Darryl Cooper, who was labeled “the most popular historian in the United States” by Tucker Carlson, appeared on a far Right podcast titled “The Jewish Question” in July.
The episode repeated familiar antisemitic tropes, blaming Eastern European Jews for the erosion of Christianity in America and declaring a problem with “organized Jewish power.”
On Carlson’s show, Cooper suggests that Nazi atrocities were largely logistical failures and that Winston Churchill was more of a villain than Adolf Hitler.
The new film Nuremberg arrives in theaters at an unsettling moment when there is a spiral of antisemitism and the growth of illiberal ideologies embracing the scapegoating of Jews and Muslims across the West.
The film, starring Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring and Rami Malek as US Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, dramatizes the efforts it took to hold the Nazi leadership accountable. Watching it now, one is struck not by the evil of the defendants, but by the sheer weight of effort required to establish facts that should have been self-evident.
Justice Robert Jackson, the chief American prosecutor, understood something we have perhaps forgotten: the Germans could have won the war.
The Nuremberg trials were not primarily about vengeance. They were about building a legal and evidentiary system so comprehensive that denial would be impossible and recurrence preventable.
The film depicts Jackson explaining, the Nazis’ crimes began with laws, so “this war ends in a courtroom.” The record had to be unassailable.
Yet here we are, eighty years later, watching norms established post-WWII being challenged in real time.
The film captures an asymmetry that persists today. The prosecution assembled thousands of documents, hours of footage, and meticulous testimony. And still Göring played games, dismissed evidence, and nearly transformed the courtroom into his personal stage. At one point, confronted with documentary proof of atrocities, Crowe’s Göring waves it away as a fabrication.
Conspiracies and lies on social media
Civilization requires an immense evidentiary burden; denial requires only a smirk. This parallels the ease with which across social media, conspiracies and libels are spread, and all efforts to disprove look weak and ineffective.
Douglas Kelley, who spent months interviewing the Nazi defendants, reached a conclusion the world did not want to hear. These men were not insane. They were not even unusual. They shared, he wrote, three unremarkable characteristics: overweening ambition, low ethical standards, and a nationalism that justified anything done in its name.
Their personalities “could be duplicated in any country of the world today.” In the last scene, he exhorts panellists on a radio show that it could happen in America as well.
This was rejected as too disturbing. People preferred the competing theory, that Nazis were psychologically disordered, a unique aberration, safely quarantined in history. Kelley spent his remaining years warning otherwise. He was dismissed as an alarmist and died relatively young by suicide.
Here is the lesson we resist most fiercely: the next catastrophe need not be another Shoah to be a catastrophe. Totalitarian rule, legal discrimination based on religious or ethnic identity, economic persecution - these do not require gas chambers to shatter lives and nations. The pattern Kelley identified does not culminate in only one possible outcome.
It creates conditions where many terrible outcomes become possible. Of course, we should be horrified at the prospect of a repeat of the Holocaust, but we should not be comforted that lesser evils would not be possible or a catastrophe.
Who are the Douglas Kelleys among us today? The voices warning about patterns rather than personalities, about conditions rather than glib comparisons? Maybe in addition to historic patterns of evil, we should be looking for new forms of tyranny, driven by technology or the toxic nature of social media networks.
Perhaps some of these warnings are wrong or excessive. Perhaps they overstate their case or see connections that aren’t there. But Kelley’s warnings were ignored for decades, and the ideas he feared have not disappeared; they are mutating on new platforms and with new audiences.
We should not make the cheap argument that any contemporary figure is “like the Nazis.” The film makes a harder argument: that the work of Nuremberg, the painstaking construction of truth against the ease of denial, is never finished. Each generation must decide whether to maintain that edifice or let it crumble.
The podcasts are uploading. The hate is gaining ground. The choice is ours.
The writer is the founding partner of Goldrock Capital and the founder of The Institute for Jewish and Zionist Research. He chairs a number of NGOs, including Leshem, ICAR, and ReHome, and is a former chair of Gesher and World Bnei Akiva.