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Sept. 10, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
42:56
20240910_winston-churchill-ww2-revisionism
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Was Churchill The Chief Villain 00:13:38
Hitler, look, Churchill, this guy's the chief villain?
Really?
And that doesn't mean that you're some type of, you know, Holocaust denier.
Utter conspiracy theory nonsense.
The idea of Zionist financiers was a dog whistle as far as I was concerned.
And he says what happened in France under Hitler with that invasion was infinitely preferable to what just happened at the Paris Olympics.
Like to suggest that that's infinitely preferable to an offensive display at the Olympics is wild.
So like as somebody who has consumed hours and hours and hours of his content, I'm not like hanging him over one tweet that he sent that I think was like, yeah, again, being very hyperbolic and I don't think was really landing.
Tucker praised this guy as like the greatest historian and scholar.
He gave him a very soft interview where he didn't push back on any of this stuff.
And I mocked that and he got he got kind of upset about that and reached out to me.
And like I never called you a Nazi.
I just said you went soft on a Hitler apologist.
So Winston Churchill is almost unanimously regarded as a hero in Western society, not least by me.
In fact, I think, like a lot of people in this country who voted in the greatest ever Britain, that he is indeed the greatest of all of us here, ahead of Shakespeare, Charles Darwin, Sir Isaac Newton, the Beatles, all of them.
Yes, Churchill had significant flaws, including some caustic opinions and brutal decisions, which were very much of their time.
These flaws are widely acknowledged, and he made some big mistakes.
But not when it comes to the World War II.
Rallying this country and the Allies to defeat the Nazis has always been considered a very good thing.
Because self-evidently, it was a very good thing.
But last week, history podcaster Darryl Cooper appeared on Tucker Carlson's show in a now viral interview, which included the claim that Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was the, quote, chief villain of the Second World War.
As we'll see, it didn't stop there.
Debate has raged ever since, not just about Churchill, but about whether free speech and free thinking apply to something as binary as historical fact.
In a moment, we'll debate the big picture with part of the problem podcast host Dave Smith, who thinks Darryl Cooper is a national treasure, and Babylon B CEO Seth Dylan, who does not think that.
But first, I'm joined by eminent historian and author of Churchill, Walking with Destiny, a brilliant book, Andrew Roberts.
Andrew, your first reaction when you heard about this interview with Tucker Carlson, not least to the fact that Darrell Cooper was described as the most eminent historian in the United States, was that a surprise to you?
That did surprise me owing to the fact that I hadn't heard of him.
So I asked a few historian friends, serious and significant figures, American historians, and they hadn't heard of him either.
I mean, I watched it and entertaining though it was, certainly very watchable, I just kept thinking, that can't be true.
That isn't true.
Well, I know that's not true, but the overarching theme that somehow Churchill was a bigger villain than Hitler was so preposterous.
Stalin and Stalin.
And Stalin.
It was so utterly preposterous that at that point I went, I can't believe anything this guy's telling me.
Yes, the shocking thing for me was that Tucker Carlson was taking him seriously at all.
A lot of this is just reheated old David Irving stuff from 20 years ago.
There were eight or nine major accusations that he made against Winston Churchill, none of which were true.
Well, let's go through some of the key ones because I think it'd be useful to viewers who didn't watch it to play a little clip and get your response to what was claimed.
So the first one, Cooper argued that, as I said, that Churchill could be seen as the chief villain of World War II and he was responsible for it becoming more than just an invasion of Poland.
Let's take a look.
How would you assess Winston Churchill?
I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War.
He didn't kill the most people.
He didn't commit the most atrocities.
But I believe, and I don't really think, I think when you really get into it and tell the story right and don't leave anything out, you see that he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.
Your response.
Well, he wasn't even prime minister until May 1940.
The invasion of Poland took place in September 1940.
And when Hitler invaded the Low Countries and unleashed Blitzkrieg in the West, Churchill wasn't even prime minister until later that same day.
So he can't be blamed for that.
He certainly can't be blamed for Hitler's decision to attack in the West, because that was taken months beforehand with Hitler's major generals.
And so that falls at the first hurdle as far as...
So the basic premise for his claim that Churchill was somehow more villainous is undone by reality.
It's ludicrous.
Undone actually by chronology.
Because of course Hitler was listening to his generals and giving orders to his generals.
And Winston Churchill at the time was first Lord of the Admiralty.
He was in charge of the Royal Navy and had nothing to do with these decisions.
Is there any suggestion backed by anything that has remote credibility that Hitler only intended originally to invade Poland and then the escalation was created by provocation?
None whatsoever.
No, there was no provocation.
There was the phony war in which nothing happened in that nine-month period.
And what he always wanted to do was to knock the Western countries out of the war so as to be able to concentrate entirely on the thing that he had always wanted to do throughout his career, which was to win Laban's round in the east by invading Russia.
Let's play a second clip.
This is where Cooper argues that Hitler became obsessed with persuading Britain not to continue the war after Dunkirk.
The British have escaped at Dunkirk.
There's no British force left on the continent.
There's no opposing force left on the continent.
In other words, the war is over and the Germans won.
And throughout that summer, 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.
We don't want to fight you.
Offering peace proposals that said, you keep all your overseas colonies.
We don't want any of that.
We want Britain to be strong.
The world needs Britain to be strong.
Churchill wanted a war.
He wanted to fight Germany.
Churchill went out of his way to try and avoid the Second World War.
He warned against Germany.
He warned that you had to be strong against Adolf Hitler.
But the idea that he was some warmonger is something that Goebbels said and David Irving and very few other serious people apart from this Mr. Cooper figure.
There's the famous Neville Chamberlain peace in our time moment, of course, before it all erupts.
Is that indicative that Hitler genuinely wanted any kind of peace?
No, no, no.
Even at the time, he laughed behind Chamberlain's back and sneered at him and ridiculed him.
Let's play the third clip.
In choosing to continue the war after Hitler tried to sue for peace, Cooper says that Churchill was committing rank terrorism because he didn't have the means to re-invade Europe.
He was literally by 1940 sending firebomb fleets, sending bomber fleets to go firebomb the Black Forest, just rank terrorism, starting to, you know, what eventually became just the carpet bombing, the saturation bombing of civilian neighborhoods, you know, to kill, the purpose of which was to kill as many civilians as possible.
Your response to that, Andrew?
Again, complete rubbish.
We did have the means to fight back.
We had the greatest navy in the world.
We were starting to blockade Germany.
We were fighting on the North African littoral at that stage as well.
The idea that the war should just end because Hitler has decided that he's won.
What he hasn't done is disgorged Poland.
And that was the reason we went to war in the first place.
So there is absolutely no evidence to back up these accusations.
Isn't it right that Britain had given Poland effective guarantees that if they were attacked, we would defend them?
Yes, on the 1st of April 1939, we gave a guarantee to Poland.
And if we hadn't stuck up for that and actually seen that through, it would have been a complete humiliation and very dishonourable, actually, on the part of Britain.
I've had lots of people, because of the Israel-Hamas war, on the Israeli side, citing some of the things that Churchill did in World War II as evidence from their side that what they're doing in Gaza is not dissimilar.
And they cite in particular what happened with Dresden, for example, where 25,000 to 30,000 people were effectively incinerated by a bombing campaign in 24 hours.
What do you think when you hear comparisons like that?
And was Dresden, as many claim, a war crime, do you think?
I don't believe Dresden was a war crime.
No, it was the nodal point by which, through which it was a great railway center, the Germans were trying to bring forces from the West to fight in the East.
It was tragic, of course, the fact that the German Gauleiter there didn't put up any air raid shelters in the previous three years, four years of war.
That wasn't Churchill's fault either.
What I was told about the defense for what happened in Dresden was if there was the capability by the German military to defend itself, as it was established there was, that is then a legitimate place to attack in a war.
Is that right?
Well, exactly.
Of course it is.
And under the laws of war, which obviously back in the Second World War were slightly different than the ones today, especially as the Germans had already attacked Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, of course, by the time of Dresden as well.
The whole strategic sense was different about what you could do and what you couldn't do in aerial combat.
Let's go to the next clip.
This is the fourth.
He says, Cooper, that Churchill's whole plan was to drag America into the war, which was a craven, ugly way to fight a war.
Let's watch.
Just the extent of media operations, propaganda operations, everything that they were running in the United States to eventually drag us into that war.
And that was his whole plan.
His whole plan was we don't have a way to fight this war ourselves.
This war is over.
We need either the Soviet Union or the United States to do it for us.
And that was the plan and kept the war going long enough for that plan to come to fruition.
And to me, that's just, it's a craven, ugly way to fight a war.
It does seem quite bizarre that he would say that the way we perpetrated the defense against the Nazis was an ugly, craven way to fight a war, given that Hitler was literally executing a holocaust of millions and millions of people.
Well, and also that we'd won the Battle of Britain, of course, by that time.
But he preferred us not to have won the Battle of Britain.
Of course, we needed to stay in that war because, apart from anything else, Churchill later on knew that Hitler was going to invade Russia, which was going to alter everything.
But to criticise Churchill for trying to so-called drag America into the war, it was Hitler who actually declared war against America on the 11th of December 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor.
Had nothing to do with Churchill at all.
Number five, Churchill's motivation was mostly personal, says Kubrick.
He says he was a psychopathic, mean, childish drunk.
I think part of it was probably kind of personal.
You know, he wanted redemption.
He wanted to go out there and like prove that he's the warlord, that they can go out there and fight this big war.
I think part of it, like 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.
I mean, Churchill's a psychopath.
I mean, I think he doesn't actually know what a psychopath is.
A psychopath, I've interviewed psychopaths, literally, in maximum security prisons in America.
A psychopath is somebody completely, genetically devoid of the ability to show empathy or compassion or any of those things.
Churchill had all those in spades.
All of those.
He had great friends.
He had a very happy marriage.
He wrote 37 books.
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
This is a man, of course, who had enormous empathy.
He was somebody who could speak to crowds, but also individuals tremendously well.
He was the exact opposite, the precise opposite of a psychopath.
He did like a drink.
Yes, he did.
He liked a cigar and he liked to drink.
I mean, if you watch the movies about Churchill, he seems to spend most of his time drinking from breakfast till night.
Is that a fair reflection?
He drank at lunchtime and at dinner, and he had a rhinocerine capacity for alcohol.
One of the people who knew him well, the journalist C.P. Snow, said that Churchill couldn't have been an alcoholic because no alcoholic could have drunk that much.
And the fact is, yes, he could drink a lot, but he was never, isn't it fascinating this?
In the whole of the Second World War, six years of the Second World War, he was only actually drunk once.
When one considers, that was in March 1944, when considers the unbelievable pressures and the strains and stresses he must have been under, it was truly extraordinary.
Blackmail And Zionist Claims 00:13:35
The final clip I want to play, this is where Cooper suggests that Churchill may have been blackmailed by financiers into supporting Zionism.
You read stories 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 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, you know, who was representing Britain in that conflict.
What did you make of what he said there?
Utter conspiracy theory, nonsense, nonsense.
And also pretty dark, I'm afraid.
The idea of Zionist financiers was a dog whistle as far as I was concerned.
It's simply not true.
He never went bankrupt.
He was helped out in 1929 by a friend who was not a Zionist.
He was a Jewish financier, but he wasn't a Zionist, Bernie Baruch.
But that was four years before Hitler came to power.
And also he had a great friend who left him a lot of money in his will, which obviously at one point he talks about Churchill being bribed.
Well, you're not bribing somebody if you give them money in your will because there's nothing you can get out of it, is there?
The whole thing struck me as a profoundly unpleasant accusation, essentially.
And also the idea that media interests were at stake here.
Actually, most of the media was opposed to Winston Churchill until he became Prime Minister.
Right.
We'll kind of have some other quotes pertaining more to the free speech part of this debate, but just in totality, do you think it was a right thing for Tucker to platform this guy?
No.
Given the attention it's had?
Well, if he's only interested in the attention, then I suppose in and of itself, that might work for Mr. Carson.
But as far as an historian is concerned and historical truth is concerned, and The idea about what genuinely happened in the past, which is, of course, as a historian, all I'm interested in, this man certainly doesn't deserve any attention whatsoever.
Well, let's bring in two other guests, Dave Smith and Seth Dillon.
Dave, you said on X, I'm halfway through this.
This was the interview.
This is just perfect.
Darrell Cooper is a national treasure and must be protected at all costs.
Given what we've just heard from the most eminent Churchill historian, arguably in the world, and I commend you to read Andrew's books if you haven't.
Would you like to stand by or withdraw your enthusiastic endorsement of this national treasure?
I will stand by it.
And just to be clear, what I was sharing was not the interview.
That's not the tweet that you're looking at.
I was sharing a 30-minute response to a lot of, you know, the...
I'm sorry.
Okay.
So, just to be clear, what was your view of the interview itself?
I thought it was great overall.
I thought it was a great interview.
I did think that there were a few pieces in there where Daryl could have been clearer.
And I think he was in the follow-up 30-minute, which I would, it seems clear to me that both of you guys have not listened to.
I would highly recommend you go check it out.
Daryl is absolutely brilliant.
I think these comparisons to Irving are totally unfair.
I think the accusation that he was making a dog whistle is unfair.
There have been lots of people who have had, let's say, alternative views on the Second World War.
And that doesn't mean that you're some type of Holocaust denier or Hitler lover or anything like that, which Daryl Cooper certainly isn't.
If anybody has listened to his, it's quite long, but his Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, which is like a 30-hour six-part podcast about the creation of the state of Israel, he covers the Holocaust.
I wouldn't say in depth, but there's about a half hour on it.
And if you go listen to it, this is just totally not somebody who is excusing the crimes of Adolf Hitler or acting as if they didn't happen or in any way does not have kind of like a profound appreciation for how hard it is.
He literally says, Dave, he literally says that Churchill is the chief villain of World War II.
But he also literally says, Pierce, which I noticed you cut out of the clip, that I'm being a bit hyperbolic when I say this.
If you listen to, well, okay, but still, that's worth mentioning.
Churchill, this guy's the chief villain?
Really?
Yes, listen.
And the guy that says that is a national treasure, Dave Smith?
Well, hold on.
Again, Pierce, I'd highly recommend you go listen to the clip of what I was posting.
No, I will.
I will.
But I just based purely, based purely on the fact that the interview with Tucker went so humongously viral, I think it's legitimate to just debate that.
I will go look at what you're talking about because I'm interested to see what he's saying.
Okay, but just him cleaning things up afterwards is another thing.
What he said in real time to Tucker is something different.
And the premise of his whole debate with Tucker, it wasn't even a debate, it was an interview.
The whole premise was that Churchill was the real bad guy, not Adolf Hitler or Stalin.
Yeah.
Right.
Okay.
Again, what Daryl says in the interview is: look, I'm being a little hyperbolic here, but I look at Churchill as the true villain.
And he didn't kill the most people.
He isn't directly responsible for the most atrocities, but here's why.
And so, again, I would just say it's not as if Darryl Cooper is walking back what he said there.
But if you go listen to the follow-up piece he put out, he's explaining where he's coming from.
Okay, but Dave, do you personally think that Churchill was the real villain then?
Oh, no.
I'm trying to convince people that it was all Woodrow Wilson's fault.
I'm not trying to put the blame on Churchill here, just to be fair.
No, no, I mean, look, I think that the greatest villains of the 20th century, there's an overwhelming case that the top three would be Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.
However, I think that in terms of like who did the most evil.
However, the question that I think is a fairly important one to ask is, were there blunders and were there atrocities committed on other sides of that war or on the other side of that war?
And I think that World War II is objectively kind of the worst thing that ever happened in human history.
And I think that 80 years later, we should be able to kind of have some of these discussions about what mistakes were made.
Did it need to go as bad as it went?
Look, I'm not saying a lot of these claims rely on counterfactuals that are not falsifiable.
They're not provable.
We don't know if the Nazis had been put down when they first started reconstituting their military.
Perhaps that would have made things go way better than they ultimately went.
At the same time, I think there's a very, very strong argument that handing a war guarantee to Poland was a blunder of enormous proportion that took the war power ability out of Britain and handed it to these Polish colonels, all in the name of defending Poland, which ultimately got destroyed in the war and then got handed to Joseph Stalin for many decades after that.
So I think there's a real interesting question of history there.
All right, I'm going to bring Seth in in one moment.
I just saw you furiously shaking your head, Andrew.
Well, first of all, on that point.
First of all, on that point, Winston Churchill wasn't even in the cabinet in April 1939 when that guarantee to Poland.
Well, was that guarantee, as Dave says, was that a mistake?
No, because after the Rhineland, after Anschluss, after the Sudetenland, you had to have a tripwire to actually go into war with him.
Okay, let me bring in Seth.
Okay, Dave, respond to that.
Yes, okay.
Well, look, look, nobody, including me or Darrell Cooper, was claiming that Winston Churchill was the one who made that call.
It's just a question of, you go, look, the outcome of making that call was about as bad as it possibly could have been.
Because of Adolf Street.
Well, sure.
No, nobody is arguing, including Daryl.
Nobody's arguing Adolf Hitler doesn't have responsibility for the Second World War.
The question is, this is almost like on the level, if I were to say that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were the great villains of the war in Iraq, that's not an endorsement of Saddam Hussein.
That's not to suggest that he wasn't a brutal dictator.
It's just to say, was this the right decision?
Did this make things much worse?
Or did it make things better?
In the case of World War II, we don't know what all of the potential outcomes could have been.
It's pretty hard to envision a worse outcome.
You know, the difference, you know what?
I actually would say there's a very good argument for saying that Bush and Cheney were the chief villains of that Iraq war.
It was illegal.
It was nonsensical.
It caused utter mayhem.
It wasn't even successful, really, in terms of the immediate aftermath onwards.
But to try and equate the Iraq war, which was a war fought against Saddam Hussein's Iraq based on a completely false premise that he had weapons of mass destruction, with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and their ideological global campaign to eradicate anyone they didn't like, which led to 12 million people being murdered, including 6 million Jews in gas chambers.
I don't think there's any combination of the people.
People are trying to say that this is just criticism of Churchill and that criticism of Churchill is not Hitler apologism or endorsement of Hitler or something like that or downplaying him.
But the two are actually linked together.
Can't vilify Churchill as the chief villain, whether it's hyperbolic or not, of World War II without ignoring or downplaying Hitler's own aggression, his own intentions, his own statements, the actions he had already taken up to that point.
You can't accomplish that vilification without downplaying those things.
So, whether he specifically goes out there and explicitly says, you know what, I'm kind of a fan of Hitler.
He doesn't have to if he's still engaging in that kind of sympathetic downplaying of some of the things that Hitler had said and done.
And then, if you also go and look at the excuse that he's not a Hitler apologist, he's got this 30-hour long podcast or whatever you should go listen to.
I don't really have time for that, but I have looked at his Twitter.
I have looked at his posts.
He's described himself as a fascist.
He puts up side-by-side photos of Hitler after having invaded France, standing in front of the Eiffel Tower with his Nazi soldiers next to him.
And he puts that side by side with the drag display that happened at the Paris Olympics.
And he says what happened in France under Hitler with that invasion was infinitely preferable to what just happened at the Paris Olympics.
Hitler went into France, invaded, was there occupying for years, and sent all the Jews to ovens to be burned and killed.
I mean, like to suggest that that's infinitely preferable to an offensive display at the Olympics is wild.
It's outrageous.
And so it goes to a number of his other tweets.
You know, it can go really deep in there.
He describes himself as a fascist.
He posts these things about Hitler.
And they're usually pretty sympathetic to Hitler over and over and over again.
They're sympathetic.
He said that this was, I think Dave said this too.
The worst possible outcome was the Allies winning this war.
I mean, that's completely outrageous.
Yeah, and Seth, you got to say, that's not what I said.
That's what he, that's what he said.
I'm quoting him.
That's what Cooper said, Darrell Cooper.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I thought you said that that was what I said.
No, what I said.
No, it sounded like you said, it sounded like you echoed him that this is the worst possible outcome.
That's what I heard you say.
That's wrong.
No, what I'm saying is, what I'm saying is that the biggest bloodbath in human history, where I think something like 25 to 30 million civilians were killed, of course, the Holocaust, the raping of Stalin's army all the way through Europe, the absolute destruction of Europe, and not just Europe, but Japan and Africa and all.
I think that is a pretty bad outcome.
I'm not saying that I wish the Nazis had won.
And just a couple of points on this.
Number one, just to your point, Piers, I was not equating the war in Iraq to World War II.
I'm just talking, it was a logical analogy.
I'm just saying the logic of saying that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were the villains does not mean that you therefore support Saddam Hussein.
No, I understood that.
As far as it's just the logic of that, that's all.
So I agree with you.
My question, my question for you, Dave, would be a lot of people.
But savage logic also does not follow.
I understand.
But Dave, my question for you would be: how would you have tackled Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, given their ideology, given their military might, given their intent was declared very clearly with the invasion of Poland?
What would you have done?
I'd have said, knock it off in a real aggressive voice.
I'd say, you knock it off, you Nazis.
This is the reality of the piece of the people.
The world was facing a genuine potential threat.
Censorship Or Misunderstood History 00:07:04
Oh, yeah, no, no, there's no question about that.
No, look, my real, as I said before, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I kind of mean it too.
My real dog in this fight is to blame Woodrow Wilson.
I think that the mistake was getting involved in World War I.
I think that World War I was looking like it was headed toward a stalemate.
America got involved and then forced the unconditional surrender of The Germans imposed the Treaty of Versailles.
I think that's kind of what set the table for World War II ultimately to happen.
Look, what happened in World War II happened?
I don't know how things would be different if things had.
Huh?
I said some people did some things.
Sure.
Okay.
Listen, all I'm saying is that the logic of saying that if you're critical of Winston Churchill or if you're critical of FDR or if you're critical of Joseph, I suppose also would be, well, but I'm just saying the logic of that guy means you're downplaying Hitler in genomics and does not follow.
Well, actually, I don't agree with you because if you actually say as a statement of fact that the chief villain of the Second World War is Winston Churchill and you don't say it was Hitler, then I'm afraid what you are doing, as Seth said earlier, what you are doing, Dave, you are downplaying just how evil Hitler was because you're saying that this who defended us against this.
Let me get a word in the middle of the day.
There's also the issue of what's not being said because you can suggest, well, did he actually say anything that was sympathetic to Hitler?
Well, some of it was what he didn't say.
In that conversation, there was no mention of the Holocaust.
There was no mention of Hitler's genocidal intentions in a conversation that was meant to determine who the chief villain of World War II was.
No mention of those things.
How's that justifiable?
Well, I mean, Seth, I just want everybody who's watching this to just appreciate for a moment that I'm sitting here and saying, hey, listen, this guy spent a half hour of this long podcast series that he did covering the Holocaust.
He just put out around a half hour kind of statement about all the controversy of the last two weeks.
Everybody on the show here has not listened to it.
And then Seth goes, yeah, I'm not going to listen to all of that, but I will find these obscure tweets.
So all I'm saying is that if you want to listen to this guy talking about the horrors of the Holocaust, he is out there on record.
Listen to it and tell me if this sounds like a guy who's downplaying Hitler.
Hang on, hang on, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave.
Hang on.
How long was his interview with Tucker Carlson?
It was like two hours, I think, wasn't it?
Yeah.
Right.
So in two hours, you don't get into the Holocaust as you're trying to depict.
Not even mention Churchill.
Not even mentioning Church.
As you're trying to pick Winston Churchill as the real villain of the war.
I mean, come on.
I think that's a reasonable.
That's a reasonable critique.
And yeah, I think I wish Tucker had asked him a little bit more of that.
And I wish he had gotten into some of the stuff he got on this other 30-minute explanation of his.
I think that's a good critique, too.
Do you agree with his tweets that are that are sympathetic to Hitler and calling himself a fascist?
Yeah, I would, again, I wouldn't agree with those tweets.
I didn't post them.
I also don't really believe, like, if you could imagine, so like as somebody who has consumed hours and hours and hours of his content, I'm not like hanging him over one tweet that he sent that I think was like, yeah, again, being very hyperbolic and I don't think was really landed.
But I will say this, if anybody is interested in hearing more from Darryl Cooper or getting to know why I do consider him to be a national treasure, I'm having an interview with him the day after tomorrow on my show, part of the problem.
I think that the caricature that's being painted of him is not really indicative of who he is and not indicative of why it is that we find him to be such a good idea.
You might rightly be able to do that.
But I want to come to Seth because you got into it with Tucker Carlson in private text messages over this interview.
What was that about?
Well, he came at me because I had mocked his response to Cooper in this interview, right?
There was a lot of criticism being published in the media about Cooper's views in particular.
And then Tucker, you know, just nodding along and agreeing.
Tucker praised this guy as like the greatest historian and scholar, you know, that he's ever heard from.
And this is the guy that you got to listen to.
He's the authority on this.
And then gave him a very soft interview where he didn't push back on any of this stuff.
Tucker didn't bring up the Holocaust.
So it was very soft.
And I mocked that.
And he got kind of upset about that and reached out to me to basically accuse me of, not basically, but literally, accuse me of slandering him as a Nazi.
I'm like, I never called you a Nazi.
I just said you went soft on a Hitler apologist.
That's all that I said.
And then he tried to make some, he made a statement on Charlie Kirk's show, which was not accurate.
It wasn't true, suggesting that I had come at him privately to denounce the fact that he had platformed this person.
And I never did that.
All I did was explain that if you're going to platform this person and not push back on them, then why would you be surprised by the backlash that you get?
Because he's saying some outrageous things and you're basically agreeing with it and going along with it.
So I did not suggest that he should have been platformed.
In fact, my opinion on this is one that is a very strong free speech position.
These kinds of voices should be heard.
We need to get these ideas out there and discuss them, and they should be refuted or they can be ridiculed.
I don't advocate for censorship.
I never suggested that Tucker shouldn't have platformed Cooper in the first place.
I think Cooper should do all the interviews possible and let's hear his ideas and let's respond to them.
And the bigger point, because Tucker tried to suggest that I was encouraging censorship and that these people who are pushing back or encouraging censorship, no, the responses to Cooper's claims, the responses have primarily been focused on Cooper's claims and Tucker's handling of Cooper's claims.
And that is a contribution to the discussion, not an attempt to end the discussion.
The responses that are happening, the objections that they're receiving are not an effort to silence anyone or deplatform anyone or end the discussion.
It's part of the discussion.
So to act like, oh, I'm being censored or, oh, I'm being canceled because there's a backlash.
This is a tactic.
It's a playbook now that they're using where these people on the right will come out with these provocative statements.
They'll generate some backlash or some objections.
And then they'll say, oh, look, the objections mean I'm being canceled or that this is a forbidden topic or that there must be some truth here because look at how hysterical they are.
Well, some people just care about the truth and want to discuss it and they're contributing to that conversation.
That's it.
Let me bring Andrew back in here.
He said several things about historians and the way that they've been using stuff about World War II.
You're going to have taboos.
You're going to have certain ways that certain topics have to be talked about that are going to guarantee that that topic is just profoundly misunderstood.
Like we're going to get to a point where the interwar period and the Second World War are far enough away that people can actually start taking a more honest look at everything that went on.
Free Speech Versus Damaging Lies 00:07:42
And it is going to be the most fruitful place that any aspiring historian can dive into because we've spent the last 70 years, I mean, in Europe's case, like literally throwing people in jail for looking into the wrong corners.
Whenever that's the case, when you try to add any type of balance to that account, it's going to look like you're trying to justify those other things.
Andrew, your response to that.
Well, in a way, of course, he's right.
The more light that one sees, the more documents you go to, the more archives that you work in, the better it should be if you're approaching it from an objective way.
But remarks such as he made earlier about Zionist financiers bribing Winston Churchill, there just is no evidence for this at all.
And also shows a profound misunderstanding of the kind of person that Winston Churchill was.
So I'm afraid I do say, yes, of course, you know, with free speech, everybody should be able to say something.
But why Mr. Carlson chose this really very, very low-rate historian to interview at such length over such issues seems bizarre to me.
I mean, Dave Smith, if, and I absolutely, by the way, would bow to Andrew's historical knowledge on this particular subject matter as being superior to just about any other human being alive, and certainly not a man given to hyperbole.
If you take what Andrew says at face value, going through point by point by point by point by point, and it turns out that pretty much everything Darryl Cooper said in terms of his argument was based on a false reading of facts.
Does that change your view of this national treasure?
Well, wait, so if everything he's saying is wrong, would that change?
Okay, sure.
Yeah, I suppose it would.
I'd be open.
So listen, he hasn't even, they were discussing a big piece that he's about to put out about World War II.
It hasn't even been put out yet.
Right.
So certainly, when this does come out, my attitude isn't like it should be taken as gospel.
I think that, sure, then it should start a conversation.
If he's getting things wrong, I think people should criticize him for that.
And then we should all look into it.
Look, his series on the creation of the state of Israel, it's basically from the beginning of Zionism up to 1948, is phenomenal.
And I didn't listen to any of it and then just take it as fact.
It's a topic that I've read a decent amount about.
And the things that he added, I went and checked all of them or is believed to be a good idea.
You know what I would like?
I mean, I'm just arguing that we invited Daryl Cooper to come on uncensored.
And he very respectfully, politely declined.
It turns out he's doing your show, Dave, which is all about.
He got a better offer.
Which is obviously particularly aggravating.
But actually, the real debate I'd like to see, no offense to any of us three, but Darryl Cooper at the same time as Andrew to actually debate the reality of what happened in World War II, that is something I'd really want to see and would be very happy to host.
Because I do think if you're going to make really quite dramatic claims, completely changing a narrative about something as consequential and historically important as World War II, as Darryl Cooper's done, you've got to have someone who's literally immersed decades of research into it to be there to counter what you're saying.
Seth.
But if Tucker likes this guy and wants to talk to him, then he has every right to give him a platform and have a discussion with him.
And he can be as agreeable as he wants.
That is free speech, is being able to say, and everybody has a right to be wrong.
You can say things without any evidence supporting them whatsoever.
It's your opinion.
You can even claim that it's fact and it's not your opinion.
And you can be wrong about it.
You have a right to do that.
And then the responsibility is on everybody else to, if it is false or it is damaging, it is dangerous, destructive, whatever, you respond to it.
You refute it.
You ridicule it.
You give your own speech, add more speech to it.
I really resist the idea that there should be filtering that happens about which voices we allow to enter the public square.
I think everybody should be allowed to have their voice in the public square.
We should welcome conversations like this.
I do think Tucker should have pushed back on him more, personally.
I think he does agree with his views, and that's why he didn't.
But it's a conversation for everybody else to have.
To denigrate the people who are actually responding and suggest that they're trying to shut down the conversation when they're literally taking part in it is also something I think.
I think that's a really interesting point, Ashley.
And Dave Smith, I mean, would you agree with that?
Because it seems to me what we're doing now is all part of the free speech process, right?
Is that Tucker has this pretty controversial interview with a guy saying very controversial things.
We're now getting top historians and top commentators like yourselves to come and debate this and talk about it and thrash it all out.
What I'm pleased about is that actually young people who tend to watch these shows, they're getting probably educated a lot more about World War II than they would have any knowledge of to start with.
That's a good thing.
And you should, of course, challenge history.
Of course you should.
Everything should be challenged.
But it is slightly dangerous when people start as their starting point with a statement that says Churchill's worse than Hitler.
And I think that is where, yeah, free speech gives him the right to say it, but it's a pretty damaging thing to fly around cyberspace in perpetuity to a lot of impressionable young minds, isn't it?
Well, okay.
Again, I don't think that's exactly the statement that he made, but I do completely agree that I believe in free speech.
I think that there should be much more speech on a lot of different topics that matter, and nothing really matters more than World War II.
It was one of the most important and, of course, also awful events in human history.
And so I couldn't agree with that more.
I think that if Daryl has a controversial opinion and somebody thinks he's getting it right, I think he should give his opinion.
Other people should call him out.
I would love to see a back and forth.
I'd love to see that debate that you were talking about, Pierce.
I think all of it is healthy and good.
And I do think that undeniably, and part of this is for good reason, but undeniably, World War II has an energy around it that really just no other historical event has.
I mean, if you could, you know, if I could sit here and say, well, as I did earlier, that the U.S. never should have entered World War I, this is not going to generate a lot of controversy.
There won't be a week worth of people flipping out over me saying that.
If I said Vietnam or Korea or the war in Iraq or any of that, you don't get any of this.
But when you talk about World War II, you do get this kind of energy.
Like it is kind of a third rail.
And I don't think it should be.
I think that we should have these conversations.
There have been a lot of people over the years.
Of course, Pat Buchanan famously wrote the book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War.
By the way, The Unnecessary War, I believe was a Winston Churchill quote.
Ironically, I think Winston Churchill's comments after the war are closer in some ways than at least in the middle of this debate between where you guys are.
So I'm all for that.
More speech always on every single issue, more speech, not less.
Let me give the final word to Andrew, our eminent historian, because there's been, I think, quite an insidious little campaign in recent years to denigrate the reputation of Winston Churchill.
Yes, he wins the greatest Britain awards and so on in the polls.
Denigrating Churchill's Reputation 00:00:54
And I certainly believe he deserves that.
How insidious do you think it is?
Does it matter?
Should we be raining back at it?
I think that, yes, it is insidious.
Yes, it does matter.
But history is an argument without end.
And, you know, it's what keeps people like me in business.
But the true sort of most powerful irony of all of this is that if Adolf Hitler won the Second World War and Winston Churchill hadn't, we wouldn't be having this argument.
There would be no free speech.
All of freedom of expression ultimately comes down to the fact that he was willing not to make peace with Hitler, but instead to extirpate Nazism.
Yeah, I completely agree.
Thank you.
What a fascinating debate.
Thank you to Seth.
Thank you to Dave.
Thank you to Andrew.
Really appreciate it.
Let's try and get the Roberts Cooper showdown sorted.
I think that would be fascinating.
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