Dinner Bell for the Right’s Last Supper
Embracing the crazies is the right's last rite
(This column, written for Takimag and slated to run February 6th, 2023, was taken offline due to a hacking that week. It’s my “lost column.” But here it is, presented in full. Subscribe for lots more content to come!)
In February 2007, 24-year-old paranoid schizophrenic Holocaust denier Eric Hunt had an idea: he’d kidnap Holocaust survivor/author Elie Wiesel and make him admit that the Holocaust never happened.
Hunt tracked Wiesel to a speaking gig in San Francisco. His plan was to accost the old man, force him in front of a camera, and make him confess that the Holocaust was a “hoax.”
A lunatic plan? Yes, because Hunt’s a lunatic.
That’s how these things work.
Trailing Wiesel, Hunt got lucky; he found himself in an elevator with his prey. He pulled Wiesel out at the next floor, but the old guy didn’t comply. He started screaming, interrupting the fantasy. Hunt froze, then bolted.
He was quickly apprehended.
At trial, he pleaded insanity. His own lawyers called him delusional. He was convicted and served less than two years.
Like all Californians at the time, I read about the case and soon forgot it. Cut to April 2013, when I was “outed” in The Guardian for my 1990s Holocaust work. And several old acquaintances from my revisionist days reached out to me.
“Oh, you have to meet Eric Hunt!”
“The kidnapper? Why the fuck would I want to meet that madman?”
“He’s dynamic!” my imbecilic friends responded. “The fresh young voice of Holocaust revisionism. And he’s a fan of yours! In fact, he said his Wiesel plan was inspired by that time you interviewed the head of the Auschwitz Museum in 1992 and got him to make bombshell admissions.”
They told me that like I’d want to hear it.
These old fools could no longer tell the difference between a two-camera formal interview in a museum director’s office and an attempted kidnapping by a mentally diseased criminal.
One of the fools gave Hunt my email. And he contacted me.
“Hey Dave, let’s chat.”
All I would say in response was, “you’re mentally ill. Seek help. Go away.”
“But Dave, here’s my latest video proving no Jews were killed in the Holocaust!”
“You’re mentally ill. Seek help. Go away.”
I refused to indulge him.
Because you don’t indulge insanity. You call it out and ostracize it.
If you allow the insane to have a presence in a movement, or circle, or political party, if you cater to them as your “base,” you’ve signed your death warrant. Thinking you can interact with paranoid delusionals and somehow you’ll lift them up instead of them dragging you down is like thinking you can fuck a syphilitic and they’ll catch health.
You sleep with the diseased, you become diseased.
That’s what’d happened with Holocaust revisionism in my absence. A formerly scholarly pursuit was now catering to schizos. I became keenly interested in understanding why. In my day, I could go on national television and present my thesis to a general audience. If I’d had a book back then, I could’ve pitched it to millions of people. Once revisionism got pushed to the fringe by a combination of media blackout in the U.S. and criminalization abroad, revisionists had little choice but to embrace the crazies for an audience.
Now, if you yourself are delusional, and your base is delusional, fine; you’re interacting with your own. But if you’re not delusional, if you’re trying to accomplish something worthy, if you adopt the delusional as your base (either by choice or necessity), the delusional will demand that you cater to their lunacy.
Schizos can be a good audience, but always at a cost. Yes, they spend and they engage. But they’ll also insist that you affirm their delusions.
That’s why you must never let them in.
Feminists are finally realizing that the first trannies should’ve been treated as I treated Hunt.
“You’re mentally ill. Seek help. Go away.”
But no; the cancer was allowed to grow. People indulged the schizos, either from a sincere place of wanting to be tolerant with the brain-diseased, or from a more sinister place of seeing trannyism as a weapon that could be unleashed upon Western civilization in a controlled manner (i.e. in a manner that wouldn’t end up alienating actual women, that most important Democrat demo).
You cannot control crazy, so you don’t ring the dinner bell to attract crazy.
But that’s exactly what the right is doing. Rightist influencers are encouraging the worst of the right – the loons – and bringing in new loons, by obsessively pushing lunatic conspiracy fantasies.
It’s suicidal. We just saw a midterm in which the GOP blew a winning hand. If you were to go back in time and tell a 1990s Republican, “in 2022 we had a Democrat president with a historically low approval rating, historically high inflation, and a Democrat Party that said ‘defund the police, don’t prosecute criminals, white people are evil, open the borders, women don’t exist,’ and yet we couldn’t win both houses of Congress or even a sizable House majority,” that 1990s guy would not believe you.
We know that GOP midterm underperformance was tied to MAGA tall tales of election theft and killer robot voting machines.
And the right’s reaction to that midterm disappointment? More tall tales!
Every night, Tucker spins new yarns about how Biden’s classified documents scandal is linked to the JFK assassination (yeah, he actually says that, and his “source” is some guy he won’t name). Every week, there’s a new January 6th conspiracy claim; a recent one is that Nancy Pelosi was a crisis actor playing along with other crisis actors posing as rioters. And the proof of this from popular rightist influencer “Catturd” and his idiot followers? Pelosi had a “camera crew” following her on 1/6, proving it was a staged Hollywood production.
“She was so well-prepared for the ‘insurrection’ that she brought a film crew! Amazing.”
I’d call that the most “Boomer” response ever (failure to understand that everyone with a phone has a camera; you don’t need a “crew”), but these people aren’t boomers. They’re fishermen, trying to hook schizos by appealing to mentally-unstable weak-minded reality-detached wackos.
Speaking of Pelosi, the Paul Pelosi police bodycam, backyard-cam, and 911 recording prove conclusively that the rightist conspiracy mumbo-jumbo was false. The two men were not “wrestling in their underwear.” DePape didn’t break in in his underwear. The glass door wasn’t smashed from the inside after the fact. Pelosi never called DePape a “friend” on the 911 call (it was DePape who butted in to say “I’m a friend”). And in total contradiction of the anonymously-sourced NBC report by hack Pedro Almaguer, who claimed Pelosi “walked several feet back” when cops arrived, what police saw in the doorway was an elderly man – not walking back, but trying to control a hammer in a younger, stronger man’s hands – scared to death to make a wrong move. And the moment he did make a wrong move, the maniac bashed his skull in.
Yet even seeing this footage, rightists are still asking “why didn’t Pelosi run or scream for help?” Even when they see right in front of them what happened when Pelosi tried to do so.
Rightists can see something with their own eyes and still not believe it.
“I didn’t need to see the Paul Pelosi video to know what was true. I knew what was true as soon as NBC suspended the reporter for telling the truth” Jesse Kelly tweeted to his 600,000 followers.
Can you even grasp the insanity there? “I’m taking the word of an MSM reporter citing unnamed sources over the thing that played out right before my eyes.”
Incomprehensible.
And “Catturd’s” response to the bodycam video was to mock Pelosi’s agonal breathing as “snoring,” as if he fell asleep during his false flag.
Again, these are fishermen trying to hook the dregs of America.
Why would Donald Trump, Jesse Waters, and other high-profile MAGAs claim back in November that the presence of glass on the outside of the broken Pelosi glass door means it was smashed from the inside, when even if you’ve never broken a window in your life there are a thousand YouTube videos showing that when you smash a window with a hammer, glass gets on both sides?
And of course the security camera footage clearly shows the door being smashed outside-in.
Why would high-profile MAGAs claim that Nancy’s phone screen being black while calling for help on 1/6 means she was faking the call, when everybody knows that most phones default to black screen during a call?
Why would these MAGAs choose such obviously false lines of attack when there are so many legitimate reasons to criticize Pelosi?
Because they’re looking to hook people to whom reality doesn’t matter. The crazies. The Eric Hunts (DePape’s plan to accost Nancy and force her to “confess” her sins mirrored Hunt’s. Rightists say “that plan’s too far-fetched.” Not at all. DePape, Hunt, this is what psychotics do).
Rather than trying to hook independents (the people MAGAs lost in the midterms with their conspiracy bullshit) by focusing on meat-and-potato issues like “women exist,” “policing and incarceration are necessary,” “your skin doesn’t make you evil,” and “open borders are bad,” rightists are actively pursuing the lunatic element.
I even have high-profile friends who’ve been retweeting Andrew Anglin, a neo-Nazi recently allowed back on Twitter. I’m sure Anglin would say, “hah, the satanic kike Cole is scared of me!” But I’m not scared of him. I just know what his kind can do to a movement when allowed in.
I saw it with revisionism, I’m seeing it now with the political right.
Why is this happening? Post-midterm disillusionment (“we lost the independents so let’s go in the other direction and court those who’ve surrendered their discernment to ideology”)? Maybe. But more likely, it’s just dolts not foreseeing the consequences of their doltery.
Oh, but they’ll see it soon! Last week Trump repeatedly attacked DeSantis with multiple false accusations. DeSantis “locked Florida down.” He “closed the beaches.” He “mandated the vax.”
None of that is true. It’s demonstrably false. And DeSantis supporters are like “why won’t MAGAs look at the facts?”
Because like Jesse Kelly, MAGAs don’t need to see something to know it’s true. If they imagine it, it’s true.
If you’re a DeSantis supporter, and if you’ve ever helped ring the dinner bell to attract the schizos (to get Twitter shares, Substack subs, or TV/radio/podcast views), you’re gonna get bit in the ass by the very loons you courted.
Trump will run a truthless campaign, and you will not be able to talk reason to the brainless idiots you helped recruit.
Funny enough, Eric Hunt eventually fled Holocaust denial. The deniers were furious to see their “fresh new face” go, and several of them blamed me for driving him out by not “accepting” him (after all, I was his “hero”).
If I did send elevator man packing, it was a happy accident. I had no desire to cure him; I was just doing as I’ve always done: rejecting crazy.
For the sake of it.
Go and do likewise.
David Cole’s column appears weekly in Taki’s Magazine. If you like David’s work, and if you want to say “thanks for a good job” in the best possible way, please go to buymeacoffee.com/DaveCole. David will be so very happy he’ll promise to stop speaking about himself in the third person.
I managed to read that prior to it getting wiped from Taki and thought it was excellent. In a related story, I recently defended your honor on a social media site when someone called you "controlled opposition" and a few other things. Nonsense. I've often found people throw that label at anyone who doesn't hold the same extreme, and generally insane, viewpoints as they do - it frequently says more about the person slinging the insult than it does about the target.
Good writing Dave! I must say one thing I have noticed in people that there ideology becomes there politics and the politics becomes there faith! Some that I was thinking about is your old thorn Irving Rubin: Me theory is that Irving would be part of woke society. Obviously he always wanted to be a victim of hate. In my opinion he never was one. But into day age people think it is cool to be a victim of injustice or racist ect.Irving probably was piss off that he was born in Canada in 1945 and not Poland! He probably had wet dreams about being in Auschwitz’s and SS she wolf Elsa was beating his Ass with a leather whip made by Hitler him self!what am getting is look at his work his group, they our gone and all most forgotten. With being said he has no legacy at all. The only this one can say about him is that he was the pioneer in that is cool to be a victim. He probably was a libtard underneath!