Tucker Carlson Responds to Backlash From Interviewing Historian Who Called Churchill ‘Chief Villain’ Of WWII: ‘That’s a Defensible Position’

Tucker Carlson dismissed backlash over an interview he conducted with a pseudo-historian who claimed Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of World War II.

Earlier this week, Carlson sat down with Darryl Cooper , whom the former Fox News host described as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Cooper, during the interview, said Church was the “chief villain” of the war and appeared to suggest that the Holocaust was an accident.

He claimed that the civilian deaths inside Nazi camps were caused by Germany’s lack of supplies and preparation to handle millions of prisoners of war. Cooper noted, “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.”

During a Friday interview on The Charlie Kirk Show , Carlson defended his interview with Cooper.

CARLSON: Darryl Cooper said, I think the villain of the Second World War period was Churchill, which is a provocative thing to say for sure. But I don’t know. Tell me more. Why do you think that? And his point was. Look, there’s this there was this regional conflict underway. Germany was pissed about the concessions that it was forced to make under the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War. And they wanted their land back and their population, German-speaking ethnic German population in all these different countries. And so it was a regional conflict. And you can take either side of that or no side or whatever.

But it was effectively a regional conflict, and Churchill forced it into what it became, which was a global war in which tens of millions of people died. That’s his position. Okay. I mean, I think that’s a defensible position. It may be the wrong position. I don’t think that’s, like, crazy. It certainly doesn’t, justify the hysteria that it provoked, in my opinion….

KIRK: I don’t get that emotional, but I don’t agree with that, but I’m not an expert historian. But it also doesn’t get me screaming.

CARLSON: Right. So I guess I would ask which is more dangerous living in a society where, you know, people have all kinds of views, heterodox views about a historical event or living in a society in which you’re not allowed to have heterodox views on an event, on an 80-year-old event. You know, it’s not a close call for me. You want to live in a free society where inquiry, free inquiry is encouraged and certainly allowed. But anyway. But the point is why the hysteria? And I think if you take three steps back, I think this is right. What you’re looking at is like is a huge is it the end of an 80-year cycle and the end of a certain way of thinking about the world, the end of a certain way of administering the world institutions which have run the West and to some extent the East since 1945. That’s all kind of going away, very fast, actually. Economic power, political power, cultural power is all moving east. And that’s tough for me as an American to accept. It’s very upsetting to me, actually.

Watch the clip above.