(JTA) — Joe Rogan, who hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the country, invited a Holocaust revisionist to his studio just over a week after interviewing someone who spreads antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Rogan’s interview of so-called “historian” Darryl Cooper on Thursday followed his interview of conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll last week. In Carroll’s interview on March 5, he claimed sex offender Jeffrey Epstein “was clearly a Jewish organization working on behalf of Israel and other groups” and said Israel was founded by Jewish organized crime figures, according to Jewish Insider.
In this week’s interview, Rogan gave Cooper free rein to espouse his views, which he praised as “nuanced” and “comprehensive.” Rogan also claimed to oppose antisemitism, which he said he saw rise following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, though he added that Jews made too much of it at times.
“And then you start thinking the way your paranoid Jewish friends think, that everybody’s antisemitic, and you go, well, now I kind of understand why they think that way,” he told Cooper at one point. “So I kind of understand the overreaction, but it is still an overreaction and I think what you do is very valuable.”
The Cooper interview was the second time in recent months that Cooper has been the guest of a commentator with a huge following on the right. In September, he was interviewed by Donald Trump ally Tucker Carlson, who praised his work. In that interview, Cooper falsely suggested that the murder of millions of Jews was an unintended consequence of Hitler’s unpreparedness for war, and that the Jews killed in concentration camps “ended up dead there.”
Additional falsehoods by Cooper on Joe Rogan's podcast
Cooper promoted similar falsehoods in his Rogan interview and devoted a long segment to explaining — at Rogan’s request — Adolf Hitler’s antisemitism as borne of battle weariness and economic hardship. He claimed among other things that Hitler opposed the mass 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom and that Hitler came to be antisemitic from feeling the reason Germans were in a “sorry state” was because “they’re being manipulated by the Jews, by the Jewish press, by the Jews who own the theaters and put out the films and whatever else.”
He added, “I think the thing that gave it emotional valence for him is that his antisemitism is what allowed him to love the German people.”
Cooper has long drawn condemnation from antisemitism and bigotry watchdogs, as well as actual historians of World War II and the Holocaust. His prominence — he has hundreds of thousands of followers on X and other platforms — comes as people espousing white supremacist and pro-Hitler rhetoric have found jobs in the Trump administration as well as in traditional media.
“Engaging in Holocaust denial and distortion disqualifies you as a credible historian,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, tweeted in September about Cooper.
This week, an ADL newsletter on extremism said the series of recent appearances by far-right figures on popular podcasts “underscores a worrying trend: false narratives about Jews and Israel are being normalized.”
The ADL drew criticism for giving Elon Musk the benefit of the doubt when the Trump backer and White House advisor gave what appeared to be a Nazi salute in January. This week, it criticized Musk, without using his name, after Musk shared a social media post saying that civil servants, not Hitler, were responsible for the murder of the Jews during the Holocaust. (The post was later deleted.)
“It is deeply disturbing and irresponsible for someone with a large public platform to elevate the kind of rhetoric that serves to undermine the seriousness of these issues,” the group tweeted.
