Nearly a decade ago, Darryl Cooper, then a little-known amateur historian, agreed to appear on Rebel Yell, a self-described “Southern Nationalist podcast of the Alt-Right.” Cooper’s decision to come on the show was not the norm. The show funneled donations to Jason Kessler, the white supremacist who organized the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. And, as one of Rebel Yell’s co-hosts told Cooper in May 2017, potential guests “usually” refused their invitations after concluding the show was run by “a bunch of fucking Nazis.”
But Cooper had a different perspective. “You guys do a great job,” he said about the show’s place in the far-right media ecosystem. “You class the place up a little bit.”
Over the last decade, Cooper’s ideas have not changed much. The throughline of his career is his abiding interest in reshaping people’s understanding of two groups: Jews and Nazis. But he has cleaned up his act enough to build a major audience. Instead of appearing on a neo-Confederate podcast, this year Cooper went on Joe Rogan, where he subtly shifted the story of the Nazis into a more flattering light for millions of listeners.
With more than 170,000 subscribers, Cooper has the most popular history newsletter on Substack—beating out Adam Tooze, the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University. On X, he has nearly 350,000 followers; one is Vice President JD Vance. Cooper has been profiled by the New York Times (“The Podcaster Asking You to Side With History’s Villains”) and held up as an author for understanding the modern right by a guest on The Ezra Klein Show. Tucker Carlson has claimed that Cooper is the “most important popular historian working in the United States today.”
Cooper is most famous for his ongoing project titled “The Martyr Made Podcast.” The first podcast in the series was a critical history of Zionism. The slant of his current series, which purports to tell World War II from the perspective of the Germans, is not hard to discern. The trailer Cooper is using to promote the series has clips of a thundering Hitler speech, delivered in English, as metal music plays in the background. It depicts regular Germans suffering while Weimar cosmopolitans enjoy their cabarets, and Nazi soldiers marching triumphantly down the Champs-Élysées in occupied Paris. There’s barbed wire, but German prisoners of war are the ones behind it.
Compared to overt Holocaust deniers, Cooper is subtle—even shifty. He has not, like Richard Spencer, Sieg Heil-ed at a public event. His references often require research. Cooper, for example, wrote “Guten morgen” to a user on X last August, along with a picture of himself holding a coffee mug. It might take a moment to realize the user is a self-identified Nazi, and the mug Cooper holds is sold on a website where you can buy a T-shirt in which a Nazi SS sword plunges through the Star of David. Cooper implores his followers not to fall into the morass of “low-IQ vulgar antisemitism.” He leaves his views on high-IQ sophisticated antisemitism more ambiguous.
Last year, Cooper posted two photos alongside each other on X: One was of drag queens imitating the Last Supper during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics; the other was of Hitler standing in front of the Eiffel Tower in conquered France. As a caption, Cooper wrote, “This may be putting it too crudely for some but the picture on the left was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right.” (Cooper deleted the post after backlash, then later wrote that he stood by the “overall point.”)
For fans who do not closely follow Cooper on social media, his far-right sympathies might be harder to discern. On his podcast, he shows empathy for a wide range of historical victims—including Jews. He does not sound like an Alex Jones. One of his greatest talents as a podcaster is coming across like an earnest nerd who just wants to share some indisputable facts. As Cooper put it earlier this year in the introduction to his Nazi Germany series, “My audience trusts me to be honest with them. And even when they disagree or get uncomfortable, they will give me the benefit of the doubt that I am coming from a place of empathy and a desire to genuinely understand people at the extremes of human experience.”
This self-presentation has been shockingly successful. In March, Rogan, a committed fan, told his audience that there is “no fucking way” Cooper is an antisemite “in any way, shape, or form” and that he is as “charitable as possible” to his subjects. They could see for themselves, Rogan said, by listening to the first hour of Cooper’s Zionism series, which opens with harrowing accounts of the violence Jews faced in turn-of-the-century Europe.
But previously unreported information found by Mother Jones, including posts under a username affiliated with Cooper, cast doubt on this narrative. It raises a more sinister possibility about his attempts at even-handedness: That Cooper may have deliberately downplayed his extremism as part of a carefully plotted effort to bring his hard-right ideology into the mainstream.
In 2016, a user going by the name “Juggernaut Nihilism” left a comment on a transparently white nationalist website called Counter-Currents.
Public records show that “Juggernaut Nihilism” is part of an email address associated with Cooper. When Juggernaut Nihilism asked goldbugs in the online forums of the TF Metals Report in 2013 whether he should buy a house, the personal details he supplied about his work history and where he lived matched those of Darryl Cooper. David Simon, the creator of The Wire, once attacked Cooper in a Twitter post that began “You go by juggernaut nihilism.” (This was an apparent reference to Cooper’s username on the site at the time.) “No time for scrotes who live in shit & won’t work a shovel,” Simon added.
Cooper did not respond to a detailed list of questions sent to him by Mother Jones, including whether he wrote the comments from Juggernaut Nihilism.
The article Juggernaut Nihilism was responding to on Counter-Currents was written by Colin Liddell. Previously, Liddell had wondered about what the “best and easiest way to dispose of [Blacks]” would be in an essay titled “Is Black Genocide Right?” In the reply, Juggernaut Nihilism took him to task for attacking allies on the far-right who chose not to publicize their racist views.
“A movement like this needs to operate at various levels, from the intellectual core (that remains terrifying and offensive to the general population right up until the big shift), on up to covert supporters slipping occasional language and subversive information into conversation and normie media,” Juggernaut Nihilism wrote. “Think of how most people you know got here. It wasn’t from basic American ideology to reading Mein Kampf and then, boom, they’re onboard. It’s a process, and you have to initiate people without scaring them off (and without blaming them for being scared off…the human mind works the way it works, and the enemy studies it carefully, controls the education system, and dominates the media).”
Juggernaut Nihilism’s comment reads as an almost perfect encapsulation of Cooper’s work as an amateur revisionist historian. He is highly attuned to when he can operate at which level. He makes it known that he is largely “onboard,” but leaves it up to his followers to surmise just how much. He has read Mein Kampf but is patient with those who have not.
Two months after the comment appeared, Greg Johnson, the founder of Counter-Currents, posted an interview in which he argued for a white America and aligned himself with the “judeo-critical” wing of the far right on the “Jewish Question.”
“Wow, really great,” Juggernaut Nihilism wrote in response.
Nine days later, Johnson shared a new interview. It was a podcast with Darryl Cooper.
Cooper has no formal credentials as a historian. After a largely isolated youth in California, during which he attended as many as 40 schools, Cooper did some college, dropped out, and enlisted in the Navy. After, he became an electronics technician. After Cooper left the service in the early 2010s, he went on to work as a Department of Defense contractor. (Cooper explained his biography in response to questions from a New York Times journalist that he published on his Substack.)
In 2014, he became obsessed with the Israel-Palestine conflict amid an earlier war in Gaza. A friend suggested he create a podcast. And, surprisingly, his hours-long episodes took off. Much of the show focused on the kinds of critical depictions of early Zionists in Palestine that can be found in the work of Israeli historians like Benny Morris. But Cooper’s tics were apparent as well. He had a habit of noting Jews’ prevalence in the left-wing political movements he counts among his enemies.
Cooper’s claims about World War II in recent interviews raise more serious questions about his biases. During his appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show last year, Cooper argued that Winston Churchill was “primarily responsible” for World War II “becoming what it did,” while making unsubtle and ahistorical insinuations about Churchill’s alleged ties to “financiers” and a “media complex” supportive of Zionism. He later specified that his source for this claim was David Irving, an infamous British antisemite and Holocaust denier.
Irving, who also lacks formal training as a historian, has been discredited for decades. In 1991, after denying the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, he used the acronym “ASSHOLS” to refer to “The Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and Other Liars.” In 1996, he unsuccessfully sued Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish history at Emory University, for defamation in the United Kingdom after Lipstadt depicted him in her book Denying the Holocaust as a Nazi apologist who distorted the historical record in support of Hitler.
Lipstadt and Penguin Books prevailed after assembling a group of experts who showed it was accurate to label Irving a Holocaust denier and a Hitler apologist. The cornerstone of that effort was a more than 700-page evisceration of Irving written by Sir Richard Evans, the Regius Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Cambridge. “Not one of [Irving’s] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject,” Evans wrote in his report. “All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about.”
Cooper has defended his decision to cite Irving in a Substack post in which he said he was “not yet in a position to adjudicate the various disputes.” But his defense distorts and waters down Irving’s views, while falsely implying that even Evans respects Irving as a historian. In Cooper’s telling, Irving believed that “gas chambers were not a primary method of killing” at Nazi death camps. Irving put it much more bluntly: “I’m a gas chamber denier.” Cooper went on to say in the post that Irving accepted that millions of people were killed in the Holocaust, that Hitler took no action to stop it, and that he bore ultimate responsibility. After reviewing the post, Evans told Mother Jones that this summary of Irving’s work contained a “collection of falsehoods and half-truths.”
During his appearance on Rogan in March, Cooper offered another piece of revisionism that bore a striking resemblance to Irving’s pseudoscholarship. This time, it involved Cooper minimizing Hitler’s role in Kristallnacht, the infamous 1938 pogrom during which around 1,000 synagogues in Germany burned down. “Hitler had to actually get on the phone with [Joseph] Goebbels and say, Cut this shit out. Like, This is not good,” Cooper claimed. “And not because he loves the Jews all of the sudden obviously. But because this is bad propaganda.”
Evans, one of the world’s foremost experts on Nazi Germany, reviewed a longer version of Cooper’s Kristallnacht comments on behalf of Mother Jones. His response left no doubt that Cooper—like Irving before him—severely distorted the historical record. “The order to local Nazi bosses was given by Propaganda Minister Goebbels, after a confidential conversation with Hitler, observed by eyewitnesses, in which the Nazi dictator had clearly sanctioned the action,” Evans said via email. “In addition Hitler personally ordered the arrest of 30,000 Jewish men, who were taken off to concentration camps where they were beaten and intimidated until they agreed to leave Germany. The following morning, Hitler and Goebbels brought the action to an end, since it seemed to have achieved its objectives.”
Taken together, Cooper’s many elisions are reminiscent of something else Evans wrote in his trial report about Irving: “Irving is essentially an ideologue who uses history for his own political purposes; he is not primarily concerned with discovering and interpreting what happened in the past, he is concerned merely to give a selective and tendentious account of it in order to further his own ideological ends in the present.”
Last year, one of Cooper’s claims garnered national headlines. During the appearance on Carlson’s show, he said that the Nazis were “completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war” and “local political prisoners” they captured after invading the Soviet Union in 1941. As a result, Cooper continued, the Nazis “just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there.” Cooper’s remarks implied that the killing of millions of Soviet prisoners of war and Jews was, in essence, a logistical oversight.
In doing so, he ignored countless massacres of Jews and other enemies of the Nazi regime, as well as the extensive record showing that the Nazis intended to starve millions of people to death after invading the Soviet Union in 1941. As University of Toronto Professor Timothy Snyder makes clear in Bloodlands—a book Cooper has cited—the Nazis’ initial plan was to kill about 25 million people by starvation.
Evans made a similar point to Mother Jones after reviewing Cooper’s comments about Soviet prisoners of war. “The Nazis regarded ‘Slavs’ as racially inferior and deliberately killed 3,300,000 prisoners taken from the Red Army by starvation, neglect and untended disease,” he wrote. “The Nazi ‘Hunger Plan’ was based on a conscious choice to use the large food supplies present in Eastern Europe to feed their own troops.”
Cooper’s suggestion that many Jewish deaths during the Holocaust had been unintentional ended up provoking the largest backlash of his career. Then-President Joe Biden’s White House called the interview a “disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans.” Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, said that Carlson and Cooper had “engaged in one of the most repugnant forms of Holocaust denial of recent years.”
But the response to Cooper on the right said more about his place in the world. Vance refused to condemn the Holocaust revisionism on the grounds that Republicans “believe in free speech and debate.” A backlash to the backlash temporarily sent Cooper’s show into the top spot on the podcast charts.
Since the incident, Cooper has grown bolder. In a Substack post in response to the criticism, Cooper left no doubt he was also talking about Jewish victims of the Holocaust—not only Soviet POWs. He stated that one of his sources was a letter written by Rolf-Heinz Höppner, a senior Nazi official, to Adolf Eichmann in July 1941. “There exists this winter the danger that all the Jews can no longer be fed,” Höppner wrote about 300,000 Jews under his authority, whom he planned to send to a concentration camp. “It should be seriously considered if it would not be the most humane solution to dispose of the Jews, insofar as they are not capable of work, through a quick-acting agent. In any case it would be more pleasant than to let them starve.”
Höppner continued, in a section not included in Cooper’s Substack post: “In addition the proposal was made to sterilize all the female Jews in this camp from whom children could still be expected, so that with this generation the Jewish problem is in fact completely solved.” Nor did Cooper mention the subject line: “Re.: Solution of the Jewish Question.”
The letter from Höppner makes clear Nazi leaders’ willingness to exterminate Jews. But, in Cooper’s telling, it is evidence of how millions of people “ended up” dead and that, as Cooper put it on Substack, a senior Nazi official did not seem “overjoyed at the prospect of mass killing.”
In the first episode of his new series on World War II Germany, released this January, Cooper proves far more willing to depict American soldiers and concentration camp survivors as eager to kill than Nazis. He describes how, after the liberation of Dachau, American GIs “rampaged through the camp, murdering dozens of surrendered German soldiers.” The survivors, Cooper adds, “were given free reign to torture, humiliate, and murder” Germans. As evidence, he extensively from an interview in which Jack Hallett, a US Army veteran, described the anti-Nazi violence he witnessed after the camp’s liberation. But he does not include what Hallett said immediately before describing the revenge taken: “Control was gone after the sights we saw.”
Also missing is any mention of what those sights were. “The first thing I saw was a stack of bodies that appeared to be about 20 feet long and about as high as a man could reach, which looked like cordwood stacked up there,” Hallett stated earlier in the oral history Cooper quoted from about what Nazis had done. “And the thing I’ll never forget was the fact that on closer inspection we found the people whose eyes were still blinking maybe three or four bodies deep inside the stack.”
This is not an anomaly. Cooper provides not a single detail in the episode about the horrors that American soldiers encountered at Dachau, or what the victims they liberated endured. Instead, at Cooper’s camp, the victims worth mentioning are German.
“The goal is not to get you to sympathize with the Germans, much less the National Socialist regime,” Cooper declares toward the end of the episode. “The goal is to understand. And if a side effect of understanding is sympathy, then so be it.”
As a forum-dweller named Juggernaut Nihilism once wrote, “It’s a process, and you have to initiate people without scaring them off.”