Why Tucker’s Historian Hates Churchill

The not-so-hidden subtext.

by Robert Spencer | Sept 10, 2024

No one really knows why Tucker Carlson featured historian/fabulist Darryl Cooper on his podcast, but one thing is clear: Cooper wasn’t there to talk history. His historical points were all made in order to support present-day political positions. Even his demonization of Winston Churchill served this purpose: it was meant to change people’s minds not so much about World War II, but about the Israel-Hamas conflict.

This first became obvious in Cooper’s wildly tendentious summation of the early years of World War II. He said: “If you go to 1939, when the Germans and the Soviet Union invade Poland, as soon as that war’s wrapped up on the German side, Hitler starts firing off peace proposals to Britain, France, because they had already declared war. He didn’t expect them to declare war, actually. There’s a famous scene where he throws a fit when he finds out that they did do that. And so he doesn’t want to fight France, he doesn’t want to fight Britain.” The poor misunderstood guy! He threw a fit for peace!

And then, in the Fall of 1940, having conquered most of Europe, “Adolf Hitler is firing off radio broadcasts, giving speeches, literally sending planes over to drop leaflets over London and other British cities, trying to get the message to these people that Germany does not want to fight you.” Yet this was not as magnanimous as Cooper would have us believe.

Tucker’s historian doesn’t explain that Hitler’s peace proposals hinged upon the British accepting German hegemony over Europe. They would not and could not do this, as they had been committed since long before Hitler came to power to preventing a single power from dominating Europe. This was a matter of self-preservation, as they saw that a Germany that stretched from Spain to Moscow could easily cross the English Channel and destroy Britain as a free society. Churchill also knew that Hitler had broken the Munich agreement, his pact with the Soviet Union, and other agreements, and thus could not be trusted to keep to the terms of any peace accord.

Darryl Cooper, however, doesn’t just dislike Churchill because he rejected Hitler’s peace overtures. “The reason I resent Churchill so much for it is that he kept this war going when he had no way. He had no way to go back and fight this war.” Obviously he did have a way, as he ultimately won the war and Hitler lost it. Cooper, however, suggests that Churchill kept going at the behest of those who were lining his pockets. Churchill, in Cooper’s telling, was not just a warmonger; he was some kind of nut: 

I read about Churchill and he strikes me as a psychopath, but he’s also a sort of — I mean, he was a drunk. He was very childish in strange ways. People would talk about how as an adult, as prime minister, they’d find him in his room and he’s playing with action figures like war toys and army men and stuff, would get mad when people would interrupt him when he was doing this. This is a strange fellow. There’s all those things.

Even worse, Cooper’s drunk manchild Churchill is only interested in taking courses of action that line his pockets:

But then you get into, why was Winston Churchill such a dedicated booster of Zionism from early on in his life? And there’s ideological reasons….But then as time goes on, you read stories about, about Churchill going bankrupt and needing money, getting bailed out by people who shared his interests in terms of Zionism, but also his hostility, I think his hostility, to put it this way, I think his hostility to Germany was real. I don’t think that he necessarily had to be bribed to have that feeling. But I think he was, to an extent, put in place by people, the financiers, by a media complex that wanted to make sure that he was the guy who was representing Britain in that conflict for a reason.

There it is. The Jews put Churchill in power! This echoes Hitler’s own rhetoric. Even as Germany lay in ruins and Hitler was preparing to commit suicide on April 29, 1945, he still blamed the Jews: “If the nations of Europe are once more to be treated only as collections of stocks and shares of these international conspirators in money and finance, then those who carry the real guilt for the murderous struggle, this people will also be held responsible: the Jews!”

Why would Cooper think it important at this late date, over eighty years after World War II began, to dredge up old National Socialist rhetoric about how the Jews were responsible for it? Because of the conflict in Gaza. Cooper makes numerous disparaging references to the “Zionists,” and states that the Israelis are committing genocide in Gaza: “I argue with my Zionist interlocutors about this all the time with regard to the current war in Gaza. Look, man, maybe you, as the Germans, you felt like you had to invade to the east….Maybe you thought you had to do that, but at the end of the day, you launched that war with no plan to care for the millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war that were going to come under your control, and millions of people died because of that.”

This is false. After studying Israel’s actions in Gaza, British Colonel Richard Kemp has called the IDF “the most moral army in the world.” But in saying this, Cooper makes his point obvious: in his view, the Zionists, just as they did in World War II, are forcing a war upon a reluctant foe and refusing all overtures for peace. Genocide is the result.

Cooper’s lengthy interview with Tucker Carlson is one long advertisement for the ceasefire in Gaza that would be tantamount to Israel surrendering and accepting defeat, and Hamas surviving to murder more Israeli civilians on another day. It’s not Winston Churchill that Cooper really wants you to hate; it’s Benjamin Netanyahu.