The time Dan Carlin called me a fascist (+Q&A)

Hi everyone. I have been in the middle of an interstate move recently, and the last few weeks have been tough. I made the mistake of packing up books I was using for current projects, because of course the movers wouldn’t possibly arrive later than expected… right? Right. We’ll be back to regular programming very soon, but in the meantime I thought I’d tell you about the time Dan Carlin called me a fascist. This post is also an invitation for any questions you have about my political, social, or religious views. We’ve covered a lot of controversial ground over the last year or two, and I thought I should open the floor to those wanting clarification on various issues.

Oh, and there’s a new Unraveling podcast out. Jocko and I discuss the sordid history of in-patient mental hospitals, and how their mass closure in the 1960s and ‘70s has contributed to our current homelessness crisis.

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Happy Hardcore History Day, everyone! You know, a funny thing happened the other day. It’s something I’ve been meaning to address. After the latest Hardcore History episode dropped, I posted it on Twitter and said, “Looking forward to this.” Not exactly a Monet, as far as tweets go, but that’s not the point. Right after I posted it, there followed several comments about my relationship with Dan Carlin:

“Did Dan ever apologize for the awful things he said about you?”

“All things considered, genuine or being catty?”

“Am I the only one who thinks @HardcoreHistory would hate @martyrmade?”

“Carlin called Darryl a fascist a few years back.”

Wait, Dan called Darryl a fascist? Well. Yes, but it was more than a few years back. It went like this. The year was 2016, the season was summer, and race riots were popping off across the country. Dan was online going back and forth with his followers about the appropriate means of dealing with subversive movements and mob violence. My feelings about mobs and public disorder should be well known to everyone here, and I jumped into Dan’s comments to call for some harsh or unconstitutional measure or another. Dan responded, “Well, now you just sound like a fascist.”

That’s it, that’s the story. Sorry for the anticlimax. A few things about the encounter. First, Dan didn’t know who I was. I had only started The Martyr Made Podcast in 2015, and by the time of our exchange in 2016 I had only released a couple episodes and had a few thousand listeners, at most. Nobody knew who I was, certainly not the reigning king of history podcasting, who was just responding to one of the hundreds of reply guys trying to get his attention. Second, I can’t remember what I said to invite his response, but whatever it was I probably had it coming. I was being provocative, trying to get Dan’s attention, and unfortunately I succeeded in a way that has taken on a life of its own.

But I’ll get back to that in a moment.

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The encounter, of course, begs the question: Is Darryl a fascist? It’s a label that has broken free from its origins in interwar Europe, and become an all-purpose accusation that someone is a racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-democratic, pro-Putin, antisemitic villain who wants Auschwitz reopened for business. The truth is, I’ve seen people play that character online, but I’m still not sure they exist in real life.

During a time of polarization, political discourse is all-or-nothing. Rather than serving to find points of compromise and common understanding, its purpose is to help people identify friends in a world full of enemies. In other words, politics consists of competing shibboleths, and each of us is carefully monitored not only for what we say, but how we say it. A statement spoken by a confirmed ally can be true, even obvious, but when spoken by a potential or confirmed opponent the same statement is pushed beyond the pale. When Michelle Goldberg, liberal writer for the New York Times, promotes the use of mass immigration to displace white conservatives in an article unsubtly headlined “We Can Replace Them,” that is good. When a writer for VDARE publishes an article headlined “They Are Replacing Us,” that is bad. When some young, misled whippersnappers peruse the Early Life section on Ms. Goldberg’s Wikipedia page, and march through Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us,” that is very, very bad. Michael Anton called this the Celebration Parallax - the same statement can be good, true, and obvious, or bad, false, and unspeakable depending on whether the speaker is celebrating or opposing it.

A politics that consists of nothing more than an assortment of taboos and shibboleths is a politics of paranoia, appropriate in time of war or anarchy, when discerning between friends and foes is all-important, and the very idea of neutrality becomes anachronistic. Too many right wingers have drawn mistaken conclusions from Schmitt’s dictum about the friend-enemy distinction. They take it to mean that effective politics consists of never-ending loyalty tests and witch hunts, as if the point of politics is nothing more than to define and suss out new enemies. Once friends and enemies have been broadly identified, we’re left with the inevitable next question: Now what? For many, the answer is to push out the Overton Window until some on “our side” start to get squeamish, then start the hunt for enemies anew. This is how you get from the 2008 Democratic primary, with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both feeling obliged to speak out against gay marriage, to the 2020 Democratic primary, when every candidate participated in a CNN town hall where they cheered and congratulated the family of a prepubescent boy dressed up as a sexualized adult female. Eventually, the witch hunt alienates enough people who matter that it collapses under its own weight. The 1692 Salem witch hunt burned through 25 innocent people before it finally targeted a public official and military commander unprepared to cooperate in his own public murder. After destroying the lives of dozens of famous people, the MeToo struggle session came to an abrupt end the moment credible accusations against Joe Biden emerged. That’s usually how these things end, but until they hit the wall everyone is obliged to be either a witch hunter, or a witch, hunted - or else keep out of sight, wear the appropriate social camouflage, and wait for it to blow over.

My natural disposition makes me ill-suited to times like these. I remember one time, on the school bus back when I was a freshman in high school. This was a country school, and the bus drove around and picked kids up individually from their houses, so it took about an hour to complete the route. Me and my friends were in our usual places in the back, causing trouble, firing rubber bands and spitballs, clowning and showing off. And so one day, we’re headed into school, and the bus stops at a new house to pick up a girl, around my age, maybe a year younger, and her little brother. The house where they were picked up was not a nice house, and the simple, hand-me-down clothes they wore further confirmed that the family was not rich. The girl around my age boarded the bus with a shy look on her face, and ushered her little sibling to a seat near the front.

“Who’s that?” someone said.

“New kid,” said someone else.

“No shit, sherlock, what’s her name?”

Nobody knew her name, so someone walked up to the front and said, “Hey, what’s your name?”

He came back and reported, “Billy Joe.”

“Huh?”

“Her name is Billy Joe.”

Someone, clowning, loud enough for everyone to hear: “Did you say her name is Sloppy Joe?”

The entire bus laughed as if it was the most hilarious thing anyone had ever heard. Billy Joe sank down in her seat a bit.

Then, a friend of mine, at the top of his lungs: “SLOPPY JOE? MORE LIKE SLOPPY HOE!”

The bus was pandemonium. And that was it, from the first bus ride at her new school, before she had a chance to be nice or rude, pleasant or obnoxious, before she even introduced herself, she had been renamed Sloppy Hoe. People forgot she even had a real name, and would get her attention by saying, “Hey, Sloppy!” It felt wrong in the pit of my stomach, and I never called her that myself, but like a fucking pussy I never stood up for her, and neither did anybody else. She ended up making some friends among the other losers and outcasts, but the cool kids treated her with indifference or outright disrespect to avoid the taint of association.

In the years I was in school with her, she was very guarded, cold, standoffish, even rude - not just to me, to everyone. Due to circumstances outside school (our moms worked together), I got to know one of the kids who was part of Billy Joe’s outcast friend group. She said it was too bad no one bothered getting to know Billy Joe, because she was kind and thoughtful, sweet almost to a fault. I hope that part of her was preserved, and that she looks back on those years as kids being stupid kids. But those are formative years, and being made the object of unprovoked, universal mockery inevitably forces a kid to develop an armored personality just to get through the day. Readers who have been on the wrong end of it know what I’m talking about, and those who haven’t would do well to consider what it would be like.

Even now, almost 30 years later, I think about this all the time. I am still genuinely ashamed of myself for sitting quietly, and my shame is magnified by the knowledge that all it would have taken was one person standing up for her to defuse the situation. I know it because there were other times when I did stand up for someone in a similar situation, and the bullies never persist once they’re called out. They try to save some face, but one person refusing to go along makes them too self-conscious of their cruelty to continue the game. I was too cowardly, and so a young girl was humiliated in front of her younger sibling on the first day of school, and every day after that until school was over.

Anyway, it’s not an exaggeration to say that both my personality and my politics are largely built on the shame I feel about this incident, and a few similar experiences. I’ve learned that a lifelong guilty conscience outweighs whatever it costs me to stand up for someone being mobbed or bullied.

I think of someone like Jim Jones, for whom, despite everything, I can’t help but feel a bit of grudging respect. Say what you want about his Kool-Aid recipes, but even as a child he would have taken on the whole school in defense of Billy Joe, and he’d have done it without a second thought. Of course, Jones is a good example of someone for whom defending the defenseless served as an outlet for his own rage. His sympathy for the girl would have been sincerely felt, but at the bottom of it all is that he would have liked fighting with the whole school. There’s a bit of that in me, and I suppose that’s why I seem to run afoul of every side at one time or another.

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Sorry to disappoint readers on both the right and left, but sadly I am not a fascist. I distrust mass movements, and I don’t like mobs, whether they march under the banner of fascism, communism, mass democracy, or whatever. Disorder breeds disorder, and leads to a society that suits the young, nihilistic, and violent just fine, but makes life very difficult for people who just want to raise their families in peace. Society should exist for the latter group, and should prioritize protecting them from the chaos and depredations of the former. If I see a mob blocking traffic and attacking passersby, their cause or political affiliation is not going to change the fact that I’d like to see a tank plow a path through them so regular people can get home from work to be with their kids. If that makes me a fascist, then I guess I’m a fascist.

Still, it’s necessary to distinguish between ideas and real life. Does our current way of doing things seem to be working as advertised? Does the average person feel represented by our representative system? Of course not. Could I come up with alternative political systems that I think would be better? Sure, probably. But there’s a middle step between Current Thing and Darryl’s Utopia, and oceans of blood have been spilled by revolutionaries who didn’t plan for that part of the journey. They could explain in vivid terms why the Current Thing was intolerable, and why their Utopia would be so much better, but they never account for the measures that would be necessary to implement their plans, or the way those measures would poison their grand project with fear and hostility from Year Zero. I often point to Iran as an example. It’s easy to say that Islamic theocracy is a poor way to run a country, and to throw your hope behind the liberals whose dearest hope is to be Just Like Us. And surely there are some of those liberals in Iran, and to those people the country must feel suffocating in many ways. But there are also a lot of people who would rather keep things the way they are, and see the Westernizing liberals as a threat to everything they hold sacred and significant. If one of the CIA’s color revolutions ever catches the Ayatollah on a bad day and topples his government, the rainbow flag-waving, pro-American regime we install in its place would have to repress or kill countless supporters of the old regime, then repress or kill the brothers, cousins, and sons of the people they repressed or killed, and the Islamic theocratic police state would be replaced by a liberal democratic police state.

The reality is that the system of rule under which we live will not be fundamentally altered except by collapse or revolution, circumstances in which the only certainty is that regular people suffer while evil spirits are given free rein. That’s something I’d like to avoid, so I guess in that sense you could say that I’m pro-American democracy.

I try not to conceal my feelings about any issue, but we’ve hit on so many controversial topics over the last few years that many of you have asked me to clarify my views. So maybe this would be easier if I just opened up the floor for questions. Politics, economics, race, class, gender, religion, social issues, foreign policy… I’m an open book. What would you like to know?

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Oh, right, I still owe you guys the rest of Dan Carlin story. Well, as Martyr Made grew into one of the Big 3 or 4 long-form history podcasts, I mostly forgot about the time he called me a fascist. But the internet? Well, the internet never forgets an incident, but the context is a different matter. Over the years, the boring Twitter exchange I just described evolved from its original form - “Dan Carlin brushed off an anonymous Twitter troll” - into a banner headline that is brought up virtually every time Dan and I are mentioned in the same place - “Dan Carlin Thinks Darryl Cooper, Creator of Martyr Made, Is a Fascist.” There’s even an entire sub-Reddit dedicated to calling me a fascist, which I have to admit is pretty flattering.

Dan was critical of the Trump Presidency, and that caused a portion of his fan base that cares about that kind of thing to turn on him. In my recent Twitter post saying that I was looking forward to his new episode, there were several comments to the effect of, “How can I trust him after what he said about Trump,” “If he’ll lie about Trump, he’ll lie about other things,” “I just can’t take him seriously since his TDS has been exposed.” I really don’t understand that mentality, but I guess that’s the age in which we live. As Martyr Made got bigger, the “fascist” incident was taken up into a larger imaginary conflict, in which I was coded as the Right Wing History Podcaster arrayed against the Left Wing Dan Carlin. Some history podcast fans broke into pro-Dan and pro-Darryl factions, and people would send me links to Reddit threads or Twitter posts where our partisans were at each other’s throats on our behalf. It’s a bit surreal to have strangers on the internet viciously fighting with other strangers in your defense, but I never really thought much about it.

Anyway, fast forward to 2020, and the aftermath of the January 6 protest at the US Capitol. Dan had mostly stopped doing his Common Sense podcast since 2016, but released one to comment on the incident. Responding to the on-camera execution of protester Ashli Babbitt by a Capitol Police officer, Dan had said that the protesters “were lucky they hadn’t shot ten of them.” I took to Twitter to voice my strong disagreement, specifically asking if he would dare say the same thing if an officer had shot a physically-constrained, unarmed, black female BLM protester at point blank range as she came through the window of the besieged federal courthouse in Portland. I thought, and still think, the answer to that question is obvious.

Later that day, I get a phone call from a mutual friend, telling me that Dan Carlin is furious with me. My first thought was, “Dan Carlin knows who I am?” and my second thought was, “Wait, furious with me for what?” I really didn’t know.

“Something you posted about him on Twitter.”

No way. My post was strong in its disagreement, but it was fair and respectful.

“Well, he’s really mad. He went off to me for like a half-hour.”

“WHAT?!?”

The whole thing was very surreal. Even though Martyr Made has grown into a big podcast, I don’t feel like a Big Podcaster. Dan was a celebrity to me, the literal reason and inspiration for starting my podcast, and I was responding to what he said in the way I might’ve responded to something Tom Brady or The Rock said - not as a peer attacking a peer, but as a fan responding to a celebrity. When you tweet that The Rock’s latest movie sucked, you don’t expect to get a phone call informing you that Dwayne Johnson is personally very angry with you.

Anyway, Dan and I never talked about it (he and I had never spoken up to this point), and I moved on and forgot about it. I made a point not to mention him after that. Then, in 2022, in a totally unrelated thread about strategy war games, I said, “I’m sad that @hardcorehistory doesn’t like me, because one of my main motivations for growing Martyr Made was to get him to play me in Axis & Allies 1940 Global.” Someone asked, “What’s the story there, Darryl?” And I said, “I called him out for a comment he made on Common Sense. Could’ve been more diplomatic.”

It was meant as an olive branch (hence “could’ve been more diplomatic”), but it was not received that way, and this time Dan decided to voice his displeasure to me directly. I tried to explain about the olive branch, but he wasn’t having it. It was very clear that he was really mad, that he really didn’t like me, and that these feelings had been growing for a long time. I didn’t know what to say. I tried to patch things over, telling him that any negative feelings he had about me were by no means reciprocated, and that the whole thing was coming out of left field for me. Dan just thought I was playing coy and being passive aggressive, I think, and told me, in so many words, where I could shove it.

I’d been a Hardcore History fan since 2015, to the point of paying to download the whole back catalog of Common Sense and the history show, and without Dan’s inspiration there would be no Martyr Made. So I kept at it, and after a while he opened to the possibility that maybe I wasn’t just being a passive aggressive douche, and that this had all been a big misunderstanding. He was still no teddy bear by the end, still guarded and suspicious, but his manner shifted from combatant to gentleman and we parted on cordial terms.

I have never been in another situation where my feelings about someone, and their feelings about me, were so radically different. Normally, if you know a person in real life who starts to dislike you, it leads to encounters that cause you to dislike him back. The mutual hostility roughly tracks, so it’s no big surprise when you walk out to find a bag of flaming poop on your doorstep. But Dan and I had never spoken. His animosity toward me had been growing, while I continued to look up to him and refreshed my podcast feed each day for a new Hardcore History. The best explanation I could come up with for how this had happened was that, while I only occasionally saw the pro-Darryl and pro-Dan camps fighting with each other, and never took the vitriol against me personally, Dan not only took it personally but believed I must have been egging it on, and what I thought were pretty innocuous tweets were actually signals to my followers to attack. Given the nature of many of the replies, I can see how he’d come to that conclusion: if people attack him every time I bring him up, then I must be bringing him up so people will attack him.

This post might get me into more hot water, since I told him I would stop bringing him up, but my intentions are good. I like Dan Carlin. I think he’s a good man and a great podcaster. I have no negative feelings about him, and I cringe when I see people attack him in comments to my posts. So, as much as I appreciate you defending my honor, I respectfully request that you “stand down, and stand by.” Put aside you politics, and go listen to the new Hardcore History, because it’s freaking awesome.