Churchill the Villain? Carlson, Cooper, and the Lessons of History

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The Lessons of History

“Why are current events unclear to so many people? And I always go back to the question of history. You can’t understand what’s happening right now unless you understand what’s happened before. You certainly can’t plan a coherent future unless you understand. Why do people know so little about history? Probably because it’s not taught.” 

These are great questions; it’s the answers that aren’t so good. Last week, Tucker Carlson hosted Darryl Cooper on his X show, saying he may be the “best and most honest popular historian” of our day. The interview drew immediate criticism from historians, media outlets, the left and the right, and as of this morning, the two-hour video has been viewed over 34 million times. 

Darryl Cooper is a writer and podcaster. He’s cohosted a podcast called The Unraveling with Jocko Willinck. His show Martyr Made is more in the style of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History or Mike Duncan’s History of Rome. 

Last week, when he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s X interview show, it was the first I’d heard of him. In less than two hours, he retold the story of Jonestown with Jim Jones as the misunderstood hero, sympathized with the Nazis, threw Israel under the bus, and declared that Winston Churchill was actually the main villain of World War II. 

In the aftermath of the episode, an army of responders went after Cooper on X, arguing various points, lobbing insults, and attacking his lack of credentials. Cooper (slightly) backed off his main claim that “Churchill was the main villain of the Second World War,” admitting he said that flippantly. But even if he renounced that position entirely, only a fraction of the people who heard the initial claim would hear the retraction. A wise man once said, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth ties its shoes.” The impact has been made. 

I’m unashamed in my love for Winston Churchill. You can read my book recommendations here and my ode to his eccentric character here. But I’m not as concerned with Churchill, or defending his reputation, as I am with the underlying trends that we can identify in this interview. 

Most responses to the episodes have zeroed in on the facts. Cooper plays pretty loose with his source material, selecting the points that fit his narrative rather than the other way around. But this is not all that unusual. In fact, while I don’t find Cooper to be very interesting for exactly that reason, I do think this interview reveals some crucial characteristics of our culture - and that is extremely interesting. 

Before we get into any of the specific positions Cooper takes in the interview, a couple of general points deserve mention. I want to briefly consider three questions. First, why does someone like Cooper draw an audience? Second, we’re used to deconstruction on the left; are we aware of the same tendency on the right? Third, what should we do? 

What’s the Appeal?

A few weeks ago, on our podcast, we discussed Ted Gioia’s 2024 “State of the Culture.” In it, he argues that we’re living in a dopamine culture. We’ve moved from the age of art to entertainment to distraction. Instead of playing sports or watching sports, now we bet on sports. Instead of watching movies or going to the theater, we scroll. Instead of reading history or watching a documentary, we listen to Darryl Cooper. 

The whole exchange is a rambling stream of baseless assertions, intimations that these two know much more than they’re letting on, and half-baked conspiracy theories with just enough plausibility to keep the conversation going. It’s much more akin to talk radio than it is to serious history. The goal is to shock. There’s no attempt to prove anything, marshall facts, or engage with other viewpoints. Cooper repeatedly asserts contrarian positions on everything from Jonestown to Israel to WWII and then points people to an unreleased 30+ episode series to answer his critics. 

The unfortunate thing is that people love this stuff. Tucker Carlson is not stupid. He’s building a platform. He knows what the masses want, and he’s giving it to them. So, the most important questions to ask about this conversation are not about Tucker Carlson or Darryl Cooper; they’re about us. 

Why are we more attracted to exciting half-truths than boring whole-truths?

In Compact, Matthew Walther writes about the unraveling of history as a discipline. Hardly anyone reads academic history. It’s boring, expensive, and often reflects the passing fads in the broader culture. Among the disciplines, history has not been immune to social influence. When you see the 1619 Project pushed by academic and cultural elites, what does the guild have left to give? Cooper exists because of the mistrust earned by establishment elites. 

Thus, Walther writes, “No summary could do justice to the parade of oversimplification, decontextualized pseudo-astonishment, one-sided gotcha-ism, casuistry, and moral lassitude on display in the conversation. But moral preening shouldn’t be our response to what Cooper is doing… Outrage will only feed Cooper’s self-conception as a Promethean figure, carrying his benighted listeners out of the darkness to which they have been consigned into the pure light of historical knowledge.” 

To think that technical precision is going to appeal to people intrigued by Cooper’s arguments is to sadly misdiagnose the problem. Cooper, and others like him, are not operating on the plane of true and false. He’d rather be alone and wrong than ever in the consensus. This is the axis of intrigue.  Decline of public trust, lack of basic historical knowledge, vulnerability to conspiracy theories, and the dopamine culture have all contributed to a culture in which Cooper’s interview has 100x the views that the most popular response will ever hope to achieve. 

Deconstruction on the Right?

From the very beginning, Cooper’s analysis of history – starting with Jonestown of all things – shows a few trendlines. Jim Jones started out at a racial justice crusader. His followers were true believers. It wasn’t just his charisma that led up to the mass suicide; the movement was unstoppable at that point. 

The Nazis, too, were overwhelmed by their own success. They invaded the East in a way and were surprised by the amount of prisoners of war. They simply had a scaling problem on their hands. He quotes a letter from 1941 in which someone laments that if the prisoners are just going to starve to death, would it not be more humane to put them out of their misery? And, so on it goes. The Holocaust was simply a logistics problem. 

Cooper resumes this arc at the end of the podcast. When he’s talking about sympathizing with others, seeing the best in others, and sharing common humanity, he says, “Can you at least see how a person in that position at that time was seeing the world, the factor they were taking into account when they were making that decision… Even the monsters in the world… People who zigged when you would have zagged and over the course of a whole lifetime of making different decisions ended up in a radically different place. There are brothers and sisters, siblings, who one of them ends up a drug addict and a porn star and the other is an engineer and a family man or something. They grew up in the same household, but they respond to the things that confront them in life in different ways and those things start to add up and eventually gain a momentum of their own.”  

This is deconstruction through and through. It’s the same play the left has been running for fifty years. Konstantin Kisin notes that Cooper is essentially an example of the “woke right” rather than the familiar woke left. “First, and highly relevant to our imminent discussion of the Woke Right, the Woke Left never claimed that the arguments they were making were true. Instead, rather than attempting to prove the impossible, they wisely made an entirely different claim: truth, they argued, is merely a linguistic projection of power.” 

This is why when the woke mobs started tearing down statues, they began with slaveholders and colonizers but expanded to any and every historical figure. It was never about what these people actually did; that would be the axis of truth, and they’re interested in the axis of power. 

He outlines the logic of “woke” this way: 

The Right now has another version of this woke logic. Kisin writes, 

The only thing missing is the scapegoat. It’s been elites, Marxists, and the establishment. For Cooper, and others like him, it is often the Jews. 

What Should We Do? 

Cooper and Carlson keep returning to this theme: so much of history is just “fake.” It’s propaganda, cultural mythology, sacred cows. But, they give very few examples of anything resembling a large-scale historical narrative that has been proven false. But they do a lot of intimating, suggesting, hinting that they know more than they are going to say about how bad the received wisdom is. They’re banking on a growing reservoir of skepticism and resentment in their listeners. 

There’s a half-truth here. It is good to question the historical consensus. It is good to ask questions. It is good to go back to the primary sources and question the prevailing narratives. But it is not necessarily true that every prevailing narrative is wrong. Taking a contrarian stance can be helpful, but when the evidence points a certain way, the best quality is not contrarianism or consanguinity but consistency. Truth demands that we follow the evidence. 

History is a discipline with a million data points, which means there will always be multiple interpretations of events, reasons, and trends. The question, though, is not simply what is possible but what is likely. What’s the best explanation? Cooper lives in the realm of the slightly possible, and given the laughable pablum coming out of our elite institutions (the 1619 Project, for example), he’s not alone. It’s not unusual to hear positions like this. It’s common, for example, to hear Paradise Lost taught as though Satan is the hero or the history of the West as one long story of oppression. Cooper’s revisions are just unusually bad. 

Historians should aim for what is most probable. This is essentially the difference between conspiracy and history: are we looking for any possible explanation or the best explanation? 

What makes a great historian is not the ability to read a lot of sources, but to make something of them. “By contrast,” Niall Ferguson writes, “Darryl Cooper offers a series of wild assertions that are almost entirely divorced from historical evidence and can be of interest only to those so ignorant of the past that they mistake them for daring revisionism, as opposed to base neo-Nazism.” 

Walter Russell Mead discussed the episode on his podcast, “What Really Matters.” He makes the point that amateur historian podcasts are not inherently bad - even when they espouse stale conspiracy theories long defeated. There are forms of pop history coming from every corner of the intellectual world. The answer to this is not to censor or do away with it. The answer is for good historians to spend more time thinking about how to reach a wider audience, much like the top history podcast in the world, “The Rest Is History.” Mead concludes on a great note; “You can only fight bad history with good history.” 

Responses to Cooper: 

Going through the Claims:

1) Churchill is the chief villain of the second world war (45:43).

The claim that made the biggest splash came when Cooper told Tucker that he believes Winston Churchill is the primary villain of World War II. He says, “He didn’t kill the most people. He didn’t commit the most atrocities. But when you really get into it and you really tell the story right and don’t leave anything out, you see that he was primarily responsible for that war, for it becoming anything more than an invasion of Poland.”

Even Tucker is skeptical about this claim. He asks him to explain, and Cooper begins to talk about the situation between Germany and Europe after the invasion of Poland. “If you go to 1939, when the Nazis invade Poland, Hitler is surprised when they declare war. He starts issuing peace proposals. He doesn’t want to fight. But then Hitler launches his western offensive, conquering France, the British retreat and Germany has won the war on the continent. Then Hitler gives speeches and sends out pamphlets saying he did not want war and did not want to fight.” 

Hitler the peace-maker! 

Let’s not forget, it was not Britain that started the war – or even kept it going after Germany’s early victory in Europe. Hitler was the one went back on his treaty with Chamberlain. He’s the one who violated the “Peace in our time” Munich agreement by invading Czechoslovakia. He’s the one who had been laying out his plan to conquer Europe and exterminate the Jews as early as 1925 in Mein Kampf. 

Instead, Britain and France, who had held out as long as they could, realized that Hitler’s aim was to raise the Nazi flag over Buckingham Palace if he got the chance (as he did in Paris only a year later). In short, Cooper blames the allies for extending the war simply because they did not want to be conquered. This is like blaming the three little pigs when they fled to the house of bricks. 

Andrew Roberts, the preeminent historian of Churchill writing today, lets loose on Cooper’s arguments in a way that is so devastating I only wish I could see the two of them debate in person. 

On whether Churchill was the instigator of the war, Roberts writes, “Yet in the moment that Adolf Hitler invaded Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg at dawn on May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill was not even prime minister. Unless Mr. Cooper is arguing that from his position as First Lord of the Admiralty—the head of Britain's navy—Churchill was somehow able to force Hitler to unleash Blitzkrieg in the West, his first argument falls to the ground.”

On Hitler’s supposed peace aims, Hansen writes, “In sum, Hitler wanted ‘peace’ with Britain only in the sense that he could envision no way of conquering it by land, sea, or air. In perhaps the war’s greatest miscalculation, Hitler believed that the supposedly easier conquest of Russia would then force a completely orphaned Britain to sue for peace on his terms.” 

2) Churchill knew he could not win the war, so he committed terrorist attacks on the greatest scale in world history. 

“Carpet bombing, killing civilians, terrorist attacks. The greatest scale terrorist attacks in world history.” Cooper goes a step beyond naming Churchill as the villain and begins to make a case for it. I’ll admit, there’s a lot of negative stuff out there about Churchill, some of it from top historians. I have never heard this take. 

Victor Davis Hansen responds to these claims; “As far as being a “terrorist,” Churchill soon and almost alone grasped the ultimate fantasies of Hitler’s planned genocide, world domination, the end of free nations, and a nightmarish global future. He had good reason for such pessimism after Hitler had once again, for the nth time, broken his word; he invaded Poland and began a policy of slaughtering civilians, and rounding up and murdering Jews.”

In terms of the “terrorism” and disregard for human life that Cooper accuses Churchill of, let’s think about the real terrorism of the war. By the time Churchill was bombing the Black Forrest in Germany, Hitler had formulated his plans to kill millions across Eurupe, which of course, is exactly what he did until he was defeated by the allies. 

You’ll notice that there’s no mention of the Holocaust in this episode, which is pretty revealing when you’re talking about the greatest scale of terror attacks in history. Cooper complains that people take him the wrong way when he says Churchill is the villain, as if that implies that Hitler is ok. But that’s exactly what he’s doing. If Churchill is the chief villain, then Hitler is not. So, all that Hitler is responsible for somehow comes in second (or third, because Cooper is more sympathetic to Hitler than Stalin) to the claims about Churchill. There is no other way to view this than minimizing the Holocaust, anti-semitism, and the sheer evil of the Nazis.

Hansen writes, “As terribly as the German and Japanese people suffered, it was minuscule in comparison to the tens of millions of innocents that Germany and Japan butchered in their respective campaigns to absorb Russia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and China—not to mention the Holocaust.” 

3) Churchill was a psycopathic, childish, drunk, who was a puppet of Zionist financiers. 

After Cooper makes his argument about Churchill, Carlson responds, “What was the motive?” (53:20) Cooper smiles and begins to describe Churchill as a person. “When I read about Churchill, he strikes me as a psychopath. He was a drunk.” He was very childish, playing with action figures and things. Strange fellow. (54:20). Later in the discussion, Cooper argues that Churchill was propped up by Zionist financiers, for which there is no evidence. 

These character issues have been answered by historians a hundred times over. The one interesting point he makes is whether the dichotomy between Churchill and Chamberlain has been over-played in the time since. Every appeaser is Chamberlain; every war hawk is Churchill; every threat is the Nazis. This is interesting but needs some fleshing out. I’d suggest two recent books:

At this point in the article, Andrew Roberts can barely stand it any longer. He takes particular umbrage against Cooper’s claim that Churchill was “childish,” responding, “states Cooper of the man who wrote 37 books, formed two administrations, warned of the coming Cold War in his Iron Curtain speech, and still defines sublime leadership. When Cooper wins the Nobel Prize for Literature like Churchill did, I will be more inclined to listen to his sophomor(on)ic strictures.”

4) Churchill is to blame for the failures of modern Britain.

Maybe the worst argument of the podcast is the one they foist against Winston Churchill. The premises go like this, Tucker starts with, “If Churchill is a hero, how come there are British girls begging for drugs on the streets of London and London is not majority English now.” Cooper responds, “Well the people who formulated the version of history that considers Churchill the hero like London the way it is now.” 

Essentially, the meta-argument in the whole interview runs along these lines. If you look around today and don’t like what you seen, you have a group of woke DEI global elites to blame who have no connection to their own countries or communities, and have ruined the West in the name of greed, control, and guilt. And as preposterous as that argument might be, they go a step further to argue that the arch-figure of this transformation is Winston Churchill. 

So, it’s Churchill’s fault that London is the way it is today, as opposed to… the people running London for the last 50 years? 

Instead, if the West had followed in Churchill’s footsteps, the world would look very different than it does today. He is the great champion of Western values and public virtue. He was flawed but courageous. He was wrong on many things but right on the most important things. He made many mistakes, but he succeeded in defeating the Nazis and securing the freedom of the Western world. 

Albert Mohler wrote a very personal tribute to Churchill in response to Cooper’s interview. I couldn’t agree more with his conclusion. “I offer no apologies for my admiration of Winston Churchill. Those who know me, or visit my personal library, figured that out long ago. As Churchill famously told the boys of his alma mater, Harrow School: “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”

I stand by his advice.” 

Dr. Cole Feix is the founder and president of So We Speak and the Senior Pastor of Carlton Landing Community Church in Oklahoma.