The shameful Nazi apologism of the Very Online right

Forget that toothless crackhead who says he had sex with Barack Obama. Never mind the lowlife pimp who cosplays as a lifestyle guru, Andrew Tate. This week Tucker Carlson scraped even lower in the barrel of cranks to find a guest for his chat show on X. He had on Darryl Cooper, a historian, podcaster and – wait for it – apologist for Adolf Hitler. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve now reached the ‘Were the Nazis really the bad guys?’ stage of contrarian online blather.

Tucker’s chat with Cooper has caused a storm. As well it might. Also known as ‘Martyr Made’, Mr Cooper is a notorious historical revisionist. He has huge beef with Winston Churchill. Churchill, not Hitler, was the true villain of the Second World War, he says. He’s a giddy promoter of the myth that Hitler made a peace offer in 1940 but Churchill rejected it and insisted on plunging the world into war. Hitler the peacenik – who saw that coming down the pipeline of online bollocks?

What Cooper told Carlson was insane. Churchill was a ‘psychopath’ kept in power by Zionist interests, he said. As for all those poor Jews in the camps – they ‘ended up dead’ because the stretched Nazis lacked the time and resources to care for them, he insisted. Depicting the Nazis’ industrialised slaughter of the Jews of Europe as an accident, just a sad, regrettable byproduct of their being too busy, is sick. It’s a species of Holocaust denial. That Carlson nodded along to such rancid revisionism is shameful.

For the true measure of Cooper, consider what he said in a recent post on X, since deleted. Paris under the Nazis, he tweeted, was ‘infinitely preferable in virtually every way’ to the Paris of the Olympics opening ceremony. To drive home his fascistic point, he put a photo of Hitler and his henchmen surveying the spoils of Paris next to a screenshot of that plump drag queen who formed the centrepiece of the Last Supper pisstake at the opening ceremony. Look, I hated the opening ceremony, but – I can’t believe this needs to be said – Paris of 2024 is preferable in every way to the Paris that was conquered by the marauding inhuman racists of the Nazi regime. This is where we’re at, folks: having to explain that a drag queen on your TV is less bad than a Jew-murdering machine taking over your country.

Cooper’s shameless saluting of Nazi Paris cuts to the heart of the Hitler apologetics that have spread like a pox through the Very Online right. These people are in the grip of a deranged fantasy: that Europe in the Nazi era was better than the new Europe of genderfluidity, mass immigration, Islamist terrorism or whatever. They scurry like the abject moral cowards they are from the undoubted problems of the present into an utterly fictional past. A past where Hitler was a peacemaker, Europe was calm (until that rotter Churchill came along), and ‘Western civilisation’ remained intact. Overlooked – wilfully – is the war, savagery and unprecedented programme of extermination unleashed by the Nazis, all of which added up to the most violent and egregious assault on Western civilisation in history.

Cooper’s theory of the Second World War, a theory gleefully lapped up by the Hitler simps of the batshit right, is a gross lie. Churchill became British PM on 10 May 1940. The Nazis opened their first concentration camp – at Dachau – in 1933. They invaded Poland in 1939. They invaded Denmark and Norway before Churchill came to power. And they invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and France in the month he came to power. I don’t know who needs to hear this – in fact I do: the barbarous online right – but Churchill is not the bad guy here.

Those of us old enough to remember the great showdown between the heroic historian Deborah Lipstadt and the Holocaust denier David Irving should feel especially worried by what’s happening right now. We had good reason to believe that the fall of Irving, also a historian devoted to ‘revising’ our understanding of the Second World War, represented a fatal blow to Nazi apologetics. What Irving presents as his historical scepticism is in truth a ‘distinctly pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish’ belief system, said the judge in Irving’s libel suit against Lipstadt after she called out his Holocaust denial. Yet fast-forward 24 years and Irving-style revisionism is not only making a comeback but also going mainstream. Cooper is ‘the most important popular historian working in the United States today’, gushed Carlson. How long until he gets Irving on?

More and more members of the batshit right are tumbling down the toilet of historical revisionism. Foghorn hater of Israel, Candace Owens, recently described as ‘bizarre propaganda’ the idea that Josef Mengele conducted experiments on Jewish kids at Auschwitz. Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times calls these people ‘Hitler-curious’. Their swirling conspiratorial belief that we’re governed by a secretive ‘Matrix’ leads them to believe that ‘all [we’ve] been told about the nature of reality is a lie’, says Goldberg. And so they take aim at every truth of our society, mistaking such puerile disassembling of proven facts for ‘scepticism’. As Goldberg says, ‘once you discard all epistemological and moral guardrails, it’s easy to descend into barbarous nonsense’.

A descent into barbarian thought really is what we are witnessing. And not just on the right. The crank right – with its war on the past, its philistine assault on truth, its vile obsession with race – is a mirror image of the woke left. Both rage with curious ferocity against Churchill: the woke leftists of the BLM era were vandalising Churchill statues years before Tucker had a Churchill hater on his show. Both relativise the Holocaust. The online right does it by suggesting the deaths of all those Jews was kind of unintentional; the crank left does it by calling everything it doesn’t like in the here and now, including Israel’s war on Hamas, ‘another Holocaust’. The former robs the Holocaust of its murderous intent, the latter robs it of its uniqueness: a right / left pincer movement of woke denialism that obscures the truth of what the Nazis did to the Jews.

And both seem hell-bent on upending our common history. On violating the truths and wonders of our past. On scrubbing away the wins of our civilisation that shape who we are. The online right’s intellectual lynching of Churchill is in many ways its 1619 moment. Woke leftists in the US have for years sought to unilaterally change the founding date of the United States from 1776, the year of the revolution, to 1619, the year slaves first arrived in America. The aim of this conceited, elitist project? To reimagine America as a nation born in sin, not revolution; hatched from crime, not democracy. Now, the crank right seeks to dismantle the foundational truth of modern Europe, a truth that rightly still moves us and informs our devotion to civilisational values: namely, that the Nazis represented an incalculable evil, and the Allies were right to wage a war to the last against them.

We joke about wokeness. We laugh at kids with blue hair who think you can change sex. We make fun of people who take refuge from words in ‘safe spaces’. But wokeness, in its truest form, is far from funny. It is a barbarous surge, coursing through the fibres of the internet and the thinking of our institutions, laying waste to every victory and insight of Western civilisation. And now we have a nexus of a morally exhausted right and a de-enlightened left, both awash with cynicism and contempt for the modernity we are privileged to inhabit. That we are witnessing an attempt to rehabilitate the actual Nazis is a testament to the threat all this poses to everything that is good and right. Reason has slept for long enough – it’s time to wake it up.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy