A prominent historian of World War II and the life of Winston Churchill recently criticized the “popular historian” who has taken flak for telling Tucker Carlson that the former British prime minister was a psychopathic villain.
Darryl Cooper — whom the former Fox News host described as maybe “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States” during their two-hour interview earlier this month — suggested that Churchill was “the chief villain of the Second World War,” guilty of “rank terrorism” and “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.”
During an appearance earlier this week on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” Cambridge-trained historian Andrew Roberts dismissed “MartyrMade” podcast host Cooper as a “low-rate historian” who mischaracterized the nature of the global conflict and made multiple false accusations against Churchill.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Subscribe to get daily/weekly email with the top stories (plus special offers!) from The Christian Post. Be the first to know.
Roberts, who is a member of the British House of Lords and author of the 2018 biography Churchill: Walking with Destiny, told Morgan he had never heard of Cooper before the interview with Carlson and pushed back against some of his claims, asserting that Cooper lodged “eight or nine major accusations against Churchill, none of which were true.”
Roberts took particular issue with Cooper’s allegation that Churchill was thirsty for war and wanted to escalate the conflict, and dismissed as “complete rubbish” Cooper’s claim that Churchill engaged in “rank terrorism” by bombing the Black Forest.
The Winston Churchill Project at Hillsdale College also released an in-depth explanation critical of Cooper’s characterization regarding the Black Forest.
Morgan and Roberts also brought up that Cooper never mentioned the Holocaust during the interview.
Podcaster Dave Smith and Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillion later joined the segment with Morgan and Roberts to discuss the controversy.
Dillon, who is a Christian and ethnically Jewish, slammed Cooper as a “Hitler apologist,” and noted that he got into a spat with Carlson over his public denunciation of the interview.
Roberts also appeared in an interview with The Spectator, during which he trashed Cooper’s claims as “classic conspiracy theory, and pretty nutty.” He also penned an op-ed for The Washington Free Beacon on Sept. 6 reiterating his objections.
Speaking to Tucker Carlson, Historian Darryl Cooper claimed Winston Churchill was the ‘chief villain’ of the Second World War. Historian Andrew Roberts tells The Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson why the accusation is baseless.@TuckerCarlson | @aroberts_andrewpic.twitter.com/vySRCc4hNe
— The Spectator (@spectator) September 12, 2024
Cooper’s interview drew criticism from across the political spectrum, including the White House.
Senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates told CNN that “giving a microphone to a Holocaust denier who spreads Nazi propaganda is a disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans, to the memory of the over 6 million Jews who were genocidally murdered by Adolf Hitler, to the service of the millions of Americans who fought to defeat Nazism, and to every subsequent victim of Antisemitism.”
X CEO Elon Musk at first retweeted the video and wrote, “Very interesting. Worth watching,” though he later deleted his tweet and admitted he had not watched the entire interview before reposting it.
The campaign of GOP vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, — who is slated to appear with Carlson during his month-long national tour on Sept. 21 — distanced himself from Cooper, saying he “obviously does not share the views of the guest interviewed by Tucker Carlson,” but that he also “doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture,” according to The New York Times.
All 24 Democratic Jewish members of the U.S. House of Representatives also signed onto a statement denouncing Carlson for hosting Cooper, according to Axios.
Carlson has raised eyebrows in recent months for some of his guests on his X platform, including disgraced actor Kevin Spacey and Munther Isaac, a Palestinian pastor who has been accused of being sympathetic to Hamas and the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in which an estimated 1,163 people were slaughtered.
