Political Views
In 2021, Cooper gained significant attention for a viral Twitter thread attempting to explain why many supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump believed in claims of election fraud during the 2020 United States presidential election. This thread was highlighted by conservative commentator Tucker Carlson and mentioned by Trump himself. [12] [13]
In September 2024, Cooper appeared on The Tucker Carlson Show . He made statements that drew widespread criticism from historians, Holocaust memorial organizations, and political figures for promoting Holocaust revisionism. While discussing Nazi Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa), Cooper claimed that the Nazis "went in with no plan for [handling prisoners] and they just threw these people into camps." (By "these people", he referred to Jews while omitting the many hundreds of thousands of Serbian Orthodox Christian, Roma, Soviet, and homosexual German concentration camp prisoners and deaths.) He further asserted that "millions died, partly because the Germans didn’t have enough food to feed their own army, let alone prisoners," framing the atrocities as a result of logistical failure rather than premeditated genocide. [14] This interpretation was widely condemned as a form of Holocaust denial for minimizing the ideological and systematic nature of Nazi crimes. [11]
Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, denounced Cooper’s remarks as “one of the most repugnant forms of Holocaust denial of recent years,” emphasizing that the atrocities committed during Operation Barbarossa were not incidental but ideologically driven and meticulously planned. Historians note that Nazi policies such as the Hunger Plan, which deliberately redirected food from occupied Soviet territories to Germany, were intended to cause mass starvation among civilians. Additionally, mobile killing units known as Einsatzgruppen carried out mass executions of Jews, communists, and other targeted groups with logistical support from the Wehrmacht. Cooper’s comments, suggesting that the genocide was an unplanned consequence of wartime chaos, directly contradict the historical consensus that the Nazi regime pursued a racial war of extermination from the outset. [11]
In response to the interview, all 24 Jewish Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives issued a joint statement condemning Cooper as a “Nazi apologist” and warning that such rhetoric promotes Holocaust revisionism under the guise of historical reinterpretation. [3]
Despite the backlash, Cooper defended his position, suggesting that the strong reactions to his interview indicated that World War II had become a sacred myth that cannot be questioned. This response was characterized as "Kafkaesque" by the conservative National Review, highlighting the problematic nature of his assertions. [15]
In March 2025, Cooper was a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. [2] During the interview, Cooper claimed that Adolf Hitler opposed the Kristallnacht pogrom. [2] [16] Cooper's comments on the Kristallnacht were reviewed and criticised by British historian Richard J. Evans. [17] Cooper also said that Hitler, after viewing the "sorry state" of the German people, could only sympathize with the belief that they had been "manipulated" by the Jews, and that Hitler's "antisemitism is what allowed him to love the German people." Rogan commended Cooper's views, calling them comprehensive and nuanced. [2] [17]
Cooper has been very critical of WW2 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and has described him as the “chief villain of World War II." His claims about Churchill have been met with widespread criticism. [18] [19] [20]
In a now-deleted Twitter post, Cooper claimed that an infamous wartime photograph of Adolf Hitler arriving in Nazi-occupied Paris was "infinitely preferable in every way" to a picture from the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics opening ceremony featuring drag queens in a scene that he believed was inspired by The Last Supper . [21] Cooper has also cited and defended the work of British Holocaust denier David Irving, [17] claiming that his works were censored because of "pressure groups". [22]
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