Inside the walls of the Anti-Antiversity: The Darryl Cooper affair

With an excursus on Dave Greene

The Antiversity is an independent producer of veracity—a truth service. It rests automatic confidence in no other institution. Its goal is to uncover any truth available to it: both matters of fact and perspective. It needs to always be right and never be wrong. Where multiple coherent perspectives of an issue exist, the Antiversity must provide all—each composed with the highest quality available.

The power of a truth service is its reliability. It may remain prudently silent on any point; it must err on none. The thesis of the Procedure is that if we can construct a truth service much more powerful than USG’s noble and revered ministry of information, we will be able to use it to safely and effectively defeat USG. Indeed, I can imagine no other way to solve the problem.

Unqualified Reservations

Note: this is a boring and long article that I had to write solely because a large number of people either do not understand, or pretend not to understand, the very simple point I will make. Don’t read it.

Let me start by saying something complimentary. Darryl Cooper’s history podcasts are widely loved because they are interesting, informative, and good. He has both what we Jews call sitzfleisch (google it, I’m not your nanny) and the ability to sort and arrange the information he reads into a structured narrative. On the other hand, he is much less good at analysis, and often defaults to a rather bland liberalism studded with poorly-fitting Right Wing opinions. A catty way of saying this is he would have made a good research assistant, but that would be stupid and unworthy. Modern technology has made it possible for the research assistant by nature to become a history podcaster by artifice instead, and this is a good thing. History podcasts are cool; my children listen to them all the time.

A more serious criticism is that, like a lot of people, he has turned his brain to mush with rightoidism. I already pointed to an inane and insane tweet of his and the total disconnect from anything resembling reality it represents here, but let’s check on what he’s firing off now:

Wow, great point!

Get OFF Twitter, now. Just do it.¹

Now, let’s say something complimentary about Tucker Carlson. He’s a very talented broadcast journalist who does excellent monologues. These monologues are often constructed to pander to your instinct to feel simultaneously threatened and validated at the same time, but that’s OK sometimes too. His opening bit trying to deprogramme America at the peak of the George Floyd hysteria was a masterpiece. On the other hand, Tucker Carlson is not a good interviewer in the sense of bringing out the best in his guests for the edification of his audience. He made his name by inviting on crazy Leftoids and allowing them to say demented things, which was great entertainment, until even the dopiest ones learned to politely decline their invitation. So he had to interview right-wingers, but he only knows one interview technique and therefore ends up allowing them to say demented things too.

More importantly, Tucker Carlson is clearly addicted to giving his viewers the edgiest, most subversive takes that make their brain explode. The problem is the perennial one: there are limitless numbers of subversive, brain-exploding takes, but only a limited number of true ones. If your business model (and it is a business) is providing these red pills, then you have committed yourself to eventually serving up dreck. It’s just a matter of time. There literally is no other way.

All this is by way of preliminary to saying that there are ways of discussing the Cooper-Carlson podcast that vindicate either Carlson, Cooper or even both of any great moral offence. Here’s one doing that for Cooper. It’s excellent; read it. What there is not, however, is a way of vindicating the podcast, or, more importantly, vindicating the online Right in general because what the episode showed is that the online Right knowledge production system is totally malfunctional and, while one should never say never, it certainly looks like the problem is unsolvable.

Tedious nitpicking

I have written 5 Notes about this crummy podcast. Each time I get a list of outraged responses accusing me of being unable to hear criticism of my Holocaust religion, contemplate that maybe Churchill was bad (a viewpoint I have been exposed to hundreds of times since childhood), or bear to hear any subversive information. What no-one ever does is simply explain why what Cooper says in the podcast is correct, because no-one can because it’s 💩. The section isn’t particularly long, so let’s go through it.

I got in trouble with my podcast partner, Jacko Willink, one time because he’s a New England Dutchman whose his family, its near and dear to their, he’s Dutch, but very near and dear to their heart that Winston Churchill is a hero. (Tucker: 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.

This is really not great. Stop pretending it is. You’d have trouble even translating it into comprehensible English.

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, Adolf Hitler and so forth, (Tucker: Stalin), 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. Germany, look, they put themselves into a position, and Adolf Hitler is chiefly responsible for this, but his whole 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 have letters as early as July, August, 1941, from commandants of these makeshift camps that they’re setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people they’re rounding up. So it’s two months after, a month or two after 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? And so this is like two months into the invasion. Right?

This is a double mistake. First, it is simply untrue that operation Barbarossa was launched ‘with no plan for that’. There was a plan: it was to requisition all the food the Germans needed in full knowledge that millions of people would starve to death. However, even this plan did not apply to the Jews, who were to be actively exterminated. Here is David Cole writing about what a steaming pile of turd Cooper’s description is. David Cole is an actual Holocaust revisionist. He believes 3.5 million Jews were killed, and he has explained at great length why his interpretation of the primary sources leads him to that conclusion, and, unlike Carlson or Cooper, he has suffered for it. What you will notice is how much contempt he has for Cooper because that is what actual revisionists who have invested time and effort in the subject think about someone who rocks up and says total nonsense. By defending Cooper, you are not defending revisionism, you are denigrating it (though, admittedly, as Cole has written about at length, most revisionists deserve denigration).

And my view on this. I argue with my Zionist interlocutors about this all the time with regard to the current war in Gaza. Look, man, maybe you, as the Germans, you felt like you had to invade to the east. Maybe you thought that Stalin was such a threat or that if he launched a surprise attack and seized the oil fields in Romania, that you would now not have the fuel to actually respond and you'd be crippled and all of Europe would be under threat. And whatever it was, whatever it was, that, like, maybe you thought you had to do that, but at the end of the day, you launched that war with no plan to care for the millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war that were going to come under your control, and millions of people died because of that. You can look at it and say, like umm, you know well, yeah.

‘You can look at it and say, like umm, you know well, yeah’. Truly, a great way to use your one best chance to bust the WW2 myth. The point, here, obviously is to draw a parallel between WW2 and the Gaza war today in which, perhaps, the daily warnings of starvation in Gaza since last year will at some point come true. But, again, it’s all just wrong, and there is no way to characterize this other than as saying untruths because you want to minimize Hitler’s culpability for mass murder.

So get back to your main question about Churchill. If you go to 1939, when the Germans and the Soviet Union invade Poland, as soon as that war’s wrapped up on the German side, Hitler starts firing off peace proposals to Britain, France, because they had already declared war. He didn't expect them to declare war, actually. There’s a famous scene where he throws a fit when he finds out that they did do that. And so he doesn’t want to fight France, he doesn’t want to fight Britain. He feels that’s going to weaken Europe when we’ve got this huge threat to the east, the communist threat over there, and he starts firing off peace proposals.

Its literally impossible to be more wrong than this. If Hitler thought there was a ‘huge threat to the East’ in 1939, or for some time afterwards, there was a really easy way to combat that, namely, not signing a treaty with the Soviet Union and then assisting it in conquering six countries. That’s literally it; one simple trick to contain global communism: don’t actively abet it.

He says, lets not do this. We can’t do this. And, of course, a year goes by, 1940 comes around, and they’re still at war.

Poor Hitler. If only there had been some way he could have not invaded Poland, like, for example, JUST NOT INVADING POLAND, then he could have had the peace he wanted.

And so he launches his invasion to the west, takes over France, takes over western and northern Europe. Once that’s done, and the British have escaped at Dunkirk, there’s no British force left on the continent. There’s no opposing force left on the continent. In other words, the war is over and the Germans won.

This is simply not true. That is not how wars work.

There’s literally no opposing force on the continent. And throughout that summer, Adolf Hitler is firing off radio broadcasts, giving speeches, literally sending planes over to drop leaflets over London and other British cities, trying to get the message to these people that Germany does not want to fight you. We don't want to fight you, offering peace proposals that said, you keep all your overseas colonies. We don't want any of that. We want Britain to be strong. The world needs Britain to be strong, especially as we face this communist threat and so forth like this.

Germany was still actively assisting Russia in its expansionist wars. Strangely, presenting yourself as a trustworthy peace partner who just wants to stop Communism isn’t effective when you have been invading country after country in coordination with Communism and are still literally doing that. In September 1940, under Hitler’s orders, the Anti-Comintern pact was renamed the Tripartite pact with the goal of persuading the USSR to join.

And I think that if there were people in Britain who, well, if they hadn't put it this way, if they hadn't been so successful at delegitimizing the peace approach by demonizing Neville Chamberlain and so forth and holding him responsible for the invasion of Poland, that people would have been, they would have understood, like, we don't need another repeat of the first world War, which is not what ended up happening, but that's what everybody thought was going to happen.

Could it just possibly be that Hitler delegitimized the peace approach?

And so Churchill, I mean, you have a guy, Churchill wanted a war. He wanted to fight Germany. I don't begrudge him that. National leaders, you can fight whoever you want. If you feel like the long term interests of the British empire are threatened by the rise of a powerful continental power like Germany. And you need to check that. Those are great power games, and you play them the way you feel like you need to play them. That's fine. The reason I resent Churchill so much for it is that he kept this war going when he had no way. He had no way to go back and fight this war. All he had were bombers. He was literally, by 1940, sending firebomb fleets, sending bomber fleets to go firebomb the black Forest, just to burn down sections of the Black Forest. Just, just rank terrorism, you know, going through and starting to, you know, what eventually became just a carpet bombing, the saturation bombing of civilian neighborhoods. To kill is the purpose of which was to kill as many civilians as possible. And all the men were out in the field. All the fighting age men were out in the field. And so this is old people, it's women and children. And they knew that.

This is probably the closest Cooper comes to saying something that isn’t totally wrong, but it’s still mostly wrong. Britain had at its disposal (a) a navy which could and did impose a blockade and (b) an airforce which could be used to take out German industrial capacity. It’s true that people like bomber Harris and )))Frederick Lindemann((( were nuts and did their best to divert British aerial raids into basically pointless war crimes, but it’s also true that Britain was entirely capable of targeting production of armaments, and restriction of the enemy's ability to produce weapons was ultimately the key to victory. See How the War was Won for details. The Black Forest stuff is sufficiently inaccurate that it’s basically made up.

And they were wiping these places out as gigantic scaled terrorist attacks, the greatest scale of terrorist attacks you've ever seen in world history.

Cooper has his chronology messed up. His theory is that Britain had to resort to these tactics to stay in the war until it could drag America and/or the USSR into fighting alongside her, but unrestricted aerial bombing of Germany really kicked off from February 1942, after America and USSR had both joined the war on the Allied side. The justification was basically that the Germans, having pioneered indiscriminate bombing of civilians both during the invasion of Poland and Russia, and having abandoned all pretense of adhering to any standards of civilized warfare in the east, had it coming. It also fitted with American tactics against Japan. This was both morally and strategically wrong, but it has nothing to do with Cooper’s claims.

Because it was the only means that they had to continue fighting at the time. They didn’t have the ability to re-invade Europe. And so he needed to keep this war going until he accomplished what he hoped to accomplish. We know now there’s actually a really great series of books. Its one of the best I recommend to everybody, but its really expensive now, and its six long volumes called history of British special operations in the second World War. And one of the books gets into the level of just the extent of media operations, propaganda operations, everything that they were running in the United States to eventually drag us into that war. And that was his whole plan. His whole plan was, we don’t have a way to fight this war ourselves. This war is over. We need either the Soviet Union or the United States to do it for us. And that was the plan and kept the war going long enough for that plan to come to fruition. And to me, that’s just, its a craven, ugly way to fight a war. (Tucker: And what was the motive?) Well, Churchill's got a long and complicated history.

The reality is that British attempts to persuade America to join the war failed. America joined the war because Japan attacked, and Japan attacked because Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Japan with the specific intention of encouraging it to ‘strike South’ and attack America. It’s true that Roosevelt and most of the New Deal regime wanted to go to war, but not because they were persuaded by British propaganda. Both before America joined the war, during the lend-lease era, and afterwards, its consistent policy was to subordinate British interests to those of the Soviets, making Britain pay over the market price for armaments the USSR got for free. This is because, basically, the New Deal regime was dominated by people who thought communism was cool and wanted to team up with the Soviet Union to implement a global progressive order, including carving up the British empire. This is all documented at great length in Stalin’s War, an actual work of competent revisionist history.

We might note here an odd tick of insincere revisionists in obsessing about political campaigns that were demonstrably unsuccessful. The chief example is Churchill’s 1930 campaign to promote a more belligerent policy against Nazi Germany, which is blamed for wrecking chances for peace, despite Churchill having totally failed to get any of his ideas implemented. The plain reality, namely that Chamberlain’s policy was tried and failed because Hitler was a psycho nut, is dissolved into the unfalsifiable thesis that Chamberlain would have succeeded had he faced no domestic opposition whatsoever. There are obvious parallels here with how loser failed ideologies blame wreckers for their failures rather than admit the wreckers were correct.

Yeah. Well, look, I think on one level there was a sense that Churchill was sort of humiliated by his performance in the first world War as the head of the admiralty, and he was out in the cold for a long time. (Tucker: You mean Gallipoli) Yeah, which, that was his operation. And so he was rightly held responsible for that and seen as responsible for one of the great disasters that the British suffered during that war. And so I think part of it was probably kind of personal. He wanted redemption. He wanted to go out there and prove that he's the warlord, that they can go out there and fight this big war. Probably. I think part of it, I read about Churchill and he strikes me as a psychopath, but he's also a sort of I mean, he was a drunk. He was very childish in strange ways. People would talk about how as an adult, as prime minister, they'd find him in his room and he's playing with action figures like war toys and army men and stuff, would get mad when people would interrupt him when he was doing this. This is a strange fellow. There's all those things.

This is really the Rorschach test. You can think Churchill was wrong about everything, but Churchill was a cool guy. He was an accomplished writer and rhetorician, natty dresser, a competent painter, eugenicist, and anti-socialist. He had a lifelong happy marriage, drank champagne, personally led cavalry charges during his military years, and smoked cigars because he liked them, not as some kind of performative masculinity thing. He came up with the idea of portable landing harbors a full 29 years before they were first used on D-Day, and, at the end of his career, he wanted to run for election on a platform of blocking non-white immigration (and he would have done it, too, had the Wets not outmanoeuvered him). There’s a word for that: based. And there’s a word for people who react to all that in horror, namely faggot.

Now, when Darryl Cooper isn’t simping for Hitler, he is very partial to the kind of manipulative emotional moralfagging that earns the faggot appellation, but his defenders are supposed to be against globohomo, so what actually is the case for Churchill’s psychopathy here? (1) He was a drunk. Well, he wasn’t a drunk; he liked to drink, because - to repeat - he was based and not a faggot. (2) He played with action figures.

I’ve raised this now many times, and I really want someone to explain this to me: what is the actual argument that Churchill was a psychopath because he played with action figures? Please, just show me or admit that this is completely retarded and Cooper is making a fool of himself talking complete nonsense. Oh, and his biographers say the premise isn’t true either. He played with action figures as child.

But then you get into, why was Winston Churchill such a dedicated booster of Zionism from early on in his life?

I actually don’t understand the segue here. This is a good example of Carlson being an incompetent interviewer and allowing his subject to helplessly freestyle into incoherence just because it sounds edgy.

And there's ideological reasons. In 1920, he wrote a kind of infamous now article called ‘Zionism versus Bolshevism’. And he basically makes the case that which was true to a large extent, that all of eastern Europe, the pale of settlement, which is where the vast majority of Jews lived, other than the United States, which is where a lot of them had traveled to. That area, had become so engulfed by a revolutionary spirit that all the young Ashkenazi Jews who were over there were getting swept up into it. It was the sixties here on the steroids in a much more serious, and ended up being destructive way. And this is 1920, so this is shortly after the Bolshevik revolution. Basically, the point of his paper is he says, these people who are over there, they’re all going one direction or the other, they’re going to be Bolsheviks. They’re going to be Zionists. We want them to be Zionists. And so we need to support this. And so that was early on. There was an ideological component of it.

Churchill was a smart guy.

But then as time goes on, you read stories about Churchill going bankrupt and needing money, getting bailed out by people who shared his interests in terms of Zionism, but also his hostility. I think his hostility, to put it this way, I think his hostility to Germany was real. I don't think that he necessarily had to be bribed to have that feeling. But I think he was, to an extent, put in place by people, the financiers, by a media complex that wanted to make sure that he was the guy who was representing Britain in that conflict for a reason. And Churchill is, again, it's so hard because especially in a short interview like this, where you have this guy who, I mean, he's an Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Martin Luther King type figure in the sort of western consciousness, right?

Unlike Martin Luther King, Churchill wasn’t a communist philanderer, but, to stick to the point, neither of the two Jews who bailed out Churchill were Zionists, and Zionism has nothing to do with the topic at all.² It’s obvious that Cooper just wants to say Jew, but feels he can’t.³ The most likely explanation is that the brave truthteller is a pussy who’d prefer to say untrue, incoherent things rather than use the J-word. Another alternative is that enough of his brain is left that he still realizes that ‘the Jews’ is not a coherent entity that you can attribute conscious agency to and so uses Zionism as a proxy. In either case, it doesn’t make any sense.

And so people have so many assumptions and built in triggers, like when it comes to this guy that it's hard to talk about him because you're always thinking about the triggers that you're setting off and your listeners. And I don't say that in a way of like, I don't want to offend anybody. (Tucker: No, no, I understand) you know, that things are going to be misunderstood. And so this is why I do 30 Hours podcasts by, well.

I think this is Cooper vaguely realizing that he is talking nonsense and trying to dial it back, but I’m not really sure. This is a really bad interview.

Tucker Carlson: It's just, it’s interesting because I, you know, as a follower of your work, I don't see you as hostile to the west. I see you actually as a product of the west and as a defender really of the west or its values, you know, in your approach, in your open mindedness, rigor, you know, belief in accuracy and honesty. I mean, those are western notions. And yet Churchill has been positioned and has been really is accepted as the defender of the west over the last hundred years. And so maybe that's, and I wonder why that is. I don't, I mean, people can certainly take issue with any factual claims you're making. I assume they're already consistent with what I think I know to be true. But why do you think Churchill has been presented in the way that he has?

“Can I lick your toes?” This is such an incredibly bad interview. Back to Cooper

Yeah. Well, it has to do with what you said earlier, right. Neville Chamberlain versus Churchill has been the binary model that has served as the chief rhetorical device for every conflict we've wanted to get into since then. Yes, the entire cold war. And then even after the cold war, in the global war on terror is if you appease them, you're Neville Chamberlain. Hitler's the, rather, Churchill's the one who saw all along where this was headed and was trying to warn people this cassandra. And finally, because nobody listened to him, the war ended up breaking out and we were forced to go stamp out this threat. And now it's a much bigger threat than it ever would have been if. And it's justified every conflict, really, since the second world war, everybody's the new Hitler, right? And so it's very valuable in that sense. But then also it really did become the founding myth of the global order that we're all living in now, right?

Finally, something true, but Cooper leaves out half the story. Everyone who wants a war will compare those who don’t want it to Chamberlain. And, by the same token, everyone who doesn’t want a war will compare those who do want it to Hitler.

A foundational narrative means that all the factions use it.

The conversation then goes on to other topics, but I’ll quote one more section because Cooper actually says an additional true thing (contradicting what he said earlier) about how, by WW2, Hitler had subordinated the anti-communism which he had used to gain power to more pressing ideological considerations, something I repeated on Dave Greene’s podcast (we’ll get to it), much to his consternation.

There’s this idea that the only reason that they did Molotov Ribbentrop was because Hitler needed to buy time so he could eventually invade the Soviet Union later or something like that. Not exactly true. I mean, obviously, he was talking about the eventual conflict with the Soviet Union very early in his career that was there. But by the time you get up to 1939, his views are starting to become more complicated on it, where he’s starting to see the United States as the real chief threat, not just to Germany, but to Europe, because he saw himself as the sort of European defender, Messiah guy, right? And he looks over at Joseph Stalin and says, and a lot of his people kind of thought this way, that this is not an international communist movement anymore. Trotsky has been banished from the country, and his followers are all dead. They were killed during the purges of the late thirties. These people are all gone. Those are all of the people who, from the very beginning, after the First World War, they saw Russia as the fountainhead of world revolution. And Stalin, he never quite gave that up. Just like the United States. He saw it as his duty to build up ideologically aligned allies and so forth. But if you really look at what happened? And a lot of the Germans saw it this way.

The fallout

Well, I hope that was informative for someone. The point of it all was to leave no further room for doubt that this exercise in taking WW2 revisionism mainstream was total garbage, offering no conceivable hope of overturning established opinions, and, rather, practically inviting the Cathedral to come down on it like a tonne of bricks. More than anything else, it was just so incredibly dumb. Its cognitive value was absolutely negative, its only possible function to make people more confused and ignorant.

Here’s what should have happened. When Carlson turned the subject to WW2, Cooper should have been honest and said ‘I’ve really only just began researching this topic, let’s stick to stuff I am expert in like the Jonestown cult’. Failing that, after the car crash had happened, Carlson could have just cut that section out of the interview and penciled in another date to discuss it when Cooper had read enough to say something sensical. But they didn’t and so the inevitable happened. People don’t like it when you say a bunch of obviously untrue things, the only common thread among them being simping for Hitler. You know - because you literally said it - that the WW2 narrative is central to the modern symbolic order, so you know that people care about this stuff, not just in proportion to its importance, but drastically in excess of its importance. If you’re going to take a swing at the king, don’t rock up in your underpants with a slingshot then stand around sniffing your farts in front of everyone. If you do, expect to get wrecked. Don’t bitch about it.

But the really important thing here isn’t what grifter and griftier did, it’s how the online Right as a whole responded. That WW2 plays the pivotal role in the legitimacy of GAE, or whatever you choose to call it, is a commonplace of Dissident Right discourse, and it’s also true. Unfortunately, the big reveal of this truth to the wider public was a spazfest. So what do you do? Honestly, it’s a tough question. I think probably best would have been to say nothing and privately counsel Cooper to take the L gracefully, but there are other constructive things you could do if you wanted to have a functional movement that contributed in any sense to increasing the total knowledge and understanding in the world.

But, obviously, the Dissident Right didn’t do anything like that because it isn’t that. What it did was a mixture of circling the wagons and doubling down on its absolute worst trait.

The great self-own

There is a certain type of analytical technique that is ubiquitous in traditional Jewish scholarship and is known by academics as the ‘reconciling hermeneutic’. Basically, you identify two sources within the authoritative tradition that (appear to) contradict each other, and then find a resolution that maximizes harmony within the tradition. There’s a lot to be said for this style of learning, but it has a degenerate form in which contradictions are hallucinated into existence (or read out from manifestly corrupt texts), and the resolutions are accepted based on purely formal criteria with disregard for correspondence to known reality, coherence, plausibility, fidelity to philology, or even just a basic sanity test. The more intricate forms of this approach in which resolutions are favored in proportion to their degree of elaborateness have earned the infamous moniker pilpul, which is not strictly accurate, but it’s too late to change that now.

On the Dissident Right, a version of this form of thought was developed that we may call the ‘paranoid reconciling hermeneutic’. In this technique, contradictions are identified in the intellectual structure of modern society, and resolutions are selected on the basis of preferring those that have the most malevolent implications. For example, one liberal will say that high birth rates are bad because of the environment, another liberal will say that immigration is needed to pay pensions, and the optimal way of resolving this contradiction is to posit a conscious plan by them to eradicate white people by stealth.

Now, this manner of thinking isn’t completely without its uses, but fundamentally it is not a productive way of thinking about the world. Those who indulge in it damage their ability to think properly no less than the dedicated pilpulist who forgets how to link a premise to its conclusion.

The only relevant question for a thinker in response to Cooper’s primetime brain fart was to ask ‘is it true?’. The answer to that question is no; most of it was untrue, and much of it was so incoherent and nonsensical as to be beneath the concepts of true and false. The Dissident Right, however, was interested in a different question, namely ‘why are people so angry about this?’ This is not an unreasonable question per se, but it becomes unreasonable when plugged into the paranoid reconciling hermeneutic. Which brings us to Dave Greene.

Superficially at least, it was very difficult to explain the unhinged reaction coming from ordinary normie-conservatives. Winston Churchill had always been a controversial figure. He was an undeniable war hawk for much of his career, and was famously responsible for the bloody fiasco at Gallipoli during the First World war. And that’s not to mention his questionable management of British colonial possessions. More to the point, as an undergrad, I distinctly remember a huge activist furor over Churchill’s possible role in killing millions in the great Bengali famine, with very little outrage heard from the college Republicans.

So why the outrage now? Why was every conservative pundit acting like attacks against Winston Churchill were the ultimate blasphemy, much worse, it would seem, than attacks against God Himself?

The issue is not with Winston Churchill, the man. The issue is with Winston Churchill, the story. Conservatives need the story of Churchill to make their worldview make sense, more than they even need God. They need that image of that elder conservative statesman, the representative of the old world, who still stood up to fight the real right-wing bad-guys. They need that great representative of the British Empire who “took one for the team” and helped the forces of anti-imperialism conqueror the planet for the greater cause of “our democracy”. Churchill was the original beautiful loser, the original “good” conservative, the image that every patriotic center-rightist tries to emulate just as they also, paradoxically, try to avoid resembling the image of Archie Bunker.

We start with the contradiction. College Republicans displayed ‘little outrage’ when some commie trash were dissing Churchill (source: Dave Greene distinctly remembers it), but they did become ‘unhinged’ when Cooper simped incoherently for Hitler (source: none).⁴ Then the resolution: some back-of-an-envelope psychology explanation about Archie Bunker based on Dave’s incredibly interesting story about a conversation he had back when he was a liberal tard.

If you want to know why conservatives found it disturbing that America’s most popular conservative pundit invited on a guest to say retarded nonsense about why Hitler is actually not so bad in the middle of a closely-contested presidential election campaign, maybe just ask them. If you can’t get a straight answer, then, of course, speculate, but surely you want your hypothesis to be true, not just edgy. Isn’t that the point of thinking, writing: to say things that are true? Well no, there is a higher purpose.

Thus, one of the main roles a dissident must play in the modern world is that of the iconoclast, clearing away the false gods of the progressive vision so that new life might have space to grow, a necessary beginning to the rediscovery of sincere spirituality.

This purpose - to ‘smash your enemy’s idols’ - is higher or, at any rate, more urgent than saying things that are true. Since, if anyone, it is normal, mentally-healthy conservative white people who ‘idolize’ Churchill, one might wonder exactly who Dave’s enemies are, but let’s park that thought because the story gets a bit weirder. At this point I can’t emphasize enough that, for your own good, you should absolutely stop reading now. I have to do this, but you don’t. Please, for heaven’s sake, do absolutely anything else.

Facepalm

In response to the article, I wrote a rather intemperate Note expressing my disdain for yet another Dissident Right piece making extended casuistical arguments in praise of Cooper’s dopey rambling while avoiding the obvious truth that is was garbage, and connecting this to the observed phenomenon that intelligent, thoughtful people keep saying that they don’t want anything to do with the Dissident Right anymore. You can read it here. In response, Dave Greene invited me on to discuss my concerns, which I declined for reasons you can see, if interested, in the thread below. I had presumed that would be the end of it, but the following Sunday evening I did a podcast with Alex Kaschuta. You can watch it here. In the course of the conversation, we indulged in some fairly vague talk about how unpleasant and stupid rightoid online spaces are, which most people listening related to easily enough. I wasn’t thinking about Dave, still less did I allude to him, but the wicked flee when no man pursueth. As if at the sound of a shaken leaf, Dave Greene heard the phrase ‘personality disorder’, and in his mind’s eye there appeared the visage of none other than Dave Greene himself. This led to the following comment, repeated both on the video and in a separate note.

Now, this is going to get really stupid (did I tell you to stop reading? STOP READING), but as you can verify I was not ‘all over’ Substack, I wrote one note, which did not insinuate antisemitism. There then followed two further invitations to his podcast, the second of which I accepted. If you are really mental, you can watch that here. The actual content can be summed up in about two minutes. I think it’s necessary to have high intellectual standards of accuracy and he agrees that it would be desirable, but thinks its too hard, so we just have to do without. Except there is one subject about which he doesn’t think even that, namely WW2, because being concerned with accuracy there - even at the appallingly low standard of Cooper’s Hitler fan fiction - is to endorse the idol of the official WW2 narrative.

Now, I can dig the idea that sometimes an ignoble lie might be tactically advantageous, though I don’t see the pertinence of that to Cooper’s embarrassing public display of incoherent nonsense. How, however, does this fit with all the talk of valuing truth, of opposing the present order for its lies? Obviously, it doesn’t, and what really doesn’t is Greene’s insistence that he doesn’t know who all these mentally disordered, paranoid, diseased people ruining everything on the Dissident Right are when all he has to do is literally look at his own comments section. Even leaving aside the substantial number that are simply excerpts from Mein Kampf, crikey. Are you proud, Dave? Are you winning?

At the close of our conversation, Dave said something that I hadn’t considered properly before, and found quite touching: it’s hurtful to him when someone disparages a community he has invested so much to build. I said I would think about this, and I did. I understand it must hurt. It must hurt if you spend years building a house only to discover the timber is infested with maggots, but you have to fess up all the same. Your community has maggots. Maybe it’s not mostly maggots, but it’s hard to tell, because they’re writhing so much you can’t see anything else. You can explain away at as great a length as you wish why it’s not your fault, why there’s nothing you can do, but what difference does it really make?

Edgar Jung was a clever guy, and perhaps a good one. He wrote some profound things, and some specious nonsense, but neither is what’s really important about him. What’s important is that the regime he brought to power destroyed the country he sought to save, and, before it commenced going about that, it shot Edgar Jung dead. That’s not going to happen this time because, fundamentally, this is all fake. It’s just people talking online. But, still, you get the message.

Rightoids are very into muh friend-enemy distinction. I am an enemy, and the friends are, of course, Dave’s frens. But are they though? Friends come in all shapes and sizes. If you are a drug addict, you will probably have friends, but you might notice that these friends don’t seem very consistently interested in your wellbeing. They seem chiefly interested in making sure you take lots and lots of drugs. The drugs make you feel good, but you keep feeling worse and they keep insisting you take more of them. New drugs, harder drugs. Do you feel good, Dave?

I can date quite precisely when I first starting reading Dave Greene because I stumbled upon his Substack when googling Rod Dreher’s divorce two and half years ago. There are a few articles I remember with not inconsiderable fondness. Over this period, Dave Greene has been on a journey. Almost tautologically, to him, this journey is growth, progress. But is it? Do these elaborate casuistical justifications for error and sloppiness to an audience of twisted buffoons, all the while proclaiming how he is simply too busy to stand up for truth and sanity, really convince him? Or may I, perhaps, employ the paranoid hermeneutic myself? Does Dave, perchance, suspect that if he was to take the side of basic standards and intellectual hygiene then he would be spat out and tossed aside by the movement into which he has sunk such great costs, and which has contempt for both? Let’s finish with another quotation. Dave may be compelled to flail comically against phantoms by virtue of the position he has placed himself in, but he’s a good writer and perhaps there is a charitable Straussian reading of certain parts:

There were warning signs everywhere, but for me, the damning moment for the modern ideology came when I discovered that its contemporary priest caste did not care about the truth of its ideas, just their utility in maintaining an order that benefited them.

No comment.

1. Parenthetically, there is this weird Rightoid thing where they point at average-looking White people and make extraordinary judgments of this sort. If people of any other race were doing this, it would be straightforward to identify it as anti-White racism, but I’m genuinely at a loss as to what motivates this behaviour.

2. In one case, it has nothing to do with anything at all because Bernard Baruch bailed him out after he lost money in the crash of 1929 and wasn’t thinking about Hitler. His principal motive appears to have been something called ‘friendship’.

3. UPDATE: As Mark points out in the comments, the second ‘Jew’ who bailed out Churchill, Henry Strakosch, in addition to having literally zero connection with Zionism, may not even have been Jewish at all. The evidence for his Jewishness basically comes down to the kind of looks Jewish, and that the Nazis claimed he was as part of their wartime propaganda. See this article by a Holocaust revisionist, a neat example of how WW2 revisionism contains legitimate research along with the mountains of dreck.

4. Perhaps the source is this tweet he links to, but this is Dave linking to … himself engaging in the paranoid reconciling hermeneutic. This is also reminiscent of dysfunctional modes of Jewish scholarship in which hallucinated errors become the premise for further hallucinated errors.