Tucker Carlson, Professional Bullshitter

The popular podcast host promotes a pseudo-historian who says Hitler was a misunderstood peacemaker and the Holocaust needs revising.

Here we go again. This week I need to return to a form of debunking I launched in the early 1990s when taking on the Holocaust deniers, namely the pseudohistory of so-called “historical revisionism”. You know, the Holocaust didn’t happen the way everyone from perpetrators, victims, and bystanders to historians and scholars think it did; World War II was really the unfortunate outcome of British and American interventionism into Germany’s struggle for independence from the restrictions imposed on it after World War I; Hitler is misunderstood and really wanted to create a Pax Europa; Churchill and Roosevelt were autocrats who imposed their wills on nations fighting for self-determination; the mass bombing of Dresden and Hamburg were just as bad as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and the like. What follows is the text of my weekly solo commentary on my podcast, The Michael Shermer Show, this one under the podcast show title “Pseudohistory Makes a Comeback on Tucker Carlson’s Show.” The provocative title of this essay uses the descriptive label for Carlson as intended by cognitive psychologists who study the phenomenon, which I explain below.

I debunked all this nonsense in the pages of Skeptic in two separate issues, here and here, and in much greater depth in my book Denying History, co-authored with Alex Grobman. Thanks to Tucker Carlson’s podcast with the pseudo-historian Darryl Cooper, AKA MartyrMade on X, who Carlson introduced as “the best and most honest popular historian working in the United States today,” all this historical distortion is back in play. Even though I’m a Ph.D. historian, I had never heard of Darryl Cooper. According to his Wikipedia page, he’s the author of one book, Twitter—A How to Tips & Tricks Guide (2011) and editor of Bush Yarns and Other Offences (2022). Maybe that’s why Carlson added: “I want people to know who you are and I want you to be widely recognized as the most important historian in the United States.”

Thanks to Tucker Carlson’s massive online audience numbering in the tens of millions (he overtook Joe Rogan on Spotify last month), Darryl Cooper may very well become as well-known as Carlson wants him to be, although likely not for the reasons suggested in the conversation. But first, let me say a few words about Tucker Carlson. He’s a bullshitter. That’s a technical term, not a libel or slander. In cognitive psychology research bullshit means the complete rejection of behaving “without any sincere regard for truth.” (See scholarly papers on bullshit here, here, and here, for example. There is even a bullshit frequency scale!) Liars acknowledge truth when they try to conceal or deny it, whereas bullshitters don’t care what reality is or to what extent they accurately express what it is. I have no idea if Tucker Carlson believes his bullshit or not, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know either. He is not a historian. He is not a journalist. If I had to put a label on him I would say he’s a professional bullshitter. He is the very embodiment of what Steve Bannon had in mind when he said: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Yeah, bullshit.

Whenever Tucker Carlson rambles on about topics I know something about, such as science and history, I can tell he’s bullshitting. He has a fascination with UFOs and UAPs, for example, but whenever he says something about the subject his narrative is full of falsehoods, half-truths, and uninformed opinions. I know because I know far more than Carlson on this topic, and after over three decades of studying bullshit I can smell it like a shark smells blood in the water—a couple of molecules of bullshit is all I need to detect to know what it is. And Carlson’s bullshit is intentional. I know because when he was at Fox News his producers contacted me about coming on the show to talk about UFOs and UAPs…until I made it clear what my position is, namely that I’m skeptical they are aliens.

Then, later, when out Skeptic Research Center published a study in which we discovered that liberals vastly overestimated the number of African Americans killed by the police each year compared to conservatives, the producers contacted me to talk about it on the air (they had already run a story showing our data graph)…until I told them that I would also point out the many other topics in which conservatives overestimate things more than liberals, such as the number of abortions or immigrants coming into our country each year. Response: “We’ll get back to you.” After that, it was crickets.

Lying About Hitler and the Holocaust

So, what exactly did this pseudo-historian Cooper tell Carlson, who nods along in seeming approval of everything he says? Only that Winston Churchill was a “psychopath” and war-monger who was the “chief villain” of the Second World War, who unfortunately forced Hitler into an unwanted war with the West even though he, Churchill, knew that Hitler only ever wanted to combat Russian Communism by invading the USSR after, you know, annexing Austria, the Sudentenland, Bohemia, Lithuania, and Czechoslovakia, and then invading Poland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Norway, Yugoslavia, and Greece.

Oh that war-monger Churchill, how could he not see what a peace-loving man was Hitler, like his predecessor Neville Chamberlain did at Munich when the West could have stopped Hitler then and there, when his own generals plotted to assassinate him and depose the Nazi regime, knowing as they did that Germany would not stand a chance in a war.

As for the Holocaust, Cooper is echoing David Irving and the other Holocaust deniers when he claims that the camps were built to house all the prisoners of war captured in the early and successful days of the good and necessary war against the Russians, and, says Cooper, “were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead.”

Yeah, sure, they “ended up dead.” I wonder how that happened? Oh, maybe those gas chambers with the Zyklon-B blue staining on the bricks gives us a clue? Well, you see, those gas chambers were used for delousing the clothes of the infected prisoners, but then the Nazis, in their mercy, decided that it was better to kill the prisoners to put an end to their unfortunate suffering, rather than dragging it out over time.

Cooper is not a bullshitter. He’s a denier. Has he never heard of the Holocaust by Bullets? This is the millions of Jews, gypsies, and other ethnic groups in Poland, Ukraine, and other territories conquered by the German army, murdered by the Einsatzgruppen—the special police battalions that followed the Wehrmacht into these conquered lands, going through every city, town, and village, rounding up Jews and others, and murdering them one at a time or lining them up in front of pits they were forced to dig and shooting them all at once.

German officials and Ukrainian militia shooting a Jewish family, Miropol, Ukraine, October 13, 1941. Security Services Archive, Historical Collection of the State Security Service (StB) Prague, archival no. H-770-3

For example, in a report from Einsatzgruppe A during the winter of 1941-1942, 2,000 Jews were killed in Estonia, 70,000 in Latvia, 136,421 in Lithuania, and 41,000 in Belorussia. On November 14, 1941, Einsatzgruppe B reported an additional 45,467 shootings, and on July 31, 1942, the governor of Belorussia reported 65,000 Jews were killed the previous two months. Einsatzgruppe C estimated they had killed 95,000 by December, 1941. Finally, Einsatzgruppe D reported on April 8, 1942, a total of 92,000 killed, for a grand total of 546,888 dead, or half a million plus in less than one year.

Numerous eyewitness accounts from the Einsatzgruppen can be found in a remarkably graphic book entitled “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders by Ernst Klee and colleagues. For example, here is a statement of a teleprinter engineer named Kiebach, from Einsatzgruppe C:

In Rovno I had to participate in the first shooting….Each member of the firing-squad had to shoot one person. We were instructed to aim at the head from a distance of about ten meters. The order to fire was “Ready to shoot, aim, fire!” The people who had been shot then fell into the grave. I myself was detailed to the firing-squad; however, I only managed to shoot about five times. I began to feel unwell, I felt as though I was in a dream. A private or lance-corporal from the Wehrmacht, I don’t know which unit, took my carbine from me and went and took my place in the firing-squad.

The following letter is an emotional, personal one from SS-Obersturmführer (Lieutenant-Colonel) Karl Kretschmer, dated Sunday, September 27, 1942, to his wife, “My dear Soska.” He apologizes for not writing more, is feeling ill and in “low spirits” because “I’d like to be with you all. What you see here makes you either brutal or sentimental.” His “gloomy mood,” he explains, is caused by “the sight of the dead (including women and children).” Which dead? Dead Jews, who deserve to die: “As the war is in our opinion a Jewish war, the Jews are the first to feel it. Here in Russia, wherever the German soldier is, no Jew remains. You can imagine that at first I needed some time to get to grips with this.” In a subsequent letter, not dated, he explains to his wife that “there is no room for pity of any kind. You women and children back home could not expect any mercy or pity if the enemy got the upper hand. For that reason we are mopping up where necessary but otherwise the Russians are willing, simple and obedient. There are no Jews here any more.”

Finally, on October 19, 1942, in a letter signed “You deserve my best wishes and all my love, Your Papa,” Kretschmer shows how easy it is to slip into the banality of evil (163-171):

If it weren’t for the stupid thoughts about what we are doing in this country, the Einsatz here would be wonderful, since it has put me in a position where I can support you all very well. Since, as I already wrote to you, I consider the last Einsatz to be justified and indeed approve of the consequences it had, the phrase: “stupid thoughts” is not strictly accurate. Rather it is a weakness not to be able to stand the sight of dead people; the best way of overcoming it is to do it more often. Then it becomes a habit.

After invading Poland the Nazis set about exterminating all the Jews they could find, you know, before that psychopath Churchill tried to stop them. For example, on October 7, 1940, Hans Frank, head of the Generalgouvernement (the governmental administration over Poland’s four districts of Cracow, Warsaw, Radom, and Lublin), in a speech to a Nazi assembly, summed up his first year of effort (Nuremberg Doc. 3363-PS, 891): “My dear Comrades!… I could not eliminate [ausrotten] all lice and Jews in only one year. But in the course of time, and if you help me, this end will be attained.” To those deniers who claim that “ausrotten” merely meant deportation, did Frank mean to transport the lice out of Poland on miniature trains?   

On December 13, 1941, Hans Frank told a cabinet session at his Cracow HQ: “As far as the Jews are concerned, I want to tell you quite frankly that they must be done away with in one way or another… Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews.” Why must the Nazis rid themselves of pity if all they are doing is transporting Jews to a new homeland? On December 16, 1941, Hans Frank addressed a government session in the office of the Governor of Cracow, in conjunction with the upcoming Wannsee Conference:

Currently there are in the Government Generalship approximately 2 1/2 million, and together with those who are kith and kin and connected in all kinds of ways, we now have 3 1/2 million Jews. We cannot shoot these 3 1/2 million Jews, nor can we poison them, yet we will have to take measures which will somehow lead to the goal of annihilation, and that will be done in connection with the great measures which are to be discussed together with the Reich. The territory of the General Government must be made free of Jews, as is the case in the Reich. Where and how this will happen is a matter of the means which must be used and created, and about whose effectiveness I will inform you in due time.

Okay, that’s enough horror for one commentary. Read my book if you want to know exactly what happened in the Holocaust, how we know it happened, and why it happened. Mr. Cooper, I’m happy to send you a complimentary copy if you like. You really should read something about the Holocaust before attempting to revise it.

As for the rest of his so-called revisionism about the Second World War, Cooper is cribbing from Patrick Buchanan’s 2008 book Church, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, along with much of what is published in the Journal of Historical Review, the leading journal of Holocaust denial.

The myth that needs revising is that the Second World War pitted freedom against tyranny, but according to the revisionists, the reality is that the Allies included Britain and the USSR, the most imperial and tyrannical (respectively) nations on earth. Here is Mark Weber, the editor of the IHR in a lecture I attended in Orange County at which David Irving also spoke:

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Britain ruled over the largest colonial empire in history, holding more millions of people against their will than any regime before or since. America’s other great wartime ally, the Soviet Union, was, by any objective measure, the most tyrannical or oppressive regime of its time, and a vastly more cruel despotism than Hitler’s Germany.

The myth holds that in World War II we witnessed the triumph of good over evil, whereas in reality, Weber says, the Allies’ goodness was indistinguishable from their opponents’ evil:

In fact, the record of Allied misdeeds is a long one, and includes the British-American bombing of German cities, a terroristic campaign that took the lives of more than half a million civilians, the genocidal ‘ethnic cleansing’ of millions of civilians in eastern and central Europe, and the large-scale postwar mistreatment of German prisoners.

Revisionists have long drawn the moral equation of Auschwitz = Dresden, Treblinka = Hiroshima. It’s a theme that appears time and again in revisionist literature. David Irving, for example, made the equivalency argument in his 1971 book Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden. Calling the attack on Dresden “the worst single massacre in European history,” Irving asks “Is there any parallel between Dresden and Auschwitz?” His answer has the nuance of a moral sledge hammer: “To my mind both teach one lesson: that the real crime of war and peace alike is not Genocide—with its implicit requirement that posterity reserve its sympathy and condolences for a chosen race—but Innocenticide. It was not the Jewishness of the victims that made Auschwitz a crime; but their innocence.”

Baloney. Yes, the Allies killed innocents on the road to victory, but the killing stopped the moment the Allies won. The genocide of Jews by Germans ended on VE day, and the genocide of Chinese by Japanese ended on VJ day. Auschwitz and Nanking were no more. The Allies killed into order to stop the killing by the Axis, and for no other reason. The Axis killed for geography, for political control, for economic power, for racial purification, and for pleasure, and the killing would have gone on and on and on were it not for the Allies. Anyone unable to see the difference should have his license to practice history revoked. That’s you, Mr. Cooper. I also recommend that you read Richard Evans book Lying About Hitler and, you know, stop lying about Hitler.

The Decline of the West

In 2016 Darryl Cooper co-hosted (with John David Ebert) a podcast called Decline of the West. This is revealing because for decades I’ve noted in revisionist literature there seems to be a longing for a return to more rigid top-down controls over the unwashed and ignorant masses, a reversion to a constitutional monarchy, perhaps, or a benevolent dictatorship. I call it the Aristocratic Romance, where everyone knows their place in the rigid class system and those at the top called the shots. Of course, those who desire the return to such a society always think of themselves as being in the chosen few in control. This is why, in contemplating new laws and decrees that place restrictions on people’s freedoms, that you imagine yourself as not knowing which group you’ll be in after such social and political changes are made—John Rawls’ original position in a vail of ignorance.

The historical reality of such societies is that the vast majority of the people—the group you and I and the revisionists are most likely to be in—would be dirt poor, uneducated, with next to no power or liberty, toiling endless hours for the benefit of someone else. The Aristocratic Romance, however unrealistic it may seem, it still not the deeper problem with these would-be revisionists, which is the racial and ethnic cleansing that such a utopian vision requires. There is no doubt that had Hitler been triumphant it would have meant the end of European Jewry (along with other “undesirables”), and perhaps the end of the Jewish people entirely. The Holocaust was not the unfortunate byproduct of war, or collateral damage amidst the larger carnage. Years before the war even started, Hitler went after the Jewish people with a vengeance. As Hitler told his adjutants three days after the Wannsee Conference that outlined the policy against the Jews and coordinated the efforts of all the departments who were responsible for implementing the final solution: “The Jew must clear out of Europe. Otherwise no understanding will be possible between Europeans. It’s the Jew who prevents everything. I restrict myself to telling them they must go away. But if they refuse to go voluntarily, I see no other solution but extermination.”

So much for the enlightened rule by educated, intelligent, and cultured European aristocrats.

Speaking of racial purity, it seems appropriate here to point out that very few of the Nazi leaders bore any resemblance whatsoever to the racial stereotype of the godlike Aryan Übermensch. Heinrich Himmler was squatty and nearsighted, Herman Goering was an obese glutton, Joseph Goebbels was diminutive and deformed, Albert Speer was balding, as was Adolf Eichmann, who also wore coke-bottle thick glasses, and even Hitler himself was a physical wreck. By their own criteria, all of them should have been sterilized before passing on their defective genes, if not gassed and cremated.

Extermination of masses of people racially or ethnically different from those in power is the logical outcome of the Aristocratic Romance and the belief that there is (or can be) such a thing as pure race and ethnicity. There is no such thing, of course, as modern genetic science has unequivocally demonstrated. Every person on Earth comes from a single population of a few thousand individuals who migrated out of Africa and began to colonize Europe and the rest of the world a couple of hundred thousand years ago. Black Australian aborigines, for example, are genetically more closely related to Southeast Asians than they are to black Africans because the route of migration was from Africa through Southeast Asia into Australia. The similarities between Australian aborigines and Africans, and the differences they show with Southeast Asians, are literally only skin deep. The principle holds for all peoples around the world, and our racial similarities vastly outweigh our racial differences.

We are, in fact, one race, one folk, one people.

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of Why People Believe Weird Things, Heavens on Earth, and Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Matters, to be publisher Fall, 2025.