🌊 America’s Most “Honest” Historian

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By Max Frost

We quit our jobs to start Roca because we loathe establishment outlets like Fox and CNN. Decades of their relentlessly negative, partisan, and fear-mongering content have left 66% of Americans without trust in the news media. That public backlash has allowed new media to prosper.

We are proud to be part of the new media alongside some people who are making the best content anywhere, people like Peter Santenello, Tim Dillon, and Tommy G. These people wander outside party lines, platform unheard voices, and seek the truth.

But in new media, like old media, the easiest way to grow audiences and make money is to create ever more divisive content. This has created a never-ending cycle where creators try to “out-anti-establishment” the next.

On the legacy media end of the spectrum, the truth is always boring: Establishment media writes off anything that challenges conventional narratives as a “conspiracy theory.”

On the other end of the spectrum, the truth is never boring.

And the king of that is Tucker Carlson.

On every episode of his show, Tucker – who has the third-most popular podcast on Spotify – attacks a sacred truth or highlights a heretical guest. For him, the truth is never simple. Nothing exemplifies this more than Tucker’s treatment of Darryl Cooper, whom Tucker calls the West’s bravest and “most honest historian."

But who is he really?

Raised by a single mother in California, Cooper attended over 30 schools from K-12. He has said that he read constantly as a child to “[maintain] some consistency as we moved from place to place,” sparking his interest in history. After three semesters of college, he dropped out, leaving for a 10-year career in the Navy. After that, he worked for the Pentagon, helping the Navy to sell weapons systems abroad.

Cooper has said he began pursuing history full-time in 2014, when the outbreak of war in Gaza led him to read up on the history of Israel/Palestine. His ensuing reading binge inspired him to start a history podcast, Martyr Made, which was inspired by Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History.

Cooper began his first series with a graphic description of a pogrom of Jews in Europe, before shifting between dense academic perspectives from both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. Despite being an amateur, his extensive, thorough analysis – some episodes are up to eight hours long – earned him legions of fans. 

Cooper’s website describes his approach as such:

In practice, this meant challenging standard historical narratives, something he says he does by taking the perspectives of radical figures – both the heroes and villains – involved. He applied this approach to the Jonestown cult, 19th-century authors, the American labor movement, and more. Eventually, he would arrive at World War II.

Cooper’s histories caught the attention of Tucker Carlson, who hosted him for an episode that dissected the legacies of Hitler and Winston Churchill. In one clip, he called Churchill the “chief villain of the Second World War”; in another, he shared the debunked theory that concentration camps were actually a “humane” way to kill prisoners, rather than a deliberate attempt to “exterminate” them. He played down Hitler’s anti-Semitism, claiming that Hitler was not publicly anti-Semitic before 1940.

The core of Cooper’s argument was that by 1940, Hitler – having secured enough “living space” by conquering parts of its neighbors – wanted peace. Churchill ( a “psychopath,” per Cooper) instead chose war, plunging the world into its deadliest-ever conflict and making Churchill most responsible for the resulting millions of deaths. That proved a fitting parable for Tucker’s recurring theme that bloodthirsty “Neocons” continually try to draw America into foreign wars.

Cooper’s Tucker appearance catapulted him into both stardom and infamy overnight. Buoyed by a subsequent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, his podcast became Spotify’s seventh-most listened to, while his Substack hit number one on the history charts. Historians, meanwhile, labeled Cooper a misinformed anti-Semite and the pinnacle of a faux intellectual. The world’s most prominent World War II experts lined up to highlight the errors in Cooper’s telling, but by that point, he was big – and each accusation by the establishment was just received as more proof that “experts” had concocted narratives that didn’t hold up to scrutiny.

A major flaw in mainstream media is that they use their privileged positions in society to create narratives and tell half-truths. When they err, they bury corrections at the bottom of their articles, where no one will ever see them. A million people will read the article; 100 people will see the correction. 

And with mainstream media, so it is with the new media.

In the months that followed Cooper’s appearance on Rogan, he walked back many of his statements. After his criticisms of Churchill racked up hundreds of millions of impressions, the leading Churchill historian offered to debate him. Cooper replied, “I’m not a Churchill expert.” He later said he had been “hyperbolic” about Churchill. And after millions heard – and believed – his take that concentration camps had been intended as a “humane” way to put starving prisoners out of their misery, he acknowledged logistical problems didn’t cause the Holocaust. He later struggled to read testimony from victims of the Nazi massacre at Babi Yar. 

Yet by that point, Cooper’s repeated media appearances and engaging, anti-establishment content had made him a staple of the new media. Even as one viral post after another (see below tweets from Cooper, @martyrmade) suggested that he was actually the opposite of an objective observer, his audience was entrenched.

Everything from his views on tyranny (“Democracy is a disease. Tyranny is the cure”) to fascism (“Fascism is merely what happens when normal people realize that the left will never stop until they’re forced to”) and Hitler (Cooper says he’s in heaven) suggests that his history is, in fact, as ideologically captured as any left-wing historian.

Cooper thus embodies the best and worst of new media.

On the one hand, he has shattered ceilings and built a mass audience by himself; he’s not afraid to question orthodoxies; and despite lacking the traditional credentials, he’s organically built a popular product and mass audience. Yet on the other hand, he’s used that position to promote half- or non-truths and portray them as reality, just as mainstream media often does. 

Trusting someone with views like Cooper’s about fascism to give an honest history of World War II is like trusting a woke professor to give an honest take on children’s sex changes. For Tucker, that makes him “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States” – because, whether right or wrong, his version of history isn’t boring.

Editor’s Note

Whether you agree or disagree with this, please send us your thoughts. We’re sure we have some Cooper/Tucker fans in the audience. We want to hear from you!

Speaking of, we had a number of people write in about yesterday’s article on the potential demise of pub banter. Find a sample below.

Kim wrote:

Brian wrote:

And Lida wrote:

And if you missed any of our recent reporting, it’s available here: 

• Free Speech Dies at the Pub

• The Robert Maxwell Story Pt. 3

• The Robert Maxwell Story Pt. 2

• The Robert Maxwell Story Pt. 1

• Inside Silicon Valley’s $50M Frat House

Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow.

—Max and Max