The David Cole Holocaust Chronology

This one's for me...a timeline and a testament

I know, I know…you unsub when I write about the trivial (“I didn’t sign up to hear about your GOUT!”) and you unsub when I write about the weighty (“TLDR! TLDR!”).

Knowing I can’t win, this one’s for me and me alone. If you happen to enjoy it too, excellent. If you unsub, good riddance.

But this is something I need on the record.

CAVEAT FOR SUBSCRIBERS

Yes, this is a long post, surpassing Substack’s limit on email length. So to read the whole thing, you might have to click over to view it on Substack.

In Gmail, at the bottom of the email in maddeningly small print it will say “[Message clipped] View entire message.” Click on that to read the rest.

Don’t think of this as a long-form Substack essay (though that’s undoubtedly what it is); think of it as a complete chapter of a book that will never be published.

INTRO

There’s great confusion among my “fans," my foes, the press, and the online censors who’ve pretty much banned me from everywhere (Amazon, YouTube, Twitter), regarding my Holocaust chronology. And that confusion is the reason I’m banned from everywhere.

So let’s take a few minutes to understand the Cole chronology. Because I'll be honest, I’m finding my “unpublishable author” status stifling. Thankfully, in 55 years I’ve never had a bout of depression or an anxiety attack; it’s just not my nature. But I’m feeling, shall we say, “less happy” than usual. These things are taking a toll on me. Nobody likes to admit weakness, but I do try to be honest with you folks.

It’s quite astounding that a good 20 idiots a day on Twitter invoke my name in support of Holocaust denial. 20 mentions a day is nothing for a Taylor Swift or a Donald Trump. But I’m a minor public figure, accent on the minor. I’m a public figure only in the most annoying legalistic sense - it’s okay to defame me.

Yippee.

But I’m not a public figure in terms of income, wealth, exposure, or anyone actually giving a crap about what I have to say.

I’m just a name, a hero figure to idiot deniers and a villain figure to idiot anti-deniers, someone to be talked about but never talked to.

So let’s do that chronology. I’ll add some additional remarks here and there.

THE BOOK

Of course, much of this was covered in my book, published by Feral House in 2014. But as Amazon’s banned the sale of new or used copies (without citing a single objectionable passage, just as YouTube couldn’t cite why my channel got banned), I might as well not have a fucking book.

But by gum I DID! Here’s the cover.

And here’s a capture from 2019 of the Amazon page; by the time Amazon banned the book in 2021, it had accrued over 100 positive reader reviews.

Considering that Adam Parfrey (the indie publisher who founded Feral House) couldn’t get a single piece of advertising for this book accepted anywhere (the first time in his 30-year history as a publisher that his ads were rejected in full), that we got any quotes from “people of note” is impressive. This was all via word-of-mouth, and the satisfaction for me was that the praise crossed ideological lines - left, right, libertarian, etc.

A sampling:

“Republican Party Animal is compelling...an insight into a world most don't experience. You should know that in my life I have maybe read ten books or less in one sitting. I received this book in the mail on a Friday afternoon and finished it early Saturday morning about 3:30. I was compelled to finish it in one sitting. It is sad that all you have built up during the last few years you have to leave behind. However, you are smart and talented and I know you will land on your feet. I know that this is far fetched but your skepticism would make you a great mathematician or physicist. Hell, you would be a damn good attorney.”

• Maj. Carlos C. Huerta, U.S. Army (ret)
  Chaplain (Rabbi) of West Point; accompanied the 101st Airborne into Iraq in 2003
  Professor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Touro College (Jerusalem)

“I would be EXTREMELY surprised if there was a smarter, more readable, more logical, and more engaging alt right writer anywhere on the planet. I mean that. To be honest, your stuff TRANSCENDS position, ideological position, that is, and I can say that about virtually no other author, left or right (in this sense, strangely enough, you sometimes remind me of Tom Hayden, whose skills as an author were greatly underrated). WHY aren't you much, much more successful? Or maybe you are? You are smart, sensitive, persuasive...you could actually change minds, and at the very least make godless leftie pinkos like myself feel they are being listened to and responded to by a sensitive, smart person. WHY aren't you more out there?”

• Tim Sommer
  The Village Voice, Sounds (UK), The Daily News, The Washington Post, Mojo, The LA Weekly, The Observer, Rolling Stone, Spin, The Rock and Roll Globe
  Author, Only Wanna Be with You: The Inside Story of Hootie & the Blowfish

“I do think your journey investigating the Holocaust warrants some revisiting and could possibly give you the chance to set the record straight in terms of your intentions and reasons. The story I see is a young guy who asked questions and couldn't get answers and so he went deeper and deeper - and eventually maybe went too deep. I don't know everything about you yet so maybe you did something to warrant the backlash you got, but so far what I don't like is the part about getting hammered just for asking questions and raising inconsistencies. Whether you are right or wrong it seems you raised some points that should be answered and explained. I'd like to get those answers and explanations, but whether I do or not - I think you should have a chance to tell your side of the story.”

• Jeffrey Scott Shapiro
  Investigative reporter, The Washington Times, CBS, TIME Magazine
  Former assistant attorney general, District of Columbia
  Trump appointee, senior advisor of the Broadcasting Board of Governors

“Funny and smart and a great, wild-ass read.”

• Jerry Stahl
  Author, Permanent Midnight

“People should read this book. It's funny and very informative. I liked it, and I'm a liberal!”

• Jim Wirt
  Producer, The Ralph Nader Radio Hour (Pacifica Radio/KPFK)

“David is the the H.L. Mencken of our time. The beautiful irony is that he is writing in a time when it is even more dangerous to be politically incorrect than in the days when Mencken was writing – yet he is much more politically incorrect than Mencken ever was. That's why I enjoy his writing even more.”

• David Kramer
  LewRockwell.com

“I just finished Republican Party Animal and it was great. Hilarious and horrifying at the same time. I found myself laughing out loud on the 7 train numerous times. Great job.”

• Matthew Sheahan
  Notes from a Polite New Yorker blog

“The world could have engaged David Cole and his balanced, rigorously skeptical revisionism, but instead it hysterically rejected his work as ‘denialism’ and is now faced with the spread of Total Holohoax cosmic conspiracy theorizing.”

• Nick Land
  Author/philosopher

“What makes Cole believable is that he’s funny. This book is not a screed or a plea for mercy. It’s a laugh-out-loud take on a screwball-worthy situation. Cole seems like the kind of guy who could find out that he’s got a terminal disease and then start joking about it five minutes later. I always believe truly funny people because they’re not afraid to make themselves look pathetic. There’s too much humor in the sad truth to reach for some boring lie.”

• Jason Hernandez
  The Constant Bleeder blog

“The primary reason I believe the Holocaust happened was reading the collection of evidence in the appendix of Republican Party Animal by David Cole.”

• Keith Knight
  Managing editor, The Libertarian Institute
  Host, Don't Tread on Anyone podcast
  Editor, The Voluntaryist Handbook

“You can love him or hate him (somehow, we don’t imagine that David Cole has many friends) — but one thing is for sure: we would not want to face off with Cole in a debate on some factual matter.”

• The Post-Tenure Tourettes blog (apparently run by a prominent Israeli academic, but as he never confirms it publicly, I won’t spoil the mystery) 

You don’t have to like the book. Nobody has to like the damn book. But it’s simply not possible to read it and conclude that it deserves to be banned from Amazon.

When sitcom actress Debra Messing, who did not read my book, led the successful Twitter crusade to get it Amazon-banned in January 2021, she sarcastically stated “let Cole sell books from his garage.” Well, I don’t have the money to set up a printing press and distribution system in my garage, as I’m unemployable beyond my Takimag job (which thankfully pays enough to keep the lights on at Casa Cole).

Messing did a week of tweets like this to her over 600,000 followers

A reminder, BTW, that Messing is best buds with The Spectator’s “conservative” icon Douglas Murray, who runs a site called “Uncancelled History” while palling around with a leftist who literally cancelled a history book (Murray refused to respond to my attempts to reach out to him).

Still, as the old saying goes, for every Messing there’s a Coulter!

As Ann wrote on her own Substack, contrasting my predicament to that of leftist darling and “censorship victim” Salman Rushdie, “Except Satanic Verses is available on Amazon (hardcover, paperback, kindle and audible), but Republican Party Animal is not, not even available second hand – not even acknowledged as a book. David Cole’s rollicking autobiography makes Debra Messing uncomfortable.”

DENIAL’S LITTLE HELPER

Worse still, the lies and misconceptions about me fuel Holocaust denial. As an example, when Media Matters’ Eric Hananoki — a man every bit as corrupt and deceptive as Alex Jones or Ron Unz — ran a piece last year linking me to Tucker Carlson (Carlson had privately shared one of my Takimag columns in 2020), the headline was “TUCKER CARLSON SHARED THE WORK OF DAVID COLE, A HOLOCAUST DENIER!”

That I’m not a denier is bad enough. Worse though is that the column Tuck approvingly shared had nothing to do with the Holocaust; it was a piece that was highly critical of Trump’s “stollen election” claims, a piece in which I spelled out why Trump actually did lose.

If there was a headline to be had, it was “Tucker publicly supported Trump’s election claims while privately sending out a column that questioned them.”

The Holocaust never had to enter into it.

But Hananoki’s a fraud.

The result of Hananoki’s lie is that deniers now think Tuck privately shared a Holocaust denial column written by a Holocaust denier. This fueled online speculation that Tucker is a denier himself, or that he “privately knows the truth,” and this has served to further spread denial and embolden deniers, all because Hananoki went for the most deceitful, inaccurate telling of the story possible.

And it went viral on “denier Twitter.”

With his utter disregard for the truth, Hananoki launched a brand new denial conspiracy theory. If Hananoki had simply told the story accurately, this wouldn’t have happened.

Charlatans like him have no conscience regarding the consequences of their actions.

THE FOUR MORONS OF DAVE’S APOCALYPSE

Continuing on, there are four categories of imbeciles who get my chronology wrong.

1. Deniers who still live in 1992. I’m still 21-years-old and anything I said in 1992 couldn’t possibly be outdated because it’s still 1992! To them, all human knowledge ended in ‘92. Time did not proceed, and nothing new has been learned by anyone about anything since.

2. Deniers who DO realize I’m not one of them, but claim it’s because I “cucked” and “sold out” due to threats from the JDL (a group that ceased to exist in 2002) and/or monetary reward from the ADL or Mossad (I wish! Then I could set up that garage publishing house).

3. Anti-deniers who also want it to still be 1992. For them, it’s important to retain me as a villain, because I was an arrogant little shit 32 years ago. I don’t make a good villain today. Because humans…oh, what’s that obscure word? Mature. Plus, the misleading museum exhibits I justifiably critiqued back then have long been fixed (i.e., by the 2000s I was kinda proven right regarding those specific critiques). So groups like the ADL and Wiesenthal Center have to keep me frozen in ‘92, when I was an impetuous dick and when the Holocaust museums had yet to admit that some of their exhibits indeed needed fixing.

4. Online gatekeepers like the censors at Amazon and the “editors” at Wikipedia, who refuse to do any research beyond reading my 1992-1994 work, not looking even one year past it, as though time simply stopped in 1994.

I’ve no illusions that this post will make me employable again or stop the daily Twitter stupidity, but I’d still rather do it than not.

TIMELINE

I first began reading “revisionist” literature in 1989. I go into the details of that process, the how and why, in my book, and honestly I don’t feel like repeating it here when I said it well enough there.

My years speaking publicly on the topic were 1992-1994. I did two national talk shows (Montel Williams and Phil Donahue), one pre-taped prime-time news show (48 Hours), and I was featured on another without my participation (Mike Wallace profiled me on 60 Minutes even though I refused to be interviewed because at that point - January 1994 - I realized it had been unwise to do talk shows at all, as it’s the absolute worst forum for intelligent discussion).

Sprinkled throughout ‘92 and ‘93 were maybe a dozen smaller, local radio and TV shows, plus the final iteration of the Morton Downey Jr. Show in ‘93 (this was his swan song period, after his national syndicator dropped him and he was “broadcasting” from a Palm Springs restaurant).

And then there was the 1992 video-for-hire I did for the Institute for Historical Review following my first of five Europe research trips (that video was edited September-October ‘92, but that’s a tale that deserves its own column).

So let’s skip to summer 1994. That’s when David Irving announced, at a conference at which we both spoke, that he’d authenticated the Goebbels Diary, and specifically the 1942 passages about Aktion Reinhard and the mass liquidation of Polish Jewry.

I saw firsthand that the “revisionists,” most of whom I already had little respect for as I found them to be either blind ideologues or blindly stupid (Mark Weber being the sole exception), greeted Irving’s revelation as though it never happened. Business as usual! Even Irving acted like he’d forgotten what he said the moment after he said it, as if what remained of the objective historian inside him had compelled him to report his findings, but the part of him corrupted by the accolades and income from the deniers was like “okay, I paid tribute to honesty. Now let’s never speak of it again.”

Remember, I’m still in my early 20s here. I’m still learning. That’s no sin. And summer ‘94 was pivotal. How could we now discuss anything but the Reinhard extermination program, which was, and is, the very center of the Holocaust? But the “revisionists” had no interest.

October ‘94 I took another research trip to Europe, and I worked with anti-revisionist author Jean-Claude Pressac, who showed me the documentation (blueprints, work orders, communiques) regarding the gassing of Jews at the Natzweiler-Struthof camp in Alsace, and I found it fully convincing. But the chamber itself - the physical evidence - was barred from public view by the French government (typically idiotic behavior by the mainstream paladins of history; the questionable Krema 1 at Auschwitz Main Camp is shown off like a high school trophy, whereas the completely authentic Struthof chamber is shut to the public).

It took two days of arguing, but I was finally able to get approval from the French government to explore the Struthof chamber (with a government-provided escort) and videotape my examination. And indeed, it was a legit gas chamber.

After I got back to the U.S. I wanted to publish my findings.

No takers.

The brave TROOTHY revisionists didn’t wanna hear it. Denier extraordinaire Robert Faurisson had put the word out: I was never to be published again. I had found absolute proof of a Nazi gas chamber. Credit where it’s due - I was merely building on Pressac’s estimable research. But nobody had ever pushed as I did to get inside with a camera and document the room itself. I came back with footage nobody else had. Important historical footage.

But it was the wrong kind of footage for the “revisionists.”

Remember, in ‘94 there were no blogs, no social media…most homes didn’t have ANY Internet at all. You needed a hard-copy publisher to be heard on a national level.

Struthof was the last straw. The “revisionists” had ignored Irving’s findings, and now they were ignoring mine. Two years of mixing with these guys had soured me on them for good.

COMPLEXITIES OF THE ERA

Again, you have to put yourself back in the pre-Internet era. You couldn’t find everything about everything by clicking a mouse. You had to learn the long, hard way — meeting people, mixing with people, studying hard-copy documents. Today, there’s so much online about deniers that meeting them in person isn’t necessary. But in ‘92 you had to put in the hours. In that context, I don’t think two years in the pre-Internet era was an unreasonably long period of time to get in and out of a particular group or movement. Especially because one of the challenges I faced back then was the dilemma of what I call “orphan documents.” Those are docs ignored by both sides, the deniers and the mainstream historians. “Orphan documents” were things you had to find on your own.

For example, the Korherr Report - one of the most important documents of the Holocaust, yet generally unused and un-cited by both sides.

Dr. Richard Korherr was Himmler’s statistician. In 1942 he was commissioned by Himmler to compile a detailed report detailing how many Jews had been killed, how many had fled, and how many were still alive (and where). This wasn’t a public document; it was Himmler’s-eyes-only (with a condensed version prepared for Hitler).

Himmler wanted exact figures.

Korherr, with unfettered access to all SS documents, definitively concluded that as of the beginning of 1943, slightly over 2.4 million Jews had been killed in the Reinhard camps, the Ostland ghettoes (which functioned as death camps), and by the Einsatzgruppen execution squads.

You’d think that Himmler’s official death census would be in every Holocaust book. But no. “Great” scholars like Yad Vashem’s Yehuda Bauer rarely if ever cite it (in his 1982 magnum opus A History of the Holocaust, Bauer doesn’t cite Korherr once).

Deniers never cite Korherr either.

Amazing, huh? With the Mao and Stalin death toll, we’re forced to roughly calculate the figure via demographic extrapolation. But with the Holocaust, we have the main perpetrator, Himmler, commissioning a specific census of the murdered. A number. Everyone agrees it’s a legit document, yet few use it.

Why?

Because if you accept 2.4 million for the beginning of 1943, you cannot get to six million by April 1945. From ‘43 to ‘45, there would simply not be enough Jews subjected to “aktions” to get to 6 mil. Every mainstream scholar agrees that by the close of 1942, two-thirds of all Holocaust deaths had already occurred. So Korherr’s figure presents a problem.

That’s why I put my approximate figure of total Holocaust dead at 3.5 to 3.6 million. But not six. You simply cannot get to six in the two remaining years of the war.

Meanwhile, deniers won’t accept a figure above 271,000. Accepting 2.4 million by 1943? That blasphemes the tenets of their cult. It can’t be more than 300,000, period! Their pseudo-religion dictates it.

So the Korherr Report, being too low a number for the mainstream and too high for the deniers, gets buried. I had to find all this shit out for myself with no fucking Internet, dudes. So again I say, two years pre-Internet is not that long a time to get into something, learn some things, make some mistakes, learn from the mistakes, and get out.

And lest you think my estimate of 3.5-3.6 million is a crime of denial, I’ll point out that Gerald Reitlinger, in his 1953 masterwork The Final Solution (still considered the gold standard in the field), gave, for the final death count, a range of 4.1 to 4.5 million. There’s not much space between my 3.6 and Reitlinger’s 4.1, and I’m always open to anyone who can defend Reitlinger’s number, or even Hilberg’s 5.1 mil. But as I said, the extremists who despise me, and the extremists who idolize me, share a similar trait - they like speaking about me but never to me.

I want to make one more point, relating to the above text. The two extremes in this matter - I wouldn’t call it a “debate” because deniers have nothing to debate, but the two extremes are, odd as this may sound, comfortable with each other. I know that sounds weird, as the two “sides” despise each other. But they know each other, they know each other’s weaknesses. They know how to “dunk” on each other. It’s the inadvertent camaraderie of familiar enemies. But the six mil and not one less and the 300,000 and not one more inflexibles don’t really know what to do with a guy like me. It’s not that I’m “middle ground;” the Holocaust as commonly taught is 90% accurately taught. But I do have certain differences with the mainstream narrative (which I listed in my banned book, and perhaps in my next long-form Substack piece I’ll outline them again, with updates).

Hence the desire of both extremes to keep me in 1992; it’s their shared comfortable battlefield.

Here’s a fun fact: Amazon banned my 2014 book, but my 1992 IHR propaganda film is still available there. Ain’t that a kick in the testies? I sure as hell didn’t put it up; I renounced any rights to that stupid thing decades ago. But somebody listed it, and Amazon’s fine with it. But my very reasonable 2014 book? Banned.

Fun fact #2: Google “David Cole” and “Holocaust” and 7 of the first 10 search results are my 1992 work. Nothing I’ve done recently. Second page of results, same thing — 7 out of 10. My old stuff gets boosted like hell on Google, but nothing I’ve done since 1994 is up there until waaaaay down the line (I double-checked on Tor to make sure I wasn’t seeing results unique to my browser).

Everyone likes 1992 Dave, either as an “ally” or a bitter foe! Everyone likes it that way. Everyone but me.

THE CHRONOLOGY

Anyway, let’s jump into that chronology. I’m only using things that can be verified via non-revisionist/denier sources.

November 1994

I wrote a lengthy dissection of Faurisson’s fraudulent work. I was most unsentimental and unsparing: I took his catalog apart piece-by-piece. I decided to start with him because I’d pegged him as the main malevolence that was robbing revisionism of whatever good and noble it may have at one time possessed. Faurisson was the worst of them all. He was also the most untouchable, as he’d built a cultlike-following that everyone from the rational Mark Weber to the drunken Bradley Smith was afraid to cross.

So that’s where I started, with the adulated faker who defined the dark path of denial.

After I finished the piece, nobody would touch it. It took months of me sending it around by mail in the first half of 1995 to get people to read it.

This is an archived version of the piece from the Nizkor site, an anti-denial archive run by B’nai B’rith of Canada. This archived post is dated June 11, 1995. That’s not when the piece was written (it was written in November ‘94); it’s when Nizkor archived it.

While I stand by everything I wrote, I’m still a bit ashamed of this one because I banged it out on an electric typewriter (I didn’t get a PC until 2001; rather late in the game, no?), and there are multiple spelling errors. My author’s pride hates that, but here’s the link.

It’s 9,240 words, so here are some highlights. And keep in mind the chronology: this was written in late ‘94, and archived in June ‘95.

Nizkor’s introduction:

David Cole, the only known Jewish Holocaust “revisionist,” has
recently responded to criticisms from his “colleagues,” specifically
Robert Faurisson and Henri Roques, in a sixteen-page letter. As Mr. Cole describes it, he has responded privately for a number of years, but now feels that a line has been crossed and is choosing to air his frustrations with the “revisionist” movement, and Faurisson in particular, publicly.

In any event, throughout the letter, and in the beginning and ending
pages particularly, Mr. Cole makes Faurisson out to be quite
dishonest. I am glad to see that he has suddenly decided to reveal
the doubts he’s had all these years, though I don’t understand why he
waited for so long.

(To repeat, I don’t think two years in the scheme of things is “so long.” Especially when you’re 21, 22. I had an active social life, I was still working in casting, and years seemed to go by quickly back then)

To pique your curiosity, here are some excerpts from Cole’s letter:

…many of the points Faurisson has made about Krema 1 are
dangerously fraudulent.

…I had come to believe, after a thorough investigation of
Faurisson’s claims, that any “assurance” from Faurisson should not
be uncritically accepted, but rather immediately suspect.

Revisionists want it both ways; they want to A) claim that Krema 1
in its present state is a post war creation and B) use Krema 1’s
present state as proof that gassings couldn’t have occurred in it.

Faurisson had ALTERED his fax and CHANGED the story…replacing the
word “oven” with “gas chamber.”

…as I have just shown, Faurisson isn’t above altering his own
texts if the situation requires…

Each time I stressed my opposition to racism or Nazism, each time I
stressed that my revisionist views were the product of intellectual
curiosity and not pro-fascism, I was embraced even closer by the
far-right because, after all, who better to have as an ally than
someone from the opposing camp?

…folks who only months earlier were giving me ridiculous praise as
a “great man” are now giving me equally ridiculous scorn for being
a “turncoat” now that I’ve dared to stray from the standard dogma.

…I’m truly perplexed by the SURPRISE that some of you
[Holocaust-deniers] are showing about my Struthof statements.
Stop acting like you’ve been hustled, guys. From day one I made it
clear that I’m a leftist, race-mixing, atheistic Jew who has no
allegiance to any dogma and who’d gladly agree that there were gas
chambers if only the proof could be found. It’s not my fault if
some of you thought that I was only saying those things to fool the
public and that privately I was “one of you.”

Faurisson is…quoting a passage and then TELLING us what we’ve just
read, hoping we won’t notice any incongruity between the passage
and Faurisson’s explanation. Faurisson is quoting a passage that
speaks of exterminations in part – AT LEAST in part, and then he
TELLS us that we in fact HAVEN’T just read what we’ve read…

…I think there is a very high probability, based on my own strict
standard of documentary evidence, that the Struthof gas chamber was
indeed used to kill Jews…

Coming up is the most important part of my Faurisson piece. It shows that in late ‘94 I was castigating revisionists/deniers for not acknowledging the Reinhard exterminations. Indeed, it demonstrates my complete exasperation with “the movement” and my longing to separate from it.

Faurisson is highly, and humorously, mistaken if he thinks he’s “harming” me by trying to get be blackballed by the far-right. In fact Faurisson’s timing couldn’t be more impeccable. And while Faurisson may be doing me a favor by helping to end the far-right’s fascination with me, I certainly hope that all the revisionists who idolize Faurisson to the point of taking his claims on faith and as gospel will not allow it to go unnoticed that Faurisson has taken this route for his “response.” Is this the behavior one expects from a revisionist? It is certainly the behavior one would expect from Deborah Lipstadt.

And while Faurisson is calling for an end to research (note his last conference speech), I wish to ceaselessly prod him (and others) with those things that I believe revisionists have yet to adequately explain (the same way I’ll never let up about the things that the “exterminationists” have failed to adequately explain).

As an example, I’ll point specifically to Faurisson’s response to David Irving’s “Journal of Historical Review” essay/conference speech on the Goebbels diary, appearing in the letters section of the current “Journal of Historical Review” (March/April ’95). Faurisson quotes from the March 27, 1942 Goebbels diary entry, and then writes “In itself, this last sentence (“Broadly speaking, one can probably say that 60 percent of them will have to be liquidated, while only 40 percent can be put to work” – Goebbels) tends to show that the Reich Minister of Propaganda did not know for sure that there was a German policy to physically exterminate the Jews, either totally or in part.”

“IN PART?” What does he think Goebbels is referring to, if not a liquidation IN PART. Faurisson is pulling an old “exterminationist” trick here by quoting a passage and then TELLING us what we’ve just read, hoping we won’t notice any incongruity between the passage and Faurisson’s explanation. Faurisson is quoting a passage that speaks of exterminations in part – AT LEAST in part, and then he TELLS us that we in fact HAVEN’T just read what we’ve read – with no explanation given to clarify why Goebbels isn’t actually saying what he so clearly seems to be saying. I think Faurisson has grown too used to having his word taken as gospel. Naked emperors don’t only exist on the “exterminationist” side.

The importance to me of this Goebbels diary passage is that for the first time we have a reliable piece of evidence which points to a plan of separation between those Jews fit for “labor” and the rest, who “have to be liquidated.” Hate it though some of us may, this fits the “exterminationist” model much better than it does the revisionist one. If revisionists wish to explain this passage some other way, they’ll have to do better than the explanation offered by Faurisson. For myself, I can say that the meaning of this Goebbels diary passage, IN RELATION to events occurring at that time, has yet to be adequately explained by any revisionist.

And Faurisson’s explanation of the “Jew transport from Berlin. No liquidation” Himmler note is similarly thin. He neglects to take into account that this entire transport WAS liquidated, in toto. It seems to me that a better explanation is that these Jews were being sent to an area where liquidations of Jews were taking place.

June 1995

Needless to say, once the Faurisson piece was posted, I received many letters. And one interview request, from a Holocaust researcher named Donald van Handle (or van Handel; I don’t recall the spelling). And that interview was also archived on Nizkor. Here’s THAT link.

And here are some excerpts. Remember to keep up with the chronology: this is from June 15, 1995…four days after the Faurisson piece was posted.

Van Handle’s intro:

I have recently had the pleasure of discussing matters of historical revisionism with David Cole. His answers are at once, funny, angry, serious, and insightful, but above all, honest. He is critical of revisionists and exterminationists alike. One may disagree with David, but no one can claim that he is insincere.

Excerpts of my responses:

All I’m saying is this; it very well might be that the remodeling of Krema
1, the Auschwitz swimming pool, the human soap story, the reduced
Auschwitz death toll, the fake Dachau “gas chamber,” etc. etc. ARE INDEED
irrelevant to the debate over the existence of homicidal gas chambers, or
the existence of a genocide plan. But you only do yourself a disservice
by AUTOMATICALLY DENYING the truthfulness of everything that proceeds from the mouths of revisionists.

Several months ago the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s magazine “Response”
published an article calling me a liar for saying that there was a
swimming pool at the Auschwitz Main Camp. This is exactly the kind of
counterproductive strategy that “exterminationists” can’t seem to get
beyond. We all know that there was a swimming pool. We also understnad
that the presence of this pool IN NO WAY negates the possibility of
gassings at Auschwitz. It’s totally irrelevant! But there’s no reason to
LIE about anything. Just be truthful. Don’t scream “LIAR – THERE WAS NO
POOL.” Just rationally explain “yes, there’s a pool, but at best it was
for the few favored Main Camp inmates – one of many perks available to
preferred inmates – but it is in no way representative of the experience
of rank and file inmates – especially Birkenau inmates.”

There, now, doesn’t that feel better!? No need to lie. Don’t
underestimate the capacity of your audience to take in seemingly
contradictory pieces of evidence.

Now, just because the “exterminationists” don’t provide much hard evidence doesn’t necessarily mean that there IS no hard evidence…the gas chamber and genocide stories might indeed be true IN SPITE of the smugness and laziness of the “exterminationists.” Just because most of these people are so sure of their own theory that they feel no need to really go out and PROVE anything DOESN’T MEAN that they wouldn’t find any evidence if they ever just get up off their fat asses to look.

(The David Irving v. Deborah Lipstadt defamation trial in 1999/2000 would force them to do just that…and as I predicted, it worked out well for them. Remember, in 1993 Deborah Lipstadt infamously wrote in her book Denying the Holocaust “This has been a difficult project because at times I have felt compelled to prove something I knew to be true.” As though it’s a burden for a professor to “prove something they know to be true.” What else are they supposed to prove? Something they know to be false? Ironically, only when Lipstadt was sued by Irving did she break a sweat to “prove something she knew to be true,” and - just as I said it would in 1995 - it worked! Her team cleaned Irving’s clock. But she shouldn’t have had to be forced into doing what professors oughta be doing anyway)

Have I encountered anti-Semitism from revisionists? That’s a tricky one, because most of them are always on their best behavior when I’m around. The ones, and there are many, who believe in wacky Jewish conspiracy theories or the supremacy of the “white race” rarely let me in on the joke because they know that I won’t share those views. I always volunteer my views on such subjects as religion, race-mixing, conspiracy theories, etc., just so there should be no confusion about where I stand on those things.

VAN HANDLE: What difficulties has your position on the “Holocaust” resulted in for you?

COLE: My position has resulted in a plethora of “difficulties,” but
the majority of them I now realize were due to my own thoughtlessness,
impatience, pig-headedness, and my mishandling of several things that, if
handled better, would have resulted in life being a bit easier for me. So
I’m not going to bitch about my “problems” because so many of them are
squarely of my own making. I’m not a “victim,” with the exceptions being
the times I’ve been beaten up (there’s no reason to do this to ANYONE, no
matter how much you disagree with their positions) and the times the media has GROSSLY misrepresented my views. And by that I don’t mean “negative press.” I mean the times they have manufactured quotes from me in order to distort and falsify my positions. Like when “60 Minutes” re-edited my appearance on the “Montel Williams Show” by taking the scene when I’m introduced at the beginning of the show – and I nod “yes” when Montel says I’m Jewish, and placing that affirmative nod after a point later in the show when Montel asks if the Holocaust is a “myth.” So, the millions of viewers who watch “60 Minutes,” saw Montel ask “Is it a myth?” – and then they saw me nod in the affirmative. The deceit is only obvious to the few who have seen the actual video of the “Montel Williams” episode. How can this kind of media behavior be excused? I’ve NEVER said that the Holocaust is a “myth” or “hoax” or “lie.” Yet to all of my family and friends across the country (and to the MILLIONS of other people) who saw “60 Minutes,” this was the unmistakable impression. And of course we all know that the great Mike Wallace wouldn’t lie, right? “60 Minutes” caused me a GREAT deal of pain and grief, and I think that this ranks with one of those things that is NOT in any way my fault, because I’m more than willing to defend (and defend PUBLICLY) any of my beliefs. But I’m not responsible for the gross and malicious behavior of some reporters and producers who, frustrated with the fact that I don’t say what they would LIKE me to say, bypass all boundaries of ethical behavior to “make” me say the words they want to hear.

I think that Faurisson is a complete fraud and liar masquerading as a historian…a man who’s spent years misleading people and misrepresenting crucial evidence in order to support his otherwise insupportable positions. Faurisson rarely if ever makes himself available to defend ANY of his fraudulent positions, most of which fall to shreds at the first hint of a critical question.

The response of the revisionist “community” to this dispute has persuaded
me to sever my ties with those few revisionists I ever had “ties” with.
The response from Faurisson, Bradley Smith, Mark Weber, and Dr. Robert
Countess (among others) has been the same. “How can you be so hard on
Faurisson,” they ask, “he’s suffered so badly at the hands of the French
government. Have some compassion!” This response really burns me up, not only because it bypasses any discussion of the truth of my specific complaints about Faurisson’s work, but even more because it comes from people who have NEVER given an OUNCE of compassion to concentration camp survivors, even though these people have suffered far more than Faurisson EVER has. To me, nothing is worse than a hypocrite. Time and again these revisionists have derided and mocked camp survivors, bragging that they won’t soften their tone because of the suffering of these people. Bradley Smith, who called Mel Mermelstein a “fraud,” “vainglorious prevaricator,” and “false tale-spinner,” and Elie Wiesel a man “not wrapped too tight,” has lost the moral right to ask me to soften my tone on Faurisson because “the poor man’s been through so much.” Faurisson has been telling revisionists that I’m some kind of villain for being so “hard” on such an “oppressed” man as he. But Faurisson, who took immense pleasure in hounding Otto Frank until his dying day, and who was NEVER swayed by the fact that Frank lost his entire family because of the Nazis, has NO RIGHT to now ask for an immunity from criticism that he has always denied others. Faurisson is suffering? Perhaps. But he has it a thousand times better than a Jew living under Nazism. I refuse to have a double standard. People may not like me, but I never want it said that I’m not fair. I’ve criticized the testimony of survivors and mainstream Holocaust scholars, and I’ll be damned if I’m not going to be just as hard if not harder on a fraud like Faurisson.

As I told Bradley in a recent letter, my association with the revisionist “movement” was always conditional; I share very little or nothing in common with any of these people except for a desire to probe the unanswered questions regarding the Holocaust. The minute I felt I could no longer trust the revisionists to be genuinely interested in getting to the truth of the gas chamber / genocide story was the minute I was out the door. As far as I’m concerned now, I’m no more in their “camp” than the “exterminationist” one. This may sound foolish to the smug anti-revisionists of the ‘net, who are probably bursting with sarcastic laughter that I would have EVER really thought that the revisionists had integrity. But back in the real world, it must be understood that both Mark Weber and David Irving are highly competent World War Two historians – and this is something that even a master libel artist like Michael Shermer (of the “Skeptic” and the “Donahue Show”) was forced to admit

I’ve been a part of most of the major media “adventures” (like “Montel Williams,” “Phil Donahue,” “60 Minutes” “The New Yorker,” etc.) and I think some people probably get the idea that I like doing that kind of stuff. But these people get a skewed perspective of my life. At best they see maybe two or three hours out of my entire year. They don’t have a clue about what I do with my roughly 16 or so waking hours each day. I’m really only in my element when I’m researching something. I hate doing the talk shows. Since I declined to appear on “60 Minutes” I’ve gone cold turkey. No more media for a long time. The worst part of the talk shows is, you’re sitting in your dressing room or the green room, waiting to go on, and you’re going over in your mind just WHAT you plan to say for the few uninterrupted minutes of talk time you’ll be afforded on the show. So you’re going over your “best” material. It’s like a comedian, about to go on the “Tonight Show” for the first time, going over his “best” seven minutes! But history isn’t like that. You can’t refine and edit the entire Holocaust into seven minutes! History is all about specifics, details, and digression. It’s an insult to the subject to demand a “brief” digest. Claude Lanzmann had the right idea; the longer the better!

But maybe my appearances on the talk shows have yielded some positive
results. After all, didn’t the “Montel Williams” episode I did with Mark
Weber end up reuniting two long lost brothers, who each thought the other had been gassed at Auschwitz? And I think that my film clips from
Majdanek (which I showed on “Donahue”) might also have some positive
effects; I’ve been told by a “little bird” (a usually reliable little bird) that there’s a chance that the Majdanek Museum might soon jettison one or all of their “homicidal” gas chambers. Last year, when I met with Majdanek Museum Curator Tomasz Kranz, he seemed ready to do that with their largest “homicidal” (actually delousing) gas chamber. I’m not a betting man, but I’d wager that, more than any concerns about historical accuracy, the major concern of the Majdanek Museum is that without “gas chambers” to view, no one would have any reason to travel to Lublin!

Remember, that was June 1995. I made it clear that I’d severed my ties to the “revisionists.” Very clear.

Following that interview, B’nai B’rith’s Nizkor, in a piece about the Goebbels Diary “liquidation” passage, noted “As even the revisionist David Cole has admitted, revisionists have yet to provide a satisfactory explanation of this document.”

On June 20, 1995, five days after the van Handle interview, I had a back-and-forth with Jamie McCarthy, the guy who wrote (regarding my Faurisson piece) “I am glad to see that (Cole) has suddenly decided to reveal the doubts he’s had all these years, though I don’t understand why he waited for so long.”

Nizkor archived my reply; here it is. It’s a lot of “inside baseball,” but here are a few key Dave quotes:

You’re a little unfair regarding my attitude toward Faurisson. You
accuse me of not making my criticisms of Faurisson public, yet how
exactly do you know WHAT I’ve told reporters over the years? Are you of
the mind that the press always prints everything I say? In your mind,
is the press so objective and fair that they don’t selectively choose
the things they print in order to force a certain angle? I can assure
you that, in EVERY in-depth print interview I’ve done in the last three
years (at least), I’ve voiced such objections about Faurisson. In fact,
I’ve always been honest about my opinions about ALL revisionists.
Surely you’ve seen the “Skeptic” article; Michael Shermer didn’t skimp
on printing my criticisms of Weber and Zundel (in fact, Shermer seemed
to prefer dwelling on those things, as opposed to my work on the gas
chambers).

Other editors and reporters have simply not published any of my
criticisms of other revisionists (and I guess you’ll think of some way
to make this my fault). When one compares the video of my press
conferences in Japan to the articles written about them, one can see
that the Japanese press simply didn’t want to report any of the things
I said about Faurisson, Weber, Zundel, and Leuchter. In most of my
interviews, there’s a vast discrepancy between what is printed and what
isn’t. My phone records show that I was on the phone with the “New
Yorker” reporter for over an hour. Yet in his article (November ’93) he
didn’t include ANY material from our interview. Similarly, I was on the
phone with a “Dallas Morning News” reporter for over THREE hours, yet her article contained ONE SENTENCE of mine. Do you think I wasted three hours with her talking about my cats, or ice cream, or the stock market? I talked about a variety of things, including my criticisms of other revisionists.

Just because YOU may not have heard of read certain things doesn’t mean
that I’ve never said them. I DO in fact live a life outside of and
independent from your awareness of my existence.

To be sure, my opinion of Faurisson has certainly changed over the
years, mainly owing to the fact that I pursued the same avenue with
Faurisson’s research as I took with the research of mainstream historians; I insisted on seeing the original sources for their claims. Unlike some folks, I don’t believe in reading just one or two books and then acting like I know it all. I always try to go back to original sources. This, of course, takes time. And it is generally seen as a waste of time by those among us who believe that one should just simply choose a point of view (“there were gas chambers” or “there weren’t gas chambers”) and stick with it regardless of the facts or unanswered questions. Unlike these people, I believe that theories are MADE to be amended over time as new evidence dictates. So, yes – I HAVE changed my opinion of Faurisson over time. Similarly, I used to think Raul Hilberg was an excellent historian, until I read his testimony at the Zundel trial, and until I was able to ask him some direct questions (through an intermediary). Once I saw the discrepancy between what he KNOWS and what he PUBLISHES, my opinion of him changed. Conversely, when I read Chris Browning’s testimony at the Zundel trial, I didn’t think very much of him as a historian. Yet after reading his “Fateful Months” and “Path to Genocide,” two of the best books in the genre, I developed a new respect for him. There’s no shame in changing an opinion. Okay, granted – it’s not the best strategy if you feel you’re in a “war” against real or imagined “enemies,” where the ends justify the means in the great battle to smash the evil ones. Frankly, I think this describes the mindset of BOTH the neo-Nazis who see themselves fighting the “Jewish conspiracy,” AND the many anti-revisionists who see themselves as “saving the world” from the “great Nazi conspiracy.”

I agree that a case could conceivably be made for homicidal gassings WITHOUT physical evidence, but I thought you would already understand this from reading my article about Struthof.

Okay, why have I made such a big deal out of pointing out that this stuff was from late ‘94 and the first half of ‘95? Because the death threat from Irv Rubin and the JDL — the $25,000 “bounty” they put on my head — was posted to the JDL website in December 1997, over two-and-a-half years later.

It’s a denier myth that the JDL threatened me and I “cucked.” By June 1995, I was done. Done with revisionists, done with the “movement.” I was publicly affirming the Reinhard exterminations, I was affirming gas chambers, I was explaining that the Auschwitz swimming pool and “wooden doorths” were irrelevant to the gassing question, I was copping to errors I’d made over the previous two years, I was calling out deniers for their fraud, and I was calling out my own youthful hubris. I was also explaining that I saw nothing wrong in evolving on an issue. At such a young age, that’s fine.

My God though, if I’d have known back then that nobody on either side of the debate would ever let me leave 1992, I’d have put a gun in my mouth.

Honestly, if I knew I’d be held here for eternity, I never would’ve said one fucking word about the Holocaust.

August 1995

I didn’t give up easy on trying to get the facts about the Struthof gas chamber to revisionists/deniers. When I struck out in the U.S., I found friendlier ears in France. The revisionists there were too familiar with Faurisson to be cowed by him like their craven American counterparts. This French magazine covered my Struthof work in August 1995:

And that was it. From that point on, nobody on either side would publish me. I was hated by the mainstream, and for that I blame myself solely, as it was my antics 1992-1994, in which I arrogantly tried to present myself as a dangerous renegade, that placed me squarely on the fringe. My actions, my consequences; I take full responsibility. And of course I was now hated by deniers too, but I don’t blame myself for that one. In fact, it’s very much a good thing to be hated by deniers; it means you’re doing something right.

And to repeat, as there were no blogs or social media or Amazon where a writer could self-publish to a large audience, I walked away. Done, finished. I left the scene in 1995.

By the time Irv Rubin issued his death threat in December ‘97, I was long out of the field; Rubin was just too stupid and obsessed to realize it. In fact, he was likely the first guy to mentally “freeze” me in 1992. Congrats Twitter idiots who can’t gauge the passage of time - Irv Rubin was your trailblazer. How proud you must be!

The fact is, by December 1997, I was gone.

And I stayed gone, as David Stein the GOP “party animal,” until my ex-girlfriend ratted out my past in April 2013 and it became a Guardian front-page story.

2013/2014

In 2013 I wrote my autobiography Republican Party Animal, published by the late great Adam Parfrey at Feral House in Spring 2014. And again, picking right up from 1995, I was fighting denial, not spreading it. In the book (now banned by Amazon, and out-of-print following Parfrey’s death) I devote tens of thousands of words to the Holocaust; here’s just one excerpt:

The Standard Story: Following the Wannsee Conference, and the decision to focus on Poland, extermination camps with gas chambers were set up in Poland: Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno (which had come into operation slightly earlier). These camps would mainly serve to eliminate massive segments of Polish Jewry.

My Take: Correct. From 1942 through 1943, Polish Jewry was subjected to one of the most brutal campaigns of mass murder in human history. Because of the secrecy surrounding those four extermination camps, and the fact that they were ploughed under and erased from existence in 1943, it’s difficult to be precise about certain details. But, more than enough circumstantial and documentary evidence exists to show that the train ride to those camps was one-way, and final.

What fascinated me was how Hitler and Himmler went from their 1940 pledge to not kill Jews to the death camps that were created in Poland in 1942. What changed? The first thing that changed was that the plan to permanently expel the Jews into the “Asian” part of Russia was thwarted when the German front stalled that winter. But that was a practical setback. More important, I believe, was a theoretical concept expressed by Sturmbannführer Höppner several months earlier. In a memo to Adolf Eichmann, Höppner floated this idea:

“A danger persists this winter that not all of the Jews (of the Warthegau district in Poland) can be fed. It should be seriously considered if the most humane solution is not to finish off those Jews incapable of work by some quick working means. In any case, this would be more pleasant than letting them starve to death.”

Never underestimate the power of an idea. Here’s where I believe we find the reason for the change in attitude from “we can’t kill them—that would be Bolshevist” to “it’s okay to kill them.” Höppner provided a perfect rationalization. When the “Bolshevists” liquidated entire peoples, they did so in the cruelest possible way—sending them to Siberia to slowly freeze and starve to death. Höppner’s take was, if you don’t want to be Bolshevist, don’t let those poor wretches freeze and starve. Rather, do the “humane” thing—euthanize them quickly and “pleasantly.”

See what he did there? He took Hitler and Himmler’s desire to do the opposite of what the Bolshevists do, and he turned it around, allowing them to now define “not being Bolshevist” in a way that would be most practical for his needs.

A new rationalization was born. Now, the “anti-Bolshevist” thing to do was “humane” euthanasia. And that pretty much sealed the fate of the Polish Jews.

It’s a funny book in parts, but also a decent history lesson. And even though it was published in 2014, it badly needs updating in 2024. Holocaust history never “freezes.” New stuff is discovered all the time. It’s a continuing process; you never declare a ‘ceiling,” not in 1992, not in 2014, not now.

Of course, it’s all moot as Amazon banned the book entirely and publishers won’t touch an Amazon-banned author.

After the book came out I began lacing into deniers mercilessly online. I’m not going to excerpt these links, because the pieces are head-to-toe attacks on deniers. They’re nothing but attacks on deniers. So I recommend reading the entire essays, if you’re so inclined.

From my old website, 2014:

My Unintentionally Negative Impact on Holocaust Revisionism

Cole (Again) on Treblinka and the Reinhard Camps

A guest essay, from 2015:

Unicornville and the Holocaust Deniers

From Facebook, 2016 (along with the essay, you can see me tussling with deniers in the comments):

Top Five Bullshit Holocaust Denial Arguments That Just Won’t Die

Over two-dozen YouTube videos (now banned) denouncing denial, preserved on AltCensored. Here’s one example:

The Final Solution to the Denier Question

Then there’s this Substack piece in which I countered a Counter-Currents author who questioned why I’m so anti-denier:

Counter-Currents Calls Me Out for Denying Denial

And this podcast from last year, focusing on my regrets from 32 years ago:

David Cole’s Final Word on the Final Solution

CONFRONTING THE CULT

Before being banned from Twitter, I’d routinely try to pull young people away from Holocaust denial. It’s something I did daily, for years, especially when I saw deniers invoking my name to get recruits. I became well-known for parachuting uninvited into Twitter threads in order to mess with denial recruiters.

I had some high-profile “deprogramming” successes. In 2017, when “Trump troll” Chuck Johnson cited my name in support of denial during a Reddit AMA (“Ask Me Anything,” an online Q&A), I reached out to him, we met for dinner, and by dessert, he officially backed off Holocaust denial. Of course, when the ADL reported on the Johnson AMA, it called me a “notorious Holocaust denier,” even though by 2017 nobody except the willfully ignorant or the flat-out deceitful called me a denier. The ADL could’ve humiliated Johnson by pointing out that he cited a man who fights against denial. But again, I’m more useful as a “forever 1992” villain. So it was up to me to reach out to Johnson myself to set him straight.

The ADL used Johnson’s mention of me in the AMA to target two of Johnson’s GOP friends: Rep. Matt Gaetz and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher. The latter was defeated in 2018 because “he’s friends with Chuck Johnson, who agrees with notorious Holocaust denier David Cole!” Post-1994 Dave can’t sink a congressman. So groups like the ADL and Media Matters have to keep me frozen in 1992; it’s more useful to them.

Connecting Tucker Carlson or a GOP congressman to post-‘94 Dave won’t harm them a bit! Only 1992 Dave can take ‘em down!

An even better story is Eric Hunt. In 2007, Hunt - a young, mentally-troubled denier - made headlines when he stalked Elie Wiesel at a San Francisco hotel and physically tried to force him to “confess his lies.” After serving time in prison, Hunt became the shining star in the denier lineup, making documentaries and being widely-feted (after all, he had the cred of assaulting Elie Wiesel).

After I was “outed” in 2013, Hunt made the mistake of reaching out to me, as if I’d be happy to meet him. I rebuffed him as too far gone (steering newbies away from denial is much easier than trying to talk sense to those who’ve surrendered their mind to the cult). But after repeated attempts on his part to be in touch, I finally let him have it with both barrels, calling him out on every lie he was spreading.

And to my surprise, he actually listened, realized his errors, and left the movement. Denial lost its “bright young future.”

Don’t take my word for my role in that. In 2017 notorious Holocaust denier Jim Rizzoli interviewed neo-Nazi Hadding Scott on the National Socialist Worldview website. And they discussed Hunt’s departure:

Jim: Here’s something that we’ve been discussing here, Diane and I. We’ve been discussing what’s happening in the revisionist movement. A lot of people, well not a lot, but some pretty high ranking people in the movement are kind of recanting! Like for instance Eric Hunt. You know, what do you think about what’s going on there?

Hadding: Well, Eric Hunt, I don’t know if it’s really “high ranking.” He’s got notoriety because he makes videos in which, I mean, he’s prominent, because he makes videos…

Jim: Right.

Hadding: I think mostly...Honestly I don’t pay a lot of attention to what other people do, but I’m sure mostly in his videos he summarizes other people’s findings.

Jim: Right.

Hadding: With Cole, he had an argument...

Jim: Oh! David Cole, yeah, yeah...

Hadding: And apparently he felt badly about his performance in the argument with Cole. And he felt he had been defeated, I guess. He said, “We really need to prove that those Jews weren’t killed in the Action Reinhardt Camps!”

My efforts to fight denial online are pretty much over now, perforce. Book banned, YouTube banned, Twitter banned; I’ve few opportunities to engage. Meanwhile, corrupt liars like Hananoki continue to call me a denier, which emboldens deniers, as they tout me as “the Jewish denier.” Indeed, the conspiracy theory on Twitter is that I was banned for being a denier! The bannings fuel the myth, and I can only watch from the sidelines as the myth grows.

WIKIPEDIA

And it gets worse when you factor in Wikipedia.

I’m including this section in part to further my case and in part to give you some firsthand insight into just how corrupt Wikipedia is, how it can target and impact a person’s life.

Everything I’ll be describing can be viewed in the “talk” section of my Wiki page (that’s where the trolls…sorry, “editors” who control the content of pages hash out among themselves why they chose to delete something).

Initially, my Wiki page was fair. It stated that some journalists and others (academics, people in the Holocaust field) call me a denier, while others reject assigning me that label. That’s all I ask the page to say, because it’s the truth. I’d never demand that the page say “Cole is NOT a denier!” The page should merely mention that there’s a difference of opinion on the issue. Sure, I’m not a denier, but I’m called one in the press, and that belongs on Wikipedia, as do the instances when the slur is not used.

As often happens on Wikipedia, a group of fanatics took over the editing of my page years ago. There is no central Wiki “authority.” Each page is like a city block, and a strong enough “gang” can take it over and bully anyone who trespasses.

The anonymous zealots (they all use screen names; there’s no accountability on Wikipedia) who took over my page HATE me. Pathologically. They immediately removed any mention of the difference of opinion regarding me being a denier. Since everything on Wiki has to be footnoted, the fanatics used as a footnote for me being a denier the May 2013 front-page interview I did with The Guardian.

It was my only published interview following my “outing.”

And don’t I look overjoyed.

The journalist who caught the story was Rory Carroll, at the time the L.A. correspondent for The Guardian (he’s now the Ireland correspondent).

I’d never met Rory before that interview. He made it clear that they were gonna run the story with or without my input, so I figured I’d have nothing to lose by talking, though it was uncomfortable being asked about a topic I hadn’t given much thought to since 1995.

I did the interview, the front-page story ran, and…it wasn’t bad. Carroll went out of his way to NOT call me a denier.

Rory was fair and humane; he’s a genuinely fine journalist.

Well, the Wikipedia trolls used that Guardian piece as a supporting footnote to call me a “denier,” even though the piece does not call me a denier.

I protested. The “editors” laughed me off. They told me that Rory calling me a “revisionist” violated Wikipedia’s “no euphemisms” rule, and since they see “revisionist” as a euphemism for “denier,” they said the no euphemisms rule meant they could footnote Rory’s column to a label he purposely didn’t use.

I emailed Rory.

I want to stress that Rory is a world-renowned, award-winning author and journalist, at a newspaper with a distinct left-wing editorial bias. The Guardian is not right-wing or sympathetic to Holocaust denial.

And Rory gave me this quote to pass along to the Wiki editors who were using his interview to support calling me a denier:

Hi David,

Ask the wiki folk to contact me. I'm willing to go on the record to say I described you as a revisionist because that was the accurate, appropriate term, that I considered denialist to be inaccurate, and that I considered (and still consider) the distinction to be important.

Rory

Faced with that, the Wiki fanatics replaced the Guardian footnote with two secondary sources that mentioned the Guardian interview in 2013. See, when a paper of record (Guardian, NY Times, etc.) gets an exclusive scoop, other newspapers/websites link to it and add their own secondhand text. But it’s not their story. These are secondary sources. Wiki’s rules are ostensibly that primary sources (the original piece) must be used, not secondary ones. But in my case, those secondary sources called me a denier (The Wrap - a second-rate entertainment site, and The American Spectator - a conservative opinion site, were both used in place of the Guardian - a news site), so the fanatics violated their own primary source rule just to preserve their need to call me a denier. They replaced primary-source Guardian with secondary-source sites that are not only not primary, they’re not even news sites.

That’s the arbitrariness of it. “No euphemism rule?” “Primary source rule?” The bullies choose to employ or ignore what they will.

When I attempted to intervene further, giving the zealots examples of instances in which people of note said I’m not a denier, they told me that they’d only allow discussion of the matter if the debate were to ever be covered in the press.

If the debate over you being or not being a denier makes the news, it deserves to be on your page, they assured me.

Well that was soon to happen.

In 2019 a judicial review board ruled in that I’m not a Holocaust denier. A Memphis criminal courts judge had posted one of my Takimag columns on Facebook. “Judge posts Holocaust denier’s column!” screamed the Tennessee papers. Soon enough, Newsweek, The Jerusalem Post, USA Today, the AP, the Forward, Yahoo! News, U.S. News & World Report, MSNBC, HuffPo, and the British tabloids took the story viral. Congressman Steve Cohen (D-TN) denounced the judge, and the ADL, NAACP, and CAIR demanded his removal.

The Shelby County Commission Law Enforcement and Courts Committee endorsed a resolution to censure the judge, and the case was turned over to the Tennessee Board of Judicial Conduct, which has “broad powers to investigate, hear, and determine charges sufficient to warrant sanctions or removal.”

Members of the Board of Judicial Conduct, the ultimate arbiter of judicial matters in the state of Tennessee, include the dean of the Nashville School of Law (who’s also a former Tennessee Supreme Court justice), officers from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, city attorneys, assistant district attorneys, assistant U.S. attorneys, an FBI agent, a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent, a director at one of the nation’s premier nuclear security companies, the president of the Tennessee Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Division, and a former senior administrator at Johns Hopkins and Duke. The Board is diverse; male and female, black and white—top people in their field.

The Board ruled against censuring or otherwise sanctioning the judge, beyond giving him a letter of reprimand stating that he needs to make his Facebook private if he’s going to post political material of any stripe. But regarding the main issue - did he post the work of a Holocaust denier - the Board ruled, and I quote: “The investigation revealed that the author David Cole is not a Holocaust denier.”

These top legal minds did what Hananoki and all the people who call me denier could do but don’t: they read my work.

The ruling was covered by the local and national press. The American Bar Association Journal noted in an article about the Board’s decision, “Earlier coverage had described the author of the article, David Cole, as a Holocaust denier. But the letter of reprimand said an investigative panel probe revealed that Cole is not a Holocaust denier.”

The ruling was also covered by The Jerusalem Post (“According to the judicial board letter, ‘The investigation revealed that the author is not a Holocaust denier’”), the Memphis Commercial Appeal (“The Nov. 15 judicial board letter says, ‘The investigation revealed that the author is not a Holocaust denier’”), The Times of Israel, and a dozen other publications/sites.

The topic of me being or not being a denier was now in the press, just as the Wiki “editors” demanded it must to be mentioned on my page. So the goalposts had to be moved.

They refused to allow any mention of the judicial board’s ruling.

Why?

Because, to quote one of the trolls, “The Tennessee Board of Judicial Conduct is not an expert in holocaust [sic] denialism.” The “editors” stated that the judges’ ruling can’t be mentioned on Wikipedia because the judges are not degreed professionals in the Holocaust field. Thus was invented a new Wikipedia standard — apparently applied only to me — that no judicial matter can be mentioned on the site unless the judge(s) have advanced degrees in the matter that was ruled on. By that standard, no medical malpractice ruling can be added to Wikipedia unless the judge is a medical doctor; no ruling regarding plane crash liability can be on the site unless the judge is a pilot. It’s lunatic, of course; judges and juries hear expert testimony — they’re not supposed to be the experts.

To my knowledge, the Wikipedia “Cole Standard” of judges having to be degreed experts in the disciplines involved in matters they preside over has been applied solely to me, alone among the millions of people and topics on the site.

Moreover, the trolls added, the ruling and all the press it garnered can’t be added to my page because “this finding is disputed” (and yes, Deborah Lipstadt criticized the ruling and called me a denier in the Commercial Appeal). Hence Cole Standard #2 - a newsworthy judicial ruling cannot be mentioned on Wikipedia if some people think it’s wrong.

Again, a standard applied only in my case.

Finally, the trolls declared “There is no reason to presume (without evidence) that the TN decision was correct just because it came from a judge or official panel.”

Cole Standard #3: A judicial ruling must be seen as “correct” by the editors before it can be added to the site. Wikipedia doesn’t exist to simply give the objective details of events of note; it’s an opinion site run by people who use it to promote their own biases. Ironically, nobody who tried to add the ruling to my page ever raised the question of whether it’s “correct” or not, and I never asked anyone to, because that would go against the site’s supposed mandate to be objective. The proper way to detail the Tennessee ruling would be to quote it (with footnotes), then add “but the ruling was disputed by Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt (with footnote).”

Just the facts.

But like I said, these fanatics despise me with a psychopathic intensity normally reserved for someone who’s done you some personal wrong.

Or at least for actual Nazis.

These things feed on each other. Amazon couldn’t cite a single objectionable passage in my book, but Wikipedia says I’m a denier, and that’s evidence enough. YouTube couldn’t cite a single reason to ban my videos, but Wiki says I’m a denier, and now so does Amazon, so YouTube was like, “they both can’t be wrong.”

The YouTube ban came the same week that Media Matters’ Hananoki called me a denier. And the Amazon ban came the week after Debra Messing launched her Twitter crusade to get my book banned. So many people who’ve never read me, never met me, yet hate me.

TO CONCLUDE…

I am not a denier; and if you read my work you’ll know that. More than not being a denier, I’ve been attacking denial since 1994.

It’s not 1992 anymore. I split from the revisionist scene in ‘94 after it drifted into denial. I split from it openly, admitting my youthful errors. That was thirty fucking years ago, and I’m sick and tired of people using me as a commodity to support their pro-denial or anti-denial obsessions.

But I’ll never get any mercy on this. No mercy, no empathy. No escape from 1992.

This was just a week ago right here on Substack. I used to get this daily on Twitter, and it follows me here, even with my paltry 1,670 subscribers (a number that never grows because my reach is dead).

“You and him would get along great” says the anonymous loser who’s never read me and never met me.

Oh but he just knows he knows me!

You got any idea what it’s like having a cult of morons who worship a fictional version of you that exists only in their low-IQ minds?

Then realizing that you inadvertently spawned that cult 32 years ago?

Then having to cope with the fact that you can’t kill the cult, because you’re banned on social media, banned from having a book on Amazon, and no publisher will touch you because a bunch of imbeciles on both sides of an issue want to freeze you in time for their own purposes?

It’s suffocating, and I’m bothered by it. You would be too.

Trust me on this…you would be too.

Thank you for reading. Remember, every beer you buy Dave goes straight into his “unpublishable author” job security fund!