The Dangerous Rise of the Podcast Historians
8 min read
Even by the standards of the American far right, Tucker Carlson’s airing of Holocaust-revisionist views on his popular show on the platform X seemed to hit a new low.
On an episode that streamed September 2, Carlson gushed at his guest Darryl Cooper, introducing him as the “most important popular historian working in the United States today.” In the 140-minute-long conversation that ensued, Cooper made the case that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of the Second World War and was most responsible for “war becoming what it did.” Cooper clarified in tweets following the episode that Adolf Hitler had desperately wanted peace with Britain and had even been ready to “work with the other powers to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.” On the show itself, Cooper claimed that Nazi concentration camps were born of a humanitarian impulse to prevent suffering, because prisoners of war were too numerous to feed, so it was “more humane to just finish them off quickly.”
This is, of course, rank historical falsification and outright Nazi apologia. By ignoring the fact that Nazi Germany targeted people with Jewish ancestry for extermination and mass-murdered them on this basis, Cooper engages in a form of Holocaust denial. And the concentration camps and killing centers weren’t the only sites of the Holocaust. Of the 6 million Jews murdered by Nazi Germany, up to 2 million were killed in what is often called the Holocaust by bullets, by marauding “deployment groups” (Einsatzgruppen) that were an integral part of the German invasion of Eastern Europe. With the help of the local accomplices, these death squads often rounded up the entire Jewish population and murdered most of them as their very first act upon entering a town.
These and other Nazi crimes have been subject to decades of documentary research and widespread historical consensus. To hear Holocaust denial in 2024 is sickening. But within a certain milieu, such revisionism has been quietly flourishing for a while.
The way Carlson introduced the man he said he was a “fan of” was instructive in this respect. To those who closely follow the work of historians, Cooper’s is not a familiar name. I was initially embarrassed not to know it. After all, I received a Ph.D. in history from an American university a year ago. How did I not know an alleged contender for the title of the country’s “best” historian?
A quick search cleared things up. Cooper isn’t actually a historian in any conventional sense. He has published no books and barely any major articles in the popular or academic press. He doesn’t appear to have ever conducted original historical research. Before he appeared on Carlson’s show, there was no Wikipedia article about him, which suggests that even his internet fame was limited to certain corners.
What Cooper does have is a Substack with more than 100,000 subscribers as well as a popular podcast. His followers on X include not just Carlson but the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Senator J. D. Vance, who has praised Cooper’s political commentary before. In other words, within a certain crowd, Cooper was already a known quantity.
This crowd includes the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. That Carlson picked X to host his show was not accidental. He started the episode by complaining about being “censored” by tech companies, but he is clearly welcome on Musk’s platform. In fact, Musk initially praised the Carlson-Cooper interview as “very interesting” and “worth watching” before deleting his own post and appearing to backtrack.
To understand the scene better, consider that Carlson is currently on a “coast to coast” tour, joined this month by such household names as Vance, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, former Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard, the failed Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy, and Donald Trump Jr. What these figures all have in common is their endorsement of Donald Trump.
In other words, the milieu that welcomes Cooper is one that is at once on the fringe and an alarmingly powerful part of the American political mainstream.
The adjacency of the American far right to Holocaust revisionism, and of both to the right-wing mainstream, isn’t entirely new. Shortly after the episode aired, a number of observers pointed out that Cooper’s ideas resembled those in Pat Buchanan’s 2008 book, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, a comparison that Cooper readily welcomed. A conservative who repeatedly flirted with Holocaust revisionism throughout his career, Buchanan wasn’t exactly a political outcast, having served as communications director in the White House of President Ronald Reagan before running for president himself in the 1990s and addressing the 1992 Republican National Convention. John Ganz’s recent best-selling history, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, details the pressure the far right brought to bear even during that triumphal post–Cold War era.
But today’s world is complicated by an additional, accelerating factor. Microblogging and online outlets have challenged traditional vectors of authoritative knowledge. A good deal of content that bills itself as scholarly doesn’t pass through editorial or vetting processes, but surfaces instead through media, such as podcasting and TikTok reels, that encourage easy narratives.
Writing in Cosmopolitan magazine, a teacher from California recently celebrated this supposed democratization of the public sphere. She praised TikTok for offering “women and non-white scholars direct access to an audience and a platform that encourages collaboration, while dismantling much of the tedious, inaccessible, othering BS of the Ivory Tower.” But TikTok’s algorithm privileges sensationalism—even the Cosmopolitan author conceded that “a video on Jack the Ripper might pay off, but one on Middle Eastern art may not.”
Far from making audiences more informed, a world dominated by TikTok and “popular historians” is rife with pseudo-historical revisionism such as Cooper’s. People presenting themselves as authorities play on prejudices and replace complex and multifaceted accounts with simple, scapegoating answers. Actual historians find themselves at a disadvantage when they try to confront sensationalist pseudo-scholarship online.
“I think the podcast media is intrinsically tough because a lot of people go to podcasts for what I call ‘shortcut learning,’ and that lends itself to the charlatans and self-styled non-PC ‘truth tellers,’ from [Joe] Rogan to Tucker,” Joseph Stieb, a historian at the U.S. Naval War College and an avid user of X, told me.
Countering online falsehoods is made even more difficult by the pleasure the falsifiers take in setting themselves against the supposed establishment. Faced with backlash, Cooper has predictably styled himself as standing up against “the sacred nature of the World War 2 mythos.”
In reality, the fare Cooper serves up is boringly unoriginal, and his pretense of impartial truth-seeking is transparently flimsy. Cooper and Carlson spent the episode dredging up tired canards favored by the far right. Cooper expressed doubt as to whether Britain really was a democracy during the war against Hitler, given that it jailed the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley. He went on to claim that after the Nuremberg trials of 1946, which led to punishment of Nazi leaders, “it became effectively illegal in the West to be genuinely right-wing.”
The two men ended by questioning whether the United Kingdom won World War II at all, saying that it actually experienced “the worst kind of defeat” in that it’s not “majority English” anymore. Cooper went on to praise the recent anti-migrant riots in Britain as the natural reaction of people whose “ancient homeland is being taken from them.” To put a finer point on the matter, he also portrayed the white rioters who opposed Martin Luther King’s campaign to desegregate Chicago in 1966 as the righteous movement of a Lithuanian neighborhood “to maintain this community that they’ve built for themselves.” His supposedly “heterodox history,” in other words, is a stalking horse for an ethno-nationalist political agenda.
Online platforms are rife with racist-inflected pseudo-history, but they aren’t the only medium for it. In 2022, Netflix released an enormously popular documentary series called Ancient Apocalypse, following the work of the Scottish-born writer Graham Hancock, who attempted to prove that an allegedly forgotten Ice Age civilization existed, predating ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt by centuries. The Society for American Archaeology released a statement saying that the work rested on false claims and that it propounded a theory that had long been associated with “white supremacist ideologies.”
Many bona fide historians are fighting the good fight on social media by bringing their own work and that of professional colleagues to the public. Take Hannah Parker, who posts what she calls “history girl summer” videos on TikTok. A postgraduate student of archaeology at the University of Nottingham who grew up in Saudi Arabia, she shows herself visiting ancient Roman sites or paintings of Greek mythology and puts them in proper historical context. She has more than 300,000 followers and has reportedly inspired many in her audience to pursue history academically.
Still, Parker is well aware of the platform’s pitfalls. Because videos recorded on TikTok are capped at 10 minutes, she told me by email, “you have to be selective with what you say. Short-form, snappy content leaves little room for nuance, and of course sensationalism will triumph every time.” As she noted, “All it takes is for one incorrect video to gain traction, and the algorithm will reward it with virality, causing even more people to get swept up by a false story.” Some platforms try to balance this algorithmic bias by explicitly countering hateful pseudo-history: Search for Hitler on TikTok and you won’t see any videos but will instead be sent to a Holocaust-education website jointly run by UNESCO and the World Jewish Congress.
Stieb told me that the “use of online media is inevitable” and “historians either engage to shape the narrative, or they lose automatically.” I tend to agree. After all, millions more people scroll online platforms than read any book written by even the most popular of historians. But pseudo-history has an unfortunate home-field advantage on social media, given its penchant for clickbait sensationalism and feeding on the worst impulses of audiences.
Historians must therefore be honest about the strategic limits of beating podcasters and TikTokers at their own game. The alternative is to restore the place of reading—and therefore the primacy of real scholarship—in American education. Doing so would require academics to leave their narrow cocoons and boldly engage the public and its narrative wars. For decades, scholars in the humanities have tended to put little effort into writing for the public or trying to speak to crowds beyond their immediate surroundings. The metrics used for promotion and recruitment seldom value such outreach, and so professors have little incentive to undertake it. What’s more, engaging the public means stepping outside the academic community’s comfortable world of self-affirming truisms and exposing one’s ideas to public challenge.
I am, of course, not the first one to note this urgency. In 2014, the historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage published The History Manifesto, calling on their colleagues to take the job of public intervention more seriously by offering “the wide-angle, long-range views only historians can provide” on the issues of the day. Similarly, in 2019, Jill Lepore took her fellow American historians to task for leaving the work of constructing a national narrative to “charlatans, stooges and tyrants” since the 1970s. But few scholars at your average academic conference seem interested in meeting this challenge.
These were gentle admonitions a few years ago. They should be heard as warning sirens now.
