A podcaster interviewed by conservative commentator host Tucker Carlson and boosted by billionaire X owner Elon Musk has received condemnation from Yad Vashem: the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.
“Recently, Darryl Cooper, in a podcast with Tucker Carlson, made statements that grossly misrepresent the German Nazi regime’s actions during ‘Operation Barbarossa’ in 1941,” Yad Vashem said in a statement about the video released earlier this week.
“Cooper claimed that the Nazis were ‘unprepared’ to handle millions of prisoners of war and political dissidents, suggesting their brutality was a result of poor planning,” per the museum.
Yad Vashem called the claim “patently false,” responding that “the German invasion of the Soviet Union was long-planned and included genocidal strategies of dealing with the local Jewish population not as a response to logistical challenges, but as an ideological one.”
Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, said “Tucker Carlson and his guest Darryl Cooper engaged in one of the most repugnant forms of Holocaust denial of recent years. These far-fetched conspiracy theories are not only dangerous and malevolent, they are antisemitic.”
In the interview, Cooper described Winston Churchill as the “the chief villain of the Second World War.”
Dan Michman, a professor and the head of Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research, said “Mr. Cooper isn’t known for having done any scholarly research on Nazism and the Holocaust, and his statements in this interview clearly demonstrate his ignorance.”
Musk deleted his X posting promoting the Carlson-Cooper interview, which he had initially described as “very interesting” and “worth watching.”
