#0023 - Darryl Cooper

From unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena, from comedy goal to relationship fails, Amazon Music's got the most ad-free top podcasts, included with Prime.

Because the only thing that should interrupt your listening is, well, nothing.

Download the Amazon Music app today.

The Mercedes-Benz dream days are back with offers on vehicles like the 2025 E-Class, CLE Coupe, C-Class, and EQE sedan.

Hurry in now through July 31st.

Visit your local authorized dealer or learn more at mbusa.com/slash dream.

On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan Experience, episode 2289 with guest Darrell Cooper.

The No Rogan Experience starts now.

Welcome back to the show.

This is a show where two podcasters with no previous Rogan experience get to know Joe Rogan.

It's a show for anyone who's curious about Joe Rogan, his guests, and their claims, as well as for just anyone who wants to understand Joe's ever-growing media influence.

I'm Michael Marshall.

I'm joined as ever by Cecil Cicarello.

And today we're going to be covering Joe's March 2025 interview with Daryl Cooper.

That's been viewed 1.2 million times to date on YouTube alone.

So Cecil, how did Joe introduce Daryl in the show notes?

It says Daryl Cooper is the host of the Martyr Maid podcast, and it gives the web address.

Pretty succinct stuff there.

So

given the chance to elaborate it all, is there anything else we should know about Daryl and this episode?

Well, you know, the reason why we're doing this episode is because there was a lot of talk of it during the Murray-Smith debate, which we did at this point three episodes ago.

This is where Douglas Murray criticized Daryl Cooper and where he accused Joe of having people on his show that downplayed the Holocaust.

And

we wanted to check this episode out and see if Murray was actually representing this episode faithfully.

Yeah, absolutely.

And this is sort of like the end of an episode, like a podcast chain, because the only reason I think Joe had Daryl Cooper on in the first place was because Cooper had been on Tucker Carlson's show, where he was doing the kinds of things that Murray was, he was saying the kind of things that Murray would later criticize him for.

And he got so much pushback and blowback.

that Joe felt the need to bring Daryl on.

And Joe will even tell us that during this interview.

So there's kind of a bit of a chain of podcasts going on.

Hey, if you do something really bad, I will have you on my show.

Maybe that's how we finally get on the Joe Rogan Rogan experience.

I'm not sure.

Yeah.

So what did they talk about?

History, mostly, and how to tell the story of history, how to be engaging when you tell that story.

And they also touched on some other subjects like war, empathy, humanity, trade unions, and acting so rashly that you shit your own pants.

They do talk about that.

That is absolutely true.

Well, from all that, I think our main event is going to be around World War II, Hitler, the Nazis, and anti-Semitism.

But before we get to that main event, we want to say a thanks to our Area 51 all-access past patrons, including new patrons Andrew Gibson and Scott Laird, as well as our longtime patrons Darlene, Stone Banana, Laura Williams, no like that one, the other one, definitely not an AI overlord, Eleven Gruthius, Chunky Cat in Chicago, Am I a Robot?

Capture says no, but maintenance records say yes.

Fred R.

Gruthius and Martin Fidel.

That fantastic bunch of people, they all subscribed at patreon.com forward slash no Rogan.

You are allowed to do that too.

You are actively encouraged.

Every one of our patrons, they'll get early access to every episode.

They'll also get a special Patreon-only bonus segment every single week.

This week, we're going to be talking about American identity, the historicity of the show Peaky Blinders, and whether Joe Rogan could possibly ever end up in a cult.

So you can check that out at patreon.com forward slash no Rogan.

But now, our main event.

And a huge thank you to this week's Veteran Voice of the Podcast.

That was Don Ford, the voice of fantasy and adventure, as Homestar Runner.

He was announcing our main event.

Remember, you can also be on the show by sending a recording of you giving us your best rendition of It's Time.

You can send that to no noroganpod at gmail.com.

And you can also tell us how you want to be credited.

All right.

So we're jumping right in.

Like Marsh suggests, we're going to be talking a lot about World War II, Nazis,

some other tidbits here and there, but mostly that throughout the entire main event, we're going to get started very early in the show when Joe expresses how much he enjoys Daryl's Daryl's podcast.

I've been listening to your podcast for a long time, and

it's so charitable and comprehensive and so thorough.

And so

you put so much weight on the real lives and suffering of human beings on all sides of any conflict.

The regular people that didn't want to be dragged into any war, that find themselves on the front line.

The stories that you tell and the way you tell them is so comprehensive and so...

Again, charitable.

Like the humanity of these people is so well expressed that your fans know you.

I'm a fan.

I know you.

I know how you view things.

I know how you portray things.

I know how honest you are about all aspects of conflict.

And again, as charitable as possible, the way you lay this out.

So when I saw these attacks on you and people were calling you an anti-Semite and a Nazi apologist, I was like, good Lord, this is not going to work on people who know him.

You know, I've been through that ringer before.

I know what that is.

But with you, I was like, all anyone needs to do, and and I encourage you, if you're like, I can't believe you have this guy on, listen to fear and loathing in the new Jerusalem.

Listen to it.

Just, you don't even have to listen to the whole thing.

Listen to the first hour of it.

And there's no fucking way the person who made that is anti-Semitic in any way, shape, or form.

Well, so

let's listen to it, I guess, and this podcast, I guess, and see if we can make that assumption at the end of it, right?

Yeah.

I think looking at all sides of every conflict equally as sort of suffering can be a real issue because there's aggressors in human history, right?

We look at, we look in the past and there's aggressors.

There's definitely people who were victims in the past.

And to say, well, all sides suffered in a conflict, you're like, well, all sides didn't start that conflict.

So another thing, too, is you got to hold the people responsible to account.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, There's a reason that no one, when they're looking at World War II, is asking, yes, but how was Hitler?

There's a reason that nobody's necessarily prioritizing the emotional state of

Hitler in this situation.

And what's interesting is even Joe is highlighting here that Daryl's incredibly charitable.

He's so charitable.

And we'll actually touch on this in the toolbox, because I would argue that Daryl goes too far with charitability in a way that ends up absolving people of accountability.

But I also think Joe is being remarkably charitable here, that this introduction is about as glowing as I've heard him give for almost anybody who wasn't Donald Trump or Elon Musk.

This is an incredibly glowing introduction.

And so this is really Joe coming out in full endorsement of Daryl Cooper as a content creator, as a historian, as a scholar, as all of these things, which I think suggests Joe has a few blind spots.

Okay, so the next clip is about people's worst interpretations.

The problem is when someone says something and they're trying to be hyperbolic or they're trying to get a reaction or you're shit talking or you post a meme online or something like that, like this bizarre culture we live in that wants to reduce people to the worst possible interpretations of what they said or who they are and to ignore everything else, but for one small tweet or one statement made in, you know, trying to be, trying to get a reaction, trying to be outrageous.

Like it's a stupid thing that we do.

And as someone who values your show and listens to your show all the time,

I don't find, it's not just stupid.

It's it's bizarre how many people fall for this kind of stupidity.

Maybe don't say things people will negatively judge you for.

I mean, like, I feel like that's a pretty easy

method to follow as you work your way through life.

I don't spend my day worrying that someone's going to twist something I did out of context and make it so like it's going to make my life miserable because of that.

I don't, I just don't do those sorts of things.

I wouldn't do that.

And, and this sort of pushing the envelope, I think, is destroying discourse, not creating good discourse.

I think this sort of pushing, trolling, this sort of thing doesn't help anybody.

It's just being, so most of the time, it's just being mean and punching down.

That's really all it is.

And so why, why make it so like this is something that we should look at Daryl as, oh, he might, and it almost sounds like he's saying he made a mistake, even though I don't think he thinks he made a mistake.

I think he thinks it's perfectly fine for Daryl to post something that would might be taken out of context or somebody runs with it.

And I also think, too, aren't these Manosphere guys sort of in some ways, not always, but in some ways, aren't they always talking about personal responsibility?

In my opinion, there's nothing more, there's nothing more,

you can't be more responsible than taking responsible for the things you say and do.

And you can't run through your life and be like, well, I was just trolling and expect someone to try to respect you after that.

I think like at a certain point, I just say, well, then

how can I treat you as anything other than a troll from now on?

Yeah, I think that's fair.

But I also think that what Joe is doing, as we'll see throughout the clips that we're going to show, they're going to play here.

I think this is minimizing what the criticisms of Daryl actually are, because this is making it sound like people are taking one or two things out of context and then getting outraged about these things because they've not seen them in context.

And it's the odd thing here and there.

And how dare they like mine, essentially, almost like their co-op mine, all of Cooper's work to find something they can disagree with.

And I don't think that's what the criticism of Daryl Cooper is.

I don't think people have had to really dig to find the things that they think are inaccurate and problematic.

I know that through the course of this three-hour-ish interview, we didn't have to work particularly hard to pick out things that we think show Cooper may not have the most accurate and even-handed version of history that he's portraying through his work.

All right.

So now they're going to talk about the Tucker Carlson interview.

I mean, the Tucker interview was, I could have been clearer in what I was saying.

I'm not going to like absolve it.

Can you explain what you said?

Because you were talking about what you say to Jocko, right?

Yeah, that's how it originally came up.

Because Jocko's wife's English, right?

So Churchill's like a sacred figure in their pantheon.

And so I said that, you know, maybe I'm being a little provocative here.

I like to provoke Jocko with my Churchill takes or whatever, but that's only part of it.

I mean, I'm very critical of Churchill's role, in my opinion, in turning.

the German invasion of Poland into the Second World War, basically, you know.

So this is what he was saying on the Tucker Carlson Shaw.

I actually went away and listened to the segment of the Tucker Carlson Shaw where he was saying these things.

But even when he's, you can see here what he's saying to Joe: you know, it was Churchill's role in turning the German invasion of Poland into the Second World War.

That suggests a very specific framing here.

On Tucker Carlson, I can play it.

I have the clip.

Oh, you've got the clip.

Oh, fantastic.

Well, let's just hear it out of Cooper's mouth directly, shall we?

Here we go.

I got in trouble with my podcast partner, Jocko Willink, one time because he's a New England Dutchman who's his family, it's near and dear to their Dutch, but very near and dear to their heart that Winston Churchill is a hero, right?

Well, everyone thinks that he's a good one.

Everyone thinks that.

He really thinks that.

And I told him that I think, and maybe I'm being a little hyperbolic, maybe,

but I told him, maybe trying to provoke him a little bit, that I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War.

Now, he didn't kill the most people.

He didn't commit the most atrocities.

But I believe, and I don't really think, I think when you really 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.

Or

just, I mean, at every step of the way, like people are very often, I find, surprised to learn.

There's a two-step process.

Why don't you just make the case for that?

Okay, so you've made your statement.

A lot of people are thinking, well, wait a second.

You said Churchill, my childhood hero, the guy with the cigar.

Yeah.

Well, and the next thought that comes into their head

is that, oh, you're saying Churchill was the chief villain, therefore his enemies, you know, Adolf Hitler and so forth, were

the protagonists, right?

They're the good guys if you think he's a villain.

That's not the case.

That's not what I'm saying.

You know, Germany, look, they, they put themselves into a...

into a position, and Adolf Hitler is chiefly responsible for this, but his old regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the East in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth that they were going to have to handle.

They went in with no plan for that.

And they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there.

You know, you have

like letters as early as July, August 1941 from commandants of these makeshift camps that they're setting up for these millions of people who are surrendering or people they're rounding up.

And they're, so it's two months after, a month or two after the Barbarossa was launched.

And they're writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, we can't feed these people.

We don't have the food to feed these people.

And one of them actually says, rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn't it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now?

It was worth us.

I know that was a very long clip, but it's worth us actually hearing Cooper's words for themselves.

So we can't be accused of misrepresenting them.

We can actually understand what he was that was saying that first got him into a level of pushback and criticism of Fiore, that got him on the Joe Rogan show, that got him further pushback and criticism and Fiori.

So he's saying that Churchill was the main villain of World War II.

Now, the thing is, there are legitimate criticisms of Churchill.

Ask the people of India to talk about the famine of Bengal, and they'll bring up some very legitimate criticisms of Churchill.

But what Cooper is saying here is that Churchill was primarily responsible for it becoming something other than the invasion of Poland.

So invading a sovereign country is bad enough.

The fact that Poland was invaded by the Nazis, that was bad enough.

That puts them in

the position of responsible here.

The person who's responsible for that invasion is the person at fault here.

It feels like we have to keep saying that on this show.

I didn't think I have to spend as much of my professional time explaining that that if you invade a sovereign a sovereign country that's a bad thing and you're a bad you're doing bad here

why would that why would we need to keep repeating that over and over and over again marsh what current situation in our current geopolitical landscape might lead us to think that someone would need to hear that uh that this message that he's sending out which is sometimes the aggressors are okay and they're and they're fine and it's okay to be an aggressor what person what thing right now might be a reflection of that?

Yeah, absolutely.

But even if we were to accept that framing, even if we say, okay, Daryl, you're right.

Hitler invaded Poland, but the bad person is the people who try to then react to that and escalated things.

Even that would be historically ignorant to say, because Hitler rose to power first after subverting democracy in Germany.

So that's overturning democracy.

By the time he'd invaded Poland, there wasn't a functional democracy in Germany.

It was a dictatorship.

But okay, that's inside of Germany.

Maybe we don't deal with what's happening in sovereign countries.

We don't do that kind of thing.

Well, what about Hitler invading and occupying the Rhineland in 1936, which was French territory, and it was in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles?

Okay, well, maybe you could say, well, that territory used to be German, and therefore they're reclaiming that territory.

That's obviously another argument that gets trotted out quite often when people invade sovereign countries and sovereign lands.

But he then went on to annex Austria via the 1938 Anschluss.

And he could say, okay, but they voted for that.

Austria voted for that.

That was a democratic decision.

They were very happy to go in for that.

Or, you know, this was something that Austria at least consented to.

But it's not like every Austrian was happy with suddenly becoming part of Germany.

And then the seizure of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.

This also happened before the invasion of Poland.

But Cooper's idea here is to rely on you knowing none of that historic context.

And just accepting that if the

Allied forces had allowed Hitler to just have Poland after he'd invaded it, he'd have been content there and he would have stopped.

And that is absolutely clearly not true when we look at the pattern of invasion and occupation that Hitler had already undergone by that time.

What I think is really telling is his framing.

He says they were unprepared to take care of the prisoners of war, like it was an oopsie invasion.

And that somehow, when you starve a bunch of people after you didn't supposedly plan, which I don't believe, right?

I don't believe that they're like, oh, know, we totally didn't plan.

Oh, man, we forgot to pack a lunch for all these people or whatever.

That is not any less of a war crime, right?

So that's not, it's not like when we get to the end, we'll be like, oh, you just forgot?

Oh, that's no problem then.

We're not going to hold these tribunals.

Like, are you kidding?

Of course.

That's, it's a ridiculous thing.

When you invade someone and you don't care about their citizens, that says a lot about the invasion, right?

That says a lot about the invaders.

And so let's not pretend that this was just sort of, again, it feels like he keeps on trying to say, well, it wasn't their fault.

They didn't do that.

They didn't mean to do that.

Yeah, man, regardless of intent, what happened, we need to pay attention to.

And I don't believe his intent, by the way.

I'm just saying, I don't believe that part of the story.

But even if I do take him at his word, it still does.

It's not a good argument.

Yeah, absolutely.

And there's a very minor point, but it also seems like from that Tucker clip, Tucker thinks that Stalin was one of Churchill's enemies during World War II.

Yeah.

Which again shows a level of historical ignorance as to what the power structures and the alliances during the war were.

Also, I think somehow someone out there has Churchill as a childhood hero.

Absolutely.

I don't know who that person is.

The stuffed plushie of Churchill with his cigar.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right.

So now we're going to be talking a little bit about Nazis here.

Well, this is one of the reasons why...

Your podcast is so important, because you talk about things in this way.

And this is one of the reasons why I knew you were misconstrued or you would be misconstrued if something like that came up.

Doing that is fine with Jonestown.

You know, with Jonestown, everybody's like, well, how could these people have convinced these people to drink the Kool-Aid?

Why would the people do it?

What kind of a monster turns into this genocidal maniac and brings people to the jungle and does this?

But when you do it with any other subject, you can kind of get away with that.

until it gets to Nazis, until it gets to World War II.

And then people have these red flags that pop up that just completely block out any objectivity.

They remove all nuance.

You lose all objectivity.

You just, anything you're saying, imagine being a young man drafted into Hitler's army at 17 years old and not knowing what you're doing and then becoming this monster.

That's a Nazi apologist, right?

This is, we've had this reductionist perspective on anything that has to do with that horrific moment in history.

So I think if Joe thought long and hard about this, he would be able to realize why there's more sensitivity around Nazis, World War II and the Holocaust than there is around Jonestown.

Because how many people lost their entire families in Jonestown?

How many people were forced out of their homes and had to flee their countries?

That isn't to say that Johnstown wasn't bad, but it wasn't at the scale of the Holocaust.

Jonestown wasn't the state-sponsored ethnic cleansing of supposed undesirable races and elements of society.

These are not in any way equivalent.

And so it's very clear if Joe really sat and thought about it, he'd be able to figure out why there's the additional sensitivity around the Holocaust.

Yeah, you're absolutely right, Marsh.

I think that's a great point.

I think, too, the problem isn't that he's empathizing with Nazi soldiers, right?

The Nazi grunt on the ground.

In the previous clip we heard and in many clips we're going to hear,

he's empathizing with people that are in charge of things, people that are doing horrible things.

He's empathizing with those people, right?

The main thrust of this entire piece is going to be him talking about he's going to be humanizing Hitler for most of this, right?

He's going to be trying to humanize Hitler.

That's a problem, right?

In the last clip we just played, he's empathizing with the German high command and how

they accidentally starved a bunch of people.

That's a real issue.

He's saying that, you know, Churchill was the one who pushed Hitler into this war.

He's the one, he's the warmonger.

It wasn't Hitler.

These are real problematic statements that neglect much of history.

And, you know,

this should also be remembered.

When Joe says there's a red flag that comes up, it's like, yeah, of course, this should be remembered as one of humanity's darkest points in history.

Now, granted, I'm sure in the far past, there was darker points in history, but in modern times, this is one of the most dark, awful things that happened in human history.

So we need to remember it and we need to approach it in a way that we keep that sort of reverence for all those people who lost their lives for this sort of stupidity and we can't start making this we can't start making excuses and say well we need to think about the conflict on both sides because sometimes both sides don't have an argument okay so now we're going to talk about anti-semitism

But in our culture, in our media environment where everybody is rightly so, so terrified of anti-Semitism, because there's real anti-Semitism out there.

And real anti-Semitism is horrible, just like real racism is horrible.

The problem with calling everything racist and everything anti-Semitic, what it's clearly not, is that you diminish what that word means.

You're essentially crying wolf.

If you just claim everything is crying wolf, then racists get bolder.

The Overton window shifts.

There's a real issue with not calling it out when you see it.

And to just pretend that all of it is crying wolf allows some of it in.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And the thing is, Joe is also, he's drawing a line here between real anti-Semitism and, by inference, unreal unreal or fake anti-Semitism, as if he gets to decide which is which.

And that's a real problem, partly because Joe will never face any anti-Semitism or racism.

And partly because he's got huge biases towards anybody who's assuming people are, you know, playing the race card or claiming oppression.

This is where Joe's bias, we've already seen his biases lie in this direction.

So if he's going to be inaccurate in his judgment of what is and isn't real anti-Semitism, he's going to be biased towards dismissing things that are genuine.

And it's bad enough when he's doing that around modern day issues.

But here, he's dangerously close to indulging in it over the Holocaust, which I think we'd all agree is even by Joe's definition, real anti-Semitism.

But he's edging towards indulging in this kind of dismissal of it, even over this subject.

Okay, now

we're going to shift to talk a little bit about World War II.

The interesting thing about the World War II question is something I've found through talking to people who, you know, disagreed with my Tucker interview is like if you put the question to them and maybe if you put it directly like this they would give you a different answer but you kind of get the you know you you you get to understand that this is how they feel about it which is if there was two options one of them is that the second world war doesn't happen at least in Europe 40 million people don't get killed but you know the national socialists stay in power and you know maybe Hitler dies 10 years later it's like the Soviet Union Stalin dies and they things move on people really kind of feel like and maybe this is because they're not involved in it like 40 million dead people is, that was a, that was a cost worth paying.

And I think that is completely insane, man.

Like, it's, it's like, if there was a sliver of a, of an opportunity to de-escalate that situation and bring it back down, like, you know, if I'm the emperor of America or Britain or whatever, I'm, I'm taking that chance.

And if it turns out that Hitler is full of shit and, you know, he stabs us in the back first chance he gets, all right, then we'll have our war.

Wait, so you should let people get taken over before you act, even when you're reacting to someone getting invaded.

Like,

apparently, that's how he handles it.

And that, to me, strikes me as that capitulate to the bully stuff.

This is what happened with Crimea.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

But what he's talking about as well, it's such a constructed dichotomy here, because either you have all of the dead of the Second World War, or Hitler just goes away by himself after 10 years.

And those are the two options he's presenting.

But what if Hitler didn't, wouldn't go away after 10 years?

What if you get a lot worse after 10 years?

Oh, well, you know, we've given it a shot.

We've given it a shot of just letting him go.

The idea as well that Stalin, you know, died after 10 years and then the Soviet Union was fine and there was no issues beyond that.

Also,

whitewashes an awful lot of history,

especially for anybody in that region would be able to tell you.

And also, he's saying here, you know, they're accepting the price of 40 million dead.

So there were actually between 70 and 85 million casualties of World War II.

So, okay, he's factoring that under by 50%.

He's only getting to about half of that figure.

I'd let most people go on that, but this is a guy who's done a 30-hour podcast series on World War II.

He's brought on here by Joe as someone who knows what he's talking about.

This seems like an omission.

21 to 25 million of those 85 million, up to 85 million dead were military.

30 million were civilian deaths due to military activity and also crimes against humanity.

And 5 to 10 million were civilian deaths due to war and war-related famine and disease.

So let's have a look at that 30 million civilian deaths due to crimes against humanity.

They included 6 million Jews documented from around 1941.

So in his version of the world where Hitler is left alone with Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia and parts of France, Does he magically not do the Holocaust at that time?

Or is he saying, well, the Holocaust is a price

we're meant to just accept as being worth paying to avoid the further bloodshed of the up to 40 million.

This right here is precisely why people accuse Cooper of downplaying the Holocaust, because he's talking about we should have just let Hitler have Poland and do with it as he wanted because he might have been, he might have gone away within 10 years.

And

what Marsh just said, we should let Hitler have Poland certainly has an analog today in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

I'm not going to make some sort of, you know, this person is somehow related to that or he's trying to, he's trying to soften the blow for that.

But I will say his story about this is amplified in these right-wing spaces.

So his take on this, on this conflict is being amplified, is being brought forward by other major influencers in that space.

Are we not thinking maybe that somehow some of the algorithms are pushing Russian-laden propaganda into the spaces where we see these things?

Think about it in that terms.

And suddenly you're like, oh, maybe I understand why someone who's denying this part of World War II might be getting a lot of play nowadays.

Yeah.

And also when you say, you're absolutely right there.

And when you're saying it might be amplified into the places where we see things, obviously we're seeing this on Joe Rogan.

And people will say, well, obviously Russian bots aren't promoting Joe Rogan.

And that's not the reason Joe Rogan's huge.

And that's true.

That's not the reason at all.

But Joe says he found this stuff out because he was listening to Daryl Cooper's podcast.

He came across Daryl Cooper's work.

So it only takes a little bit of a push to amplify Daryl Cooper or people like Daryl Cooper, narratives like Daryl Cooper's a little.

And you can get it, you can essentially fish for some of these larger platforms like Tucker Carlson, like Joe Rogan, like Russell Brand or whoever.

And if you can get them to organically pick up the thing that you're baiting them towards, they will spread it to their audience completely organically and there is no fingerprints on it.

So if somebody was trying to push a narrative, they would push it towards people who've got these big platforms so they could pick up on it by themselves and they feel like I've just picked up on it for myself.

Nobody's influenced this at all.

Okay, next up, we're going to start talking a little bit about concentration camps.

Pre- or post concentration camps.

This is pre- or post the beginnings of the Holocaust.

This is where it gets into that.

Like, should we decide to stop something in its tracks at whatever cost of life?

Because ultimately, that is the right thing to do, because we're witnessing the genocide of people.

and then we're also witnessing a group that will remain in power that has not just committed genocide but is committed to genocide.

Right.

So what we were talking about and all of the points I was bringing up on Tucker were all from before that.

In fact, they were from a full year before the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

That was June 1941 and that's where most of the Jews lived.

So if he, you know, if Hitler never invaded the Soviet Union, he never even would have had access to those people.

So Joe, to his credit, is trying to push back about the genocide.

But the problem is he doesn't know enough about this to hear when he's being sold something that isn't quite true.

So any pushback he's able to make is going to be very limited.

And we'll see that throughout the interview.

But he is at least trying to point out that there was a genocide happening, and we should probably care about that.

And Daryl here is talking about, he's saying that.

There wasn't a lot of bad activities that were happening prior to 1941.

Well, there was a thing called the Kristallnacht.

And I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, but it's when Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools were ransacked as attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers, rioters destroyed over 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland.

Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps.

So when he asked that very pointed question, was this before the concentration camps?

And he answers, it was this, this happened well before that stuff happened in 1941.

He is objectively wrong.

Yeah, he he is.

He is.

He also says, you know, before, he says about Hitler would have accessed it to Jewish people.

Now, there were 1.7 million Jews in Poland as part of the Holocaust.

So of the six million Jews that were killed, 1.7 were in Poland.

And they were in Poland explicitly at the point at which Cooper said Hitler should have been left alone.

So that is almost a third of the total number of Jews who died in the Holocaust that Cooper is saying we should have just let Hitler have.

And then there were also on top of that German Jews and Austrian Jews and Czech Jews to add into that.

But you know, he and Cooper's not interested in that because there were other Jews in the Soviet Union that Hitler never even would have had access to had they not been forced into Soviet Union, which is fine.

But

what he's therefore saying is that's totally fine because, yeah, Hitler had the means and the motive, but not the opportunity.

So it's perfectly fine.

He might have wanted to kill those Jews, but he couldn't get near them.

So we shouldn't blame him.

But even if we accept that, what about all the Jews that he did have access to that you're arguing should never have been a trigger for a war because he should have just been allowed to have Poland?

Okay, so now we're going to talk about Hitler and the Jews.

When did Hitler start going after the Jews?

You mean in terms of

rhetoric?

Oh,

so yeah, like if you take him at his word in Mein Kampf, which is, you know, it's a piece of political propaganda, you know, that he wrote as a sort of a politician in Germany in 1924.

And so you have to take it with sort of a grain of salt, but it's also one of the few sources we have.

Like,

given his audience at the time, he probably didn't have a lot of reason to make this part up,

is that he had been from like small town Germany, right?

And he was from a middle-class family.

His father was a civil servant, respectable people.

And nationalism back then was very much like a middle-class.

ideology and the the the middle class people nationalists would complain about the workers and you know the proletariat how they don't want to be socialists none of them have any national feeling and everything and hitler really didn't grow up with any really even knowledge of the Jews.

He says his father, he never heard him say the word.

And, you know, if they had any in the small town that he lived in, like they were apparently well assimilated because he didn't know about them.

This, I think, is really, really key to understanding

what I think is problematic about this conversation.

It starts with Joe asking the very reasonable question, when did Hitler start going after the Jews?

And Darrell's response is, you mean in terms of rhetoric?

No, not in terms of rhetoric, in terms of genocide.

When people talk about Hitler going after the Jews, they don't normally mean with mean words and strident arguments.

He wasn't trying to destroy the Jews with facts and logic.

But Cooper doesn't want to particularly answer that question because the answer is really inconvenient to his point.

So he tries to sidestep it into Hitler going after them with rhetoric.

Does not answer the question.

In fact, none of this answers that question.

None of this answers the question as to when Hitler started to going after Jews.

Instead, what it's doing is to try and justify Hitler's views on Jewish people and therefore try and essentially emphasize in this some of Hitler's self-professed qualities, including from Mein Kampf, which he had no reason to lie about in his egotistical political propaganda book.

Of course, he had reason to lie about it, Darryl Cooper.

Why would you think otherwise unless you had some biases here?

Yeah, that's a great point, Marsh.

He also...

makes a glaring obvious mistake here, something that anyone who went through what would be a

10th grade sophomore level history history class would be able to pick out, which is that Hitler wasn't born in Germany.

He wasn't from Germany.

He was from Austria.

And he doesn't become a German citizen until 1932.

Now, some people might think, oh, that might be a slip-up.

It might be whatever.

And it's like, well, academics in this field don't make that mistake, right?

If you had an academic on, if he had someone on who, hell, even if he had somebody on who was just, like I suggest, a high school history teacher, they wouldn't make this mistake.

But Daryl is placing and putting himself out there as a podcaster who is going in depth into these, you know, deep, sort of deep dives on the history of World War II.

Well, if that's the case and he's making very simple mistakes like this, what else is he getting wrong?

Now, I'm not saying he's getting anything else wrong, but I am saying as we work our way through, we should definitely be leery if he messes this piece up.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, bear in mind, as you say, this could have been a slip of the tongue.

And okay, it can happen.

He's actually going to repeat this in a couple more places throughout this interview, which is why we've both picked up on this.

But Daryl Cooper's done a 30-hour podcast series on the Nazis and doesn't seem to know that Hitler was Austrian, that he was born in Austria.

And that seems to be a pretty glaring omission.

And if it was a slip of the tongue, we wouldn't just be picking this up because it will happen several more times.

All right.

So now, again, we're still staying on this sort of historical journey that Hitler went through.

You know, in an ideological crisis, he's like, are these the German people?

Like, really?

This is what we're talking about?

And then he says, and, you know, this is the way he relates it.

And he says it was actually the key that unlocked everything else for him.

Is that, you know, he would say he realized, we could say he came to believe that, yes, these German masses, they are in a sorry state right now.

But the reason for that is that they're being manipulated by the Jews, by the Jewish press, by the, you know, the Jews who own the theaters and put out the, you know, the films and whatever else, all of that, they're being manipulated and corrupted by these people.

And so for him, it became, like, I think, you know, he has the, he had a lot of the same explanations and reasons you would hear from any anti-Semite then or now, you know, banking and whatever.

Like, all those things were like in there.

But I think the thing that gave it emotional valence for him is that his anti-Semitism was what allowed him to love the German people.

You know, like it was like the only way for him that he could get around the revulsion he was feeling and actually being up close with the German underclass.

He excused their faults by

blaming Jews.

And so it, his, his sense of love for his people.

And I mean...

So in this clip, he's actually talking about the time that Hitler moved from his village to Vienna.

So when he's talking about the German people, he's in Vienna.

These are Austrian people.

So we can forgive this for the first time as a slip, but it's seeming a lot like he doesn't know that Germany and Austria are

different countries, which is a confusion that he shares with Adolf Hitler, who had very similar opinions on how separate those two countries were.

Oh, no.

And he also says, in casual passing, he's explaining why Hitler came to have these views of Jewish people.

And he says, in casual passing, he also had a lot of the same explanations and reasons that you would hear from any anti-Semite then or now,

banking and whatever.

So he's an anti-Semite then.

Those are the reasons people are anti-Semitic.

So he's saying, well, yeah, obviously he thought all the same stuff that other anti-Semites think, but he actually had this other stuff as well.

Well, if he had those other views, he didn't pick those views up by watching how how downtrodden the Viennese underclass was.

He's got them from other places.

He's clearly got anti-Semitic views.

But no, it's not that.

It's just that Hitler, he hated the Jews because he just loved the German people too much.

If anything, he loved them too much.

And that's why he came to hate the Jews.

What about the Germans who were Jews?

Those were the German people as well, but not as Daryl Cooper explains it.

We're just accepting this dual loyalty framing here.

And that will actually be something that Dary Cooper will continue to return to.

The idea that the Jews who were German, they weren't German, they were Jews.

And the same in the Czechoslovakia at the time, the same in Poland.

He talks about those

being very distinct.

And so this is a dual loyalty, dual nationality framing that allows you to otherize Jewish people within the German state and these other countries.

Yeah.

He also describes Hitler's love for his people like it's a superpower, like it's a spider bite on his hand, that his, you know, it's sort of, this is the anti-Semitism that fuels his overflowing love for his people.

It's, you know, and also too, like, you know, that's for certainly problematic.

But then very specifically, he uses the same exact wording when he attacks the, you know, the attacks that the people that are attacking the media are doing on the right right now.

So he's using pretty much the exact same wording they would use to say that the media is controlled by Jews, et cetera, et cetera.

This is the same wording that we're hearing today.

It was, it's anti-Semitic today.

It was anti-Semitic back then.

To remind people, the original answer that we just had a clip of is this is all recollections of Hitler in his own words, in his own book that he wrote in prison after a failed coup.

So, could it be my struggle?

Yes.

Could it be that a narcissist in prison for a coup is an unreliable narrator?

Could it be that, you know, we're playing him up and he's playing himself up as the underdog and that his cause is righteous and he wrote a book while he was in prison and you're buying it.

We're going to continue on with this.

This is, again, still that same history lesson.

And so I think that people who knew Hitler before World War I,

and we have like memoirs and interviews with people who did know him pretty, pretty well, they say pretty much unanimously, like we never heard him mention the Jews back then.

And this is the period in Vienna when Hitler says his anti-Semitism was developing and he was figuring these things out.

And what I think was probably going on, like my read of it, at least up to this point, is that his anti-Semitism, just like a lot of people in Europe at the time, was it was theoretical and abstract.

You know what I mean?

Like the Jews had never, you know, you got to remember like the Russian Revolution, all of the things that people like Hitler would associate with the Jews.

Like none of that stuff had happened yet.

Like he might not like them.

You know, he might think that

whatever, all the stereotypes that go along with him, but it was just sort of an abstract thing that it wasn't dangerous, right?

Yeah, it's just that kind of very harmless anti-Semitism that

you have before you go on to commit a genocide.

He's saying here, Hitler's friends never heard him say anything anti-Semitic.

Okay, I mean, that argument doesn't particularly hold.

Well, he was never racist around me.

It's never a way to exculpate it from accusations of racism.

But okay, who are we talking about here?

Which of his acquaintances

are you sourcing here?

Because you haven't mentioned anyone.

You're just saying, no, people he knew him.

Well, who are you talking about here?

And maybe the reason that they

didn't highlight or didn't notice how anti-Semitic he was is because they were friends, good friends, apparently, acquaintances at the very least, with someone who turned out to be one of the most genocidal anti-Semites in all of history.

And maybe they didn't want to say, oh, he was always like that.

Yeah, even when I knew him, he was exactly like that.

And then went on to kill all these people or be responsible for the deaths of all these people.

That's not going to look good on them.

so when they write their memoirs they all lied over all of that they change the details of their life to make it look like they weren't just uh the the sitting passengers uh sitting by they weren't just passengers sitting by while hitler went about being hitler but we can't know who he's talking about we can't know who these acquaintances were because cooper hasn't said anyone that he's citing Now, there is a book by August Kubisek called The Young Hitler I Knew, which alleges that Hitler even fell in love with a woman called Stephanie Isaac, who had had a jewish surname but wasn't jewish so is that what he's referring to because that's often cited as to oh did you know that hitler fell in love with a jewish woman actually it turns out she wasn't jewish but it's it's cited in that kind of way that is one thing that i could find a memoir of somebody who knew hitler from back then uh or who knew hitler at all who'd written about it but the only other memoirs that i could find were from a very brief search.

I haven't done a 30-hour podcast dive on this like Daryl Cooper has, but I could only find memoirs from people who knew Hitler once he was lead with the Third Third Reich, at which point it's pretty fair to say he was anti-Semitic.

So I can't find any memoirs from the pre-Hitler, the pre-Third Reich days of people saying Hitler was perfectly cool with the Jews.

And also notice here, just in passing, we're also just smuggled in the framing that the Russian Revolution was down to the Jews.

Yeah.

The Jews did that, which is going into again to this old anti-Semitic trope of there being

this global cabal who's overthrowing and controlling governments.

It all sort of feeds into that.

All right, we're going to take a short break.

We'll be back right after this.

The Mercedes-Benz Dream Days are back with offers on vehicles like the 2025 E-Class, CLE Coupe, C-Class, and EQE sedan.

Hurry in now through July 31st.

Visit your local authorized dealer or learn more at mbusa.com slash dream.

Hey, this is Dan Harris, host of the 10% happier podcast.

I'm here to tell you about a new series we're running this September on 10% Happier.

The goal is to help you do your life better.

The series is called Reset.

It's all about hitting the reset button in many of the most crucial areas of your life.

Each week, we'll tackle a topic like how to reset your nervous system, how to reset your relationships, how to reset your career.

We're going to bring on top-notch scientists and world-class meditation teachers to give you deep insights and actionable advice.

It's all delivered with our trademark blend of skepticism, humor, credibility, and practicality.

10% Happier is self-help for smart people.

Come join the party.

Okay, welcome back.

Let's jump right back in.

Okay, so now he's going to bring it into sort of modern day and talk about Israel.

Israel, one of the things I really tried to get into in the early part of that series, especially, is that the Zionist project,

and the more I think about it, this is kind of a theme in so many of my podcasts.

You know, it started out as an idealistic venture.

You know, it started out as something, you know, you have these people who are in really like kind of a unique situation.

Maybe the like the Roma, the gypsies are like the only other group of people you can really point to of like a widespread transnational group of people who do have a sort of cohesive identity, but they don't have a homeland.

They're just living in other people's countries.

And I think the lesson from World War II and much of the 20th century probably

is kind of it's kind of the opposite of the one that people have taken from World War II, which is nationalism is bad and it's dangerous and bad things happen when people start to think that way.

I think the real lesson from World War II is, or from, you know, what happened to the Jews specifically, is everybody needs a country.

So, the thing is, those Jews he's talking about had countries.

They were German, they were Austrian, they were Polish, they were Romanian, they were from a range of countries that were pushed out.

This is the idea, the anti-Semitic trope, that Jewish people have divided loyalties.

Because, sure, they may live in this country, but they're one people, regardless of where they live.

They'll never belong there, they'll never be loyal to a country, they'll never be prioritized or be part of a country or have pride in a country because they will will always have this superior loyalty to

Jewishness as a people.

And this is the trope that's led to pilgrims and

Jewish people being forced out throughout history and exiled throughout history.

So he's just smuggling this in here as just a fact that they need their own country because they don't have one.

Yeah.

And he uses very specifically the words, other people's countries.

So they were never belonged to the Jews ever.

They were never part of those countries.

They were always sort of

a group of people who existed sort of outside of that group of people that were in that country.

Yeah, you could be a Polish person who was born in Poland, but because you were Jewish, according to Darrell Cooper, you were always living in someone else's country.

And this is an anti-Semitic idea.

All right.

So now we're going to talk about Jewish interests.

You know, you need...

to have a country that is looking after you and looking after your interests because living in other people's countries, it can go well for a long time.

But, you know, it's not just the Jews, like minorities in general.

Bad things happen over time.

Minorities are just easily scapegoated.

They're easily made the sort of the outlet for the frustration and resentment of people that are

upset over unrelated things.

And it's an uncomfortable position to be in.

There's also general suspicion when cultures move into areas and don't assimilate and then try to bring with them the rules of their land, which we, you know, we're particularly scared of in America.

We hear the concept of Sharia law.

You know, like people start to freak out.

Well, there's people that move here that want that, you know, and they don't want to assimilate and they don't want to be a part of this homogeneous culture.

They want to change it.

So that scares people too.

So, yeah, again, Jewish people weren't in other people's countries.

They were in their country, the country they were born in, the country their family lived in, the country their ancestors, you know, for generations could have been from.

They were never in other people's countries.

And also what Joe's bringing up here, I think America should re-reflect on their role in the conversation when we get onto the subject of of people going to another country and not

assimilating into the local culture.

Because there was a pretty strong local culture in America before any European settlers arrived who found the America that we know right now.

Sure is very different than it was back then.

You know, also, who gets to decide what piece of their culture they get to bring to the table?

What doesn't fit under Joe's and other people's ideas of homogenous?

Like, what is the, what's the thing?

Because I've seen countless videos in the United States of people freaking out because someone doesn't speak, is speaking a different language other than English.

Even though up until before Trump, there was no official language of the United States.

We didn't, English wasn't the official language.

We never had an official language because we've been a melting pot for so long.

We just recently changed it, I think, with an executive order recently.

But there's like a million of those, and hopefully they get removed when Trump goes away.

But in any case, there wasn't an official language, but people still freak out about it.

People still scream about it.

We're talking about Sharia law here.

And we're also in a country that's run by white Christian nationalists.

So we're talking about one, this religion, this, this sort of ideology run by a religion is bad, but this one

run by a different group of people is enshrined.

And so, you know, it's pretty much, you know, this is, these are very similar things.

It just so happens that one of those groups of people is brown and the other people are white.

And there's another thing, too, when he talks about assimilation, the reason why people, the people who are against other people coming in and forcing them to assimilate, the reason why they do that is because no matter how hard those people assimilate, they're always going to look a little different and they will never properly assimilate.

And that's on purpose.

That is on purpose because we want to make sure that, you know, this whole group of people assimilates, but then those people are really easy to pick out of the group.

And so that they never actually, even though they they strive to assimilate, they never actually reach the standard.

And that's something that those people always point out.

Yeah.

And especially when Daryl's talking there about the thing about being a minority is it's very easy to be scapegoated.

You're absolutely right that the standard for assimilation will constantly be shifted.

So you could be, you could try, do whatever you want to assimilate, quote unquote, to what you think is the amount that would make you fit in.

But if a regime comes in that decides they want an other to scapegoat, they will switch that standard out on you.

So, yeah, I can totally understand that.

Okay, now we're going to talk about America versus Poland.

And so, to say, all of you people with all your differences, you come over here and get with the program, and you can be one of us, just radically open.

And again, we had to do that, or else the country would not be here, or it would be

an Anglo country sort of clustered around the 13 colonies and maybe moved in a bit.

But, you know, we wouldn't have been able to hold this whole continent against the French and the Spanish and everybody else who was around unless we were that open.

And so, that was like a prerequisite for America becoming

what it is today.

In Europe, it's very different, man.

Like there's like there's such thing as a Polish person.

And Poland is the country where Polish people live.

You know what I mean?

And like over here in America, like we have, we have a much more fluid identity.

We're constantly having to renegotiate it.

So Poland is a place where Polish people live, unless they're Jewish, because as Daryl has already made clear, Jews are living in other people's countries.

The Jews in Poland, from what Daryl is saying, weren't really Polish people.

And do you know who else thought exactly that same thing?

Yeah.

The guy who built all those big camps in Poland.

This is why people are criticizing Daryl and his rhetoric and his comfort in excusing Hitler and the Nazis.

Yeah.

And let's not pretend that.

our country, because he tries to bring in America as a, this is different.

It's different here.

And we're not used to how different it is here.

We're looking over at another country and they have different ideals and morals and standards.

And when we talk about here, we're a melting pot.

Let's not make it seem like, you know, this isn't a white nation.

It's a white nation.

People in this country are unfairly targeted and punished because, and this is sometimes very severely punished because of their skin color.

Black people are more than three times likely as white people to be killed in a police encounter.

They oftentimes get way more

vindictive and harsh sentencing from judges.

That has been shown time and time and time again.

In fact, our White House just recently

put signs on the lawn displaying mugshots of people deported and the crimes that they had on those pictures, even though numerous studies show that immigrants don't commit crimes at a higher rate than native-born Americans.

So let's not pretend we're sort of this magical integrated land of happy people.

We're seeing racism play itself out in the highest offices of our land.

So now we're going to talk about white people.

It's also, there's a thing when an all-white country wants to stay all-white where people get very nervous.

If you have, you know,

let's say China, like China is Chinese people.

We all agree that it's like, it's filled primarily with Chinese people.

There's people that live there from all walks of life, all over the world, but it's mostly Chinese people.

If China had decided that they wanted to remain Chinese and stay Chinese and that being Chinese was very important to what China is, no one would have a problem with that.

Yeah.

When a country like Poland does it, you're like, oh, those white people, they want to keep everybody out.

They want it to be all white.

Yeah.

And because we're, you know, that's post-World War II.

That's, that's post-Aryan race talk.

That's post-Nazi stuff.

That's what people are legitimately freaked out about.

That's the most recent stain in our history where we look back and say, wow, that was close.

Evil almost won, though.

So it's kind of hard to tell where Joe is on this one because he's right.

People do get nervous when they say, you know, when countries say they want to stay all white.

And he starts bringing it up like we shouldn't get nervous about it or that it's hypocritical.

But then he sort of changes his mind or he follows that through and then realizes, oh, it's, it's maybe a good thing because we're nervous because of that time that evil almost won.

So does he know that that's not a good line of thinking?

That this kind of all white idea isn't necessarily a very good line of thinking?

I can't quite tell, but he's able to see that sustain.

Part of me wonders whether this is Joe's effect of being in a room with somebody he wants to agree with, but then his own brain kicking in midway through that sentence and following it through to what his values may actually all, in fact, be.

But whether Joe knows that or not, this is a very, very well-worn talking point for white nationalists.

It came up a few years ago, about maybe sort of seven or eight years ago, I interviewed a guy called Jared Taylor on my show, Be Reasonable.

He was the leader of American Renaissance, which is an unquestionably white supremacist organization.

Very, very much so.

But Taylor argued: well, Japan has controls on migration and doesn't like integration.

So why do we feel uncomfortable when white people want to live by themselves?

But if we just, if we leave Japan and even China aside for a moment, I think it misses a few things.

Even if we just talk about America and Poland, because Daryl has already alluded in this conversation to the fact that in 1798, he even says, if you asked an English person and an Irish person in 1798, are you the same race?

They both say no.

They wouldn't agree with that.

And that's because whiteness as a concept isn't defined apart from by opposition and by oppression.

So who counts as white is a way of controlling power.

And for a long time, Irish people didn't count as white.

Italians didn't count as white.

And when they found a new minority of people that they wanted to scapegoat, they expanded what counted as white so that they could more clearly clearly exclude other people.

So it's about policing the boundaries of

power.

And that's been true all the way through various parts of history.

And

at very significant parts of history and geography, Jewish people weren't considered white.

It's maybe even a relatively modern idea that Jewish people would be.

And that's in order to say, well, Jewish people can't be oppressed because they are not

a racial minority in the same way of ethnic minorities in that kind of way.

But meanwhile, if you look at, say, one of the most racist regimes in living memory, which is apartheid South Africa, Japanese people were designated by the South African apartheid government as honorary white.

So Japanese people counted as white.

And I read an interesting book about it where somebody who sat on a park bench, a police officer came over and said, you're Chinese.

You're not considered white.

You're considered one of the lower designations.

The designations were black and colored was the designation that they used in specifically that term.

You aren't considered white.

You're one of these other designations.

And so you're not allowed to sit on that particular park bench.

And the person said, I'm not Chinese, I'm Japanese.

And the police officer said, I'm so sorry, sir.

You're white, you're allowed on this bench.

Because the designations around race were so arbitrary at that point.

To the point where at the time, a local Chinese community took umbrage with one local Chinese businessman arguing in apartheid South Africa.

If anything, we are whiter in appearance than our fellow Japanese friends.

So why are the Japanese considered white when we, as Chinese people, are even whiter if you look at us?

So it's a really messy

boundaries between what counts as white are nowhere near as defined as what Joe and Daryl would like to think here.

Nor should they be in terms of

access to countries and power and structures.

I'm saying that's a bad thing, but I'm saying that their worldview isn't coherent.

But all of that aside, Joe specifically brings up China.

He brings up China as saying, well, China have decided that they're just for the Chinese and nobody

has a problem with that.

Right now, China are accused of persecuting and potentially even organizing the genocide of the Uyghur Muslims.

And no, we aren't just super chill about that, Joe.

We consider that a genocide because when China decided they only want people who look exactly like them, they saw the Uyghur Muslims as not looking exactly like them, of being a different ethnic race.

And they've tried to genocide them.

And that's a bad thing.

So even the example you're bringing up is nowhere near as simple and black and white as

you're pretending, Joe.

And he's also contrasting China with Poland here.

He's saying, you know, look at, they can have a sort of a Chinese country where Chinese people are welcome only and the other people have to have real hard time sort of integrating themselves.

Why can't the Polish people have that same sort of existence?

And it's like, well, Poland belongs to the EU.

They have a free movement and residence policy.

You can get residence in other countries if you have a job.

That's

very specifically making a policy of integration across all of the European Union.

You don't get to choose the color of MMs you want.

Basically, you've agreed that everybody in this entire group gets to move freely where they like.

And so you don't get these same choices.

You've chosen to be part of an alliance that makes it so you cannot make these choices.

So let's not pretend that these sorts of things, and maybe they're using this as a way to say this is what happened back then.

But I do think that they are also thinking about it as if it were today, too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

100%.

All right.

So last clip in our main event, they are talking about the Jews.

So, you think you go back to feudal times and you've got the aristocracy, you got the church, and you got the peasantry, and then you have like another group of people who kind of serve a unique function, but a kind of a uniform function across Europe in the Jews.

You know, they would very often be like, they played a very kind of critical role in the feudal in feudal Europe, you know, because they were the only ones who had a network that kind of stretched across the whole place.

And so, a lot of times, like the rulers would have Jews working for them who, you know, they were basically like your diplomatic channels, kind of.

You need to talk to people over there.

Or if you needed to raise money for something, they had large capital networks that could help you raise money for it, things like that.

But

they weren't serfs or peasants.

They weren't the aristocracy.

They weren't the church, obviously.

They were kind of their separate thing.

And most of the time,

they were allowed to sort of abide by their own laws, like run their own

little societies like how they wanted.

This absolutely massively whitewashes centuries of pogroms and anti-Semitic panics and scapegoating and rumor and

all of this kind of stuff.

And this has been written about extensively, so I can't really, I'm not going to go into it anywhere near as much detail as it deserves.

But there's a book, Jewish Space Lasers, by a journalist called Mike Rothschild, which looks at

the anti-Semitic panics and conspiracy theories throughout history.

I'll give you a couple of quotes from that.

It's a great book.

He explains, by the middle of the 12th century, the church essentially declared war on lending at interest, a war that was almost entirely directed at getting Jews out of money lending.

The Council of Vienne declared usury as heretical in 1311, putting it on par with murder and incest.

Royal permission began to be required of Jewish bankers to lend money at all, and Jewish estates were made property of the king if the banker died without an heir.

It became harder and more expensive for Jewish lenders to operate, meaning they had to charge even higher fees while dealing with more competition from the growing number of Gentile bankers.

The cycle often ended ended in violence or outright expulsion for Jews.

Here's another quote.

Jewish moneylenders were routinely blamed for outbreaks of bubonic plague and lawlessness, while tens of thousands of Spanish Jews were killed in the late 1300s because of their economic success, with those unwilling to convert to Christianity singled out.

Ultimately, usury would be one of the justifications given for Spain's edict of 1492 demanding either the baptism or expulsion of the kingdom's 300,000 strong Jewish population.

So this idea that Jewish people were allowed to just run their own little societies however they wanted, and it wasn't that big a deal, and how they had a special place in aristocratic society that they were allowed to have and had extra power and things, that just isn't true.

And what Darrell Cooper's actually talking about is a sort of official position called the court Jew.

And he's even whitewashing that because it didn't emerge because Jewish people were independently wealthy.

It came about because money lending was barred.

So the society also banned Jews from those professions.

So Jews took up the professions that were available to them.

So there's another great quote from another great part of Jewish Space Laser by Max Rosschild, where he explains what it was like being the court Jew and how there was a great amount of money that could be made, but then there was also a massive risk if the money ran out and you suddenly would have nothing to offer and you weren't valued, or if you suddenly lost the favor of the court, because those people who had those positions had...

basically no other option but to do business with the rulers however the rulers wanted to and knowing that at any time, if they upset the court in any way, that money could be stripped from them, and all of their rights and their possibility of living would also be stripped too.

So, it was incredibly precarious to be in this position.

That Daryl is pointing out, that Daryl is painting as being this really privileged, really, you know, this

lofty, exalted position.

It was actually incredibly precarious and led to a lot of people being killed along the way.

So, yeah, Daryl's completely whitewashing pretty much all of history in this one simple statement.

We're going to take a quick break and then move on to our toolbox section.

From unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena, from comedy goal to relationship fails, Amazon Music's got the most ad-free top podcasts, included with Prime.

Because the only thing that should interrupt your listening is,

well, nothing.

Download the Amazon Music app today.

The Mercedes-Benz dream days are back with with offers on vehicles like the 2025 E-Class, CLE Coupe, C-Class, and EQE sedan.

Hurry in now through July 31st.

Visit your local authorized dealer or learn more at mbusa.com/slash dream.

Wow.

So that's the tool bag?

And something just fell out of of the toolbag?

All right.

So now this week for our toolbox, we're going to be talking about the fallacy of charitable interpretation.

Marsh, what is that?

Yeah.

So the principle of charity is something you, or is sometimes known as steel money.

And that's a good thing in

conversations, in arguments, where you essentially assume that the person you're talking to is acting in good faith.

Assume that they don't have malevolent intent.

They're not trying to deceive you.

And that the argument that they've put forward is genuinely what they think and not just a way to try and trick you.

So that is a very good principle.

However, it can be abused.

And that's what we're calling the fallacy of charitable interpretation, which is essentially if you go so far out of your way to provide charity to one particular side, it stops being about fairness and starts being about providing cover and offering excuses.

And I think that's what we see throughout this conversation that Daryl Cooper is doing in the ways that we've been looking at.

We've got some great examples of that here.

All right.

So we're going to start out with, they switched to talk about the Iraq war with the United States.

If you go back to 04 when the Abu Ghraib expose came out, Americans were horrified by that, and rightly so.

You know, they saw those pictures.

But the thing that was interesting is that they were horrified, yeah, partly because, like, look how awful this is that they're doing to these people or something.

But, you know, for all they knew, they knew these people were in prison.

They might have thought they were terrorists or something.

What people were really like feeling at the time was, what are we doing to our people?

Like, what, what is, you know, what are we putting them through that our people are being reduced to this?

Yeah, I mean, it feels like you're trying to paint the aggressors as victims too here.

That's not great.

That's not a good thing to do.

We essentially brainwashed our entire country at that time, especially soldiers that were in that region, that those people were less than human and they were terrorists and they were awful people.

And so when they were killed and they were treated

inhumanely, we should blame the people who put that out there as responsible.

We should look, you know, I don't care how many nice paintings George W.

Bush makes, he's still a war criminal, right?

And we need to look at him like that and we need to paint him like that and say, look, he did the wrong thing and he did an awful thing and he's never answered for that a single time.

But we should point it out and say, that's a terrible thing that he made the United States people do.

And he pushed our hands into that by feeding this rhetoric over and over and over again.

Let's not forget it.

Yeah, I think that's true.

But also he's talking about Abu Ghraib and how there were human rights abuses and atrocities that happened at Abu Ghraib to the prisoners there.

And what he's saying is rather than look at the soldiers who were behaving, who treating people so inhumanely, we should look at, well, why did they come to do that?

What circumstances led the soldiers to be do that?

What did we do to these poor soldiers so that they would then treat these prisoners in that way?

And I think I was offering far too much charity because it absolves

the perpetrators of abuse of the responsibility of that abuse.

Yeah.

And you find soldiers all across Iraq where it had contact with Iraqis and some of them had a contact with prisoners.

You don't see that happening everywhere.

You saw that there.

And so that might also tell you that maybe the people who are involved in that particular bit of sadism, they're different different than other people.

All right.

So now we're going to talk about nature versus nurture.

It doesn't, I mean, look, you may have like your Jeffrey Dahmers or something out there that are an exception to this rule, but they are the exception that proves the rule.

That it doesn't matter who you're talking about.

You could be talking about Uday Hussein, you know, Saddam's son, just a sadistic monster of a human being.

But, you know, that kid was a three-year-old at one point, or that guy was a three-year-old kid at one point who did not like, it's not like he was waiting in line in the spirit world before he was born.

And they're like, who wants to be Saddam Hussein's son he's like i do i do that's the world he was thrust into you know and you see a guy like that and then you you know you're horrified by the things that he does but then you say look man you know if the stories are true at least like saddam hussein used to take him and his brother when he was six years old to go watch torture sessions and executions because he needed to harden them for you know ruling the country one day and it's like i i don't i i don't want to pretend like i have the remotest idea of you know you know, how a kid is supposed to respond to watching torture sessions when he's six years old and coming up in that world.

Like, what do I know about that?

You know what I mean?

And so I like, I try to stay humble as I'm reading about these people, not assume that I'm better than them or different than them and really just try to understand them on human terms, you know.

So there's no question that someone's upbringing can really fuck them up.

It can desensitize them to violence.

That's obviously true.

But we still have to be really careful not to use that truth as a way of excusing the acts they go on to do.

We have to be able to hold those two things in mind and say people are still responsible for the actions that they take, even if there have been awful things perpetrated against them in the past?

And that's even more so the case when the charity that you extend to the aggressors doesn't then extend even more so to the victims, because it makes it seem like the only person you're painting as victims here are the ones who've done the really terrible stuff.

And

just to throw it out there, do right-wing people Do they normally give such a charitable idea to normal people's backgrounds that find themselves in bad situations, right?

So like we talk about gang members, someone who's a gang member who's brought up in a gang at a young age and they do something terrible.

Do they normally give those people the same benefit of the doubt that they're giving, you know, Saddam Hussein's son here?

I don't feel like that's the case when I see it.

And these people commit way lesser crimes than Uday Hussein did.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, look at the response around the start of Black Lives Matter to the death of George Floyd.

And we saw a lot of people like combing through George Floyd's criminal record to say, well, he was a criminal.

He did all these things, therefore, but none of that meant that he deserved it, deserved what the police did to him.

But that's not the rhetoric you'd have heard from certain sections of society who will at the same time,

like with Darryl Cooper here, be very sympathetic towards the people who are committing extreme acts of violence if it's in this kind of way.

All right.

So the next piece is about empathy.

When you get past a certain threshold of understanding people,

you're butting right up against empathizing with them.

I I mean, it's like, that's the very, you know, that's like the next step.

You got to take one more step and you're empathizing with those people.

And so people see that, you know, and you're empathizing with evil people, you know, whoever, whoever it is.

But I really believe that it's, it's really good for us, like individually, you know, and as a society too, to, I think it has a positive effect on us to like, when we force ourselves to understand, you know, people we don't like

as human beings and just understand that their motivations are really no different than ours.

So with this, to be honest, I do agree with this.

I think we should have empathy even with people we consider evil and we should try to understand their motivations.

I've spent at least large parts of the last decade or so of my life, maybe probably longer than that, trying to do exactly that when I talk to people who have quite extreme views.

You know, that is the principle of charity.

But again, and

again, when we do this, it's really important that we don't then just excuse what they've done.

And these clips are useful for framing it because we'll come to more clips of Daryl doing exactly that,

excusing people because of these other things.

I mean, I interviewed a guy, Jim Humble, for Be Reasonable, and he was a guy who promoted miracle mineral supplements, so a form of industrial bleach, as a cure for cancer and malaria and AIDS and autism and way more than that.

And it's a man that I would conservatively estimate is responsible for the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of people.

And I was on the phone to him.

And I realized he's probably killed this number of people.

And I had empathy for him.

He seemed very old.

He seemed very frail.

He seemed completely convinced about it.

But he was still completely completely culpable for all the wrong that he's done.

And you have to be able to hold those things in mind.

Otherwise, you end up whitewashing people's actions.

Right.

So this next clip is, again, we're going to talk a little bit more about the Jews.

You know, that overreaction is really counterproductive, too.

Yeah.

You know, because to go back to what I said a second ago, like understanding brings you right up to the brink of empathy, you know, that, you know, more understanding to these issues.

And I've found this a hundred times, you know, because like, look, anti-Semitism is a weird thing.

And we can talk about some of the history of that if you want.

But, you know, it's a, it's this thing that people get obsessed with.

You know what I mean?

Like, it's not like part of their ideology.

I've watched this happen to like good, clear-thinking, regular people.

They start listening to a few podcasts that, you know,

they can't repost under their real name on Twitter because they're funny or interesting.

And then pretty soon you can't bring that dude to a party anymore because he just can't go 10 minutes without in neutral company, like bringing up the Jews.

And it's like that happens.

You see that happen.

I mean,

like what you see on social media a lot.

I mean, it's like a, there's no doubt there's been like a big explosion of that kind of rhetoric, you know?

Yeah.

And I think a lot of it is online trolling and it's, you know, the fact that people are so sensitive about it that like it's just the easiest way to get a huge reaction, you know, from people.

And I think a lot of it has to do with that.

But I think a lot of it also has to do with the fact that so many of these of these questions have really been made, you know, it's not like they're off limits, like they're illegal and you're going to go to jail if you talk about them.

I'm still sitting here.

I I mean, I'm on your podcast, and I've, so that's a big platform to talk about these things.

It's not like that, but the attempt is to make it so that you can't be in any kind of respectable society.

Yeah, the attempt is to make you radioactive.

Yeah,

I did want to point out, as they say, on the largest platform in the English-speaking world, he sort of recognizes this right at the end.

He's like,

I'm also on the largest media in the world right now.

Yeah, maybe you're not that radioactive, actually.

And also, maybe those people weren't genuinely good, clear-thinking, regular people if they were listening to anti-Semitic podcasts because they were funny.

So maybe they didn't end up being radicalized by those podcasts.

You know, they were really just normal folk until they started listening to a few podcasts and now they're extremists.

Maybe they were already leaning in that direction when they found those shows.

And also, according to, according to Daryl here, well, the reason.

that people, that those particular people are turning anti-Semitic, well, maybe it's the fault of the people who were so upset by anti-Semitism.

Maybe it's how upset they get.

Maybe that's what's forcing these people to become anti-Semitic.

That's a nonsense argument, but that is what Daryl is putting forward here.

And there's always this idea, Marsh, that you hear when people talk about trolling.

They'll say things like, well, they don't mean it.

They were just trolling.

Oh, they don't mean it.

Maybe they do mean it.

And maybe they're using the idea that they're trolling as armor to try to prevent you from criticizing them.

Maybe that's exactly what they're doing.

And if trolling is convincing other people to do these horrible things, it's just as bad as trying to convince somebody with valid,

real views that you have.

If I accidentally convince you to be anti-Semitic, that's just as bad as purposefully convincing you to be anti-Semitic.

Let's not just say that there's no blame here.

Yeah.

And that cover of Just Joking is very much that I'm just joking unless you're into it.

It's essentially the cover they're using here.

All right.

So

Marsh has labeled this one negative editorializing about Hitler.

So this should be an interesting clip.

Hitler's one of those guys.

I noticed this when I was reading all the Jim Jones books and stuff, which I think I read probably all of.

They're not very good.

You know, some of them are interesting, like they're good reads, but you can't help but

notice, especially after you've read several of the books, that the authors just cannot help but

be like cynical and turn it into a polemic on every page.

Like even the thing Jim Jones or Hitler did as a child, they have like negative editorializing to it and everything.

And it's like, you know, it really kind of,

a lot of them are still good books.

You You know, you read like the most recent sort of great Hitler biography by Ian Kershaw.

It's a great book.

He's a good historian, an excellent writer.

And, you know, you have to learn to kind of see through that polemic a little bit.

And then you have, you know, a good history on your hand.

It's almost like it's an obligation if you're going to cover a horrific figure.

You have to look at things that way.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And,

you know, it's a.

You're talking about reading Hitler's book and taking Hitler's word for why he was the way he was directly from the source before.

Like when you do something horrible,

in fact, one of history's most repulsive acts, people they tend to search out for why you did it and they don't tend to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, we just heard Cooper repeatedly doing positive editorialism, editorializing about Hitler.

Oh, he wasn't anti-Semitic.

Well, he was, and yeah, he did have these anti-Semitic views that everybody else who were anti-Semites had and current anti-Semites have, but really, it's just because he loved the Germans so much.

That's what it was.

This is positive editorializing about Hitler.

And he'll carry on doing that throughout here.

But if anybody tries to portray, tries to look through Hitler's history and point out the signs that were pointing towards something quite dark and malevolent, well, that's negative editorializing.

As you say, you haven't given Hitler enough of a benefit of the doubt.

Yeah, he's making his, he's trying to sell Hitler's ideas as understandable in several places in this podcast.

Yeah.

And like, if you were transported back in time in Hitler's body quantum leap style, you would also hate the Jews.

I don't believe you for one.

And that is way too sympathetic for my tastes.

And that is why people are calling you out and rightly so.

Yeah.

Now we're going to talk about Hitler in World War I.

Right.

And you take a guy like Hitler who volunteered early, like right away, and he survived the whole four years of the war.

And you think about him as just an example of this generation of people who spent like their most formative young adult years in the trenches.

I mean, in constant terror of doing things that,

I mean, forget about just like the

physical discomfort of living there.

I mean, you're in the mud, you're covered with lice and fleas all the time.

So is everybody else.

You're, especially later in the war, you're like living off of starvation rations if you're a German or an Austrian.

All right.

So he's talking about the experience of the soldier in World War I, the German experience as the the soldier.

And he's trying to use that as a basis for why Hitler became who Hitler was.

A lot of people had that experience and only one of them went on to lead a nation to exterminate six million Jews, right?

So many of those people lived through the exact same things.

Why are we apologizing for just one of those people?

Yeah, absolutely.

And think about what he's suggesting here as well, is that the horrors of war were so intense that they led Hitler to visit the horrors of war again on Europe 20 years later.

As a logical point of view, this does not make any sense, but it's just trying to offer some further, you know, he would call it context.

I would call it excuses.

All right.

So now we're going to talk about how the

people suddenly don't turn into demons.

They're just people.

I mean, the Germans were a sophisticated, advanced.

political and cultural, you know, place.

They didn't suddenly turn into demons for 12 years and then go back to being the nice normal Germans that we know now.

Like these things happen the same way every other historical event, you know, ends up happening, which which very often is not, you know, what you find is it's not

so much is not really like the the result of a of a plot or a plan or anything.

People are often just reacting.

Again, here is more abuse of this principle of charity.

Nobody planned anything.

It was just reacting.

You know, it's almost like he's saying events got out of hand.

It was just this momentum happened.

It was external to people.

Except none of that is true.

They very much did plan the Holocaust.

They very much did plan the expansion into Europe.

They laid the groundwork with laws.

They got lawyers on board and they rewrote the German laws to make that happen.

They changed the German state.

They restructured the German state around this end goal.

It wasn't just a bad idea that got out of hand that nobody could stop.

This was a very specific plan.

And to say it wasn't a plan is to completely whitewash it.

Yeah.

I mean, it's called Operation Reinhard.

It's not called whoopsie, right?

They didn't just say that.

They actually had a plan.

Here's a quote.

The plans to exterminate all Jews of Europe were formalized at the Wanasi conference.

I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly.

They held at an SS guesthouse near Berlin in 1942.

The conference was chaired by Heydrich and attended by 15 senior officials of the Nazi Party and the German government.

Most of those attending were representatives of the Interior Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, and the Justice Ministry, including ministers for Eastern territories.

At the conference, Heydrich indicated approximately 11 million Jews in Europe would fall under the provisions of the final solution.

So are we just suggesting this is a spontaneous conference that they had?

That they didn't plan to have this conference?

That it was just some sort of reaction?

Whoops.

I was sorry.

We just had a reaction.

We just all got together and sort of had a synergy that day.

No, this is a planned thing they had a plan don't make it seem like they didn't even have a plan man like that is genuinely apologizing for what they did absolutely all right last clip we're going to talk about hitler's virtues

you know to answer your question though as far as how people get sucked into it the thing that the thing that you know is is shines through again and again, no matter what you're talking about, whether it's any of the stories I've talked about, is that very often people get sucked into it because,

not because of like some latent evil in their heart, but because their virtues get hijacked.

You know, Hitler is a good example.

That is somebody who say whatever you want about him.

He loved the German people and he cared about the German people.

Other than the Jewish German people, or the Romani German people, or the German gay people, or the German trans people, or the German disabled people, or the German socialists.

He had those killed en masse.

But other than that, he loved the German people.

You're whitewashing Hitler by pointing out he's got all these virtues.

If anything, he loved too much.

He didn't.

He killed a lot of people.

He killed a lot of his own people, even if he didn't acknowledge that they were his own people.

And you know who else tells you that they do things out of love?

It's abusers do that.

Abusers tell us that all the time, and we shouldn't believe those people either.

And I'm the last person who thinks I'm smart.

Trust me.

All right, Marsh.

Was there anything good in this show?

I mean, yes.

But I'm going to mine very specifically about a part we just did not get to at all.

There's a part in the conversation where they start talking about labor rights and they talk about unions and about how people went on strike to get the rights that workers currently have.

And that's actually true.

And that's actually important.

We haven't covered it on the show because it wasn't deeply anti-Semitic and

wasn't about the Nazis.

But I think it's very, that was pretty good.

I can't argue with that.

Yeah, I actually think you know, more of America in particular would be in a much better place if people were more willing to join a union and collectively bargain and go on strike for their rights and the rights of their colleagues.

Um, and I know that from the outside, looking at America, it seems like you've got some of the worst paid leave laws in the world in terms of vacations, you've got some of the worst parental leave, some of the worst laws around things like the living wage, some of the greatest worker exploitation by billionaires on the planet.

So, I will, with very heavy caveats in very specific ways, suggest that you take one single tip from Daryl Cooper and join a trade union.

You know, together we bargain, alone we beg.

I love that too.

I thought it was a great part of this.

And it is, he is talking about trade unions in a way that I think is powerful and that we should, in some ways, listen to.

I don't think that everything he said there in that particular section was awful.

And, you know, and

here's what I want to talk about instead of my something good.

I want to bring back the episode that we're reflecting on.

I want to bring back the Douglas Murray-Dave Smith debate when Dave Smith and Joe Rogan sat across from Douglas Murray and said, that's not what he said.

That's not, you're misrepresenting his views.

That's not, I disagree with their assessment.

Now, I will agree that this man in this podcast and on Tucker's show did say he wasn't a historian, right?

He did say that.

You may or may not agree that, you know, when you put out a 30-hour history podcast, maybe you are pretending to be a historian.

And that should hold something.

You should be held accountable for some of the things that you said you've researched.

But in any case, I do think, you know, as much as I disagreed with Douglas Murray on that show, I do feel like Douglas Murray had a point that he was downplaying.

some real awful things in history and making it seem like there was a lot of blame for World War II and not that we shouldn't focus that blame on one group of people.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right, so that's it for the show this week.

Remember, you can access more than a half hour of bonus content every single week for as little as a dollar an episode.

All you have to do is go to subscribe at patreon.com/slash no Rogan.

Those people also get an ad-free experience.

Meanwhile, you can hear more from me at Cognitive Dissonance and Citation Needed.

And you can also hear more from Marsh at Skeptics with a K and the Skeptics podcast.

And we'll be back next week for a little more of the No Rogan experience.

If you love the show, please rate and share it.

If you want to get in touch with us, become a patron, or check out the show notes, go to knowrogan.com.

K-N-O-W-R-O-G-A-N.com.

The Mercedes-Benz dream days are back with offers on vehicles like the 2025 E-Class, C-L-E-Coupe, C-Class, and EQE sedan.

Hurry in now through July 31st.

Visit your local authorized dealer or learn more at mbusa.com slash dream.

Hey, this is Dan Harris, host of the 10% Happier podcast.

I'm here to tell you about a new series we're running this September on 10% Happier.

The goal is to help you do your life better.

The series is called Reset.

It's all about hitting the reset button in many of the most crucial areas of your life.

Each week, we'll tackle a topic like how to reset your nervous system, how to reset your relationships, how to reset your career.

We're going to bring on top-notch scientists and world-class meditation teachers to give you deep insights and actionable advice.

It's all delivered with our trademark blend of skepticism, humor, credibility, and practicality.

10% have here is self-help for smart people.

Come join the party.