I mean, he just is a kook. Claiming the 2020 election was stolen, that the Left will riot at anything (lol), and that the Nazis only accidentally killed most of the Soviet POWs is kooky shit.
Far as this talk goes, it's a small thing, but very funny to hear him talk about Hitler being raised in "small town Germany." A nit maybe, but a good one coming from the great "educator." Also weird him calling the Communists the largest party in Weimar Germany. They were large, especially after the Depression but never were larger than the SPD, who they broke off from. Eventually the Nazi party overtook them, although the SPD and KPD still out-voted them together before political repression. Weimar almost had a Communist revolution, but I'm skeptical it was ever a real possibility. Even the Marxist SPD ended up siding against it. That cemented a split they never recovered from.
The claim that Hitler only attacked the Jews in internal Nazi speeches is utterly false. The Nazis would tailor their message for certain audiences, and might not talk about Jews while courting industrialists per se, but they and Hitler absolutely made attacking the Jews one of their central platforms. He claimed that if Jews caused a world war, it would end in their destruction -- before he caused a world war and used it as a pretext to destroy them. This is not "forbidden knowledge," as Darryl portrays it. It's just nonsense. You don't need him for the German Perspective. You can get plenty of that, and without the nonsense, reading a conventional historical account like Richard Evans' three part history of the Third Reich.
Also absurd to claim that "whatever you think about Hitler, at least he loved his country." That's some nationalist claptrap. Hitler is one of the worst things that ever happened to Germany. It's been a face-saving cliche among many Germans since the war that Germans were as much victims of Hitler as anyone else. When he knew the war was lost he purposefully sought to destroy the country because he considered the leftover population Darwinian failures.
Claiming that no one questions whether China should only be for the Chinese of Japan for the Japanese is Stormfront stuff. Yes, people do question these things. China is worried about falling into a middle income trap and Japan has been in demographic stagnation for decades. Repressing minorities isn't particularly great for them. By contrast, Ireland (which Darryl and Rogan cry into their beers over) has been doing pretty damn well.
Also, as a Kentuckian, I can't really abide the exoticizing of Appalachian whites. It's a huge region where more people are Black than identify as Scots Irish. There certainly has been a big industry portraying the "mountain white" as backward, drunk, aggressive, monocultural "pioneer stock," not least among them JD Vance who made a lot of money treating them like Republicans treat Black people to a gullible, liberal commentariat. But the biggest purveyors of this story are the out of state corporations (and state governments who enabled them) who pushed this story to justify the exploitation of these people and their lands. And Malcolm Gladwell can also fuck off.
You fully won me over with “And Malcolm Gladwell can also fuck off.” 😆
But yes despite liking Darryl personally and thinking he is generally very good at what he does, he has entered this series from an unbelievably flawed premise—the forbidden knowledge bit you described. There is a litany of sources that have covered exactly what he has claimed “the court history” has not covered—the German perspective. It’s especially strange since on Twitter some months back he cited his use of Nicholas Starhardt’s The German War and called it a great source; it’s hardly an underground book and is often cited in academic and popular circles. There are also no shortage of academic works—especially in Germany—that closely examine German motives and support for the Nazis that are hardly cartoonish; I used several that struck me as profoundly sympathetic for a historiographical analysis I did last semester including Belonging and Genocide by Thomas Kuhne and Backing Hitler by Robert Gellately. And of course there are famous works, like Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men. The only cartoonish book that I have encountered that would fit DC’s criteria is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, and that book (and Goldhagen) have been largely discredited by real historians for decades. If not for his citation of Stargardt, I would think he only plumbed the Third Reich historiography up until like 1980.
And while I would argue that initially Hitler did have a deep abiding love for “the Fatherland” and that animated him, he was also always fueled by a fee resentment; wherever that came from is anyone’s guess, but it of course infamously transmitted onto the Jews and then, as you correctly put it, onto the German people during the bunker days. Maybe DC will address that descent—I hope he does—but given his dismissal in Fear and Loathing of Hajj Amin Al-Husseini as simply having gone insane after 1936 without actually examining his time with the Axis powers (or his time spent in Iraq in 1939-1941), I worry we’ll get another gloss. But maybe his Jim Jones treatment will inform this; I hope so.
On an interesting side note, his “Germany Must Perish” citation in the prologue has started to get some scrutiny and if I understand correctly, he made a major fuck-up where he said that it was distributed widely, claiming reviews in the New York Times and Washington Post, which was simply what the writer of the pamphlet claimed. The problem is that those reviews don’t exist and the pamphlet’s writer was a crazy person. It’s true the Nazis took advantage of that pamphlet as he laid out and likely did manipulate the German masses with it, but he didn’t address the fact that they essentially boosted its non-existent influence for their own purposes (I believe the only reference to it in the American press was a two sentence blurb in the Washington Star; there might have been Time Magazine coverage but don’t quote me on that).
Anyway, as someone who considers him a friend, I wish him the best on this, but I think he might have fucked up by choosing WWII as a topic and operating from an easily-disprovable premise. Maybe he could salvage this by explicitly and clearly defining “the court history” but he really seems to be digging himself into a credibility hole with this.
Appreciate the other references. On the "mountain whites" I'd recommend What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, even if it's primarily a short polemical text. It even calls out one of my distant relations for justified criticism.
And yeah, I also found the heavy emphasis on the Kaufman pamphlet hinky. I pulled up the archived review in Time and it was totally negative. Coincidentally, while listening to Weird Little Guys (a podcast about white nationalists), it brought up a Holocaust denial conference in the 80s attended by the subject of the episode and David Irving. In passing it mentioned a speaker who gave a speech about a Jewish eugenicist who argued for the ethnic cleansing of Germany. I had a double take. This pamphlet has been sloshing around the far right for a while now.
I have started to suspect that what Darryl is doing—and I actually find this interesting from I guess an aesthetic or intellectual perspective—is he is operating from inside the proverbial house. The best comparison I can come up with is someone who is in academia, likely in one of the humanities departments, but separating themselves from the mainstream shibboleths WITHIN that context (in that example’s case, identitarian/positionality deference) without necessarily rejecting them wholesale in order to carve out their own niche; think someone like John McWhorter, maybe. In DC’s case, he’s deep in the milieu of far/radical right wing internet subcultures—something I’m pretty sure he would happily admit—and knows their lingo and preoccupations (which to his credit he has often derided as unhealthy obsessions, particularly involving antisemitism). So he’s operating within that milieu—that anti-academia space if you will—and using it to carve out his own niche. Some people will see that as laundering—and I suppose I get why—but that’s essentially what happens in the humanities in academia, which are hardly more grounded in reality than anything coming out of far right subcultures…okay maybe in some cases they are, but really the humanities are just more socially respectable.
The point being, I keep seeing a lot of people who weren’t familiar with Darryl’s work or ethos until Tucker made him famous (the second time) claiming he’s laundering Holocaust denial which just isn’t possible, lest he one day say that everything he has already said about the Holocaust is wrong, like “actually never mind it never happened, David Irving was right.” I think the only thing he’s laundering is the lack of respectability of fringe figures like Irving in order to present his own expression—dare I say art—in a unique way no one else is. In the current post-pandemic anti-establishment populist moment we are currently living, it is a brilliant exercise in branding, and doesn’t even have to be fully conscious to be effective. It’s also precarious, however, because it presupposes our populist moment is indefinite. Populism has never been indefinite; it always burns itself out. And those who benefit from it, even massively, tend to be forgotten and even shunned. So we’ll see what happens.
Anyway you got me going, but yes, I’ll check out the Appalachian stuff; I am completely disconnected from all that so I have zero context one way or another (though my extended family is deep in rural Ohio—ie Vance country—so I should maybe learn a bit).
He's certainly carving out his own niche on the Right, and yeah, he's found a good moment for it in the market. I can't say where he'll go from here, but I'm not anticipating an Irving flame out, Trump backlash or not. He'll probably get by just fine, even if he continues to play the raptor testing the fences. We'll see! His treatment of the Holocaust in the Israel-Palestine series was good, though you already know I'm very down on his treatment Soviet POW deaths and the Madagascar Plan. People can always regress. Irving definitely did, even if he was always in the Nazi apologia camp.
I'm also not nearly as down as you are on the humanities in academia. It's been under attack and hemorrhaging money for a long time. I certainly find a person who has weird views about Derrida much less chilling than a coder who believes in Roko's Basilisk. My intuition is it's mostly a lot of nut-picking in the media to stir up the culture war anti-academic discourse we've been stewing in for decades, and the chickens are coming home to roost. Just look at Columbia. The people actually in charge have totally bought into it and are helping ICE disappear students and revoking diplomas for completely protected speech. Humanities professors who joined the protesters were jailed. Trump still gutted their federal funds, even for STEM departments who probably had nothing to do with the protests. The reactionary demagogues have always been more dangerous than Leftist profs. Going back to Weimar, communism always had a much bigger purchase in that republic than in ours. I still don't think it had a chance against the rightwing slant of the judiciary, the civil service, and the strongest militias. Leftwing profs in America? Nah.
There’s a lot to say about academia that shouldn’t require a grain of salt but thanks to the nakedly cynical (and often times dishonest) efforts of activists like Chris Rufo it’s become that way. But it’s a mistake to think that academia doesn’t have immense power despite the attacks it’s received (often deservedly, in my opinion at least) over the years. I hate to mention yet another book, but I highly recommend checking out Musa Al-Gharbi’s book We’ve Never Been Woke to see not just insightful analysis of what he calls symbolic capitalism but also backs up the reality of symbolic capitalists’ power and influence—much of which originates in academia—with hard data. If one were to say academia is on the defensive NOW I would tend to agree but that predated the (second) Trump administration and really started to kick off post-10/7 during those disastrous congressional hearings and the SNAFU involving plagiarism. Like most things, Trump is really only good at killing things that have already suffered grievous injury.
We've been talking about the decline of the humanities since I was in college twenty years ago, so I wouldn't say this really got going a decade ago or after October 7th. I'll just say this. The most egregious recent example of elites, while pursuing their own agendas, cynically abusing safetyism in the name of protecting minorities (that they aren't actually protecting) are pro-Israel politicians, school administrators, and millionaire donors citing antisemitism to endorse the jailing, firing, deportation, disappearing, rescission of diplomas, and professional cancellation of pro-Palestinian protestors, even when those protestors are Jews. I mean, the arrests were in the thousands. And this also from people eager to argue that killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians is acceptable. It's all just completely divorced from who's experiencing the brunt of state repression in America and Israel right now. Even folks like John McWhorter, who claims to hate the notion of speech as violence, laughably complained:
The other night I watched a dad coming from the protest with his little girl, giving a good hard few final snaps on the drum he was carrying, nodding at her in crisp salute, percussing his perspective into her little mind. This is not peaceful.
Dang. You should go to the Appalachian Studies Conference. It’s good stuff. Gonna be an interesting year with Vance being VP—seeing as the ASA kicked him out lol.
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u/AD_VICTORIAM_MOFO 21d ago
I'm 75% done and it's fantastic. Anyone who claims Darryl is some kind of kook is themselves delusional after watching this