation with extremism.
To be fair, they have not had to look very far.
Mr. Cooper has left a long trail of posts criticizing democracy. ('Democracy is a disease. Tyranny is the cure.') And he has presented fascism as an understandable response to the excesses of the left. ('Fascism is merely what happens when normal people realize that the left will never stop until they're forced to.')
Last year, Mr. Cooper posted on X two images side by side. The first was a historical image of Nazi leaders in Paris. The second was a photograph of the controversial 'Last Supper'-themed tableau at the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony, which featured drag queens. Mr. Cooper wrote that the former image was 'infinitely preferable in virtually every way.'
He later deleted the post for being in 'bad taste,' but defended the sentiment behind it in the email interview: 'It is hard to imagine that any historical catastrophe could have led to a worse present result than a country like France, for a thousand years a jewel of Christendom, concluding that the best use of their limited time in front of a global audience was a blasphemous mockery of the Last Supper.' (Mr. Cooper is Christian and sometimes writes about theology, although he did not confirm via email to which denomination he belonged, if any.)
This is a pattern of Mr. Cooper's: to say something shocking and then to backtrack slightly. It's a strategy, his critics say, to slowly shift the boundaries of mainstream discourse.
'From my perspective, he is very clearly laundering ideas and talking points that have been very common among the white nationalist far right for decades,' Mr. Wyman said. 'He understands the rules of the game and what you can and can't say.'
Asked by email to describe his politics, Mr. Cooper avoided labels, but blamed liberalism for destroying 'local institutions that embodied the ancient human way of being together.'
He suggested that most Americans felt unrepresented by their government, but added that any attempt to change our current system of mass democracy would 'lead to disorder and unpredictable consequences.' He said that 'anarchy is worse than tyranny for regular people,' and confirmed his admiration for Francisco Franco, the far-right dictator of Spain.
Some of these sentiments have made him a divisive figure on the right.
In a column last year in The Free Press, the conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari coined the term 'the Barbarian Right' to refer to Mr. Cooper and others, calling them 'a cohort of writers, pseudo-scholars and shitposters dedicated to reviving some of the darkest tendencies in the history of thought' by attacking 'what they see as the founding 'mythology' of the postwar world … that the Nazis were actually, you know, evil.'
The conservative military historian Victor Davis Hanson, who was part of the 1776 Commission — the Trump administration's rebuttal to The Times's 1619 Project — has also criticized Mr. Cooper, saying he was not 'aware of the facts' of World War II.
Yet there is little dispute that Mr. Cooper's way of doing things, in affect as well as in politics, is becoming more popular on the right. The new Trump administration has been more aggressive than ever in targeting what it sees as anti-American history about representation and diversity, and in regarding international agreements and human rights as weak and suspicious.
In this environment, figures like Mr. Cooper have come to the fore, advancing the notion that the left is a powerful force of social disorder, the main villain of global politics.
Ms. Hemmer, the Vanderbilt historian, described it as a nativist, isolationist strain, once embodied by figures like the paleoconservative Pat Buchanan — himself the author of a book, 'Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War,' about Mr. Churchill's belligerence.
'In the '80s and '90s, it was a minor key in the party,' she said. 'Now, it's the chorus.'
Who's Suppressed?
The idea that right-wing authoritarianism is a lesser evil than left-wing authoritarianism brings Mr. Cooper into conversation with a tradition of historians and writers who view World War II as a clash of two evils in which the atrocities committed by the Germans were not morally different from those that had been perpetrated by the Soviets.
That's an important frame for Mr. Cooper's new series, 'Enemy: The German's War,' which Mr. Cooper fast-tracked after his appearance on Mr. Carlson's show. He released the first episode in January.
'Anyone expecting me to validate their prejudices will be sorely disappointed,' Mr. Cooper wrote in an email. 'That goes for people used to dehumanizing Germans as well as for people hoping, since I've shown a willingness to engage alternate narratives of the war, that I'm going to excuse or deny atrocities committed by the Third Reich.'
In February, Mr. Cooper posted to X an image of a stack of books, including many mainstream histories, that he said he used to prepare for the show. That stack also featured several books by David Irving, a disgraced British historian who has denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and helped popularize the theory about Mr. Churchill's culpability in World War II espoused by Mr. Cooper on Mr. Carlson's show.
Mr. Cooper has defended Mr. Irving's work, even though Mr. Irving was found by a British court in 2000 to have misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence in his books. To Mr. Cooper, he's an example of 'pressure groups' succeeding in censoring questioning voices.
It's a theme that seems to resonate with him: powerful forces keeping people from knowing the full story, even if the story has been discredited.
Asked in an interview whether it was true that the German account of World War II had been suppressed, the historian Richard Evans, who was a central witness in the case against Mr. Irving, replied with incredulity.
'That's ridiculous,' he said. 'Who are these people suppressing knowledge? It's just a fantasy.' Mr. Evans pointed to his own three-volume history of the Third Reich as proof.
The first episode of Mr. Cooper's new series opens with a long reading from 'Germany Must Perish!,' a 1941 tract by an American Jewish businessman calling for the mass sterilization of Germans — and a text used by both Nazi war criminals and German revisionist historians to claim that World War II was motivated by a genuine German fear of a Jewish plot to take over the world.
It's a classic Cooper move — to try to put his listeners in the mind-set of a group considered beyond the pale, to get listeners to understand how they arrived at their justifications.
But to what end? What are the present political implications of trying to empathize with Germans under the Nazi regime, to better understand their own justifications for their crimes?
On a recent episode of the 'New Founding' podcast, Mr. Cooper suggested that he worried the accepted American account of World War II ran the danger of providing the United States with the justification for committing crimes abroad.
A friend of Mr. Cooper's, a history grad student named Alexander von Sternberg, grappled with this in a column, 'Darryl Cooper: Revisionist History and Misplaced Empathy.'
Pointing out many errors in Mr. Cooper's interpretations and the one-sidedness of his framing, Mr. von Sternberg bemoaned the lack of rigor in Mr. Cooper's approach to sourcing. He also asked why this second-rate argument was being put forward in an attempt to understand the Nazis.
'If the empathy we feel is merely to serve the contrarian impulses so many of us possess, then what kind of empathy is that?' Mr. von Sternberg wrote, voicing the question central to the project of making a podcast for a large audience in 2025 that seeks to humanize the Nazis. 'It certainly does not appear to foster a greater, more complex understanding of the human condition. In fact, it simply sounds like a typical way to shift loyalties from one narrative over to another.'