American conservatives turn on Winston Churchill
The idea that Winston Churchill is 'the bad guy of the 20th Century is 'horse s--- of the most profound kind,' he declared.
The best-selling author's ire was triggered by an emerging trend of conservative influencers espousing 'Churchill revisionism' on their platforms.
The idea, held among some factions of the US hard-Right, that Churchill ought not to be lauded for his role in the Second World War, is rooted in American isolationism.
As Donald Trump extols the virtues of American protectionism, insisting the US has been 'taken advantage of' by its foreign allies, the idea is surging afresh.
Despite Mr Trump being a Churchill fan, having twice restored a bust of the wartime leader to the Oval Office after it was removed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Churchill revision has taken hold among some of his most influential followers.
Rogan, America's most-listened to podcaster, and Tucker Carlson, a conservative journalist and commentator, both recently interviewed Darryl Cooper, a hard-Right influencer who has described Britain's wartime leader as the 'chief villain of World War Two'.
Credit: YouTube/TuckerCarlson
The theory has its roots in the 1940s, with the inauguration of the America First Committee, spearheaded by aviator Charles Lindbergh, and its campaign to keep the US out of the war.
Hostility to Churchill continued with Pat Buchanan, who twice ran for the US presidency, blaming Britain's wartime leader for prolonging the conflict.
'This is a very clear movement on a subset of the American right, but it's a growing movement. And that's why I believe it's important to challenge it,' Mr Murray told The Telegraph, after his tense exchange with Rogan.
'They always look like what they're trying to do is simply correct the historical narrative. What they're doing is in fact, distorting the historical narrative,' Mr Murray said.
'I think it's important that people who actually do have very large followings do not play around with very dangerous ideas [they have] encountered. And I've been worried that that's something that is happening [more frequently],' Mr Murray added.
Carlson described Mr Cooper as the 'best and most honest popular historian in the United States' during his appearance on the Tucker Carlson Show last September.
In the almost two-and-a-half-hour chat, Mr Cooper described Churchill as 'the chief villain' of the Second World War.
'You know, 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 said.
'Churchill wanted a war, he wanted to fight Germany. The reason I resent Churchill so much for it is that he kept this war going when he had no way to go back and fight this war. All he had were bombers.
'He was literally, by 1940, sending firebomb fleets... just to burn down sections of the Black Forest,' claimed Mr Cooper.
'It was just rank terrorism... that eventually became just carpet bombing, the saturation bombing of civilian neighbourhoods, the purpose of which was to kill as many civilians as possible.'
Five months later, in February, Carlson parroted some of what Mr Cooper said, launching his own attack on Churchill in an interview with Piers Morgan.
'Well, I know he helped defeat the Nazis with his friend Stalin. I'm not defending the Nazis. I'm just saying, where is Western civilisation? What did he preserve? Where is it? I don't know where it is,' he told a bemused Morgan.
Credit: Piers Morgan Uncensored
According to Christopher Galdieri, professor of politics at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, the theory is used to prop up the argument that modern America would be better off had the US not entered the Second World War.
'Pat Buchanan argued the US should have stayed out of World War Two and let Europe figure it out and that the whole world would be better off if that had been what had happened,' Prof Galdieri told The Telegraph.
'That's an idea that used to be at the very fringes of conservative thought that is clearly becoming much more acceptable.'
Andrew Roberts, author of the widely praised Churchill: Walking with Destiny was scornful of those trying to rewrite history.
'Nothing Cooper or Tucker Carlson has said is new,' he said.
He told The Telegraph: 'We've had these critiques from Alan Clark, from Professor Maurice Cowling, and also from Patrick Buchanan – and obviously also from people like David Irving.
'What it tries to argue is that the British shouldn't have fought the Second World War, we should have let Hitler take Europe whilst we kept the Empire and allowed Hitler to then have a struggle against Soviet communism.
'It takes a very, very weird world view, frankly, to believe in that kind of thing. But also it takes some ignorance of what the world genuinely was like in the 1930s and 1940s, and what the dictators were all about, and what the Western democracies were capable of doing,' he added.
'If you allow Adolf Hitler control over Europe in the second half of the 1940s, he would in fact have annihilated all of the Jews in Europe and not just 50 per cent of them.'
The Telegraph has approached Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper and Joe Rogan for comment.
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