Notes on the Ten-Year Anniversary of My Cancellation

Sadly, that’s the snappiest title I could think of

(This week’s post is purely anecdotal, just ol’ Dave observing a milestone. I’ll try to make the next one more substantive)

Hard to believe it was ten years ago.

See, back then we didn’t use the term “canceled.” Indeed, by and large, there was little censorship on Facebook or Twitter (the latter, at the time, was seen as a fairly trivial platform anyway). Obama was president, I was a top GOP organizer and “party animal” in L.A. (with a national presence via my articles carried by Breitbart, FrontPageMag, The Blaze, American Thinker, and elsewhere, my business partnership with Larry Elder, and my hosting of senators and congressmen), and conservatives were obsessed with the blandest of messages: “support the troops!” “Democrats are the real racists!” “Flag pins and tricorn hats!”

Ah, the tricorn hats! The Tea Party-era tricorn hats. By God, if I had a time machine I’d go back to 1997 and buy Amazon stock, then I’d go to 2008 and buy a stake in Acme Tricorn Hat, Flag Pin, and Uncle Sam Vest Corp. (a subsidiary of 中国石油天然气股份有限公司 of Beijing).

“Safe messaging” is always backed by the GOP establishment, but during the Obama years it was backed by the GOP base, too. Friends of Abe, our Gary Sinise/Clint Eastwood/Kelsey Grammer/Jon Voight/Jerry Bruckheimer-founded org of Hollywood conservatives, had a membership that was one-half pro-life Pat Boone acolytes (“Abortion is genociding the precious black community! Nothing’s more important than forcing impoverished low-IQ crack-addicted single black moms to carry to term; they’re America’s future!”) and one-half jittery Jew neocons (“Oygenflaaaaaygen, Israel is America’s greatest ally; I’d DIE for her well not me exactly as I have a bad back and anxiety plus there’s my vision oy vey don’t get me started on my eyesight and canned food makes me gassy”).

It was a terrible bunch, but it was home. I got free booze and respect and I was one of only two guys in the entire group with an attractive young girlfriend (the other being Voight, and he didn’t have one lady but a rotating stable of girls who looked exactly like his famous daughter, and if that didn’t disturb us it’s only because other members were even freakier).

So, about that lady-friend of mine. If this essay seems overly focused on her, it’s because, at its core, this is a two-person story. Lots of cameos: Hollywood celebs, D.C. politicos, even Trump. But if this were a movie, it’d only have two leads.

For those of you who only know me from my post-2013 work, well, that means you only know me because of Rosie.

Rosie Tisch. Five years with that rogue Blade Runner replicant, who cost me $500 a day for meals and never gained a pound.

This is not a staged photo…this was her daily lunch. No joke. That Margarita on the right side? That was my share.

I dug her six-foot-tall runway model body, I dug her perfect little Disney princess face, and even more I dug the mind of pure diabolical calculation crouching behind it.

Here she is trying to convince me this wasn’t gonna go pear-shaped. Note my skeptic-face.

I never liked her, but I considered her my near equal (grading on a curve for the 14-year age difference) in terms of sharpness (as in, smart, but also as in, cutting and unsentimental). Indeed, she was far less sentimental than I. I pride myself on occasionally being able to show human emotion, even to the extent of sometimes doing good when there’s no reward other than the deed. I don’t do it a lot, but it’s not virgin territory to me.

Unlike Rosie.

Facing execution, asked to repent, villainous Aaron in Titus Andronicus declares, “If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul.”

Rosie would never say such a thing because there’d be no need to speculate about “if.”

Funny thing is, while my disdain for her is deeply-rooted in my own misfortune, you could speak to anyone who ever knew her, and they’d hold the same opinion. Five years, I never met a friend of hers; only former friends.

In me, she was fortunate enough to find a man who, for better or worse (spoiler: worse) is attracted to deviousness.

My relationship with Rosie was similar to my relationship with the GOP and Friends of Abe as a whole: empty. I’ve never been an ideological lock-stepper. In my preferences, I check almost no leftist boxes. But there’s plenty on the right that fails to interest me or leaves me repulsed.

I enjoyed my time as a Republican because it was pleasing to me that I’d resurrected myself, going from a pariah in my 20s because of my Holocaust work to becoming, in my 30s and under a new name – a man rubbing shoulders with senators, vice presidents, and the Speaker of the House.

And to be fair to Rosie, she threw me one hell of a 40th birthday party.

My political activism, like my time with Rosie, was based on superficialities. Pride, aesthetics, ego. Empty calories. Yeah, I looked down my nose at the baby-waby pro-lifers and the Stars-n-Stripers who thought Iraq was a “good war” and the Israel-first oygernflaaaygeners (hell, I mocked the latter by sometimes feeding them “revisionist” Holocaust history, which they’d eat up because it came from “David Stein the Respected Holocaust Filmmaker,” proving a point I’ve long held that you can make anybody believe anything if you present it the right way).

In my 20s, I’d known only public drubbings – deserved drubbings, in that I knowingly put myself in positions of risk by angering the blindly unreasonable on topics that I knew would drive them to a rage. Too many clever, calculating people pull the “poor me; I am but an innocent lamb” act when they encounter consequences. It cheapens the “clever, calculating” brand; leave the “dindu nuffin” bullshit to the ghetto. Nobody suckerpunched me. Not even the guys who literally did. I claim my fate and take pride in the consequences.

Just as I took pride in the fact that I’d managed to climb out of the pariah gutter and here I was, rounding 40, a man of stature.

That said, L.A. DWP doesn’t accept pride as payment. That GOP status gig didn’t pay. I ain’t independently wealthy, folks. Holocaust revisionism didn’t pay, and getting jacked off by Republicans for the ego boost didn’t pay. There was no money in any of it. You were supposed to do it “for the cause.” My “cause” was me and me wasn’t making a dime.

Me was certainly losing a lot of ‘em, though.

By the end of 2012, the constant money-drain from Rosie, plus no money coming in from anything other than my casting work and my side gig of matching movie directors with venture capitalists and taking a finders fee (Breitbart, FrontPage, The Blaze, none of those places paid), had me rethinking my choices. Rosie and I had grown to hate each other, but we were trying to stay together for the children (the man-children of the GOP).

It wasn’t working. She had eyes for an over-the-hill musician, and I wanted to stop spending $500 a day on food. So we ended it.

But as 2013 rolled around, I knew it wasn’t nearly “ended.” Rosie started complaining about having to eat cheap. Fast food! Salads! Keep in mind, Rosie came from wealth, but she always wanted her parents to think she was earning enough from acting and modeling to fend for herself (she wasn’t).

I don’t think her parents were fooled; they’d often thank me for taking care of their daughter via gifts like the use of their Vegas Strip timeshare.

And now, Rosie was pissed at having to eat like a normal human. She wanted revenge.

She had the ammo. She knew everything about my Holocaust years. In 2013, YouTube wasn’t banning videos yet; my old appearances on TV talk shows from the 1990s were online. 20 years may have passed, but it was still unmistakably me.

But Rosie had a dilemma: how to out me without implicating herself. If her line was to be, “Oh no! David Stein is actually David Cole the Hollycost denier,” well, how do you do that without the GOPs going “uh, you’ve been with him for five years; you obviously knew the whole time. Yet you never said a word until now? You’re no hero!”

Politically, Rosie was actually a little to my right. She loved shooting things. A lot.

She’d pose for online ads for my RPA (“Republican Party Animals”) primary and election-night events.

I’m totally pro-2A, and I have home protection, but I don’t get pleasure from shooting. I knew dudes who were like, “Rosie loves firing AR-15s? What a turn-on.” But that never turned me on.

What did was how she loved the racial stuff. Any German pureblood white chick can shoot a gun. How many embrace their DNA?

Indeed, Rosie kinda liked the thrill of flirting with “dangerous” racialist samizdat. Over the years, many times, I’d shoot audition reels for her to submit to casting directors. Rosie was not a bad actress. Not great, not bad. Perfectly serviceable. But being six-foot-tall was a detriment, so we put a lot of work into her career (including me illegally buying her way into SAG).

We’d always shoot her audition reels in my liberry room, because it’s the quietest room in my house. Now, I have a large liberry. Real large. Ten thousand books, collected over a lifetime. Political nonfiction, arranged in multiple bookcases in some small semblance of order (with some mix-and-matching as I’ve run out of space). History (general). History (Holocaust). Left wing/Marxist. Feminist. Atheist. Religious right. Conservative mainstream. Far-right racialist. Far-right conspiratorial. Americana. Judaica. Etc.

Every audition reel we did, Rosie would insist on sitting in front of the far-right racialist bookcase! Every fucking reel. Specifically, this shelf:

David Duke! Hans Eysenck! Michael Novak! “Racial Hybridity,” “Race and Culture,” “Race and Reason,” “Race and Reality,” “White Man, Think Again!” “Not Out of Africa,” Wilmot Robertson’s “The Dispossessed Majority,” “Red Star Over Southern Africa,” and the cherry on top, Arthur Demarest’s “Resettlement: The Case for the Relocation of the American Negro.”

That was her shelf of choice. She could’ve been in front of the feminist bookcase, the world history bookcase, or the American presidents bookcase.

But no. She chose that one.

Not once,

but again…

and again…

And again…

and again…

and again!

Yeah, it turned me on (just the notion of a girl that young willing to spit in the face of leftist mores regarding race). At the same time, I thought it was risky; those videos were going to casting directors. But she held that the focus was just blurry enough that nobody would notice.

Well, she didn’t get a lot of callbacks. But still, I admired her moxie! Or maybe just her youthful arrogance.

When it came time to out me, that’s where her youth, and her privileged upbringing, failed her. She felt invincible. Like with the bookcase audition tapes. Nothing bad ever happens to Rosie.

I come at things from a more Judaic perspective.

Expect the worst.

When I got word that the “outing” was coming (a story I tell in greater detail in my book), I warned her: you can’t avoid tarring yourself. Don’t do it; you’ll find yourself banned as well.

But you can’t dissuade the headstrong, and besides, I liked her headstrong nature. Can’t bitch about it when it bit me in the ass.

Her plan was to use her one ally in Friends of Abe, a guy who drew as much water as I did: Michael Walsh, at the time writing for National Review.

The term “derp” is played out, but honestly - doesn’t this face just kinda scream “derp?”

Walsh was why we were never freaked out by Jon Voight’s dating habits. Walsh made Voight look wholesome.

Imagine Friends of Abe leadership playing “perv poker.”

Kelsey Grammer: “Let’s get the betting started. I wager…I knocked up a woman 25 year my junior.”

Clint Eastwood: “I’ll see you, and raise cheating on all my wives, pressuring my mistress/girlfriend to have abortions, eavesdropping on her private telephone calls, kicking her out of our house, leaving her destitute, and then signing a deal for her to direct films but secretly blackballing her instead.”

Mykelti Williamson: “Whoo, this game gettin’ a little rich for my blood! But I’ll see you and raise stalkin’ my ex-wife and carvin’ up her new boyfriend with a butcher knife.”

Jon Voight: “That’s pretty damn ghetto, T! But I’ll see you and raise dating women who look like my own daughter.”

Michael Walsh: “Seen, and raised: dating teenage girls who look like my dead daughter.”

Grammer, Eastwood, Williamson, Voight: “Fold.”

Walsh was a perv extraordinaire. And yes, after the unexplained, sudden death of his young daughter, he asked me to procure the “company” of attractive young women similar to her in type to “take his mind off the tragedy” (in recent years Walsh has joined Team Trump, doing “Stop the Steal” podcasts with Steve Bannon and likely comparing notes with Ali Alexander).

Walsh – then in his mid-60s – had fallen heavily for Rosie, so he agreed to be her vessel for my destruction. And at a GOP event the night of April 20^th, 2013 (a loaded date, to be sure, but coincidental. The 20^th fell on a Saturday that year, and there was a Second Amendment bash in the Valley attended by top GOP mucky-mucks), Walsh and Rosie showed my David Cole videos to the entire room.

As I recall in my book, my first indication that anything was wrong was the real-time decline in the Friends of Abe Facebook group I ran. 2,000 members. 1,800. 1,200. 900. 650.

And that was that. Over the next week I was fired and banned, defriended and spat on. Initially, the matter was handled internally by the party. But within a week one of the Abes leaked the story to The Guardian, and on May 3rd it went national, and viral.

Among the Abes, there was no circumspection regarding “cancel culture;” that phrase wouldn’t be coined until a year later. At most, ten Abes reached out to talk to me about my views. For the rest, about half were too blinded by anger to respond rationally (“We must expel this Nazi! Democrats are the real racists!”), and half were concerned with the effect on their career should they be linked to me. And to be clear, although the term “cancel culture” was not yet in the mix, the precedent of banishment for insensitive words had been set decades ago (see Al Campanis and Jimmy the Greek). The difference in my case was that my “evil words” were from twenty years earlier, which somewhat foreshadowed the coming fad of digging through old social media for cancellation material (I’ll be writing more about that in next week’s Taki’s).

As I sat there having gone from leader to leper in one night, I hardly considered all to be lost. Knowing the outing was coming, I’d already signed a lucrative book deal with my friend Adam Parfrey at Feral House. And the Guardian journalist who wrote the piece (and who’d end up becoming a friend) refused to call me a denier (his editors agreed).

That, more than anything, saved my hide. Honest reporting from a responsible journalist, taking what could’ve been a hit piece – and would’ve been in anyone else’s hands – and making it fair and balanced, is what kept me alive. Sure, every other news organ that covered my “outing” – MSNBC, CNN, TIME, Yahoo News, Huffington Post, Gawker, The Hollywood Reporter, The Wrap, Jerusalem Post, etc. – called me a denier. But none of them ever interviewed me. The Guardian was the primary source. And as long as I had that, I had hope.

Everything I just wrote was covered in my book. Here’s some new stuff. And it explains why I struggle with my feelings regarding these decade-old events.

Ironically, Rosie didn’t have to take me out. With a little more patience, I’d have taken myself out. In December 2013, my mom became terminally ill, and I withdrew from all social endeavors to take care of her full-time. In December, I’d have had to leave the GOP and Friends of Abe anyway. And Rosie wouldn’t have had to destroy her own career. Which she did. As I’d warned, she was not hailed as a hero for exposing me, but as a villain for living off “evil denier” Cole. For taking his “blood money” for five years. For knowing about his “crimes” and covering them up until it became advantageous to expose him.

She was fired from as many gigs as I was. She became unemployable as an actress (undoubtedly by a few casting directors who’d received her “bookshelf videos,” and who now said “I KNEW those books looked shady!”).

And yet, if she’d only waited seven months, I’d have been gone anyway.

Patience isn’t for the young!

My book came out in 2014, but I couldn’t promote it because of my mom (Parfrey had wanted to book me on a speaking tour). I did podcasts, anything I could do from home. But I know I cost Adam a few bucks by not being able to do a traveling tour; God bless that guy, he never got angry. He knew my circumstances, and he understood.

Whether I’d remained in the circle or not, Friends of Abe ended up falling apart in 2015 due to warring factions: the Trump people vs. the OYGENFLAAAAAAAYGENS.

Even I couldn’t have mediated that impasse. FOA dissolved in early 2016.

So regardless of Rosie, via the combination of my mom’s illness and FOA’s implosion, that part of my life would’ve come to an end anyway.

But because of Rosie – i.e. because of my autobiography, which wouldn’t have been written had I not been outed – in December 2014 I was contacted by Takimag. The editor at the time, Ann Sterzinger, had read my book and written a glowing review.

She wanted to know if I was interested in a full-time writing gig. Like, the kind that pays.

That led to eight-and-a-half years (and counting) of the best job I’ve ever had.

So sure, I landed on my feet. I’m a hard man to kill. Irv Rubin and his sidekick Earl Krugel tried it, in the literal sense. And guess who’s six feet under.

Still, on this ten-year anniversary, I struggle with mixed feelings. I can’t forgive Rosie, even though her actions led to my book which led to my job which led to me being able to keep my house. But that was not her intent in outing me. Her intent was to destroy me. And I can’t allow myself to forget the massive financial hit of 2013, right when I needed money to take care of my mom. Much of what she required for her care wasn’t covered by insurance; I had to take out a loan on my house to cover her costs (I’m not complaining; I’d have sold my house if necessary).

I also can’t forgive the small group of false friends who assisted Rosie, who smiled to my face while plotting my demise. But as for the “bystanders,” the collateral damage of this disagreeable affair, I have a blanket attitude of not just amnesty, but remorse and humility. I’d put many of them in a difficult position. To me, my Holocaust work was 20 years old, ancient history. And it wasn’t the norm in 2013 for stuff that old to be dredged up for a “cancellation.” But I shouldn’t have been so cavalier with the lives of friends; decent people were caused a good deal of stress by my past. That’s on me.

I’m grateful for the ten or so who stood by me in 2013, but I’m grateful as well to those who’ve extended their hand since. I’m not the most charming fella on earth but I’m a decent enough writer, and I think my work at Taki’s has done a lot to mend those fences.

There’s some bittersweetness in the mix ten years on. My book is banned from Amazon (even used copies can’t be sold) and I’ve been told that I’m banned myself – as an author, regardless of what I write, so that pretty much kills the dream of a second edition.

Pity; there are some fine tales from 2015, like the time I got to speak for Trump to the national press (one of his major talking points from summer 2015 was actually my words...it’s a fun story, how that came to be), and 2016 to 2018 – living with a 21-year-old porn star and her Aussie Shepherd/Lab mix – would be a real page-turner.

I don’t miss the girl but I sure miss the dog.

But with Adam Parfrey dead, a second edition doesn’t seem likely. Perhaps that’s for the best...there are a few stories from those later years that don’t make me look too good.

I’m also banned on YouTube – again, not just my videos but me, the guy. I’m even banned on other people’s videos!

Plus, my Wiki page refuses to acknowledge that The Guardian said I’m not a denier and that in 2019 Tennessee’s highest judicial body officially declared that I’m not one. So Wiki calls me a denier (while suppressing evidence to the contrary) which Amazon & YouTube use as the reason to ban me, while simultaneously banning/erasing all content that would allow people to see for themselves via my own words that I’m not only not a denier but quite vocally anti-denial.

That’s what makes this decennial weird…I “feel” more canceled now than I did when the cancellation actually happened. Ten years ago, I could pretty much post or sell content anywhere. I felt wronged, but not constrained or silenced. It’s like it took Big Tech ten years to finally catch up with me.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about Rosie, after her acting career fell to shit, daddy bought her a big-ass house in the hills (which she flipped for an even bigger one down in Temecula), and, with career no longer an option, she married Texas-born failed-actor-turned-Disney employee Robert Maxhimer (aka “Big Tex Maxhimer”) and began popping out kids.

She’s now reinvented herself as Rosie Maxhimer the “mommy blogger” on Instagram, 67,000+ followers and paid partnerships with Microsoft, Walmart, JC Penney, Disneybooks, Penguin Books, Simon & Schuster (holy crow, I had a bestseller and I can’t even find one publisher!), DreamWorks, Unilever, Green Giant, Old El Paso, Breyer’s, Bissell, CVS, and Netflix.

No word on whether she’d accept sponsorship deals from Racial Hybridi-Tea (“blend leaves not blood”) or Negro Resettle-mints (“cool and refreshing, like a swim back to Africa”).

I, on the other hand, will happily accept a few bucks via Buy Me a Beer.

If you’re so inclined.

Thank you for reading.

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