Tucker Carlson has a unique ability to blow up the internet, and he did so again recently when history podcast host Darryl Cooper appeared on his show. Cooper made some controversial comments, primarily about Winston Churchill and the second world war.

Throughout the episode, Cooper asserted that, ‘Churchill was the chief villain of the second world war.’ He accuses Churchill of wanting war with Germany when Hitler only wanted peace with Britain. He suggested Churchill may have been influenced by his ‘Zionist’ financiers to wage war on Germany and that it was Churchill who was the first to start firebombing cities. The culpability of the Germans, in contrast, was downplayed, with Cooper suggesting that the deaths of millions of Russian POWs on the Eastern Front resulted more from a lack of planning and logistics than a concerted effort at mass murder.

The backlash against Cooper’s comments has been fierce. Historian Niall Ferguson was one of many to reject Cooper’s historical analysis, lamenting that, ‘It is surely the epitome of professional failure to have spent more than three decades writing, teaching, and speaking about these matters, and to have achieved so little that a nasty little Nazi apologist like Darryl Cooper can win an audience of millions.’

You don’t need to agree or disagree with Cooper’s arguments to understand how such apparently fringe views might attract a large audience. It is a direct result of attacks on free speech and the attempts by our political and cultural elites to limit the range of acceptable viewpoints.

Darryl Cooper paints himself as a rebel defying orthodoxy. He claims that the second world war is ‘the founding mythology of the current global order’, and therefore our role in it has been beyond reproach. He goes so far as to say, ‘it really became effectively illegal in the West to be, like, genuinely right wing’ after the war. This is obviously an exaggeration, but there is a kernel of truth to the claim that a somewhat idealised and uncritical version of the second world war does permeate the collective psyche of the West. Hollywood movies still depict us as the good guys and our enemies, particularly the Nazis, as an unparalleled evil. And political leaders routinely draw analogies to the second world war, with every foe a reincarnation of Hitler – for example the way Democrats and the media describe Donald Trump.

Given the powerful grip the second world war holds over the cultural zeitgeist, it is somewhat understandable how an edgy and controversial take on it might be interpreted as speaking truth to power; in the same way as someone who courageously defies the woke orthodoxies on climate change, DEI, or gender theory.

Commentator and satirist Andrew Klavan sums up this view perfectly, saying, ‘Because our leaders have become oppressive and censorious and think that they can tell us what to say, and they lie and lie all the time, and they are close to becoming tyrants, it gives credence to people who defy them even when they are in the wrong.’

This is precisely what proposed misinformation and disinformation laws, set to be debated in federal parliament before Christmas, will do. The act of censorship will give credence to those censored, whether warranted or not.

These laws will empower a government agency to impose huge fines on social media companies if those companies do not censor ‘misinformation’ to the government’s satisfaction. But this will require a government agency to decide what is or is not true, in effect establishing an official truth. Content falling foul of this official truth will be censored if it might cause ‘harm’ in certain defined ways including harm to ‘electoral or referendum processes’, ‘public health’, ‘the Australian economy’ or vilification of a group distinguished by their ‘gender identity’.

There is no plausible way that fringe viewpoints like those of flat earthers or moon-landing deniers could possibly cause any such harms. No, the proposed misinformation laws are squarely targeted at mainstream Australians who dare to differ on strongly contested policy issues like pandemic responses, net zero and immigration. Pushing such mainstream viewpoints to the fringes will add weight and legitimacy to other fringe-dwellers who more appropriately belong there.

Ultimately, if the federal government wants to prevent the spread of certain ideas, using censorship as its tool will inevitably fail. Censorship draws attention to the issue and lends it legitimacy. Just take the decision by Australia’s eSafety Commissioner to try and censor footage of a knife attack against a bishop in a Sydney church. Far from preventing this footage being seen, it drew worldwide attention to it.

The backlash against Cooper’s views, and by inference Tucker Carlson for platforming him, has predominantly come from the centre-right. But what you will notice is that none of this backlash has called for Cooper to be silenced or Carlson’s show to be banned. Cooper’s allegedly false arguments have been met with purportedly better arguments.

And this is exactly how it should be.

But a genuine question remains as to whether this episode of the Tucker Carlson Show would be censored under Australia’s misinformation laws, if they are enacted. Cooper is after all being accused of Holocaust denial and Nazi apologism. One of the harms targeted by these proposed new laws is ‘vilification’ against a group distinguished by ‘race’ or ‘religion’. It is entirely foreseeable that some government regulator or third-party ‘fact checker’ will conclude that this episode is beyond the pale and must be censored as misinformation.

If that happened, instead of a spirited debate in which Cooper is chastened, the censorship would lend attention and credibility to his viewpoint. It would legitimise his claim that you cannot criticise Churchill or have anything other than an approved take on the second world war.

What it shows is that the only solution to misinformation is spirited and abundant free speech.