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Notes -
Two questions are being conflated here:
Is Cooper clearly a /pol/ adjacent dissident right shitposter who transparently has white nationalist sympathies?
Does he deserve to be ‘cancelled’ / does this ‘tarnish’ his work as a popular YouTube historian / does this make everything he does a not-so-secret propaganda effort for the far right?
The answer to the first is obviously yes. You can’t follow him long term on Twitter without seeing this. That he sometimes deletes ‘mask off’ implicit or explicit tweets about blacks, leftists, Jews and so on isn’t evidence against this. Obviously being a moderately respected successful YouTuber is a comfortable enough life that he has the time preference not to constantly try to blow up, but enough slips through to be clear, as @Gillitrut notes. This isn’t like the “Taylor Swift is secretly a Nazi” /pol/ collage posting (regardless of the veracity of that claim), the man clearly has strong personal political opinions that align broadly with DR X/Twitter, a community that various shitposts clearly suggest he is part of and which is never more than semi-ironic. Cooper is 0.1 steps away from retweeting colorized videos of Rhodesia in the 1960s set to chill synth with the caption ‘there was once a country…’, if he hasn’t already.
The answer to the second is entirely a matter of opinion. Many if not most historians are strongly opinionated and it’s clear that this always has an effect on their work. But you can’t divorce Hobsbawm’s writing, great as much of it is, from the fact that he was lifelong communist and viewed everything through that lens. Cooper has his biases, his worldview, and one might fairly consider them when consuming his content.
I also question his intellect. For example, at the end of the Tucker video, Cooper says that no historic European monarch would have imagined that they could allow mass immigration without getting “their head cut off”. I don’t think this makes sense (there wasn’t a mass immigration button they refused to push; mass immigration is in large part a consequence of technological modernity), and even if you take it as truth, I don’t think it serves his argument at all (it implies, if anything, that the people are largely fine with what’s happening, which would contradict what Carlson was just saying, and which is incongruent with his previous statements). He then says that the politicians who implemented mass immigration did so even though they knew it was a terrible idea and would irreparably harm their own people. He offers no real reasoning for this, and again I consider it unlikely; for the most part, the politicians who allowed mass immigration into the US didn’t think it would change much at all, and in many cases significantly underestimated the demographic transformation that would follow. The whole interview is full of this kind of bullshitting.
Partially this is Carlson’s fault. Carlson throws out opinions like facts and then almost dares the interviewee (who is usually ideologically sympathetic to him) to disagree. He asks matter-of-factly why “there isn’t a Nuremberg trial” for those who enabled mass immigration into Europe, which is bizarre question to pose your historian guest and which doesn’t make sense even if you strongly oppose mass immigration (which invading force would administer such a trial?). Cooper just kind of agrees and moves on.
Exactly. Whole thing looked good on a spreadsheet when you assume absolute fungibility of human stock but any consideration of second order effects or where more recent immigrants are coming from...
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