Why Do We Listen to Podcasters, Not Professors?

Social trust and the “death of expertise”

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Darryl Cooper sits atop the Substack “leaderboard” of history newsletters. He has more subscribers there than distinguished and well-known historians like Adam Tooze, Michael Oren, Niall Ferguson, and Timothy Garton Ash. He has been a guest on some of the most popular podcasts in the world, and his own “Martyr Made” podcast sits near the top of the history charts.

This is too bad because Cooper, who has emerged as one of America’s top voices on history, doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing.

A star in what we might call the Joe Rogan Intellectual Universe — a group of vaguely right-wing personalities who coalesce around certain conceptions of masculinity, counterintuitive ideas about science and history, and disdain for so-called “elite” opinion — Cooper has mangled the narrative around the Second World War in recent months.

He told Tucker Carlson last year that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of the war because his defense of Poland widened and prolonged the conflict in Europe. He also blamed the deaths of Jewish people in the Holocaust on the hardships and logistical failures in Nazi Germany at the time (”the Germans didn’t have enough food to feed their own army, let alone prisoners”), downplaying the…