Darryl Cooper: Revisionist History and Misplaced Empathy

“Perhaps it is because of my own bias toward [Darryl Cooper as a friend, but the responsibility for such imprecise talk is something I place on [Tucker] Carlson, not on his interview subject.”

I have, for many years, recommended Darryl Cooper’s hit podcast Martyr Made to the relative handful of people kind enough to listen to my own show History Impossible and read my thoughts on various publications, including my own Substack. And not fully to bury the lede, I still do, though admittedly with a little more reservation than I might otherwise have only a month earlier. The reason why there is any reservation on my part can be summed up in the following email I received a few days before writing this essay:

“You’ve previously recommended the Fear & Loathing in New Jerusalem series by the Martyr  Made podcast as a good resource for learning about the Israel-Palestine conflict. In light of  Darryl Cooper’s recent Holocaust denial, would you still recommend that podcast?”

This is one among several messages I have been receiving in recent weeks. I was not surprised when they started coming in—I have been producing a historical podcast since 2019 and occupied a similar space (that is, until 2021) as Cooper (a space one might presumptuously call the “Dan Carlin School of Podcasting,” with long-form episodes lasting anywhere from two to six hours). I had even collaborated with Cooper once in 2020, and he and I had developed something of a friendly relationship and occasionally (but playfully) antagonistic banter online. This friendly relationship was solidified when he offered to fly me back across the country to my hometown of Minneapolis in the wake of George Floyd’s death to be with my mother while “neighborhood incursions” were taking place in my childhood home’s immediate vicinity (I grew up five blocks from where Floyd was killed). By then, I knew he and his work were controversial but does that not matter less than someone who would offer a kindness he had no obligation to offer?

Thanks to this experience, I find myself, as a historical podcaster with at least some audience crossover with Cooper’s, in a strange space, after Tucker Carlson’s now-infamous interview with Cooper has been given time to gestate and be reacted against. Thanks to one of our conversations, I had known Cooper was planning to discuss World War II from the German perspective for some time at that point, and while I thought it was a potentially interesting and illuminating angle on which to tackle our world’s most famous conflict, I immediately knew this would not go over smoothly, whenever it happened. Fast forward to September 2, 2024, it indeed happened, and not in a way that I believe Cooper necessarily wanted or was prepared for.