In the movie Boys from historybased on the play by Alan Bennett, a student wins a scholarship to Oxford on the basis of an argument he makes in his entrance exam: Hitler, he claims, was “greatly misunderstood.” As a work of fiction, it’s a spiteful comedy—a mockery of the particular kind of arrogance required to twist the tragedy of the Holocaust for personal gain. But now satire has come to our news cycle.

In a long, winding interview on Tucker Carlson’s show this week, podcaster Darryl Cooper offered his thoughts on the “mythology” — the heroes, the villains, the plot, the moral stakes — of World War II. But in his version, it was Winston Churchill who was sorely misunderstood. Churchill, Cooper told Carlson with dramatic flair, “was the main villain of World War II.”

The claim is wrong, on every count. The gravity of the error was underscored by a striking coincidence: Around the time the interview was published, the Alternative for Germany had become the first far-right party to win a German state election since the Nazi era. The past never dies, the old saying goes; it’s not even the past. But Cooper and his enthusiastic host, those history boys with microphones, weren’t talking about history—not really. They were talking about themselves. They were treating World War II as an exercise in branding. And that was, though not surprising in the context of Carlson’s show, a new low.

Read: America Made by Tucker Carlson

The reality of consensus is based on a history of consensus. In this time of fragile facts, the one thing most people could agree on was that Hitler was a bad guy. But the time for consensus is over, Cooper suggested. Instead, as the title of his episode summed it up, “Winston Churchill ruined Europe.”

As Cooper lays out his convoluted argument (“I may be exaggerating a bit,” he admits at one point), it becomes clear that the real villains in his story are, ultimately, not Hitler or Churchill, the Axis or the Allies. Instead, they are the culture warriors of the present: the woke, the masses, the ruling class—the people who will be offended by statements like “Winston Churchill ruined Europe.” And the real heroes are, by extension, those who dare to say the unsayable. “There are some things you just can’t question,” Cooper told Carlson when he questioned the “myths” of World War II. (“Literally, asking questions is a crime?” Carlson replied, before answering his own question: “Yes.”) Cooper conceded that debunking myths might not land you in jail; but “you can ruin your life and lose your job.” (“You can go to jail in this country,” Carlson replied.)

Read: American cynicism has reached its breaking point

If your goal is to present a clever, rather than truthful, interpretation of history, World War II will serve you well: its over-documentation is fertile ground, giving you many cherries to pick. It will give you the fodder you need to suggest that the Holocaust was essentially an accident. And then it will allow you, if you wish, to treat the suffering of people from the past as evidence of your own victimhood. You can take the accepted narrative and rewrite it.

In other contexts, Cooper and Carlson might condemn this approach—an arch-postmodernist attitude in which all facts are relative and all orthodoxies are suspect. But the history boys need their straw men. And Churchill was the real villain of the war is less an argument than a provocation: the claim that, as World War II is relegated to Hallin’s sphere, Hitler’s villainy should be relegated to the sphere of legitimate controversy. It should be relegated there because it is one of those things that you have no right to question“Darryl Cooper may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” Carlson’s show announced, promoting the interview. “His latest project is the most forbidden of all: trying to understand World War II.”

“Forbidden”—the stuff of perfume, clothing, heterodox educational institutions—makes sense as branding. Forbidden is exotic. Forbidden is bold. Forbidden can transform the boys of history into men. And it can do it from the comfort of your own podcast studio.

Read: Tucker Carlson’s Final Moments at Fox Were As Dangerous as They Were Absurd

History, from this distance, is easy. Carlson and Cooper can talk about being arrested for questioning orthodoxy without fear of it actually happening. They can broach the mystique of the “forbidden” without referring to the many things—books, ideas, people—that carry real risk of being banned. They can speak freely. They can do so, indeed, thanks to the actions of people who did not have the luxury of treating the Holocaust as a thought exercise. Influencers can, if they want, interpret others’ outrage as a victory. They can brag that they have “weakened the narrative” about World War II. They can choose not to consider what their questioning really amounts to. “History today is not a matter of belief,” says a teacher in This Boys from history announces. “It’s a show. It’s entertainment.” His students still have time to shed such arrogance, the film suggests. Or at least they should.