What’s It All About, Carlson & Rogan? Pondering the Big Platforming of Darryl Cooper by Diana West

Posted By Ruth King on March 28th, 2025

https://dianawest.substack.com/p/whats-it-all-about-carlson-and-rogan

One of the more interesting things Darryl Cooper revealed while ensconced on the massive Joe Rogan platform last week concerned his appearance on the even more massive Tucker Carlson platform last summer. It was the night before the Carlson interview, Cooper recalled, and he and Carlson were having dinner, talking about the upcoming show. Carlson informed Cooper that he was going to introduce him as America’s greatest living historian. Cooper says that he demurred, having explained to Carlson that he was no historian, did no original research, published nothing; rather, that he was someone who recorded stories about what he had read.

Carlson was having none of that. He was dead set on tagging Cooper with this nonsensically extravagant accolade and told him just to roll with it during the taping the next day. If you go back and watch Tucker’s opening of the Cooper show, you will notice that no blush, no gulp, and barely a muscle move across Cooper’s face as Tucker coats him with this syrupy wash of words — “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” But even that wasn’t enough for Tucker: “I want people to know who you are, and I want you to be widely recognized as the most important historian in the United States today because —”

Yes, yes … why? Tell us why!

“— because I think that you are.”

If Carlson’s motives remain opaque, we are now at least privvy to the calculation, the Barnum-esque decision, to dress up the podcaster as this “greatest,” this “most important” historical expert in the whole of these United States. This created what I see as the moving target. Step right up and take you turn … and sure enough, a flurry of “outlets” I don’t pay attention to, and a clutch of “court historians” (ditto) stepped right up and took their turn at shooting down some of the clunkier clay pigeons Cooper launched — Churchill, the “chief villain” of World War II (Cooper also called him a “psychopath”), Hitler, the peacemaker (Cooper did not call him a “psychopath”), and the Holocaust, the accident, which Cooper did not name at all. The massive response was more like shooting fish in a barrel. Surely, I thought, something else was going on in or around this apparent provocation.

My own concern at the time, truth be told, was Donald Trump. The interview aired in early September, the traditional kick-off of the final stretch of the presidential campaign. As usual, the Left, reading from the old communist playbook, was desperately, noxiously slandering Trump as the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. What was Tucker thinking — as closely associated with Trump as he is, and with that huge MAGA audience — when he deliberately interjected Hitler into the campaign season? After all, it was Tucker’s Trump-adjacent platform that accounted for most of the angry denunciations, drawing a level of criticism a Trump-neutral venue would not have inspired from the White House, Congress, even Yad Vashem.

As the saying goes, there are no coincidences, comrade — so, really, what was this all about? An air of contrivance still nags at me. I say this, I feel this, at least partly because I have a peculiar non-role in this whole — dare I use the Yiddish word? — geschrie. That’s because I, a journalist, not a historian, wrote a counter-conventional-history of World War II and the Cold War. It’s called American Betrayal, and it is a chronicle of the long-hidden war that no one wants to talk about, whether Conventional Churchillian or Carlsonian Hitlerite. It lays out the massive, secret war of communist subversion waged inside our policy- and war-making councils, which, once perceived, turns the World War II we all know and regularly commemorate into the war that actually made the world safe for communism. It turns the leaders we are taught to honor for “saving Western civilization” from Hitler into patsies of (see FDR), if not parties to (see FDR), Stalin’s long-term strategy to capture and destroy it. By the way, Stalin and FDR are AWOL from these online Cooper interviews.

In any case, having written such a book (which, in podcasting terms, comes to an audiobook of 20 hours and 41 minutes) — I came to know what controversy is. I know what smear campaigns are, too. My book triggered both and more — including what one reviewer called a “disinformation campaign.” In the course of this campaign of villification, there were so many straight-up, demonstrable lies published about the contents of my book that I spent a couple of years in fairly constant turmoil rebutting them. These features are not present in the current controversy.

I mention this background because it is my experience in these matters that tells me there is something ersatz in the “creation” of Darryl Cooper as a free-speech-hero pushing the boundaries of — pushing the boundaries of what? Not the boundaries on what is discussed about World War II exactly, including its origins. I am still thinking again about the absence of the super-villainous roles played by Stalin, also FDR, which failed to make it into these MAGA+ presentations. They complain about taboos and the “reductionist perspective” even as they tee up a “reductionist” storyline of their own which packages WWII as a face-off between Churchill and Hitler — and, pace Darryl Cooper, Hitler, we hardly knew ye.

***

There are times when a viewer — say, the average college graduate (no historical grounding) — will miss what it is that Cooper and his MAGA hosts are actually talking about because of the elliptical language they use to communicate.

Take Cooper’s conversation with Tucker about laws in Europe banning Holocaust denial. They go on and on about them, but never name the laws they are talking about. For example, Cooper bemoans the fact that European courts have been for “the last 70 years putting people in jail for looking into the wrong corners.” Wrong corners? What wrong corners? Tucker adds: “Literally, it’s a crime to ask questions.” What questions? What crime? They fail to mention even in passing the free-speech-travesty of Europe’s Holocaust denial laws. I don’t know of anyone who supports them, by the way. This omission is bizarre. Is it calculated? Perhaps they both find themselves simultaneously wary about using the words “Holocaust” and “denial” as they discuss the hardships visited upon those who look into the “wrong corners” and dare to “ask questions.”

FInally, Tucker asks Cooper: “Do you think we are far enough away, 80 years, from that war, where you can try to take as objective a look as you can and that will be allowed”?

Without hesitation (pre-set question?) Cooper replies: “No, I don’t. I think we’ve got a little ways to go on that, but I hope I can kind of start to break the ice a little bit.”

Given the context outlined above, what Cooper is hoping to “break the ice a little bit” on is Holocaust research (“denial”?), and, as we learn with more specificity from his recent appearance on Rogan, World War II “from the perspective of the Germans.” But hey — whatever floats your ice-breaking boat. Go for it, Darryl Cooper. Harkening back to the Tucker’s Big Build-Up, however, why is this particular line of research and approach to the past the essential, if weirdly coded knowledge “America” — MAGA — must have?

On considering this perplexity, it somehow seems relevant to take into account Tucker Carlson’s apparent penchant for strongmen. I don’t know much about Rogan, although during the Cooper interview he comes out as enthusiastic supporter of socialized medicine, one of the building blocks of socialist/communist systems. Tucker’s positive view of Putin in Russia is well known; more recently, he has racked up a series of smarmy interviews with Islamic strongmen throughout the sharia states of the Arab world. As I work through this essay, a TikTok clip is going around of Tucker extolling El Salvador’s Bukele and what Tucker calls “right-wing authoritarianism” in general. He goes so far as to discuss “right-wing authoritarianism” as a “popular” model for the world. “I love democracy, free speech is the most important thing to me,” he quickly adds (interrupting himself the way he does).

Really? I do not recall Tucker Carlson ever showcasing the free-speech-heroes of our day who have spent their adult lives fighting against the Islamic-sharia- and Marx-derived censorship that has strangled Europe. These heroes include Geert Wilders, Filip Dewinter, writers and free speech activists such as Lars Hedegaard, Elisabeth Sabbaditsch-Wolff, and political prisoner Tommy Robinson, who, after 147 days in solitary confinement and counting, is being tortured and destroyed by the British government as a mentally functioning human being for charges related to posting a news documentary online. If free speech is “the most important thing” to Tucker Carlson, its leading European champions should be important to him as well, but they are not. This tells me we are looking at more posturing.

One other thing. By implication, Tucker’s Tik Tok throws Hitler into this same “right-wing authoritarian” mix, albeit as a failure (“disgusting”) due to “bigotry and Nazi shit where you’re killing Jews and whatever.” (Love the “whatever.”) Framing Nazism — a contraction of “national socialism” — as a right-wing system is common on the Left, which persists in denying its roots in Marxism. Karl Marx, by the way, was a raging anti-semite.

***

Six months passed before Rogan re-ignited the Mysterious Cooper Platforming story. Then again, maybe Rogan didn’t “re-ignite” anything. Maybe there’s no mystery, either. Maybe he always wanted to have the “greatest popular historian” in America on his show, just never got around to it. Judging by the.nature of his intro, however, Rogan had a purpose in mind, a hook, anyway: He seemed intent on neutralizing Cooper’s post-Tucker branding in the MSM as an “anti-semite” and “Nazi apologist,” and by dint of his own emphatic endorsement. “I’m a fan, I know you. I know how you view things. … I know how honest you are.” The grandiose titles were out, but Rogan was practically brimming over with an impassioned kind of gratitude for Cooper himself, for what he does — as a podcaster.

I have been listening to your podcast for a long time. And it’s, it’s so charitable and comprehensive and so thorough, and so — you put so much weight on the real lives and suffering of human beings of all sides of any conflict, the regular people that didn’t want to be dragged into any war that find themselves on the frontline. The stories that you tell, and the way you tell ‘em is so comprehensive, and so, again, charitable, the humanity of these people is so well expressed that your fans know you. I’m a fan, I know you. I know how you view things. I know how you portray things. I know how honest you are [voice trembles?] about all aspects of conflict, and again, as charitable as possible, the way you lay things out. So when I saw these attacks on you, when people were calling you an anti-semite and a Nazi-apologist — I was, like, God Lord, this is not going to work on people who know him …

Still, there was something hanging over this recent interview: what happened last summer when TCN hosted conversational takes on Churchill, Hitler and Auschwitz that, sketchy and abbreviated as they were, and, misconstrued as Cooper claims they were also, would still have found favor in a kaffeeklatsch at the Reich Chancery — and, for that matter, Hamas HQ in Qatar. Post-October 7, when, in an inversion of expectation, public discourse has been transformed by jihadist rhetoric, protest and violence, the synergy between these two Jew-annilhilationist ideologies, Nazism and Islam (including the 1988 Hamas Convenant) is striking.

However hip to this context Rogan might or might not be, he did at one point embark on a peroration of his own on anti-semitism. It ran the gamut from — “crying wolf,” “doesn’t make any sense” — to — “particularly right now, after October 7” “Whoa, where has this been hiding?” — and then — “you start thinking the way your paranoid Jewish friends think” (paranoid Jewish friends?) — and back to — “still an overreaction.” Somewhere in there, he issued a blanket disclaimer, stating that “real anti-semitism is horrible, just like real racism is horrible.” In sum, the mega-host set before his guest a veritable smorgasbord (not a Yiddish word) from which to choose a little disavowal here, or even a little lip service there. Did Cooper bite? The short answer is no. In fact, the only thing Cooper mustered in reply (after all that) was to call anti-semitism a “weird thing” — not exactly what we would call “charitable.”

Like, look, anti-semitism is a weird thing … but, you know, it’s this thing that people get obsessed with, you know what I mean? Like, it’s not like part of their ideology. I’ve watched this happen to, like, good, clear-thinking, regular people. They start listening to a few podcasts that, you know, uh, uh, they can’t repost under their real name on Twitter because they’re funny or interesting [?] and then pretty soon you can’t bring that dude to a party anymore because he just can’t go ten minutes without — in neutral company — like, bringing up the Jews.

“Neutral company”? That’s pretty “funny and interesting” right there — especially for what it implies about the non-neutral company Cooper keeps. (He did tell Rogan he lives in north Idaho, previously associated with Arayan Nation.) Cooper continues:

And, it’s like, that happens. You see that happen, I mean, the, uh, you know, what you see on social media a lot, I mean, it’s like, uh, there’s no doubt there’s a big explosion of that rhetoric.

In short, Cooper’s take on anti-semitism is all about “over-reaction,” and how it is “counter-productive.” Which led him into a very revealing discussion of Gaza.

Theo was talking about this in one of his recent interviews. He was saying, you know, you, somebody sees what’s happening in Gaza right now, and they just see kids getting pulled out of rubble, and it’s shocking and horrifying, and they see that, and they find out that the US is sending money and weapons, and, like, Why is that happening? And they start looking into it, and they go to the websites that are going to tell them the truth about it, and pretty soon, one link leads to another, and, when they go ask one of their, you know, history professors at school or something, like, “Hey, you know, Uncle Adolf 1488 in the comments section, like, told me XYZ,” like, you know, go and ask about it, he gets, like, shouted down and attacked for, like, asking the question. … They think, “Hmm, that’s weird. Like, why are people responding this way? I was asking the question in good faith.”

Imagine that. Except that I can’t imagine that, given the pro-Hamas tilt across education and academia. In fact, the “shouting down and attacks” that come to mind involve beleaguered Jewish students, for example, trying to make it across Harvard Yard, or riotous seizures of civic centers across the Western world. I also think of the nationally coordinated hostile operations that blocked citizens’ highway access to airports on a couple of Days of Rage, or some such. Things like that. Going along with Cooper’s fantastic hypothetical, however, maybe “people” were responding “that way” because “1488” is a white supremacist numerical symbol! The number 14 stands for the so-called “14 Words” slogan, and 88 stands for “Heil Hitler,” H being the 8th letter of the alphabet.

I am wondering whether Cooper forgot that he was in “neutral company.”

By the way, I didn’t know about “1488” before looking the number up on a whim to see if there might possibly be any Third Reich associations. Did Joe Rogan wonder about it — or know? He didn’t ask a single probing question. He didn’t even comment when Cooper spoke a second time about anti-semitism, not as a “weird thing” this time, but as a positive force for Adolf Hitler — I’m not kidding — ”the thing that gave emotional valence for him”:

His antisemitism was what allowed him to love the German people, you know. It was like the only way for him that he could to get around the revulsion he was feeling and actually get up close to the German underclass. He excused their faults by blaming Jews.

As Uncle Adolf 1488 might have said, Who who could blame him?

***

Tucker and Rogan aren’t pushing boundaries with Darryl Cooper so much as they are erasing them. Do they know it? Someone knows it. Maybe it’s deconstructionism for the post-literate age of social media. That’s what I start to hear as Cooper explains his approach to historical events.

These things happen the same way every other historical event, you know, ends up happening, which very often is not —what you find is it’s not, uh, it’s not, uh, so much is not really, like, the result of a plot or a plan or anything. People are often just reacting.

In other words, forget about long-range strategies, boring-from-within ideologies, long marches, Marxism-Leninism, all that stuff — which in and of itself, by the way, strikes me as a red flag, pun intended.

Cooper goes so far as to illustrate this paradigm of people “just reacting” in history by way of a very strange interlude, an extremely scatological personal account of an series of unplanned events that befell him, causing him — just as in history?? — to “just react” and (apologies in advance) defecate on the floor of a friend’s house.

Yes, I, too, am wondering why we are still here; however, it really could be that there is something here that may become gravely important.

Describing his prep for his lectures, Cooper tells us he reads a whole bunch of books (wow!) before recording his — let’s use another Yiddish word — schpiel.

Like I try to stay humble as I’m reading about these people, not assume that I’m better than them, or different than them, and really just try to understand them on human terms, you know.

Try replacing the word “humble” with “non-judgmental” — Like, I try to stay non-judgmental as I’m reading about these people.

Next, swap “human terms” for “amoral terms” — and just try to understand them on amoral terms. Presto — moral relativism! It could be as simple — and as dangerous — as that. But let’s see how this notion plays out.

When I did that in the Tucker interview with regard to the Germans in the Second World War, and the series that I’m working on right now, which is the Second World War from the perspective of the Germans, you know … it’s not just people who are purposely misinterpreting things, or anything. You know, a lot of people who are in good faith, they see something like that, and they think you are trying to justify or rationalize what happened, you know, because there is this, there is thing, thing, where —

Cooper breaks off, and, as he often does, changes tracks to talk about the Jonestown story — which is, in a way, his historical safe space, something he has studied to a point of immersion while listening, he says, to 1,000 hours of tape recordings of Jim Jones and other Jonestown speakers. Maybe he switched topics above because he knew he was about to sound as if he were confirming what he wanted to deny; that he is trying to “justify or rationalize what happened” during the Third Reich. Maybe we might better say his approach to such topics is to do anything but judge them. This suspension of judgement goes directly against traditional calls from God and Judeo-Christian morality, starting from around the time Moses brought down the Ten Commandments. Cooper’s whole — another Yiddish word — schtick seems to be not to judge anything, except, as gleaned from his Twitter feed, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Of course, non-judgmentalism is just the beginning:

I mean, the Jonestown story, this really did kind of happen to me, where, you know, when you get past a certain threshold of understanding people, it’s, you’re butting right up against empathizing with them. I mean, it’s like, that’s like the next step: You gotta take one more step and you’re empathizing with those people. And so people see that, you know, and you’re empathizing with evil people, you know, whoever it is. But I really believe that it’s really good for us, like, individually, you know, and as a society, too. I think it has a positive effect on us to, like, when we force ourselves to understand, you know, people we don’t like as human beings, and just understand that their motivations are really no different than ours.

ROGAN: Well, this is one of the reasons your podcast is so important because you talk about things in this way.

I wonder if anyone listening hears what I hear: Cooper is describing and Rogan is applauding a way to find a pass (understanding) or excuse (empathy) for anything — for any atrocity, any form of evil. This is what I mean when I see Platforming Cooper as not pushing boundaries so much as erasing them. When studying killers and killing machines, where else might such a quest for “understanding [that] brings you right up to the brink of empathy” lead?

***

I know one answer. Exonerating Stalin in the Ukraine Terror Famine.

Cooper, I find, practices the dark art of historical distortion. It’s almost imperceptible at first: Did he just shove Abu Ghraib onto the narrative-shelf with civilizational destruction of “cultures and societies”? Maybe I misheard. Nope, later on, this same impulse is unmistakable. I definitely hear him grossly, absurdly mis-matching historical events — in this case, smearing the founders of UN-mandated Israel in 1948 by equating them with the Bolsheviks who seized power in Russia in October 1917.

Here’s how Cooper put it:

The means that the Bolsheviks and the Zionists used to establish themselves and create their state [sic], and like sort of get their foothold [sic], the means that they used were so violent, and so over the top, that it came to define in a lot of ways the subsequent history of those countries.

Is he kidding? I’m afraid not. He does the same thing with the Ukraine Terror Famine and, incredible as it may seem, life in these United States.

Near the end of the Rogan interview, after a ramble through industrial history from Roman times, focusing on the move from country to city, Cooper gets to Stalin’s state-engineered famine in the Ukraine, during which somewhere between six million and 15 million people were purposefully starved to death or otherwise killed. Before Cooper’s full quotation appears (below), I want to emphasize that there is no doubt about the genocidal atrocity Cooper is referring to. He has mentioned “kulaks,” and Stalin targeting “small farmers” living in “communities” and Stalin wanting “these to be consolidated into efficient industrial farms.” (Pro tip: Calling Stalin’s collectivized farms “efficient” is a tip-off.)

Then this:

Over there they did by brutal violence in a very accelerated period of time like something that we did over a longer period of time that was more or less voluntary, and, but at the end of the day, like, the social effects were the same, you know.

No, I don’t know. But old-time Pravda couldn’t have said it better. Or Nellie Ohr for that matter.

All of those people had to move into the cities and work in industry [at least the millions who weren’t killed], and that was, I mean, it was inevitable. you know. I mean, it’s like Russia would be speaking German right now if they didn’t industrialize, and, you know, get into a place where they actually could fend off that [1941 German] invasion. I mean you had to do it, just to compete.

I mean, it was inevitable. I mean, you had to do it, just to compete. I know of no other way to interpret this except to say that Darryl Cooper has just offered an apology, a rationale, and excuse, for an even larger genocide than Hitler’s.

***

Rogan asks Cooper to explain how people get sucked in (although he would do well to ask Cooper how he, himself, got sucked in).

Cooper explains:

But to answer your question as far as how people get sucked into it, the thing that you know shines through again and again — no matter you’re talking about whether it’s any of the stories I’ve talked about — is that [when] people get sucked into it’s because, uh, not because of, like, some latent evil in their heart, but because their virtues get hijacked. You know. Hitler is a good example. That is somebody who – say whatever you want about him, he loved the German people and he cared about the German. But that love — I mean it’s very – I mean, it’s like —

It sure is very, I mean, it’s like, all right. Again, Cooper hops to a parallel track, this time to describe the effects of the “neuro-chemical oxytocin,” which, he says, boosts trust and love for those in the “in-group” and increases distrust and hate for the “out-group.” The Psych 101 terms are mounting up — empathy, emotional valence, latent evil, neiro-chemicals, in-group, out-group — as Dr. Cooper diagnoses Patient H with having loved the in-group too much. “A lot of things are like that, where it’s really your virtues get hijacked,” he adds. And there’s no finding the hijacker, there are no boundaries, no latent evil. And no one — except Benjamin Netanyahu, of course — ever has to take responsibility for anything.

Then, as is so often the case, Cooper’s mind goes back to Jim Jones. “That story just sucked me in so much,” he recalls. “For three or four months, I had that in my headphones, for like … eight hours a day I’m listening to Jim Jones just rant, I was dreaming about him, for real. But through that experience what I found is, I— and even to this day now … I’m separated from it and it’s all over — is that I really sympathize with those people the same way I sympathize with, like, the radical movements that emerged out of the civil rights trouble, the Black Panthers and whatnot, who, they went down a dark road. but when you put yourself in their shoes — you know, say what you like about Jim Jones ….”

It’s those magic shoes again, the ones that lets Cooper slide on through sympathizing with the victims of Jim Jones — the poor people who literally drank the Kool-aid in the jungle — to sympathizing with the Black Panthers — the thugs who killed cops, raped women and pistol-whipped potential witnesses.

But back to Jones — and Hitler, who frequently intertwine together in Cooper’s conversation. They both loved “their people,” he will tell you. Jones had a fine start as an early civil rights leader, Cooper says, and, of course, Hitler was just aglow with his love for the German people. Books about both men, Cooper points out, always “turn into a polemic on every page.” (Referring to Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, which he calls “great,” Cooper says, “You have to learn to kind of see through that polemic a little bit, and then, you know, you have a good history on your hands.”) Drug abuse, too, fueled both men’s lives. Cooper says Jones used amphetamines to wake up and barbiturates to go to sleep every day for 10 years. “That’s the same with Adolf Hitler, too,” he says. “You keep yourself going that way.”

The linkage between drugs and paranoia is of particular interest to Cooper, who talks about his extensive reading of police reports on cases of family violence committed by a father or husband involving drug use.

As I just read through these, just again and again and again, it became very obvious, like, this is what happened, except at a larger scale, at Jonestown, you know. It’s hard for people to kind of accept when you’re talking about somebody like Jim Jones, who was, like, a raving lunatic by the end, but he loved his people. Like, he actually did. People say, “Well if he loved them, it’s not possible, how could do that to them?”Those are people who have never been around, like, domestic violence before.

This last comment brought me up short. In fact, had I noticed it earlier I might have recast the piece with an eye toward strains of Stockholm Syndrome. I am wondering now whether Darryl Cooper uses history as a kind of therapy, a means of making the most evil maniacs, homocidal or genocidal, turn into protectors who “love their people.” It’s not impossible, although I am speculating, of course. What is not speculation is that Cooper says he believes that one has to have been around domestic violence to understand the emotional wiring of Jones and Hitler both, as if in “understanding” the sheer, unspeakable evil can be neutralized.

He continues discussing these pathologies.

It’s very complicated. You know, you can have husbands who are absolute monsters to their children and their wife, but they still love them and it’s weird. And they have a serious emotional crisis if they leave, or something, you know, like, it’s very complicated. and Jim Jones was like that way.

Actually, like having gone through that process of reading about it and understanding it in this way, you know – it remains to be seen if I will still think this when I finish all of my reading by the time I get up to the end of the World War II series — but I see a lot of that in the Hitler story.

It is a “Hitler story” few of us would easily understand — without, as Rogan might say, being first “sucked in” — like Cooper? To be sure, he is warming to his subject, now, declaring Hitler “was more like a prophet figure. He saw himself as, like, almost like a — not a religious figure in the sense that he was sent by God [sarcastic inflection?] and anything like that, but he had this, like, sacred mission to save the German people.”

It is no reach to imagine that Darryl Cooper is on a mission to save Hitler — at the very least from a posterity without “empathy.” I am no closer to understanding why this work is being thrust on us in this way, but I do wonder now if the Big Platforms are engaging in some kind of psychological experimentation. What I also wonder is how long Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan will continue to harness their most powerful tools of mass media to urge Americans, especially Americans on the Right, to participate.