Tucker Carlson hosts accused Holocaust denier who calls Churchill the 'real villain'

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson is under fire for hosting on his show a fringe "historian" who called Winston Churchill the "chief villain of the Second World War" and not Adolf Hitler and claimed that six million Jews "ended up dead" rather than were murdered by the Nazis.

Carlson wrote that Darryl Cooper “may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States" in a post promoting the two-hour video discussion between himself and Cooper.

Cooper blamed Churchill for World War Two becoming as bad as it did instead of being limited to a regional war in Poland, despite the fact that Churchill was not in office when Hitler invaded Poland and England and other Allied nations declared war on Germany in response.

"Maybe I'm being a little hyperbolic, maybe, but ... I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War," Cooper said. “Now, he didn’t kill the most people, he didn’t commit the most atrocities, but I believe that when you 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."

According to him, Hitler did not want to fight England and France, but Churchill ignored all of his peace overtures.

Cooper stated that it is "not the case" that he considers Churchill's enemies, such as Hitler, to be the "good guys." He blamed Hitler and the Nazi regime for launching a war "where they were completely where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners."

His explanation for the Holocaust was that "they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there." He then went on to compare the Nazis' actions in Eastern Europe to the "Zionist" actions undertaken by the State of Israel following the Hamas massacre of October 7.

Carlson did not push back on these claims. During the discussion on World War Two, he stated that "literally, it's a crime to ask questions."

The interview was widely condemned as an exercise in Holocaust denial. Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan wrote on X, "Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper engaged in one of the most repugnant Holocaust denial displays of the last years. Antisemitic, ahistorical and deranged, an affront to the victims and to the persuit of truth. Decent persons should condemn this display of bigotry and malevolence."

Former Congresswoman Liz Cheney wrote on X, “Actually, this is pro-Nazi propaganda, including, ‘Churchill was the chief villain of WW2’ and Hitler ‘didn’t want to fight.'"

“No serious or honorable person would support or endorse this type of garbage,” Cheney added.

“Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are," conservative analyst Erick Erickson said. “He’s neither the best nor the most honest. He’s a contrarian moral cretin who has turned his contrarianism into Nazi apologetics.”