Covering this whole topic reminds me of when I wrote an article called “Why Can’t Everything Be Free? ” and someone said something to me like, “Are we so far gone that this needs to be explained to people?” The answer is, “Yes, we are indeed.” This topic is sort of like that.
I'm really close minded about some subjects; and no amount of discussion will EVER move me in any way towards anti-semitism or holocaust denial, or of any questioning of Israel's "right to exist." I'll bet you, John, that you can guess why in two words: yup, "evangelical Christian." I actually don't see how anybody who accepts the Bible as the inerrant word of God can even take a single step down that rabbit hole, or as the Bible might say, that wide road to hell. They better repent, and start hoping that God will choose to forgive them for their sinful doubt. The rest of the list is a sad commentary on social media, and our education system.
I get your point. But, yes, some on the list I don't consider anything but periodically provocative. Given the long list of Democrat propaganda that has masqueraded as mainstream news, I'm maybe more tolerant of provocative and even some conspiratorual musing. I tried to be nice and respectful to my left community until I confirmed my suspicion that most of them live in the upside down of absurdity that is hazardous to everything and everyone they get power or influence over.
I think it’s imperative, specifically because the left lives in an increasingly bizarre world of denial and fantasy (which I’m sure we both agree on), that those of us on the right side of the political spectrum don’t fall into the same trap and become like them.
I absolutely agree that Provocative is fine. I think it’s even necessary at times because of the left’s desire to suppress everything they dislike.
Yet, I think it’s imperative that we don’t welcome those that deny reality (an accusation we frequently and justifiability level against leftists) into our ranks, especially those that would deny the obvious because of a hatred of others based only on their religion.
The real problem isn't denial that the Holocaust happened, it's that the crimes of the National Socialists are kept in the forefront of our cultural consciousness even to this day, but the atrocities of the communists are either ignored, rationalized or "put in context."
A just and proper interpretation of the Holocaust would make CRYSTAL CLEAR that it, the Holodomor, Stalin's purges, the body count of the Great Leap Forward and all the other horrors of totalitarianism are the natural result, not of a racist ideology, but of a political philosophy that regards the individual human being, Imago Dei, as nothing more than a disposable pawn who exists solely to serve The State.
That even 1% believe that the Holocaust never happened proves that there are a significant number of genuinely stupid people (see First Law of Human Stupidity, Carlo M. Cipolla) AND that their are a significant number of people who believe in conspiracy theories.
Further evidence that our education system is a national disgrace.
With the warning label on that Pew research graph "opt-in panels overstate extreme attitudes", I think it should never be put up. I don't believe those numbers represent the actual electorate. There are plenty of kooks and cranks out there on both sides, and clearly there is more evidence that distrust of any past media narrative is suspect as being propagated by the regime in control of the corporate media editorial power, but I know A LOT of people on both sides of the political aisle and I find very few kooks and cranks on the right side... I think because being a righty tends to require a lot of LOGOS processing. Conservatives are less likely to be emotionally exploited and influenced by their media feeds. However, PATHOS and ETHOS dominates the left cohort that I know. They head off into irrational land at the smallest of encouragement. The conspiracies run deep and wide if the topic otherwise creates bad feelings in their little hypersensitive selves.
I hate to tell you, but there is no shortage of kooks and cranks on the right or people like Alex Jones and Candace Owens wouldn't be as popular as they are.
I am actually thrilled to see both Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson getting brutally criticized from the Right these days, but they still both have huge audiences. Will that continue? I hope not, but as of right now? They do. Tucker Carlson was even invited to speak at TPUSA events not so long ago.
I think that you’re right and hope so too. I do think they are looking just do eyeballs to get more likes or whatever and thus more money. It’s rather pathetic in my opinion.
Are they really popular? Or are they just niche players to a small cohort? Compare that to CNN, MSNBC and The View. Or Heather Cox Richardson's Substack.
From my perspective, because there is little evidence of mass kookiness and crankiness on the right, the left amplifies the few on the right to manufacture a false moral equivalency.
Here is another consideration. Many if not most of the right-side claimed conspiracy theories played over the last decade, especially during COVID, have turned out to be true. Meanwhile I cannot think of a left-side myth that has held up.
It can be hard sometimes to know how popularity online translates in the larger world sometimes. For example, someone like Nick Fuentes who constantly gets attention on X, has, to the best of my knowledge, never gotten 1000 people to gather in the real world anywhere. So, how "real" is his popularity? I think that's an open question
That being said, I can name off a number of conspiracy theorists and/or Anti-Semites on the Right who at least qualify as extremely "online" popular including Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Mike Flynn, Nick Fuentes, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly, Mike Lindell, The HodgeTwins, Candace Owens, Jake Shields and Andrew Tate among others.
Some people might not agree on all of those or might like one or two, but to me, they're all heads of the same hydra and yeah, they do have a big following. Granted, I would still absolutely say the Left is significantly worse, but I don't consider it to be a small problem. I think it's metastasized to a genuine threat to the entire conservative movement because the things these people are promoting are so vile and toxic that it will ultimately destroy anything on the Right that embraces it.
Sadly, we live in the post-modernist world where every fact is up for grabs.
I've given up arguing with these people--mercifully there aren't too many of them on Substack--so I just block them. I expect that if everyone who's as horrified as you and I are did the same, they'd wind up isolated in an echo chamber and we wouldn't need to worry about them.
But you cannot argue someone out of a position they didn't argue themselves into.
Yeah, it feels like a lot of people take positions like this based on nothings more than feels or trying to seem "edgy," and ultimately it ends up helping to enable some of the worst sociopaths in our entire society.
To offer a respectful & slightly contrarian take: there are plenty of reasons to worry about the declining sympathy for Jews & Israel among the young (and however much young Republicans are genuinely bad on this, campus Leftists and other young Democrats post-10/7 are 1000x worse).
That said, the language in this poll - "was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe" is broad enough to include David Cole-style moderate revisionists as well as virulent antisemites. I've moved toward Cole's position over the years I've been reading him, and I hope that it - and not the flat-wrong denier position - becomes the norm in the next few years.
The rest of this (long) comment elaborates what I mean by Holocaust revisionism.
These aspects of mainstream Holocaust understanding are correct:
1) Substantially all of the European Jewish communities were uprooted and their inhabitants generally killed,
2) between 1939 & 1945
3) by the Nazis and non-German collaborators
4) in a systematic, deliberate effort.
Where the mainstream gets it wrong and why:
1) 6 million dead is an exaggeration; an accurate total is in the (still appallingly evil) 3.5-4.5 million range.
Why: there's a document called the Korherr Report, named for its author who was the head of statistics for Heinrich Himmler; Himmler had asked him for an update on how the Final Solution was going, and he calculated that 2.4 million Jews had been "evacuated" (i.e., killed in Eastern Europe) as of January 1, 1943.
Given that Korherr's report relies on then-current data and has been widely accepted as accurate, and given that mainstream Holocaust historians are in agreement that roughly 2/3 of the Holocaust deaths occurred before 1943, it's extremely unlikely that 3.6 million more Jews were killed in the period of 1943-45
2) Auschwitz paints an inaccurate picture of how the Nazis did most of their killing.
As you note, more Jews were killed in the extermination camps like Treblinka and Belzec, but the number of Jews killed by the "mobile" Einsatzgruppen was also much higher than people typically think.
Zyklon B is the most well-known Nazi murder weapon, but "ordinary" carbon monoxide might have killed just as many people, to say nothing of all of the mass shootings with 10,000+ victims. After they were dead, the crematoria
Why? One quote that's stuck with me from Timothy Snyder (not a revisionist as far as I know) in Bloodlands: 75+ years after WWII, we don't even have an accurate understanding of how Hitler did mass killings, let alone how Stalin did. I think this is rooted in the fact that Holocaust survivors who've lived to tell their stories are disproportionately people from the *least* lethal camps - Auschwitz and Buchenwald both had over 100,000 survivors, compared to Belzec (<10) and Treblinka (70) and Babi Yar (<100).
Very disappointing article. I kept waiting for the ‘sarc off’ but it never came. If you haven’t figured out such basic truths yet it’s hard to imagine you have anything relevant to say on other matters.
I'm really close minded about some subjects; and no amount of discussion will EVER move me in any way towards anti-semitism or holocaust denial, or of any questioning of Israel's "right to exist." I'll bet you, John, that you can guess why in two words: yup, "evangelical Christian." I actually don't see how anybody who accepts the Bible as the inerrant word of God can even take a single step down that rabbit hole, or as the Bible might say, that wide road to hell. They better repent, and start hoping that God will choose to forgive them for their sinful doubt. The rest of the list is a sad commentary on social media, and our education system.
I get your point. But, yes, some on the list I don't consider anything but periodically provocative. Given the long list of Democrat propaganda that has masqueraded as mainstream news, I'm maybe more tolerant of provocative and even some conspiratorual musing. I tried to be nice and respectful to my left community until I confirmed my suspicion that most of them live in the upside down of absurdity that is hazardous to everything and everyone they get power or influence over.
Frank, I totally agree.
I think it’s imperative, specifically because the left lives in an increasingly bizarre world of denial and fantasy (which I’m sure we both agree on), that those of us on the right side of the political spectrum don’t fall into the same trap and become like them.
I absolutely agree that Provocative is fine. I think it’s even necessary at times because of the left’s desire to suppress everything they dislike.
Yet, I think it’s imperative that we don’t welcome those that deny reality (an accusation we frequently and justifiability level against leftists) into our ranks, especially those that would deny the obvious because of a hatred of others based only on their religion.
The real problem isn't denial that the Holocaust happened, it's that the crimes of the National Socialists are kept in the forefront of our cultural consciousness even to this day, but the atrocities of the communists are either ignored, rationalized or "put in context."
A just and proper interpretation of the Holocaust would make CRYSTAL CLEAR that it, the Holodomor, Stalin's purges, the body count of the Great Leap Forward and all the other horrors of totalitarianism are the natural result, not of a racist ideology, but of a political philosophy that regards the individual human being, Imago Dei, as nothing more than a disposable pawn who exists solely to serve The State.
THAT is the true evil of the Holocaust.
That even 1% believe that the Holocaust never happened proves that there are a significant number of genuinely stupid people (see First Law of Human Stupidity, Carlo M. Cipolla) AND that their are a significant number of people who believe in conspiracy theories.
Further evidence that our education system is a national disgrace.
With the warning label on that Pew research graph "opt-in panels overstate extreme attitudes", I think it should never be put up. I don't believe those numbers represent the actual electorate. There are plenty of kooks and cranks out there on both sides, and clearly there is more evidence that distrust of any past media narrative is suspect as being propagated by the regime in control of the corporate media editorial power, but I know A LOT of people on both sides of the political aisle and I find very few kooks and cranks on the right side... I think because being a righty tends to require a lot of LOGOS processing. Conservatives are less likely to be emotionally exploited and influenced by their media feeds. However, PATHOS and ETHOS dominates the left cohort that I know. They head off into irrational land at the smallest of encouragement. The conspiracies run deep and wide if the topic otherwise creates bad feelings in their little hypersensitive selves.
I hate to tell you, but there is no shortage of kooks and cranks on the right or people like Alex Jones and Candace Owens wouldn't be as popular as they are.
There are more people on the right rejecting Owens and Carlson that jumping on their Jew-hating bandwagon.
I am actually thrilled to see both Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson getting brutally criticized from the Right these days, but they still both have huge audiences. Will that continue? I hope not, but as of right now? They do. Tucker Carlson was even invited to speak at TPUSA events not so long ago.
Good points. I think some dislike Tuckers position on Israel, but like the rest.
I think that you’re right and hope so too. I do think they are looking just do eyeballs to get more likes or whatever and thus more money. It’s rather pathetic in my opinion.
Are they really popular? Or are they just niche players to a small cohort? Compare that to CNN, MSNBC and The View. Or Heather Cox Richardson's Substack.
From my perspective, because there is little evidence of mass kookiness and crankiness on the right, the left amplifies the few on the right to manufacture a false moral equivalency.
Here is another consideration. Many if not most of the right-side claimed conspiracy theories played over the last decade, especially during COVID, have turned out to be true. Meanwhile I cannot think of a left-side myth that has held up.
It can be hard sometimes to know how popularity online translates in the larger world sometimes. For example, someone like Nick Fuentes who constantly gets attention on X, has, to the best of my knowledge, never gotten 1000 people to gather in the real world anywhere. So, how "real" is his popularity? I think that's an open question
That being said, I can name off a number of conspiracy theorists and/or Anti-Semites on the Right who at least qualify as extremely "online" popular including Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Mike Flynn, Nick Fuentes, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly, Mike Lindell, The HodgeTwins, Candace Owens, Jake Shields and Andrew Tate among others.
Some people might not agree on all of those or might like one or two, but to me, they're all heads of the same hydra and yeah, they do have a big following. Granted, I would still absolutely say the Left is significantly worse, but I don't consider it to be a small problem. I think it's metastasized to a genuine threat to the entire conservative movement because the things these people are promoting are so vile and toxic that it will ultimately destroy anything on the Right that embraces it.
Sadly, we live in the post-modernist world where every fact is up for grabs.
I've given up arguing with these people--mercifully there aren't too many of them on Substack--so I just block them. I expect that if everyone who's as horrified as you and I are did the same, they'd wind up isolated in an echo chamber and we wouldn't need to worry about them.
But you cannot argue someone out of a position they didn't argue themselves into.
Yeah, it feels like a lot of people take positions like this based on nothings more than feels or trying to seem "edgy," and ultimately it ends up helping to enable some of the worst sociopaths in our entire society.
To offer a respectful & slightly contrarian take: there are plenty of reasons to worry about the declining sympathy for Jews & Israel among the young (and however much young Republicans are genuinely bad on this, campus Leftists and other young Democrats post-10/7 are 1000x worse).
That said, the language in this poll - "was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe" is broad enough to include David Cole-style moderate revisionists as well as virulent antisemites. I've moved toward Cole's position over the years I've been reading him, and I hope that it - and not the flat-wrong denier position - becomes the norm in the next few years.
The rest of this (long) comment elaborates what I mean by Holocaust revisionism.
These aspects of mainstream Holocaust understanding are correct:
1) Substantially all of the European Jewish communities were uprooted and their inhabitants generally killed,
2) between 1939 & 1945
3) by the Nazis and non-German collaborators
4) in a systematic, deliberate effort.
Where the mainstream gets it wrong and why:
1) 6 million dead is an exaggeration; an accurate total is in the (still appallingly evil) 3.5-4.5 million range.
Why: there's a document called the Korherr Report, named for its author who was the head of statistics for Heinrich Himmler; Himmler had asked him for an update on how the Final Solution was going, and he calculated that 2.4 million Jews had been "evacuated" (i.e., killed in Eastern Europe) as of January 1, 1943.
Given that Korherr's report relies on then-current data and has been widely accepted as accurate, and given that mainstream Holocaust historians are in agreement that roughly 2/3 of the Holocaust deaths occurred before 1943, it's extremely unlikely that 3.6 million more Jews were killed in the period of 1943-45
2) Auschwitz paints an inaccurate picture of how the Nazis did most of their killing.
As you note, more Jews were killed in the extermination camps like Treblinka and Belzec, but the number of Jews killed by the "mobile" Einsatzgruppen was also much higher than people typically think.
Zyklon B is the most well-known Nazi murder weapon, but "ordinary" carbon monoxide might have killed just as many people, to say nothing of all of the mass shootings with 10,000+ victims. After they were dead, the crematoria
Why? One quote that's stuck with me from Timothy Snyder (not a revisionist as far as I know) in Bloodlands: 75+ years after WWII, we don't even have an accurate understanding of how Hitler did mass killings, let alone how Stalin did. I think this is rooted in the fact that Holocaust survivors who've lived to tell their stories are disproportionately people from the *least* lethal camps - Auschwitz and Buchenwald both had over 100,000 survivors, compared to Belzec (<10) and Treblinka (70) and Babi Yar (<100).
Very disappointing article. I kept waiting for the ‘sarc off’ but it never came. If you haven’t figured out such basic truths yet it’s hard to imagine you have anything relevant to say on other matters.
Okay, make your case that the Holocaust didn't happen.