These are conversations that, until recently, remained confined to the corners of the internet – on forums like 4chan and Reddit, or obscure blogs often discussing pseudoscience and bodybuilding: Was Winston Churchill actually the true culprit behind World War II? Was he to blame for its millions of human losses? For the death camps themselves? Would Adolf Hitler have simply stopped at Poland if not for Churchill, that belligerent figure, declaring war on Germany?

Recently, these ideas have taken on a much broader resonance in the United States. They now feature, for example, on The Joe Rogan Experience – the world's most listened-to podcast hosted by Joe Rogan – or on Tucker Carlson's platforms. Carlson, formerly a journalist at the conservative Fox News channel, is a pillar of the MAGA ("Make America Great Again") movement and hosts another hugely popular show, The Tucker Carlson Show, broadcast online.

In September 2024, Carlson welcomed an "amateur historian," Darryl Cooper, the creator of the Martyr Made podcast. The day before the episode aired, Carlson wrote on X that Cooper was "the best and most honest popular historian in the United States." He added: "His latest project is the most forbidden of all: trying to understand World War Two." Trying to understand it from the German point of view, he might have added, as that is the essence of Cooper's "forbidden" project – as though historians had never considered that perspective before. This is the credo of pseudo-history: to attack an all-powerful orthodoxy, to challenge "myths" about World War II supposedly acecepted thoughtlessly by everyone else.

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