Tucker Carlson Criticized After Hosting ‘Nazi Apologist’ on Podcast

Both liberals and conservatives have turned against Tucker Carlson after controversial podcaster and self-proclaimed historian Darryl Cooper claimed on Carlson’s show that “millions of people died” in Nazi concentration camps.

Cooper also portrayed British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as the “greatest villain” of World War II.

Carlson said on X that Cooper “may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States” when he The Tucker Carlson Show Monday’s episode, featuring topics such as Christianity and authoritarian leaders like Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin.

The episode then featured a series of claims from Cooper, who had previously gone viral on the MAGA fringe with a lengthy Twitter thread in July 2021 in which he purported to explain that the January 6 riot happened because Democrats lied about Trump.

Of Churchill, Cooper told Calson: “He didn’t kill the most people, he didn’t commit the most atrocities, but I believe… if you look into it and tell the story properly and leave nothing out, you see that he was primarily responsible for the development of that war,” Cooper told Carlson.

He further claimed that this did not mean that he saw Adolf Hitler as the hero of the war. “That is not the case,” he said.

But where Hitler went wrong, Cooper suggested, was in involving Germany in “a war where they were totally unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war and local political prisoners.”

The Tucker Carlson Podcast

“They went in there without a plan and just threw these people into camps,” he said. “And millions of people died there.”

Six million Jews did not end up “dead” – the Nazis systematically murdered them during the Holocaust.

Cooper is a podcaster who hosts the podcast “Martyr Made,” whose popularity skyrocketed after the Carlson episode. The episode was ranked No. 2 on all Apple Podcasts as of Tuesday afternoon, behind only Carlson.

Cooper said Churchill “wanted” to go to war despite Hitler’s efforts to broker peace, and brushed aside Hitler’s murderous oppression of Jews and other races. He described the actions of Churchill’s bombers during the war as “crude terrorism” in killing civilians. “They wiped these places out, like gigantic terrorist attacks, the largest, you know, scale of terrorist attacks that you’ve ever seen in the history of the world,” Cooper said.

While some praised Carlson’s discussion (“Very interesting. Worth watching,” Elon Musk wrote on X), others criticized Carlson for discriminating against someone who dismissed the actions of the Nazis.

“This is basically pro-Nazi propaganda, including: ‘Churchill was the biggest villain of WWII’ and Hitler ‘didn’t want to fight,’” former Congresswoman Liz Cheney wrote on X. “No serious or honorable person would support or endorse this kind of nonsense.”

“We didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” conservative analyst Erick Erickson wrote on X.

“He is neither the best nor the most honest,” Erickson wrote in a follow-up post. “He is a wayward moral idiot who has turned his waywardness into Nazi apologetics.”

“This is just the same old Hitler apologetics,” Sohrab Ahmari, the founder of the conservative magazine Compact, wrote on X. “Remarkably, there is no historiography behind it. This “popular historian” only makes inferential statements. Shameful.”