A Retraction Is Required from VDH & The Daily Signal -- ASAP

Below is the letter I just sent off to Hanson and The Daily Signal

To: Victor Davis Hanson and The Daily Signal

CC: Newt Gingrich, Geert Wilders, Frank Gaffney, Richard Viguerie, J. Michael Waller, Ruth S. King, Andrew Bostom, and many others

I am writing to demand the retraction of a remark Victor Hanson made about me during his recent Daily Signal podcast and column concerning World War II history (August 29, 2025).

Below, verbatim, is Mr. Hanson’s remark in which he pairs the noxious Hitlerian provocation promoted by podcaster Darryl Cooper with my name, Diana West, referencing my book American Betrayal. Amazing but true, Mr. Hanson has actually expanded on the original smear, which first appeared last month in an interview with Dave Collum on the Tucker Carlson Show, by adding my photograph to a montage of images of Tucker Carlson, Dave Collum & Darryl Cooper — as if we are all of us intellectual or political allies! Nothing could be further from the truth. Photos of Pat Buchanan and Herbert Hoover follow mine, in no way ameliorating the impression that I am in sync with Carlson, Cooper and the lesser-known Collum in some kind of neo-Bundist network, as conjured by the Daily Signal’s lurid headline: “WWII Revisionists Went Too Far With `We Should’ve Sided With Hitler’ Claim.”

Both the remark and the headline are utterly unjust and quite injurious to my work and reputation. No, I have never made such a "Hitler Claim," and the proof is in all of my widely published books, columns, blogs, and interviews. On the contrary, my work has nothing to do with these men; and, further, I have published numerous articles, statements and made podcasts making my criticism and opposition to the corrosive agendas they (Tucker Carlson being the most influential) promote loud and clear.

Nevertheless, here is what Victor Hanson publicly and recklessly stated about me: "Recently, there's been more revision about World War II. Tucker Carlson had on his show, the other day, a chemistry professor from Cornell University, David Collum, that was sort of resonating what a prior blogger Darryl Cooper had said about World War II in the vein of Diana West, Pat Buchanan, all the way back to Herbert Hoover. The gist of it was we should have never have allied with the Soviet Union, and we should have either let Hitler and Stalin fight it out, or, in the case of David Collum, he suggested we might have wanted to fight with Hitler..."

I demand a retraction from Mr. Hanson on his podcast, social media and in his Daily Signal column, and alerts to Hanson’s retraction by the Daily Signal on its website and social media, alongside a Daily Signal correction for having erroneously included me under the lurid “Hitler-Claim” headline (“WWII Revisionists Went Too Far With `We Should’ve Sided With Hitler’ Claim”). The reason for this demand is as simple as it urgent: “What … Darryl Cooper has said about World War II” is NOT NOT NOT “in the vein of Diana West.” Nor have I ever advocated "[siding] with Hitler."

Indeed, I find no intersection between what Podcaster Cooper and I see when we look at World War II — which is exactly what I noted in one of my (numerous) earlier critiques. I had been bothered by Cooper’s Hitler argumentation from the start, (and I recorded a Patreon podcast about it on September 6, 2024, called “Hitler v. Churchill … v. Tucker?”). In March of this year, I wrote “What’s It All About, Carlson & Rogan: Pondering the Big Platforming of Darryl Cooper," and in that Substack essay, I noted:

As the saying goes, there are no coincidences, comrade — so, really, what was this all about? An air of contrivance still nags at me. I say this, I feel this, at least partly because I have a peculiar non-role in this whole — dare I use the Yiddish word? — geschrie. That’s because I, a journalist, not a historian, wrote a counter-conventional-history of World War II and the Cold War. It’s called American Betrayal, and it is a chronicle of the long-hidden war that no one wants to talk about, whether Conventional Churchillian or Carlsonian Hitlerite. It lays out the massive, secret war of communist subversion waged inside our policy- and war-making councils, which, once perceived, turns the World War II we all know and regularly commemorate into the war that actually made the world safe for communism. It turns the leaders we are taught to honor for "saving Western civilization” from Hitler into patsies of (see FDR), if not parties to (see FDR), Stalin’s long-term strategy to capture and destroy it. By the way, Stalin and FDR are AWOL from these online Cooper interviews.

Perhaps Mr. Hanson is somehow unfamiliar with my 2013 book American Betrayal. (See below for a review-essay explaining what American Betrayal is about by the late Vladimir Bukovsky.) Aside from my book, however, it would have been very easy for him to learn the truth about my reflexive consternation at having been smeared by Collum on Tucker’s show. As soon as I saw what had been said about me in the Collum-Tucker interview, and which was included in clip that went viral (8.5 million views), I posted and pinned to my Twitter/X account the following Tweet.

Had Mr. Hanson bothered to check his facts before speaking/writing, he could have seen this. Or, had he bothered to conduct a quick Google search of my name and "Darryl Cooper,” he would have found that what tops the queue is another essay I wrote titled: "Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan and the Creeping Poison of Darryl Cooper,” which was published at Richard Viguerie’s Conservative HQ on April 22, 2025.

I am sure that Mr. Hanson and the Daily Signal do not wish to remain party to this continuing smear of my work and reputation. I look forward to swift rectification of the matter.

Sincerely,

Diana West

Author, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press 2013)

The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization (St. Martin’s Press 2007)

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A few links for your continuing edification:

1) "Big Lies, Viral Tweets and American Betrayal”

Excerpt: "All of a sudden, American Betrayal was enveloped in a stink bomb of a false binary — National Socialist Hitler or Communist Party Stalin. Pick a side. Never mind they are both evil Marxian spawn. And don’t forget to breathe in that whiff of Hitlerian revisionism (Cooper)."

In light of the Daily Signal’s Heritage Foundation beginnings, here is my Heritage presentation on American Betrayal.

Here is one of two essays Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov co-wrote about American Betrayal:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2013/09/28/its-worse-than-a-conspiracy-it%20-s-consensus/