In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an American podcaster, Darryl Cooper (@martyrmade). He’s best-known for “Martyr Made”, a history podcast that provides a strongly revisionist and biased analysis on historical events such as the Revolution of Dignity and World War II.

Darryl became known to big audiences in 2021, when he published a Twitter thread in which he basically described a massive conspiracy against Trump during both 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. The culprits were predictable: the corporate press, intelligence agencies…

…and of course the evil Democrats. To Darryl, Russia was not working together with the Trump campaign, even though there’s clear evidence that many of his officials — including Carter Page, Rex Tillerson, Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort — interacted intimately with…

…Russian officials and even GRU operatives. Trump later pardoned five people who were convicted as a result of investigations on the Russian interference in the 2016 US elections:

2016 Trump campaign

His thread gained support and was spread by people like Donald Trump Jr. and Glenn Greenwald, and was even brought up on live television by the former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson. Darryl’s Twitter account went from 7,000 to 70,000 followers in just four days.

Today, Cooper is followed by many prominent figures from the right, including Trump’s VP candidate JD Vance. At some point, Martyr Made was the most popular podcast on Apple and Spotify, even more popular than Joe Rogan Experience, Tucker Carlson’s show and Talk Tuah.

This popularity was mostly due to him being interviewed by Tucker Carlson on his show. During the interview Cooper claimed that, instead of Hitler, it was actually Winston Churchill who was the main culprit and warmonger of WWII.

Darryl made false claims about WWII, including that millions “ended up dead” merely because the Nazis did not have enough food for them (rather than as a result of intentional genocide). Many real historians have debunked these claims:

Reply to Darryl Cooper: The T…

Even though sometimes claiming to be a libertarian, Darryl’s rhetoric reeks of pure fascism. When asked whether Europe under Nazi/Hitler leadership would’ve been a better outcome than today’s version, he said “I can’t imagine anything worse happening than what did happen”.

Elon Musk naturally shared the interview and promoted the conversation as “very interesting”, although he later deleted the post.

Alleged sex trafficker and pedophile Andrew Tate also praised Cooper’s fascist rhetoric.

In another incident,Darryl posted two photos from Paris. In the 1st photo,Hitler had just conquered the city during WWII. The 2nd photo showed the opening ceremony to the Paris Olympics.He then claimed that the first photo was “infinitely preferable in virtually every way”.

This is pretty rancid considering that the Nazis authorized deportation of Jews from France, and around 77 000 Jews living in France were sent to concentration camps and killing centers or died in detention.

Cooper has suggested that the most desirable thing for society is a “charismatic autocrat”, so it’s not really a big surprise that he’s cheering for Team Trump or defended Putin’s actions in both Syria and Ukraine. In his own words, fascism is “nothing more than what…

…happens when normal people realize that the left will never stop until they’re forced to.” In another post, Darryl claimed that “Democracy is a disease. Tyranny is the cure.” He’s also called for the ”ending of democracy" and putting the military in charge instead.

When it comes to Ukraine, Darryl has been collaborating closely with Scott Horton. He's the editorial director of

Antiwar.com

, a sponsor of the 1st pro-war RATWM rally, and is connected to the MAGA takeover of the Libertarian Party:

Angela McArdle

Together, Darryl and Scott have even published a book titled “Provoked: America’s Role in the Russia-Ukraine War”. In it, the dynamic duo claims the old Kremlin narrative that the war was “provoked by NATO expansion”, and that it has nothing to do with Russian imperialism.

His analysis on Ukraine is extremely one-sided, and he neatly forgets that from the get-go Putin played a big role in despoiling Russia after the fall of the USSR, using his KGB/FSB network and knowledge to put the oligarchs under his rule.

To Darryl, all color revolutions — including the one in Ukraine — were orchestrated by the US. He calls leaders like Saakashvili CIA puppets and demonizes people like George Soros. He even criticizes election legimization processes like parallel vote tabulation (PVT/PRVT).

In November 2021, Darryl was still adamant about Putin not conquering Ukraine, saying that he “has shown no signs at all of trying to take over Ukraine,” and that Russia is just “providing aid” to “ethnic Russian separatists” after a “Western-supported violent coup”.

Yikes.

He’s also called Russia the “unequivocal good guy” in the Syrian civil war, neatly forgetting the chemical and double-tap attacks conducted both by Russian and al-Assad forces against civilians and humanitarian workers.

Cooper’s analysis contains cherry-picked analysts & biased pro-Kremlin individuals such as Scott Horton & never mentions any of the covert operations conducted by the Russian intelligence agencies in Ukraine. There’s no critique of Putin or Yanukovych, but only of the West.

And this seems to be Cooper’s modus operandi — he cites very specific people, events, and occurrences and completely ignores the other perspective.

This basically makes his podcast propaganda that has little to do with actual history.

My book, titled Vatnik Soup: The Ultimate Guide to Russian Disinformation, has been published. You can order it here:

Vatnik Soup — KLE-art

Or on Amazon:

Vatnik Soup. The Ultimate Guide to Russian Disinformation: Pekka Kallioniemi, Morten Hammeken: 9788…