Diana West: Gatekeeper against Anti-Semitism...

...Even When It May Not Be There

Diana West's latest substack on Daryl Cooper and the guilt by association of his interview hosts, Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan, is a complex tissue of good questions, not-so-good questions, uncharitable assumptions, creative cherry picking, subtle mischaracterizations, and mean-spirited character assassination. There were so many things that I found troubling in it, all entangled and raveled in a complexity of analysis, that I soon realized I couldn't simply respond in one paragraph, but had to perform a tedious operation to disentangle and unravel what it is she's doing. I may not have succeeded completely, but I think I shed some light. The overarching irony here is that, effectively, she is—even if indirectly—defending the very same court history she spent years deeply and meticulously critiquing—namely, the very important if not crucial component of the Nazi Narrative at the heart of that court history.

My substack essay here quotes Diana followed by my comments interspersed. My commentary will be within square brackets. Sometimes I include her quotes of Daryl Cooper as well.

* * * * *

…Churchill, the “chief villain” of World War II (Cooper also called him a “psychopath”), Hitler, the peacemaker (Cooper did not call him a “psychopath”)…

[Maybe that’s because the entire West has been drilling Hitler’s psychopathy into everyone’s heads for 75 years, so much that it has become an integral part of our collective cultural psyche; or must Cooper anxiously include that so as to remain above suspicion…?]

They fail to mention even in passing the free-speech travesty of Europe’s Holocaust denial laws. I don’t know of anyone who supports them, by the way. This omission is bizarre. Is it calculated? Perhaps they both find themselves simultaneously wary about using the words “Holocaust” and “denial”

[As the kids used to say, Ya think…? Obviously Tucker and Cooper were tiptoeing in gingerly fashion around that minefield. Diana seems oblivious to the overwhelmingly massive fact that this has been a minefield in Western society for decades—and all the more so, the more you are trying to be part of the Mainstream at all (as Tucker is). She acknowledges the travesty of Europe’s laws, but completely ignores what both Tucker and Cooper also added, how even though it’s not technically illegal in America, you can lose your career in one “wrong” tweet if you have a job higher than burger-flipper. Given Diana’s intricately subtle and torturous essay here bristling with insinuations often based on the slenderest of evidence fraught with misconstruals, what would be “wrong” in our Gatekeeping Society may often be a matter of uncharitable distortion rather than accurate diagnosis. “I don’t know of anyone who supports them, by the way.” Um, what about those European countries and their parliaments?]

Harkening back to the Tucker’s Big Build-Up, however, why is this particular line of research and approach to the past the essential, if weirdly coded knowledge “America” — MAGA — must have?

[Diana is assuming a lot here—that Tucker is presenting this as knowledge that MAGA must have. Must have for what? Did he say that himself, or is that just her spin on it, as if every show he puts out has to be some kind of direct call for a MAGA agenda? He puts out a lot of shows on a lot of different topics that he thinks are important; why is this one topic so triggering to her sensitivity?]

I do not recall Tucker Carlson ever showcasing the free-speech-heroes of our day who have spent their adult lives fighting against the Islamic-sharia- and Marx-derived censorship that has strangled Europe. These heroes include... Tommy Robinson…

[Perhaps Diana should have looked a bit longer before writing that. Tucker interviewed Tommy sympathetically in 2018; and more recently in 2024, Tommy tweeted twice approvingly about Tucker.

[So apparently Tommy doesn't share Diana's suspicions about Tucker.

Far-right British extremist Tommy Robinson thanks Tucker Carlson and Republicans for coming to his aid

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/far-right-british-extremist-tommy-robinson-thanks-tucker-carlson-and-republicans ]

… he [i.e., Rogan] did at one point embark on a peroration of his own on anti-semitism. It ran the gamut from — “crying wolf,” “doesn’t make any sense” — to — “particularly right now, after October 7” “Whoa, where has this been hiding?” — and then — “you start thinking the way your paranoid Jewish friends think” (paranoid Jewish friends?) — and back to — “still an overreaction.” Somewhere in there, he issued a blanket disclaimer, stating that “real anti-semitism is horrible, just like real racism is horrible.”

[Yes Diana, only non-Jews can be paranoid. More importantly, Diana's slice & dice quotations here very subtly mislead the readers who don't take the time and trouble to watch the video she is quoting from and see how she is cherry picking out of context. Let's let the reader see for himself. Here's a relevant clip from Rogan's YouTube. ]

[And there's a lot more that could be added from Rogan's mouth throughout the two plus hours that would tend to massage away the unfair muscle spasms Diana is intruding into his interview.]

[Diana quoting Cooper] I’ve watched this happen to, like, good, clear-thinking, regular people. They start listening to a few podcasts that, you know, uh, uh, they can’t repost under their real name on Twitter because they’re funny or interesting [?] and then pretty soon you can’t bring that dude to a party anymore because he just can’t go ten minutes without — in neutral company — like, bringing up the Jews.

[Diana is really good at transcribing all the hemming and hawing Cooper tends to include in his rhetoric (e.g., "um, like, you know", etc.); but her motive seems to be mean-spirited, showing him to be some kind of faltering incoherent evil neurotic, and instead of charitably interpreting some of his locutions as sloppy in keeping with this hemming and hawing, she tries to infer the worst possible motives. Thus the "funny or interesting" remark—which really is parenthetical and, if she paused her talons to think about it more calmly, was his way of saying that that's why these “regular people” becoming slowly sucked into social media spasms of anti-Semitic material (including seemingly anti-Semitic but perhaps not really so) might have wanted to share it because they found it funny or interesting otherwise, even though it might have content that hypersensitive Gatekeeper Guardians like Diana might leap upon like jackdaws to construe in the worst possible light. And this thus would, as Cooper is reasonably speculating, inhibit such Internet surfers from doing so, obviously.]

“Neutral company”? That’s pretty “funny and interesting” right there — especially for what it implies about the non-neutral company Cooper keeps. (He did tell Rogan he lives in north Idaho, previously associated with Arayan Nation.)

[The Aryan crack is a cheap shot of guilt by association without a shred of proof for the sly insinuation. As for Diana's hypersensitivity about "neutral company", it just shows her myopia to the whole point Cooper and his guilty by association colleagues are trying to describe—namely, a neutrality between anti-Semitic extremists on the one hand, and a (Leftist and Communist-dominated) Western Mainstream that imposes an irrationally excessive litmus test about Jews, on the other hand. Since Diana's myopia does not see the latter but in its place only sees a virtuous defense of Jews, she concludes that this neutrality must be providing cover for the former.]

In short, Cooper’s take on anti-semitism is all about “over-reaction,” and how it is “counter-productive.” Which led him into a very revealing discussion of Gaza.

[that "all" is uncharitably misleading]

Going along with Cooper’s fantastic hypothetical, however, maybe “people” were responding “that way” because “1488” is a white supremacist numerical symbol! The number 14 stands for the so-called "14 Words" slogan, and 88 stands for "Heil Hitler," H being the 8th letter of the alphabet.

[It's highly unlikely Cooper doesn't know this about “1488” and needs a remedial lesson by Diana to explain it. In fact, it's much more likely, to the point of being screamingly obvious, that he purposefully used that in his hypothetical example to illustrate the irrationality of the Argumentum ad Hitlerem fallacy (which Diana ironically commits in mid-refutation and proceeds to lay on thick).]

He didn’t even comment when Cooper spoke a second time about anti-semitism, not as a “weird thing” this time, but as a positive force for Adolf Hitler — I’m not kidding — ”the thing that gave emotional valence for him”:

[quoting Cooper] His antisemitism was what allowed him to love the German people, you know. It was like the only way for him that he could to get around the revulsion he was feeling and actually get up close to the German underclass. He excused their faults by blaming Jews.

[So what is Diana's historiographic explanation for the Hitler phenomenon from his rise to popularity through his Third Reich ascendancy? As Cooper said in the Tucker interview, most people, by dint of the dearth of the kind of investigative research applied in every other historical context but oddly lacking with this unique exception, the average consumer of the Mainstream Narrative (Diana's "court history" she otherwise selectively subjects to an exacting critique) is left to conclude that Germans went from being a typical liberal progressive European nation/people up to 1933, then suddenly became the Worst Evil Monsters in All History for 12 years, then became normal people again in 1946. What Cooper is doing in this uncharitably weaponized quotation by Diana is in the context of trying to explain how normal humans could succumb to the Nazi transformation; but she takes it, apparently, as some hidden dog-whistle to his "Aryan" brothers. Remember her cheap shot of guilt-by-association:]

(He did tell Rogan he lives in north Idaho, previously associated with Arayan [sic] Nation.)

[Diana goes on:]

Maybe he switched topics above because he knew he was about to sound as if he were confirming what he wanted to deny; that he is trying to “justify or rationalize what happened” during the Third Reich. Maybe we might better say his approach to such topics is to do anything but judge them.

[Why should he join the massive, diverse yet lockstep chorus that for the past 75 years has been already judging them with a verdict which demands one also agree in lockstep with the narrative that packages it—a narrative, furthermore, as Diana knows and complains about selectively, that has become the reigning court history imposed on everyone through the cultural & sociopolitical power of Mainstream consensus in all Western institutions (academe, schools, arts & entertainment, politics, news media)? His whole point is to try a different approach than the simplistic Germans-Became-Unique-Monsters-Overnight-Until-We-Killed-Millions-Through-Fire-bombings-and-A-bombings]

[quoting Cooper] I mean, the Jonestown story, this really did kind of happen to me, where, you know, when you get past a certain threshold of understanding people, it’s, you’re butting right up against empathizing with them. I mean, it’s like, that’s like the next step: You gotta take one more step and you’re empathizing with those people. And so people see that, you know, and you’re empathizing with evil people, you know, whoever it is. But I really believe that it’s really good for us, like, individually, you know, and as a society, too. I think it has a positive effect on us to, like, when we force ourselves to understand, you know, people we don’t like as human beings, and just understand that their motivations are really no different than ours.

[Though Diana is quoting Cooper in the Rogan interview in full, her bolding implies she has selective amnesia, since during the other Cooper interview, with Tucker, Cooper went on at length about the types of people sucked into Jonestown, hundreds of them, who were relatively normal (though perhaps many with various mental & emotional problems, such as drug addictions, family abuse, etc.) before they were seduced by Jim Jones and his siren song of love, community, freedom, and social justice in opposition to an "oppressive" mainstream System of society. It is in this wider, deeper context that we should understand that quoted paragraph and those uncharitably mean-spirited bold emphases by Diana—a context withheld from the reader by her.]

He has mentioned “kulaks,” and Stalin targeting “small farmers” living in “communities” and Stalin wanting “these to be consolidated into efficient industrial farms.” (Pro tip: Calling Stalin’s collectivized farms “efficient” is a tip-off.)

[Straw man. Cooper does not in that quote call Stalin's collectivized farms "efficient". He says Stalin wanted them to be such. What dismays is how Diana strawmanned literally in the very same breath in which she quotes the original she is strawmanning. At least she could have inserted some more subtly misleading and complicating nuances as insulation to mask what she's doing, as she does artfully in most of the rest of her article.]

[quoting Cooper] All of those people had to move into the cities and work in industry [at least the millions who weren’t killed], and that was, I mean, it was inevitable. you know. I mean, it’s like Russia would be speaking German right now if they didn’t industrialize, and, you know, get into a place where they actually could fend off that [1941 German] invasion. I mean you had to do it, just to compete.

I mean, it was inevitable. I mean, you had to do it, just to compete. I know of no other way to interpret this except to say that Darryl Cooper has just offered an apology, a rationale, and excuse, for an even larger genocide than Hitler’s.

[If Diana had a charitable bone in her body with regard to Cooper, and paused to reflect for a moment, she could consider that what Cooper is doing here is describing some of the exigencies that attended the otherwise evil project of Stalin which—again as with his description of Germans during Nazism—he apparently surmises were part of Stalin's calculations, introduced to the historical narrative as an alternative to sheer demonization bereft of an explanation that would have no option but to treat it as an eruption of Satanic evil without any human context. All this said, I do agree that Cooper at times seems to exhibit some Leftist spasms whereby Western behavior is indirectly insinuated to be no better than the worst of the worst in history in terms of some kind of lofty, morally responsible overview he is privileged to possess, typical of liberals with good intentions (aka, useful idiots); but this doesn't exonerate Diana's eisegesis of his rhetoric]

[quoting Cooper] [when] people get sucked into it’s because, uh, not because of, like, some latent evil in their heart, but because their virtues get hijacked. You know. Hitler is a good example. That is somebody who – say whatever you want about him, he loved the German people and he cared about the German. But that love — I mean it’s very – I mean, it’s like —

It sure is very, I mean, it’s like, all right. Again, Cooper hops to a parallel track, this time to describe the effects of the “neuro-chemical oxytocin,” which, he says, boosts trust and love for those in the “in-group” and increases distrust and hate for the “out-group.” The Psych 101 terms are mounting up — empathy, emotional valence, latent evil, neiro-chemicals, in-group, out-group — as Dr. Cooper diagnoses Patient H with having loved the in-group too much.

[And of having hated the out-group too much. Funny how Diana left that other side of the coin out.]

“A lot of things are like that, where it’s really your virtues get hijacked,” he adds. And there’s no finding the hijacker, there are no boundaries, no latent evil. And no one — except Benjamin Netanyahu, of course—ever has to responsibility for anything.

[Diana is moving the goalpost here. Cooper isn't talking about whether these various figures have to take responsibility or not—he's discussing how they (and their followers) got to the monstrous place they facilitated and wound up in. Again, Diana seems tone-deaf and color-blind to one of the points of Cooper's efforts—to find an alternative explanation to historical horrors other than simplistic demonization. Meanwhile, that crack about Netanyahu should have a receipt, or be retracted. As it stands, it's a sly cheap shot.]

[quoting Cooper] when you’re talking about somebody like Jim Jones, who was, like, a raving lunatic by the end, but he loved his people. Like, he actually did. People say, “Well if he loved them, it’s not possible, how could do that to them?”Those are people who have never been around, like, domestic violence before.

This last comment brought me up short. In fact, had I noticed it earlier I might have recast the piece with an eye toward strains of Stockholm Syndrome. I am wondering now whether Darryl Cooper uses history as a kind of therapy, a means of making the most evil maniacs, homocidal [sic] or genocidal, turn into protectors who “love their people.” It’s not impossible, although I am speculating, of course. What is not speculation is that Cooper says he believes that one has to have been around domestic violence to understand the emotional wiring of Jones and Hitler both, as if in “understanding” the sheer, unspeakable evil can be neutralized.

[Even if Diana's psychologizing theory is correct, it's not relevant to whether his points about anti-Semitism and the widespread Western Mainstream prohibition of inquiry beyond rigidly set lines have any validity. Apparently in her eyes, they don't and the prohibition is not only just fine with her, it must be (re-)enforced by, among other things, gatekeeping efforts in social media such as this very substack essay of hers.]

[All this said, the only important problem I have with Cooper is that, at least on the Tucker and Rogan interviews, he never mentions Jim Jones’s Communism—an egregious omission, given how long Cooper discusses Jim Jones on those interviews (and he frequently revisits the theme throughout). I tweeted him just now asking him if he used Tina Trent for his research on Jonestown. He’ll probably ignore me like Diana has all my tweet responses over the past few months to her tweets.]

[The TinaTrent essay on Jim Jones, which highlights his Communism—

https://crimevictimsmediareport.com/?p=4206 ]

[Speaking of Cooper’s tweets and his purported anti-Semitism, here’s his latest (at the time of this writing), defending the Talmud. What self-respecting anti-Semite would do that?