Why Is the New York Times Legitimizing a Holocaust Denier?
Tucker Carlson’s interlocutor, Darryl Cooper, isn't a “revisionist”—he’s a Nazi apologist.
IT WAS SHOCKING, although not surprising, to see Tucker Carlson praise the prominent Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper, who said Adolf Hitler was a peacemaker and called Winston Churchill the “chief villain” of World War II. But it was even more shocking—as well as dismaying and disheartening— when the New York Times conferred some credibility on Cooper by repeatedly describing him as merely a “Holocaust revisionist” rather than an outright denier.
According to Carlson, Cooper “may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States. His latest project is the most forbidden of all: trying to understand World War Two.” Elon Musk briefly seemed to agree, touting Carlson’s interview with Cooper as “worth watching” in a social media post he later deleted.
In fact, Cooper is a Nazi apologist, who has written that the Nazis’ 1940–44 occupation of Paris was “infinitely preferable in every way” to the Paris Olympics of 2024.
REGARDING THE HOLOCAUST, Cooper told Carlson that it was all a big mistake. “In 1941,” he said, the Germans “launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war.” Consequently, “they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there.”
Even this claim is completely ahistorical. The Nazis were explicit about their plan to use mass starvation as a weapon of war—they called it the Hunger Plan. Timothy Snyder, the preeminent historian of Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, explains the intentionality and brutality of the Nazi starvations:
“In a Hunger Plan, the Nazi regime projected the death by starvation of tens of millions of Slavs and Jews in the winter of 1941-1942. . . . No matter which technology was used, the killing was personal. People who starved were observed, often from watchtowers, by those who denied them food.”
To imply that starvation was an accident or a mere failure of logistics not only ignores the facts of the starvation campaign; it also implies that there was no systematic genocide, no gas chambers, and no killing centers. And never mind the “Holocaust by bullets” in which 1.5 million Jews were shot to death by the SS Einsatzgruppen.
Carlson’s enthusiastic welcome for Cooper was alarming enough to draw international press attention, with coverage from India to Australia, as well as by the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and other outlets in the United States. The New York Times reported two stories on the Cooper-Carlson connection, both with misleadingly anodyne headlines: “Tucker Carlson Sharply Criticized for Hosting Holocaust Revisionist,” and “Vance Declines to Denounce Carlson After Interview With Holocaust Revisionist.”
Among legitimate historians, “revisionism” can refer to a good-faith attempt to develop a new or updated perspective on historical evidence. In a sense, all history is revisionist, as serious scholars constantly attempt to expand, elucidate, or correct our knowledge of past events.
But Cooper isn’t trying to refine our understanding of the Holocaust—as, for example, Snyder did by situating it within a broader pattern of mass killing the zone between the Rhine and the Urals in the first half of the twentieth century. Instead, he is arguing against all evidence that the most infamous genocide in human history was not a purposeful and thorough plan to murder millions, but an accident.
Holocaust deniers typically attempt to sanitize their antisemitism with neutral-sounding terms and phrases such as “revisionism” and “just asking questions.” Their pseudo-academic center is blandly called the Institute for Historical Review. The so-called Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust publishes a journal, An Inconvenient History: A Quarterly Journal for Free Historical Inquiry.
Regrettably, the New York Times, and several other mainstream outlets, have indulged a similar euphemism, white-washing Cooper as a revisionist, rather than a denier, which elides his noxious ideology, and underplays the dangerousness of his fawning interview on Carlson’s increasingly popular podcast.
I INITIALLY ASSUMED that the Times’s “Holocaust revisionist” headlines had been written in haste by an uninformed editor and would therefore be quickly corrected, given that the articles themselves correctly refer to Cooper’s “false claims.”
I was wrong.
I wrote to the two reporters and received this reply: “It's an interesting question and one we wrestled with. Classic Holocaust deniers say either the Holocaust didn’t happen or was greatly exaggerated. Cooper conceded that millions of Jews died. He is questioning the motives and methods.”
This is a meaningless, and credulous, distinction. Questioning “motives and methods” is a sly way of absolving Nazism of moral blame. It surely does not transform “classic” denialism into sophisticated-sounding revisionism. The Times headlines normalize Cooper’s pretension to legitimacy. They ignore the vast gulf between unintended starvation, which Cooper falsely claims, and premeditated mass murder, which is what actually happened.
Other sources have been more accurate and more responsible. The White House called Cooper “a Holocaust denier who spread Nazi propaganda,” and denounced Carlson’s interview as “a disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans.” Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance center, said it was “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.”
Writing on the Times’s own opinion page, Michelle Goldberg did not hesitate to identify Cooper as a Holocaust denier, cogently explaining that they “excel at mimicking the forms and language of legitimate scholarship, using them to undermine rather than explore reality.” Sadly, the Times’s headline writers fell for that very trick.
The Nazis were not simply ill-provisioned bumblers who somehow failed to keep their prisoners alive. The thirty-three thousand bullet-riddled corpses at Babyn Yar did not die of exposure. Denying the Nazis’ overtly murderous intentions is just one more way of denying the Holocaust, pure and simple.
By its own admission, in a 2001 retrospective, the Times’s “staggering, staining failure” to report accurately on the Holocaust in the years 1939-45 was the most shameful episode in the newspaper’s long history. Stories of the annihilation of Europe’s Jews “were mostly buried inside its gray and stolid pages, never featured, analyzed or rendered truly comprehensible.” (They also infamously missed the Terror Famine several years earlier.)
As of this writing, the digital Times headlines continue to call Cooper a “Holocaust revisionist,” obscuring his denialism and implicitly suggesting that he raises valid questions. We should expect that sort of thing from Tucker Carlson, but not from today’s New York Times.
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