How Tucker Carlson’s Nazi apologist guest, Darryl Cooper, won fame by defending big lie supporters

The profile of right-wing podcaster Darryl Cooper (aka Martyr Made) got an unfortunate boost this week, thanks to an already-infamous appearance on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. 

As of this writing, “The Martyr Made Podcast” is the top-ranked show on iTunes — ahead of The New York Times’ Daily, the Joe Rogan Experience and Carlson himself. He’s got over a quarter-million followers on X; his sit-down with Carlson was even boosted by Elon Musk (who later quietly deleted his supportive post). Cooper counts Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance among his X followers. Among New Right influencers, Cooper’s kind of a big deal.

Carlson praised Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” and lauded his work on the “forbidden” topic of “trying to understand World War II.”

Putting aside the abject silliness of saying World War II is a “forbidden” subject anywhere on this planet, the appearance was of a piece with Cooper’s “just asking questions” style of ahistorical revisionism, which frequently includes Nazi apologia and Holocaust skepticism. He called Winston Churchill “the chief villain of World War II” and said that the murder of 6 million Jews was “humane” because there was no food to feed the “prisoners of war.”

These sentiments are hardly uncommon in Cooper’s output. In a since-deleted tweet from July, Cooper posted two photos. One was of Adolf Hitler and his high command stalking through Paris, with the Eiffel Tower in the background. The other was of drag performers in the Paris Olympics opening ceremony — who appeared on the TV broadcast for mere moments. Cooper wrote that the Nazi victory lap photo was “infinitely preferable in virtually every way” to the Olympics photo. And there’s no reason to believe this was mere trolling.

Pretty gross, right? So where did this guy come from? How did he cultivate such a large audience? 

It all started with a long Twitter thread back in July 2021, in which Cooper credited “discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent” for his ability to “extract a general theory about their perspective.” In dozens of tweets, Cooper purported to explain the reasons that tens of millions of Americans believed Trump’s thoroughly and decisively debunked “Big Lie.” 

In short, he claimed, it’s all the mainstream media and institutions’ fault. Trump-supporting boomers can’t be expected to have agency, nor can they be blamed for believing “grifters and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories.” In Cooper’s telling, they are mere victims in a grand conspiracy to mislead the public — and therefore can’t be blamed for latching on to Trump’s craven, democracy-assaulting lie.

According to Cooper, “the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them. They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov’t official, because they feel most betrayed by them.”

The thread continued with vague innuendos and a gish-gallop of semi-relevant information, but at no time did it put any responsibility at the feet of Trump, Carlson or any other “grifters and media scam artists” who brain-poisoned their followers with an entirely false narrative that most of them believe to this day.

Cooper’s thread went viral thanks to endorsements by numerous high-profile MAGA influencers like Donald Trump Jr. as well as fellow travelers spanning the far-right to the MAGA-friendly faux-center. “Cooper went from 7,000 followers to 70,000 in 4 days,” marveled the normally unsentimental Glenn Greenwald, who also published Cooper’s “absolutely brilliant exposition” as an article on his personal website. 

Cooper didn’t endorse the Big Lie. But he did lay the blame for the lie’s effectiveness on the people who said it was a lie, rather than the person (Trump) who created the lie and the people who spread it (Tucker Carlson included). It’s the “look what you made me do” defense, but about a baseless fraud that continues to rip the country apart. 

So that’s essentially the Martyr Made origin story. Three years later, his reach is far wider, but it seems as though Cooper’s Nazi revisionism was the bridge too far for a lot of right-wingers who might have been previously inclined to credulously boost his message (like Musk) — although Andrew Tate still appears to be a fan. 

What ties the two moments together is the “just asking questions” revisionism that makes a big show of challenging the supposedly manufactured institutional narratives (e.g. “the 2020 election was not stolen” and “the Nazis were the villains of World War II”) through sloppy, misleading or sometimes just flat-out-wrong arguments. 

And this kind of reflexive contrarianism can be seen among other MAGA-friendly podcasters with huge platforms, distorting reality fields by holding onto a mantra that if an “institution” says it’s true — then it can’t be. 

We’re headed into another election where one of the two candidates has indicated that if they lose, they won’t lose gracefully. People like Cooper, through their deranged brand of “anti-establishment” activism, are already helping lay the groundwork for another Big Lie — even one they don’t necessarily believe in.