134: Denial, Genocide, and the Shadow of David Irving
In this episode we talk about two dramatic portrayals of a seminal 2000 libel trial, the court case brought by Holocaust denier David Irving against American scholar Deborah Lipstadt: a contemporary UK television drama-documentary 'Holocaust on Trial' and the 2016 film Denial. We then consider the legacy of Irving, his reputation today, how fascists now see him, how they see the 2016 film, the planned republication of his work by Antelope Hill books, and how he is weirdly replicated in current 'rising star' internet Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper. We then consider our own coverage of Israel's genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the question of how to talk about genocide after the Nazi Holocaust. Our discussion also touches upon another of the 'guests' brought on by Jubilee to debate Mehdi Hasan in the recent edition of 'Surrounded'. We also briefly discuss the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad thing. CONTENT WARNINGS Episode Notes: Mother Jones piece on Darryl Cooper: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/martyr-made-darryl-cooper-nazi-jews-juggernaut-nihilism-tucker-carlson-joe-rogan-substack/ Mari Cohen at the *Jewish Currents*, "Can Genocide Studies Survive a Genocide in Gaza" https://jewishcurrents.org/can-genocide-studies-survive-a-genocide-in-gaza "Little changed even after Amnesty International published a landmark report accusing Israel of genocide in December 2024. For Nimer Sultany, a scholar of international law at SOAS University of London, this silence pointed to a glaring double standard, in which many scholars could rush to imply that the Palestinians had committed acts reminiscent of genocide, but be “unable to or unwilling to make the same charge against Israel, when Israel has committed much worse atrocities against the Palestinians since then.” “This shows that the early use of genocide was propagandistic and political in nature. It shows that they don’t care in the same way about Palestinian civilians or Palestinian victims,” he said." Polite Conversations, with the same title: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5mpxDnGm1c8isJlDGgidqc?si=igr81Hv4SvOMw_rdFA6V9Q Doomernaut Substack: https://substack.com/@thatonewhitepopulist , "Number 1 alogger of the kosher right "" Antelope Hill Publishing, *Nuremberg, The Last Battle* by David Irving https://antelopehillpublishing.com/product/nuremberg-the-last-battle-by-david-irving/ Holocaust on Trial (2000) – NOT on the pro-Irving channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCe3G9gODU4&t=1s Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
There's this line from Goethe, De Feige de Rot nur, wo er sicker ist, means a coward only threatens when he feels secure.
I thought you didn't speak German.
Hm.
You learned German in the last year.
Well, I had to master all these documents.
Irving had 40 years start on me, so I had to catch up.
Did you?
know Daniel, how are you doing?
Well, I've been thinking about Holocaust denial for a week, so I'm about normal, I guess.
No, not really.
This has been a rough week.
Thinking about the details of Holocaust denial actually is worse than most of the stuff I do these days.
You know, I was like, please, give me Megan Kelly, not more David Irving.
Please see you now.
That's something I thought I would say, but, you know, hey, that's where we are.
Yeah.
Turns out there are some things worse even than Megan Kelly.
And yeah, I think that David Irving definitely qualifies.
David Irving as an individual probably isn't.
Like he's much less on the line than way to Megan Kelly.
But I don't know.
I get the sense that in person, David Irving is a real prick.
Well, I think we're going to discuss that in more detail.
So we did kind of cover Irving before in a previous episode, which we will link to below.
I did not really listen to that episode, but anyway, so.
Before we get on to the main subject, though, we kind of feel like we ought to address the gigantic.
rampaging elephant that was in the room for pretty much everybody talking about politics.
As usual, we're late to it, but you don't come to us for hot off the press's topical discussion.
No.
Which I'm, of course, talking about the...
that's annoying, but whatever.
That was kind of my immediate response.
It turned out I saw, because I didn't realize there were like six of them, I thought it was just like one, but no, it's an online ad campaign.
So there are a bunch of them.
And I happened to watch like the least offensive one, like, you know, you know, and then I watched some of the other ones that I'm like, no, this feels a little more nasty than I was originally thinking it was.
And then it's funny because it's like, not even like the right wing, like hacked onto this as a, like a big story they could spend for weeks because like some lefties on Twitter and blue sky were having, what is, I think a fairly reasonable conversation about like the use of like eugenic language in terms of a blonde haired, blue eyed woman having good genes, et cetera.
I don't know.
I think, I think, you know, obviously the, the right wing backlash is like that of like pure bad faith in terms of what any mainstream person was, was doing with this.
I feel like I did pretty much the same thing.
I sort of saw it come up on the feed and I thought, oh, I'm not interested.
And it kept on going.
And mainly what I was seeing was people joking about it, laughing about it, being ironic, you know, taking the piss out of the idea that taking the piss either about people being upset about or about the idea that people were upset about it so i thought okay well i'll go and see what this is about and i went to youtube and i found a video of Sydney Sweeney doing, you know, sort of the sexy voice and the sexy body language thing that that's clearly, clearly taken from those like 90s guest ads and all that stuff.
I don't know how pervasive that was over on your side of the plan, but they were doing this in the early 90s.
They had like cheesecake gene ads.
It was all over the place for like five years in my teenage years.
Well, the thing about the advert was that I just thought, well, this isn't anything unusual.
This is just normal stuff.
There's nothing here that's the slightest bit unusual, either the cheesecake objectification or the using sex to try to sell a product in an advert.
or even the stuff about jeans.
I thought, well, I mean, what is it?
It amounts to her saying, you know, I've got good jeans or I've got blue jeans or something.
And that's, you know., it's kind of like a lot of adverts, it's just kind of stupid and annoying.
I don't even understand what's being, what, what I'm supposed to think is happening in it.
I think it's also worth the, how often do you watch ads, Jack?
Like, I don't, you know.
Well, I have very low tolerance for ads, partly because I really, I don't watch very much television.
To be, I don't have the TV on.
I, I, I seek things out.
If things, if I hear about things that I want to watch, I seek them out and I. obtain them without subjecting myself to television.
So I really don't see very many ads at all.
So I think over the years, my tolerance for them has come down to a bare minimum because basically I see a TV ad now and I'm just instantly furious at it.
Yeah, yeah.
So I pay for YouTube premium precisely so I don't have to watch the fucking ad.
Yes, I will pay money to the evil Google Corporation so that I don't have to watch the American Eagle ad.
So I think there's also the thing that just, you know, you and I are just not posed to, are not poisoned in a place where we just see ads all the time.
And so this is just, you know, but anyway, I think that might be a factor in just the way the two of you approached it, the two of us approached it anyway.
Yeah, but yeah, yeah.
And I have to say that at 49, I don't feel like Sydney Sweeney has any meaning for me anymore.
Like, you know, I can, I can, I can, I can tell the sort of in a theoretical way that that's a very attractive young woman but that doesn't have anything to do with me at this point you know that's just like yeah but the the thing that the thing that i found interesting about it firstly was it's again it's a quote unquote controversy well it's not that's the point it's a fake controversy yeah and it's been completely ginned up by the right and the way they've done it is because they've sort of attached this semiotic thing to sydney sweeney presumably because she looks like a valkyrie
you know yes um and they've they've attached all this sort of freight or baggage to the idea of sydney sweeney she supposedly you know we she supposedly sends people like us into a fury because she exists and people find her attractive.
I suppose the idea is that woke people or left-wing people deny the existence of attractiveness.
I don't know what that is.
Or like because she's white and blonde and conventionally attractive, because you, you know, yeah, that's what people are angry at because she's conventionally very attractive.
It's like, no, I've been on the left for a long time.
I've been in a lot of lefty spaces.
It turns out that lefty people have a lot of sex.
It's fine.
But I suppose it's because it's, and I don't know to what extent American, the name is a bit of a giveaway.
think american eagle jeans which i'd never heard of before this so i suppose their marketing department scored a coup there yeah they've been they've also been known to do like they do like more jeans i watched some videos about this just from other content creators that they do have a history of doing jeans for people who are otherwise underrepresented so people with like kind of you know bodies with like shorter legs and like bigger asses and that's you know like where it's you know deliberately going out there and like marketing their products to someone to two people who are not who don't look like sydney sweetie let's put it that way you know
Okay, well that's interesting.
Let's have a history in their advertising of doing, you know, doing like you know people of all stations and sizes.
Let's just put it that way.
That's interesting because that's not what I expected.
So that makes me think, that makes me more puzzled about what's going on here because it seems like a deliberate thing.
thing to choose this particular actress with all this freight attached to her from the right wing, you know, and also to do this kind of play on good cheens.
That's, well, that's a bit odd.
This is, this is where, this is where I, where, you know, something that I've been hearing from the right wing and a little bit from the, from, from left here.
So again, I put very little, I put less than an hour into this all told, except for.
just in my daily listening because all these right-wing dipshits had nothing to talk about except for Sidney Sweeney's ass for three days.
You know, the real criticism and the real thing that I think is probably true is that American Eagle in this, they're seeing the writing on the wall in this kind of new Trump era and going like, well, we gotta, we gotta court the, we gotta court the.
Charlie Craig fans a little bit more.
We've got them.
And I mean, just for pure harsh business numbers, they just read the writing along and go, well, we need to attract a more right-wing audience.
This is a way to do that.
Yeah, that's depressing.
It indicates that we're leaving the admittedly very imperfect era of woke brands and entering into the even worse era of volk brands.
Yes, yes, yes.
I like that.
Yes, no.
I think that's the most interesting thing about it.
I think we are, I think that's just true now.
When we see that, Target not putting out, not doing a big like Pride Month celebration thing, it's like.
you know the right wing backlash has worked the right wing backlash has worked yeah and over time it was always cynical it was always cynical it was always it was just it was just something but it has worked at the thing it has, the corporations have learned the lesson that they were being taught, and that is to not, you know, to not be woke.
Sorry, you know, yeah.
Not that they were really particularly woke to begin with, you know, but you know what I mean, you know, yeah, to change the marketing so that it's ideologically acceptable to the people who now seem to be in the ascendant.
Yeah.
Yes.
But, and which is, you know, in its way, this silly, privileged, frivolous story is indicative of something very depressing that's happening across American society and to a lesser extent because we're a bit behind you on the same road in british society which is the you know complying in advance and the the capitulation of institutions be they educational or political or journalistic or commercial across the board just just like dominoes just complying and capitulating across the board so yeah i think the dominoes guy was probably a racist i think that was you know anyway
um i don't think that was compliance i think that was you know yeah anyway I'm not trying to get sued here, but I said I think.
I said I think.
It's okay.
He said he thinks.
It's allegedly.
The laws are very different in the U.S. and the U.K. We will cover that shortly.
But anyway, continue.
Yes, we will.
The thing I was going to, a couple of things to say before we move off this very silly topic um it is it is a ginned up controversy the idea being that the left or the woke or whoever that whatever they call people that aren't them now basically were upset about this advert now i didn't i didn't see any of that personally i follow an awful lot of left-wing people on on blue sky i didn't see a single person really saying you know this ad amounts this advert amounts to eugenics or anything i saw people criticizing it but
that's all um and the as i think has now been revealed in a newspaper article which which analyzed the analytics you know um people simply were not talking about these ads.
Maybe a couple of people on the left were saying, you know, this is eugenics language, which it kind of is.
I mean, it is.
Yeah.
I mean, it only took off as a quote unquote controversy after the right started to talk about how the left were having a meltdown about it, which is the pattern that we've seen again and again and again and again.
And even then, from what I've seen, the vast majority of the quote unquote left discourse about this has been, yeah, well, it's a bad ad, but you know, look at what the right are doing, look at what the right are saying about it, et cetera, et cetera.
The other thing I want to say about this is that yes, this advert partakes of what is essentially a eugenics discourse that is endemic in our culture industries that is everywhere i am begrudgingly coming to the end of a watch of the of the television series picard which is sort of picking up what happens to jean-luc picard 20 years later i'm in the third season now the entire i'm not going to don't worry no spoilers don't everybody who watches to see it
is has already seen it it's fine and if you haven't seen it don't honestly i don't even know why i'm watching it but the entire plot of the third series hinges at the individual particular level and at the macro level sort of race essentialist species level, which is built into Star Trek anyway, on the idea of people having particular personality traits because of their genes, the entire thing, and being good or bad because of their genes.
This is everywhere.
It's everywhere in science fiction.
It's everywhere in fantasy, which are the dominant modes in pop culture.
It's everywhere in true crime.
Every other true crime documentary is called Born Evil.
You know, this is not, it's not that the advert isn't.
partaking of a eugenics discourse.
It is.
It's that our entire cultural production partakes of that same discourse all the time.
Yeah.
I mean, this is a little more on the nose about it you know but yeah and yeah no i agree i agree you know how could i not okay um that's basically all i wanted to say about it i have two other very brief points to make um okay i will make them in less than a minute so we can move off of this um not talk about jeans anymore certainly not in this episode so two things that i think do well cb sweeney has a history of doing these kinds of things she sold like bath water stuff she's done other advertisements that you know kind of prey on the male gaze like she sold she sold like
her bath water in a soap at one point like a limited edition so it did come out that she's a registered republican as well that was one thing yes she is a registered republican the other thing that makes her in 2025, that makes her a fascist.
So I mean, pretty much, yeah.
Also, I found out I was perusing her Wikipedia page as you do.
I'm going to talk about this.
Let's peruse her Wikipedia page just to, just to, you know, like get the basics.
Purely for research purposes.
Yeah.
Purely for, you know, I have other tabs for the other things I might want to think about about Sydney Sweeney.
I'm fine.
Don't worry.
Actually, she is not.
It's fine.
It's fine.
When it comes to this sort of thing, Sydney Sweeney is so vanilla, you know.
Believe me, believe me.
I have, I have.
much more interesting people to think about in that terms than Sydney Sweeney.
Anyway, the other thing is, and this is the burn her at the stake moment, you know, ironically, not literally.
She was born and raised in the panhandle of North Idaho.
That area is a Nazi hotbed.
It is.
Yeah.
It is very much so.
You know, Randy Weaver's compound was up there.
Yeah.
Like very close.
Aryan nation.
Yeah.
No, she grew up in that area.
And so it is entirely possible that she has some Nazi tensions to her political beliefs, even if she's not a full on white nationalist herself.
You know, I just saw grew up in North Island.
I'm like, she's a Nazi.
God damn.
I caught you.
evidence indeed.
Damning evidence, you know.
Everybody who grew up in North Idaho was a fucking Nazi.
Not the case at all.
There are great anti-fascist groups working out in North Idaho.
But, you know, as it like they did this with Taylor Swift back in the day, you know, you're one of the white nationalists for like, and they did this with Taylor Swift.
And I was telling this to my wife.
I was kind of telling this story.
It's like, you know, just casually, like, you know, like the right wing kind of like pretends that they've been using like Taylor Swift's like app to like share Nazi memes and stuff, you know, just like, why are they using Taylor Swift?
It's like, well, she's blonde.
She's blonde.
She's blue head.
She's blonde.
She's blue.
She has blonde eyes and blue hair.
That's what I'm trying to say.
You know, she's convincingly attractive.
She can almost look like an Aryan goddess.
And she's never like said anything about it, you know?
And my wife just went, ew.
And I'm like, yeah, that's all she has to say.
All she has to do is say the word ew in public.
on this topic and i would just totally believe that she does not follow these things you know and then later on she did so you know we're fine but to my knowledge city sweetie has not like said anything at all about this about this topic which kind of makes me think you know anyway there's it's we've already gone on too long about this um if you want more we could do a full episode on this i really don't want to i'm going to just stop talking about this um if we were going to do it i would bring it into context to all those 90s at that's what i would do Yeah.
So one more thing I wanted to say before we move on to the main topic, because apparently I still haven't made myself clear on this issue from feedback thatack by the way um the adl yes i agree don't cite them i agree okay do not cite the adl okay done so let's move on i think it's very funny that you get this feedback and i don't maybe you're just more active this guy i think that's probably the case i i shouldn't really be getting i get it sometimes
but it seems like you get it a lot more anyway um i think it's because um people trust me less than they trust you on these issues.
And that's fine.
You know, I'm getting told stuff I need to hear.
So that's good.
if i do things that are problematic you can reach out to me it's fine you know i i do check my blue sky i'm just not on it as much i do other things with my free time these days um but anyway okay that aside main topic let's go yes so on to the main topic of the episode which is well the original plan as i understand it was for us to do something nice and easy to to bridge a bit of a gap so daniel you suggested that we talk about the 2016 film denial which is a
dramatization by david hair of deborah deborah lip the american scholar deborah lipstadt's own book which i can't remember what it's called but she wrote this about the holocaust No, that's the original.
That's the book that Irving sued her over.
She wrote another book about the trial.
No, the book is History on Trial.
History on Trial.
That's right.
And Hare adapted that book into the screenplay, which became the film, Denial.
It's about the occasion in, well, it started in 1995.
The process from Irving, the book being published, Lippstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust, in which she said, He sues her and Penguin Books, which published that book, it takes five years, 2000, to get to a British court.
He sues in Britain because British libel laws are insane.
Basically, if somebody sues you for libel, you have to prove that you didn't do it.
this will be a topic we have to cover down the but yes continue yes when i say insane what i mean is that they're insane for for 99% of us.
They're perfectly sane from the point of view of rich and powerful people because that's what they're designed to protect rich and powerful people from criticism.
In this instance, they laid a perfectly innocent, at least of libel, scholar and her publishers open to an aggressive, frivolous, potentially damaging lawsuit from a Holocaust denying neo-fascist, David Irving, who pretended to be a historian and ended up in court in the year 2000.
And it's a seminal moment in these issues, certainly a seminal moment in David Irving's career.
He lost big after the defense mounted an incredible case where they got scholars from they got a professor robert uh robert van pelt who's the world expert on auschwitz they got professor rich j evans who's one of the of the world's foremost experts on the Third Reich.
They got Peter Longerick, the excellent German Third Reich historian.
They got all these people in to write.
And they basically demolished Irving's contentions and his career in the process, because certainly Evans, in his analysis of Irving's work, demonstrated that Irving was a falsifier of the history of the Third Reich.
He lost the case, had to pay all the damages, et cetera, et cetera.
And the film is about that.
So you wanted to talk about that film.
And I, when you mentioned it, I said, well, there's a dramatization, a drama documentary from the time, from the year 2000, which I watched.
Again, we were talking in the last bonus episode about me watching the BBC television film of Copenhagen at the time.
This is another thing I watched at the time.
I might have seen this one.
This aired on NOVA in the US, and I was an active watcher of NOVA at that time.
So I may have seen this, but I wasn't interested in the topic at the time.
So I didn't, you know, it didn't stick to my brain.
But at that time, I think I would have already seen Mr. Death and Mr. Death is like one of my all time favorite movies and certainly my favorite movie about this topic.
But this was, I mean, it was huge, hugely influential for me.
As I said, I watched it at the time on Channel 4 in the year 2000.
They taped it.
I had it on VHS for many years, watched it many times.
And that is a documentary stroke dramatization of just sections from the trial transcript.
Right.
And yeah, so I watched the movie Denial and you watched the television drama documentary Holocaust on trial.
And but it turned out to be, the episode has turned out to be a bit more complicated than just an episode where we talk about these two dramas, hasn't it?
Yeah, let's talk about a movie.
That's, you know, it's so easy.
Let's just do a Marvel movie.
next time we need a little bit of filler let's cover captain america again why not you know like you know it's fine certainly no like lurking presence of you know political subculture underneath the marvel cinema you know for jesus christ good lord no no there's no no there's no you know sociobiology or eugenics in any of those movies oh hang on a minute gentlemen they're all over those movies anyway yes let's continue So, I don't know.
Do you want to talk about these two dramas a little bit before we get into it?
Yeah, yeah, I know.
No, I do.
I do want to discuss this.
So, yeah, I mean, so I, I know, I think you said something to the effect of I despise the 2016 film.
And I, you know, I think I, you know, I, I don't know.
I'm lukewarm on it.
I did really like Holocaust on trial.
If this was my first, if it was my first watch, I did really enjoy it.
I think there are things that the 2016 film does that I wish that the documentary did, namely kind of emphasize exactly how horrifying the libel laws in in Britain are on these topics and just how like absurd it is.
the absurdly high bar that they had to cut that they had to to reach in order to succeed at this and that's something that the 2016 film does does it does it does it well and then it emphasizes it because it's a Hollywood movie and it does it, but it also chooses the very wrong viewpoint character and gives us some really skewed decisions in terms of the way they choose to tell the story.
So, but yeah, no, I really like, I mean, I'll just say I really like Tom Wilkinson.
I like him in everything.
I first saw him in the bedroom, in the bedroom, not in the bedroom.
He wasn't in my bedroom, but I saw him in the bedroom.
That would have been in like 2000, 2001 or something like that.
And then he was actually an HBO movie called Normal in which he is a 50-year-old man who transitions.
He does a gender transition.
This is 2003, you know, and he's brilliant in it.
It's a very like well-acted, it's a very well-understood.
I haven't seen it in 20 years, but I'd be willing to bet that that holds up even to 2025 standards.
It's it's really, really fucking good.
And I've just always loved Tom Wilkes and things.
I mean, obviously he's in Batman, he's in a whole bunch of other stuff, but I he should have been the lead character here.
Like, ultimately, the problem is this movie, you know, the trial isn't about Deborah Lepstad.
I mean, it is about like, but the drama, the story that we're going through is not about Deborah Lepstad.
It's about, you know, it's about Richard Rampton, the solicitor, you know.
Yeah.
Sorry, which one is barrister and which is solicitor?
I can always, I can never keep track of it.
I think he's the barrister, right?
Yes, he's the barrister on the QC.
Yes.
Anthony Julius, the solicitor is played by, I think his name's Andrew Scott.
Andrew Scott, yes.
In the film, yeah.
Yes, yes.
No, in Britain you have a solicitor and you also have a barrister or a QC who actually argues the case in court.
Yeah.
So Richard Rampton played by Tom Wilkinson here is the barrister or QC.
Yeah.
Yes.
I first saw Tom Wilkinson in the mid nineties BBC adaptation of the Dickens novel Martin Chuzzlewit in which he plays Seth Pecksniff.
And it's he's absolutely brilliant in that.
He's hilarious in that.
I believe I've loved him ever since that.
He's always bright.
Like, I mean, I just love him.
He's no longer with us, unfortunately.
But I mean, he's a.
Yes, he died a couple of years ago.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's he's he's legitimately one of my favorite actors of all time.
So the movie also has a quite good performance, I think, by Tim Spall as Irving.
Yes.
Yes.
I think a little bit too sort of overtly villainous at times, maybe.
Yeah.
But yeah, I think I think there's a I think there's a conversation to have there.
But yeah, I can see where you're coming from.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But as you say, I mean, the problem with the movie is that it sort of focuses on a I'm pretty sure heavily fictionalized version.
of the scholar...
uh deborah lipstad who you know the story isn't about her um and as you say dramatically it should be about this this the case.
It should be about almost anyone else, you know, even Irving.
There is a like twisted version to this.
You could make this about Irving.
You could do like a, like, like Oliver Stone's Nixon version of like, you know, watching this man where like you were like looking at him, you know, like tell these lies and, you know, be confronted by them in court.
I mean, I think there's a really compelling case for that being a really good story.
would be really fucking difficult to do but you know like you know but I'm afraid the The film struggles, I think, with, you know, dramatizing these events.
And it has to manufacture loads of spurious conflict between Lipstadt and her team of lawyers and so on and other people.
And it's just, I don't know, it just feels deeply unconvincing and pointless and irritating to me almost all the way through.
When the film focuses on the stuff that's of interest, and both the film and the television docudrama, they have scenes in common, so to speak, because they both have scenes which are drawn directly from the actual trial.
The trial transcripts.
So you get dialogue in both, which is almost exactly the same, because it's the transcript of the actual trial.
In preparation for the trial, the defense has had access to all of Irving's private diaries, compiled over a 40-year period.
They're able to make use of some of this material in their cross-examination.
This is Irving in his diary speaking to Irving.
This is not Irving punting some thesis about Jewish culpability to a television audience.
A quiet evening at home, etc.
Jessica, who is Jessica?
My little infant child.
Yes.
When she was nine months old at this time.
A quiet evening at home?
Jessica.
Who is Jessica?
My little infant child.
Yes.
She was nine months older than me.
Nine months old in September 1994.
Nine months old in September 1994.
Jessica is turning into a fine little lady.
She sits very upright on an ordinary chair.
Her strong back muscles are the product of our regular walks and my arms to the bank, etc.
In those walks, we sing the Binketty Bankettie Bong.
And more scurrulously, when half-free children are wheeled past, and then you go into Italian.
i am a baby not jewish or sectarian i have no plans to marry an ape or a rastafarian racist Mr. Irving?
Antisemitic Mr. Irving?
I don't think so.
Teaching your little child this kind of poison.
Racist, Mr. Irving.
Anti-Semitic, Mr. Irving, yes.
I do not think so.
Teaching your little child this kind of poison.
When it focuses in on that, instead of doing its sort of Hollywood thing where they all travel to the Auschwitz camp and you get loads of sentimental stuff and, you know...
It's actually quite a nasty portrayal, I think.
It makes her look like a sort of a bad-tempered, intolerant shrew whereas as i mentioned the historian richard evans who wrote a brilliant book about the trial and in which he then represented his own research demolishing irving's work the book is called lying about hitler um in that book he describes deborah lipstadt as relentlessly positive and upbeat all the way through the entire thing so you know the version that we get in the film is just needlessly over dramatized oh when it's not doing that and
focus is in We're going to talk a bit about Deborah Lipstadt here in a minute.
Don't worry.
Yeah.
Okay.
She has committed some sins.
Let's just put it that way.
But denying the Holocaust.
is a good book.
I read it for the first time when we, the first time we talked about this, back when we talked about Holocaust denial, because we talked about Mr. Death and then we talked about this trial a little bit in those earlier episodes.
And I went back and I, I did actually read the book, the original book, Denying the Holocaust.
And I, I went in not expecting to like it because Deborah Lipstadt's politics and my own are quite different.
But it is actually, it's a good book, I think.
Denying the Holocaust is a good book.
The one thing that she's, and we'll just do it here because we're talking about it, so it's fine.
Well, it has to be said, in 2019 or 2020, when we did those first two episodes, Deborah Lipstadt, the claim was in certain quarters that she deliberately sort of elited the crimes of Israel or, you know, in terms of like, like, treated Israel as like a special project and like that, Israel could not commit genocide.
Israel obviously is not doing, and like, you know, was not like speaking accurately in terms of the actions of the state of Israel on the Palestinians in general.
and that there are some spurious things that you can find in denying the Holocaust.
You and I read denying the Holocaust.
I think we went through those exact pages together and came to the conclusion that we did not think that was an accurate characterization that Lipstat, regardless of her personal opinions, that book does not go there, you know?
No, it doesn't.
Lipstat has, you know, even at the time, she had made a lot of comments on, you know, to the effect of, you know, the actual Holocaust, the Holocaust was a different kind of genocide, that it was unique in its own way.
And that, of course, we need to pitch all these other genocides as well, but the Holocaust was unique.
And I think I agree with that, that, you know, the scale of it, the speed of it, the, you know, but.
I do too.
To my own surprise, I believe that.
Yeah.
Yes.
I mean, there are other genocides in Lipstat up until a certain day in October 2023 was always very careful on these issues, at least in terms of, I don't pay a ton of attention to her, but at least, and since then, she's really gone off the deep end of this.
And I think now she is actually engaging in racist behavior towards Gazans.
And she's not, she's not a Douglas Murray, she's not a Sam Harris, she's not a Benjamin Netanyahu, but she has tipped over that line significantly.
I mean, I don't have an exact quote from her, but I have seen enough to know that she is, you know, you know, it is one of those things that October 7th really threw some people's brains into the blender and hers was one of them.
And, you know, it's really disappointing because, you know as much as you and I would disagree with her politics and a lot of other things she was actually pretty good on that topic and now she is not so it's just disgusting i mean it is one of those we're gonna we're gonna talk about this in more detail shortly but you know it is astonishing to me that anybody who studies the holocaust that anybody that like and who and who is of an ethnic group in which this was done to you would not see what's happening in gaza for what it is that's just i mean it's just it baffles my mind it has to be
like selective blindness.
Anyway, Denying the Holocaust is a great book.
I read it for the first time in my early 20s.
I reread it.
I've reread it five or six times since.
I did not reread it for this podcast, but it is a great book.
For what it is, it is a great primer on this kind of material.
It's almost as good as anything you can find even now.
Accurate up to the time, but Lipstadt is kind of doing monstrous things.
That's awesome.
Yes.
Yeah, she is now an apologist for the genocide that the state of Israel is currently in the process of committing with the collusion of your state
mine yes yes and that is indefensible yes yes it especially for someone who is as educated and knowledgeable as she is on these topics you know like especially for someone like deborah lipstad it's just it's unconsciable anyway yes okay well i don't i don't really know that i have much more to say about the films you know i really like the i really like the tv dramatization of the trial and the documentary elements in it are very good as well, certainly as an introductory thing.
It's a documentary, even now, I would sort of say if you've got a young person, not a very young person, but a young person, you want to kind of, they're interested and you want to start them on this topic, you know, you could do a lot worse than starting with this, with some warnings in advance, starting with this as a sort of an introduction to this subject.
It's very good indeed.
The movie, I think it's too hammy and over dramatized and I don't like it.
Yeah, sure.
That's basically all I have to say about it.
Yeah, I have more tolerance for that kind of thing than you do.
I think that's just true about both of us.
But I think we agree on the specifics of like how what it does right what it does wrong and so it's fine.
So yeah do or do not see these movies if you care to.
So why are we doing this?
Why did I get why did I light upon this topic as something?
Why did it click in my head like oh let's do a casual movie episode about Holocaust tonight.
Well, David Irving David Irving is still alive.
Yeah.
despite false reports i think last year that he died he is still hanging on he is very ill apparently but from what i gather he's from what i gather he's having health issues and you know i do not believe in a hell and i do not believe in torture and for any but certainly i will look forward to the day when when he is writing hell, you know, as a metaphor, not as a real thing.
Oh, it turns out that I think we've mentioned the publisher Antelope Hill Publishing before.
Do you remember Antelope Hill?
Not specifically.
Okay.
Antelope Hill is a explicitly white nationalist publishing house.
Sorry.
Is it, is it, are you saying Antelope Hill?
Antelope Hill, yes.
Antelope Hill, right.
Antelope Hill.
So, Daniel, why is it called something as silly as Antelope Hill?
That was going to be my next question.
I cannot answer that question.
I don't think they've ever described it.
They don't have it on their about page or anything like that.
But I would ask you, what else starts with the words ah.
Yeah, yeah.
There might be some person that's really well associated with far-right movements with the initials ah.
I'm just curious.
I'm just asking questions.
It could be.
Just asking questions.
Yeah.
I am almost certain that is where the name comes from.
Anyway, you know, if it was not, they would have some explanation for it on their webpage.
That's all I'm going to say.
They are a explicitly white nationalist publisher and they are doing a Yes, that's possible.
That's possible.
The only thing you can think of is like some family lore where there was a hill with a bunch of antelopes on it and they just named it after their family crest or something.
I don't know.
It's possible.
I'm just going to say that the fact that it has the same editions as Adolf Hitler, you know, that is not a factor that did not influence what this publishing house is doing.
Anyway, they're kind of uninteresting.
There's some lore behind them.
They act like they're kind of a major kind of independent publisher.
They're like they're ramping up in production.
It turns out to be like a married couple and they have, they've abused one of their employees and then on, there's some reporting for a few years on that.
I'm not, I'm not really interested in that today.
If you want a full episode on Antelope Hill, we'll do a full episode on Antelope Hill.
It's fine.
I can do it, but I'm not interested in that today.
They are releasing a, sorry, I got it in front of me.
They're releasing a reprint of a long out of print book by David Irving.
And apparently they had to reach out to the family and they reached out to Irving to get the rights for it.
They described this in a podcast I listened to and it's called Nuremberg, the last battle.
So it's David Irving's, you know, kind of revisiting of the Nuremberg trials.
And so David Irving comes up, David Irving, you know, he's, you know, and of course, the political cesspool as i do every week And well, I've got a quick clip for you.
They were just, this is, so you remember the political cesspool?
We covered them way, long, long time ago, but they're kind of a neoconfederate podcast.
They've been.
drifting more and more towards overt, you know, Hitlerism lately over the last year or two as the culture just moves with them.
I think they were always there, but they knew how to hide it a little bit better.
And now it's like every episode is like, you know, Jewish influence and power, Jewish influence and power.
It's like, yeah, God, this is the most boring fucking podcast.
But, you know, I listen to it every week.
Yeah, this is part of my pets.
You know, I must have done something terrible in a previous life, right?
I'm a reincarnated SS guard or something.
Anyway, anyway.
So, and James, again, I'm going to, I'm going to, I suffer.
I'm going to, I suffer through this so you get to listen to this.
But this is so James Edwards, whenever he starts talking about David Irving and whenever he talks about like David Duke, he brings up like Black Klansman and how that's an A-list movie inside.
And then whenever he brings up, you know, David Irving, he has to talk about this Hollywood movie that was made in 2016.
It's like this big production and everything.
And he has one thing to say about the casting.
Rachel Weiss plays Deborah Lifstad.
He has one thing to say every fucking time anybody talks about this movie on the right.
They have one thing to say.
That was a movie that came out about 10 years ago now, Denial.
And I don't know, Taylor, of anybody else who.
adjacent to our cause who has received a treatment like that from Hollywood.
I mean, that was an A-list film.
Of course, the narrative is pro-Jewish.
Pro-Jewish.
But, and it leads you to believe, you know, of course, certain conclusions.
But, you know, I think it's important to watch these movies.
I've seen that movie a couple of times.
They cast.
You notice how careful he's talking around that?
Like that's anyway, we'll talk about that in a minute.
I just want to get to the rest of this clip.
Timothy Spall in the role of David Irving in that movie, and he did a wonderful job, frankly.
Interestingly, creative casting for the role of Deborah Lipstott, Rachel Weiss played her, and Rachel Weiss is a gorgeous woman.
Lipstott is certainly, they did her a favor in that casting, that's for sure.
But she's an Academy Award winner, and then Tim Wilkinson plays in that.
He's an Academy Award nominee.
The point is.
Everybody takes interest in David Irving, and Hollywood has certainly taken interest in him, and that movie revolves around his libel trial in the early 2000s.
They always say this about the casting of Rachel Weiss.
It's like, well, she's playing that old hag.
And they hired an extremely attractive, you know, non-Jewish woman to play.
It's like, it's a Hollywood movie.
They hired an attractive actress.
This is how Hollywood works.
This is how Hollywood has worked since the 1920s, if not before.
What are you talking about?
It's like, you know, they can't portray their Jewish selves as ugly, as twisted as they really are.
They have to, you know, they can't have some hag up there.
They've got to have like a beautiful woman.
And, you know, I looked it up.
You know, Rachel Weiss was about the same age as Lipstad was at the time of the trial.
At the time the movie was made, she's a few years younger.
I looked up photos.
I mean, you know, I was just curious, what did Lipstad, you know, does not, is not a Hollywood actress, but was a few years older.
But, you know, I saw pictures from the trial.
I mean, she looks like a perfectly attractive 50-year-old woman.
I mean, you know, again, we have our issues with Deborah Lipsnap, but, you know, the fact that she's some like hideous crone is not like, you know, it's not on the list.
But, you know, of course, these guys are Nazis.
And so, you know, that's just the language they have to use.
Every single time, every single time.
This is just what movies do.
Movies cast pretty people.
They do it with Nazi shit.
Shindler's list, right?
cast yes race finds as amon gert the commandant of the pledge of common concentration camp have you seen photographs of amon gert they did a real favor hollywood almost always does that that's just that's just how hollywood works you know everybody you know i saw i've known people who've worked in the film industry and it's like you know you know working a film is like you sit there it's like a small manufacturing job you're sitting in building sets all day you're putting cameras in place you're doing other and and then for five minutes a day two super models walk in and talk at each other for a few minutes you know like that's
just every hollywood production is just like that it just is that's what that's what movie stars are like we talked in the last in the last bonus episode we talked talked about the movie conspiracy they cast Kenneth Branner as Reinhard Heydrich and Stanley Tucci as a yes.
It was like one of the other Nazis.
was Colin Firth.
I mean, what are we even talking about here?
It's just what they do.
It has to be a conspiracy.
It has to be this thing.
The Jews are secretly trying to associate young, attractive, non-Jewish women with Deborah Lipstadt because they don't want you to know how hideous she really was.
It's like, I know, it's stupid.
Because, of course, if you saw a photograph of the real Deborah Lipschtheit, then there's no way you'd actually sympathize with her for...
You'd be on the same page.
But you notice how like, A, the thing of where he's having to talk through, he's like, well, the movie reaches certain conclusions.
And then he kind of said a big pause.
And it's like, you know, um, and it doesn't, but, but he says he's watched it multiple times.
Like he's a fan of the movie.
I mean, what, and what, what does that mean about the way the movie was?
And what does that mean about how this cultural product exists is I think the question that we want to, I want to ask and not answer just yet, but that's something that really started to interest me was he's talking about that.
And then I saw the movie and then we had our criticism of the movie, but like, that's a, that's a really important question that really talks also to what we do.
And I am definitely open to criticism on this, but uh let's let's let's uh let's continue but that's that's what that's what james edwards had to say and the point of the i use the incident quote because you know the point he's making is like well this is a big expensive hollywood movie and of course, David Irving is such a scholar.
He's such an important person that even people who hate him, you know, think of him as a truly important person that's worth making a Hollywood movie about.
And if you believe that, I've seen a lot of movies about people who aren't, who aren't, you know, not exactly stellar samples of human achievement.
Let's just put it that way.
Well, I mean, there's being somebody who's important enough to make a movie about, and the movie isn't really about him.
anyway, but and then there's, you know, being somebody that a movie portrays positively.
That movie does not portray David positively.
Well, that's not the point of that movie the point of that movie is not that david irving is this great this great guy you know i have my issues with the movie but it manages not let's get it let's get it i think i think this is the perfect place to say this then there is a reading in which it does there is a reading in which the holocaust on trial sides with david irving there is a reading of it the movie the hollywood movie we'll talk about that one further i mean but they both do it portray accurately david irving represented he chose to represent himself he's up against a brilliant scholar,
a well, a Jewish scholar, for that matter, with a team of liars from a publishing house that they spent millions and millions of dollars in five years defeating this David Irving character.
And, you know, so it's like the big publishing company, the big guys, and they're just, they're just beating up on this little David Irving who, you know, never went to college, taught himself German, who taught himself all this, who became a very respected scholar.
And then when he reached conclusions they didn't like, you know, they, they kicked him out of their stuff.
They called him a racist.
They called him the equivalent of being called a paedophile is kind of what what Irving says in one of the movies.
It is like being called a wife, Peto, a paedophile.
It is a verbal yellow star.
And ultimately what Irving says is, you know, look, they don't have the documentary evidence does not say what they say it does.
The documentary evidence, you know, we don't have the blue cyanide of the walls we don't have all that you know and everybody in this movie admits that the way you know how the holocaust happened is not through that but through all this other documentary events well if you believe Irving is correct if you believe that Irving is actually right about this it's very easy to believe well of course those are all just fake documents that's all just that's all just a bunch of Jewish clip flim flam etc it's very easy to to kind of see that like you know the uh both I mean the holocaust on trial you
know, presents us like, well, this building has been destroyed, but then it gives us like the CGI like walkthrough of like, this is what it was.
And it's like, that's just a fucking drawing.
I don't know that that existed.
How do I know that existed.
Of course, if you read all the documents and you spoke Germany's for years on this, you would know that it existed.
That's unquestionably true that you cannot reach another conclusion.
Honestly, that's what the trial finds.
But it's very easy to just reject all that and go like, no, Irving, Irving's the little guy or Irving's the David and, you know, the Jews are the little Goliath and they he tried to he tried to make a civil action against them to to gain his reputation back and they crushed him that's exactly what that's it's very easy and it's very easy to watch that movie and come to that conclusion you and i are very if you go in determined to do that i mean yeah well i don't think that's the fault of either text well honest well i i i agree with you on that okay i agree with you on that because ultimately they portray accurately
kind of what's going on but it does, you know, make us wonder, you know, well, should we tell these stories?
You know, how is there a way of doing it that doesn't do that?
I think is kind of the question.
And I think this podcast does a good job, but like we do not highlight the works of these guys.
We do not go places that we do not make it comfortable for them.
We've never invited them on.
We never will invite them on.
I play brief clips and then it counts to them in a lot of context.
We don't link directly to their materials, although I might have to do that today for a different reason.
But, you know, again, I'm not expecting, you know, like.
It's just to me, it's an industry question of like, even with these works, which are explicitly designed to tell David Irving as a flamethrower artist and a piece of shit, it is very easy to come to.
to come to come you know again i i know how they think i can you know i was watching the movies and i'm like yeah no of course they like this movie you know like you know it's very easy to come to that conclusion and i don't know i again i don't think it's on the part of the filmmakers i just like i don't know what do we do with that i think there's a big question that's been going on in like kind of media studies and sort of you know kind of news coverage is like what do we do about misinformation when you have people that are like just willfully unable to be reached on topics and this is like it goes more much larger than the holocaust of course but you know um You know,
there's all, I mean, I listened to Megan Kelly and Jack Vesobik and Charlie Kirk and they just, they're just feeding lies all day long about, about like what's going on in the Trump White House and like, you know, how do you, how do you combat that, you know, even for people who don't listen to it as many hours a day as I do, you know, people just believe it casually.
And then, you know, suddenly the, you know, Russia Gate was just a hoax the whole time.
And it's just like created by Obama and Hillary Clinton and the, you know, it's the deep state and everything.
It's not like, you know, and Epstein was never, you know, it's like, it's like, they just, it's just, you create this alternate world.
You create it to such a fidelity that it's very easy to get in there.
And then.
Any cultural product that goes against that like narrative, any culture, no matter how skillfully produced, by definition, it's just going to be either dismissed or viewed through that lens and like just and especially with something like holocaust now where you know people have spent like 40 years figuring out how to deny the holocaust you know there is you know there are like hundreds of thousands of you know not hundreds of that there are like thousands of books written from a denier perspective that look on the surface always on the surface like very detailed technical
treatises on these topics and i some somebody can't even somebody with an interest in this topic i couldn't approach that material and immediately tell you why it's wrong You need another scholar to do that.
And so then it looks like, well, you just have these two scholars at a very high level having a legitimate academic debate.
That's the whole point of Vervick's career.
And I mean, I think, I mean, I mean, you know, he lost a lot based on this trial.
I mean, he lost, you know, he lost the trial.
But, I mean, they're still republishing his books.
They're still, like, he's still very well respected in those spaces.
Like, in those spaces, yeah.
Right.
I think one of the things that the TV docudrama gets across better than the film is the extent to which, and this is really more fundamentally, this is what this is about.
This isn't, this trial wasn't about.
Deborah Libstadt fundamentally.
It wasn't even fundamentally about the Holocaust.
What it was about was the fact that this guy, David Irving, was not a historian.
He was a falsifier of history.
And this is what Professor Evans, this is the great service that Professor Evans did when he went into this and he produced his report for the trial and then turned it into his book.
He documents in pitiless, merciless detail the extent to which Irving falsifies the evidence, falsifies the facts, lies, omits, distorts, mistranslates.
And Evans also at the start of the book, he goes through the public perception of Irving versus the reality.
One of the things, and he's quite acerbic on the journalism around the case as well.
He's acerbic about the fact that the journalists commenting on it talk about it as if Irving is the defense, as if he is the one who is being picked on, as if he is the one who is being sued, as if he's on trial, because they haven't properly assimilated what's going on.
And they're repeating the standard view of Irving that they've heard from other people, that he's a respected historian who's got a reputation for discovering new documents and stuff like this.
And he exposes that as...
He doesn't have a PhD.
He doesn't have, you know, a professorship anywhere or tenure.
He doesn't actually discover new documents or burrow around in archives more than any other research historian.
Evans exposes this whole thing for just a mirage.
And I think that the TV docudrama doesn't concentrate on the idea of the Holocaust, denial of the Holocaust and the historicity of the Holocaust.
Absolutely, because that's from the point of view of the documentary makers, that's the most important thing.
And of course, in terms of history and politics, of course, it is the most important thing.
Absolutely.
But what the trial was actually about, as I say, was the fact that this guy is a fraudster.
He's a neo-Nazi fraudster.
It wasn't enough to show he was a Nazi.
you could easily, I mean, you could, you know, you could say, well, he's just allowed to believe that, you know, because.
Well, you had to, they had to show that Lipstadt was correct and not being defamatory when she said that about him, which they, which they did.
So they have to, they have to show not that he is a Nazi, not that he believes odious things, although it is important to show that he believes odious things, but also that he was falsifying the documents, he was falsifying the stuff.
And then again, lying about Hitler gets deep into the weeds on this, is like goes into like particular lines where he's.
you know, omitting certain things.
And, you know, again, this could be an easy mistake to make where Irving is not accomplished in the German language as he is.
He is well respected as being, as a, as a native speaker of German as you can be and not actually be a native.
He is incredibly fluent in German.
That's the thing.
Also, there's a pattern of it.
He's constantly mistranslating.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mistranslation is always in the favor of Hitler.
Exactly.
And that's the nub of what really the movie could have been about is about how he's a falsifier of history, not just a Nazi.
And so, I think it's worth seeing, particularly the TV film, I think it's worth seeing.
uh you know if you want the hollywood version hollywood version i think it's fine it's annoying but it's fine but yeah no like the like the movie i want to see is like herzog looking at like lying on the lying in the documents.
Like that's the movie I want.
You can even have the screencast.
On the deeper point, I mean, I kind of agree.
These were kind of the debates that people put up around this at the time.
They were saying, you know, shouldn't you just ignore it because by going after Irving, which of course, as Richard Evans points out, wasn't what was happening.
They were not picking on him.
They weren't going after him.
couldn't just ignore it.
She and Penguin Books had been accused of...
But the idea was, you know, you shouldn't do this.
Essentially, people were saying you shouldn't defend yourself against this accusation because you'll be platforming him.
And well, you need you need to establish the the actual record.
I mean, we've talked about this on previous episodes.
There was a point in time where I and I know that you this is true of you as well.
I believed the version of the conspiracy theory about around the JFK assassination when I was much younger.
I believe that.
And at that time, no amount, partly because of that fucking movie.
And at the time, no amount of non conspiracy theories.
history writing about it could have convinced me otherwise because I was in that conspiracy brained headspace.
But what allowed me eventually to climb out of it was the presence of good arguments elsewhere.
They were there for me to find.
I wasn't ready to accept them at the time when I was 20 years old, but they were there for me to find when I became ready to go out and seek them.
And I think that's the service that is done by combating stuff like this in this forum, which is that it puts the reality on the record.
It's there for people who are willing to see it.
Yeah.
And making it like, Richard Evans writing the book is an important thing.
I think everybody who listens to this show should read that book.
It's a brilliant book.
It's a brilliant book.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't do a lot of book recommendations just because I don't read that many books these days, you know, but basically everything Evans wrote.
He wrote an excellent book recently called The Hitler Conspiracies, where he talks about five conspiracy theories centering around the issue of the nazis in the third reich that's a great book he wrote a three-volume history of the third reich as a whole which is i haven't read all of it but the stuff that i've read of it basically the first volume very good indeed um you uh sent me you obtained a copy of this and then sent me that copy through very legal means of course yeah yes everybody sees through this it's fine the tv docudrama you
The TV docudrama, yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
And so I did watch the version you sent me, and then I was looking for something else, and I was like, let's see if this is findable online.
YouTube found it.
The whole 90-minute version found it instantly.
It's like the first link on YouTube.
I was right.
It was fine.
It was...
The first...
When I looked for it on YouTube, I only found the cut-down 50-minute version.
Oh, that's good.
I found the whole thing on YouTube.
Oh, oh, oh.
You're going to bite your tongue a little bit.
Guess what the channel it's on that it hosted the whole thing.
Oh.
The channel called Irving Books.
It includes also the entire 45-minute thing that Irving filmed when he confronted Lipstadt at the talk and other David Irving materials.
This is an Irving fan posting this documentary or this docudrama, whatever.
Well, that is bizarre.
I, you know...
They think it exonerates him.
That's what I'm saying.
They think it exonerates him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, like, on that topic, I have another, you know, I have another, you know, I have another clip this one is not related this one i was going to do this as a uh is a is a kind of a roundup thing but i had a we're coming at this a different way.
And we're kind of talking about how these guys like kind of use their media appearances and how they talk about their media appearances.
And in a previous episode, I think the most recent numbered episode, or maybe in the last most recent news roundup we do a lot of episodes i can't keep them straight anymore but we talked about the media son jubilee appearance right that was a news roundup yeah that was a news roundup okay so we talked about the media son jubilee and you talked about this guy conner who was pine sap and i found out pine sap had been on uh elisha schaeffer's show he did a full appearance there he is very much a dick flintes accolite etc etc and i said to you because i'd only watched it one time and i hadn't gone through a bunch of the other clips at that point and
wasn't really kind of relevant to what we're talking about, that he was not the worst one.
He was not nearly the worst one because I watched the whole thing and you didn't.
And I said, there's backwards hat guy.
And if you've seen the thing, if you've even seen clips, you've seen the guy with the green baseball hat, it's on backwards.
He's got like tussled hair, went up twice and was, he was actually the last person to speak before the, like kind of the 10 minute and debate thing.
So he, he had, he had kind of the final word.
Well, let's just say, if you remember when we talked about James Zalsup, I said, and and then also put on vaccination for a while.
And I said that James also wanted he never wanted to be richard spencer he wanted to be jazz hasn't make feels he just like eats every every word that man says and regurgitates it at him Well, this guy, he goes by Doomernaut on Twitter or on Substack.
He's not, he may be on Twitter, but they, so they linked to his sub stack.
I will now read to you the title.
Like the, the, he is the number one, a logger of the kosher right.
And the first two articles as, as of the ties of this time are about this guy, Nathan Koftas, who refutes Kevin McDonald through using other evolutionary psychology methods.
So he's like a right wing eugenicist dipshit who believes it's actually because the Jews are just naturally better at being humans that they end up in, you know, high positions of authority rather than.
than being because of they are you know they have some in-group strategy you know just because we're better because you know eugenics is right etc so in defense of cofness over or in defense of McDonald over Kofness because he believes Kevin McDonald, by the way, testified for David Irving at the survival trial.
I did, I did, I did, I did, I'm not taking the movie for this, but I have listened to many hours of Kevin McDonald speak.
I know very much what that actor did not sound anything like Kevin McDonald.
It's fine.
Nobody knows what Kevin McDonald.
I know what Kevin McDonald sounds like.
I, you know, it's not a problem.
It's just like Kevin McDonald has a very particular way of speaking.
It's just like, I didn't even tweak that it was Kevin McDonald at first.
I'm like, oh, that's okay.
That's supposed to be McDonald.
I get it.
But I mean, the substack is titled, you know, that one white person populist, like this is, this is, I mean, this is explicitly white nationalist material.
YouTube, the Jubilee channel, when it linked to everybody's social media, they linked to this substack on that where 10 million people have seen it.
So anyway, yeah, right.
Dupernott, Dupernott really wanted to be, he wants to be Mikey Knight more than Mikey Knight wants to be Mikey Knight, I think at this point.
He's a huge fan.
And apparently, I think they were in contact like behind the scenes on Twitter, you know, or something like that.
Maybe he's probably on the forums.
He's, you know, anyway, I didn't look deeply into this.
Doom or not went on to, went on the Daily Show episode 1368.
And yes, there have been 1300 actually a few more now because this is like a week and a half old but this is as this jumper not talking about the you know a you're just going to get to hear him chat with my enoch so apologies for making list to any amount of my enoch it's only 40 seconds long but you know but also he's talking a little bit about the the selection process like how he got on jubilee they reached to my friend and they were like you know you know you know more way more about politics than i do they were like and she's more of like a normy kind of she's more she's right-wing but she's more of a normy and
She was.
He means not a white nationalist probably.
Like, you know, you should apply and I'll throw in a word for you and I applied and they really liked my application..
I had to, I went through, I was interviewed on a Zoom call by the producer.
And then just, yeah, they set me up.
So pretty simple actually.
It's much easier than people think it actually is.
And they don't really reimburse you, which is so like they're probably looking for people to come own.
So it's actually probably pretty easy to get own at.
It's really hard to be any more damning about the Jubilee process at this point than listening to that 40 seconds clip, right?
Yeah.
I'm an open Nazi.
They interviewed me.
I probably told them I was an open Nazi.
They linked to my Nazi substack because they're not paying people, who do they think they're going to get with this stuff?
We want far-right conservatives to come and debate somebody.
We want somebody who's itching for that little inch of fame, who really wants to get out there and make viral clips.
This is, you know, again, it's exactly, but again, this is how these guys like defend.
He thinks he won.
Like, if you want to, we could do an episode about this, about this Daily Show episode.
We can go through all the things that like every time that MediaSan did what I think MediaSan is.
is right to do is like look i have made these particular claims i want you to debate this claim and he's like no i don't want to debate that claim i want to debate the jews i want to debate you know i want to debate other things i'm not interested in donald trump etc like he wants to bring it on to he wants to do mike enox Mike Enoch's rhetoric at Medi Assad.
That's what he wants to do.
And Mike Enoch, in his discussion of debates, he's always like, well, no, you don't let them make their points.
You ask them about Jews.
You ask them about Jewish influence.
You ask them about this.
Do not talk about any other topic.
No, we are not talking about Gaza.
We are talking about, et cetera.
We are talking about these topics.
This is all we're talking about.
This is all I'm going to be here to debate you.
And I refuse to discuss anything else.
And so, and, and, you know, in the turn of the online blood sports era, that's a really effective technique because, like, you know, people are not as trained as Betty Assad is and they're not like able to come in there with an arsenal of facts and going, like, I'm not going to, I'm not here to discuss it.
I'm here to discuss this this i mean ultimately they're kind of doing the same thing they're just like and it's very clear that in like mediasan's like other things and i rewatched a couple of those clips with the um just to kind of get them in my head again it's very clear mediasan realizes he talked to a dotsie very very quickly and he just doesn't he you know he understands him yeah yeah yeah he gets it um i really wish he just said it They're always going to think that they won, though, aren't they?
Or at least they're going to pretend that they won in public.
That's the thing.
Yeah.
They're going to come out and they're going to say, well, of course, I wiped the floor with them, etc.
You know, just the one kid.
There was the one kid who tweeted, you know, like he didn't get to go up and he, like, he said, you know, he just, he did a screenshot of himself sitting there in his chair.
It's like, I didn't want to go up because MediaSan spelled terrible.
And it's like, you know, you didn't even get to talk, you know, you're trying to like, you're a little pathetic.
I won by not going up there and debating MediaSan like, Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just cope, obviously, and racism.
And this is something, this is something, and Ian, this may sound like self-defensive.
This may sound like a thing, but I have been critical lately of my decision not to do an episode kind of talking about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, like not doing it early in 2023 or 2024, early on, or even doing, I thought about doing something like how the Nazis are talking.
about this topic right you know and kind of doing that i was dissuaded from doing so by a wiser head but you know and i'm just like i just don't know how to do this i don't know how to do this episode given what we do and the thing and i've said this to you privately and i'm going to say it here on the podcast just like i i I feel really bad about that.
But in my head, this is why, because the first thing they're going to do is like the famous anti-fascist podcaster, this guy who knows us inside and out to, you know, who disagrees with everything we believe in also thinks the Jews are doing terrible things in Gaza and Gaza.
He doesn't say they're Jews.
He says it's the Israeli government, but he knows they're fucking Jews.
And then the idea of having my words used against me in that context, that made me go away from doing that topic.
And, you know, I'm maybe that was cowardice on my part.
Maybe I would not, I should not have made that decision, but that's, that's my answer to that.
You can respond to that or not.
I think that's the right decision.
I mean, I, I. i'm not going to tell you how how how to feel but i think that was absolutely the right editorial decision i think we we did talk about this um and there were sort of structural problems with uh our remit as a show that made it very difficult to find a way to cover it in a in a way that was more more full and focused that just were kind of inescapable.
I mean, I think you made the right call personally.
Okay.
I love that call.
I'm open to criticism on that basis, although Jack will probably get the criticism.
That's what we find out.
People just reach out to Jack.
I think what Daniel did is unconsciousable.
I can't believe you're still, I guess, with him, et cetera.
I think a really interesting, this is a sideline, but I think it fits into this.
There was a great episode of Polite Conversations.
with the title, Can Genocide Studies Survive a Genocide in Gaza?
And it's with an author, Mary Cohen, who is at the, or Mari Cohen, I'm not sure, at the Jewish Currents.
And Cohen wrote.
a really great, very long, but really great article with the same title.
And it's about how the, you mentioned the ADL earlier, it's about how the particularly sort of like the field of genocide studies has been so focused on the Holocaust, so focused on like Livstad, on the treatment of the Jewish Holocaust as being in some way unique.
And that criticism of Israel is like denying the Jewish people.
their sanctum after the events of the Holocaust.
There's this very legitimate feeling in some circles about that.
And that these organizations, that these scholars and that these organizations have refused to make statements as they very well should have made statements about what's going on about the ongoing genocide or ethic cleansing however whichever term you prefer about the ongoing genocide in Gaza because they are reticent to you know to reach that to to you know upset people in that way and it's a great article I have a quote but I don't need it I didn't quote it here I just kind of describe the article listen to that conversation it's a great conversation look at that article
And the reason I wanted to bring it up here is because it also fits into the same question.
It's like, well, how do you cover this?
Like how do we, I mean, I'm not, I'm not scanning the ACL, the ADL, the ADL, the ACL, the ADL.
I'm not in any way defending the ADL here.
The ADL is a monstrous organization on this topic.
The ADL should be front and foremost of criticizing, and I think people like Jewish Voices for Peace, et cetera, are essential voices because they are Jewish, because they, and yet they do very strongly criticize the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza in the strongest terms.
I'm not putting on the strongest terms, but you know what I mean, there's no equivocation whatsoever on that.
Unsparing, yeah.
And I think it's, you know, for me, this is all like kind of, it's all this kind of like failure of actors in the space to actually reach conclusions and to actually you know have the gumption to go about and like say what needs to be said and you know like call it out whenever it whenever it needs to be called out i mean you know look you and i i mean look i i think i defended myself on this topic earlier you and i have spared no bones about complaining about you know the us government and the uk government we we tore
biden over the coals on many occasions over all the failures that he had and we would have done that to kamala harris as well There's absolutely no, you know, we see these things clearly and we don't mince words when we talk about them except for legal reasons, of libel reasons, etc.
You know, you have more to worry about there than I do.
do but um um we uh you know again well my government has basically just made the being in solidarity with palestine illegal so yeah well you know mine is mine is getting there mine is getting there yeah um you know and god that's actually the thing that's the Nazis hate Trump for the most.
It's like that we love everything except his stance on Israel.
He's not, he's not, he's not harsh enough on Israel, you know, like he's too, like they love him on everything, but Israel is like the turd in the punch bowl, you know.
It's like, we love the punch bowl, but why does there have to be this turd floating in it?
Yeah, no.
I just wanted to, I just, again, to me, it's like, it was part of the same process.
The process that kind of brought me to kind of talking about this.
How do we talk about this?
What do we say?
What do we do?
This is not to say we are blameless.
This is not to say, you know, like it's just these organizations, we have to be able to call this stuff out where it is and we need to be honest about it.
You know, you and I use humor.
We use, you know, we're a small show.
We use, you know, what we use the techniques that we have to talk about this stuff.
We don't, we are not beholden to the budget of a, you know, denial was made for $10 million.
They could have been a lot more radical and gotten that $10 million, you know.
But I don't know.
I think there's just responsibility for how we talk about these things.
And that's.
what interested me and i don't have a good answer for this i don't have a good answer but i wanted to kind of pose the question yeah so yeah um i think i think there's a lot to be said about the the idea that the Holocaust is unique.
I think it is unique in some respects.
I'm kind of reluctant to say that because so many of the people that say that are doing so for reasons that I disagree with or even using the idea of the uniqueness or the incommensurability of the Holocaust, you know, for political.
I mean, let's just say it.
The Holocaust is weaponized.
Yes.
ideologically by people to defend the state of Israel or to deflect criticism of the state of Israel.
That's a fact, and that is completely reprehensible.
And the idea of the categorical uniqueness of the Holocaust is often used in that way.
I think, nonetheless, it's true to say that it was unique in some respects.
I think every historical event of that kind is unique in some respects.
I think it's worth pointing out the fact that it is categorically unique in some ways.
But I do think a of the, just even aside from the question of the weaponization of the Holocaust as a topic to silence or deflect or blacken a criticism of Israel.
Even aside from that, so much of how we talk about the Holocaust in our culture is just morbid and salacious.
And frankly, it's been commodified to a huge extent.
And I think, you know, I think kind of my meta complaint about stuff like denial is that it is part of a kind of a commodification of this topic, you know, for sort of selling a kind of sentimental media version of it.
which I find pretty distasteful.
As was Schindler's list, as was Schindler's list.
I mean, yeah, I absolutely agree.
Yeah.
On the question of Irving and what the value is of combating people like him, I think it's worth pointing out that we have this guy now, Daryl Cooper, who Mother Jones did an article recently about this, which is very good, I think.
And it points out the guy is...
I used to listen to his podcast.
I used to listen to Martyr Maid, but I haven't listened to that much.
Martyr Maid, that's yeah, exactly.
On X, he has hundreds of thousands of followers, one of whom is JD Vance.
He was interviewed by Tucker Carlson and praised by Tucker Carlson.
He's the biggest history blog on Substack, chillingly.
Substack, which just recently sent out a push notification to people for a blog which was just openly anti-Semitic.
And he was on Rogan, and Rogan has said, oh, there's no way this guy's anti-Semitic.
This guy is an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier, and it is frightening how much he is like David Irving.
I'll just read a little bit from this Mother Jones article.
It's talking about the fact that one of Daryl Cooper's things is that he likes to attack Winston Churchill.
Now, again, I'm no apologist for Winston Churchill.
David Irving did that as well.
David Irving wrote a book about how he decided that Winston Churchill had the Polish leader General Sikorsky assassinated, which, as far as I can tell, is complete bollocks.
This is another, this is Daryl Cooper thing as well.
And from this article, he says, Churchill, he's talking about Churchill being primarily responsible for the Second World War because of his alleged ties to financiers and a media complex supportive of Zionism.
He later specified that his source for this claim was David Irving, an infamous British anti-Semite and Holocaust denier.
Irving, who now lacks formal training as a historian, because Daryl Cooper, no formal training.
Irving, who also lacks formal training as a historian has been discredited for decades.
In 1991, after denying the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz, he used the acronym assholes to refer to the Auschwitz survivors, survivors of the Holocaust, and other liars.
And it talks a bit about the case that we've just been talking about.
And then it goes, again, it talks a little bit about Richard Evans debunking his work and so on.
And it shows Cooper is not just drawing on Irving.
He's also misrepresenting Irving by downplaying, he's recycling Irving's arguments while downplaying his anti-Semitism, re-phrasing his argument.
so that they sound less openly outrageous.
Here's a bit.
In Cooper's telling, Irving believed that gas chambers were not a primary method of killing.
That's a quote at Nazi death camps.
Irving put it more bluntly.
I'm a gas chamber denier.
So he's laundering Irving as he repeats his talking points.
He's also misread.
Cooper is not just misrepresenting Irving.
He's misrepresenting Irving's criticisms of Irving, Evans' criticisms of Irving, making it sound that Evans is less critical.
So this, we have this guy who's now the biggest he's a star holocaust denier on x and substack and joe rogan and podcasts and tucker carlson and he is not just very very much like david irving he is directly using irving's arguments and laundering him so i would i would argue irving invented that like alt right attitude yeah in some ways he may not have invented it but I remember when we did our original episode on this,
I found like some old YouTube clips of like when Irving came to the States in either 85 or 86.
I think there was, I think my sources differed, so I don't remember if it was 85 or 86, but he gave some talks to some conferences and he does the racist jokes.
He does the plausibly denial, but not really plausibly denial thing about race.
He does the African people are just stupid.
He does, he plays all the hits.
He sounded exactly like Richard Spencer in 2016 and he did it 30 years earlier.
Even the bit, we see this in the denial movie, you know, the fact that he does this stunt, you know, he has somebody in the audience to ask about him and he comes in and it's like, I'm David Irving and he films the whole thing and he like puts it up in his, you know, it's like, it's just so, he's just so born.
He was born 30 years early for this era.
Yeah.
But he kind of invents this stuff.
in a lot of ways he's he's the progenitor of it but luckily he's got this little duke you know yeah he's got this little avatar in the form of daryl cooper as as you know as as that's what happens he's you know i mean look david ever lost the trial but he kind of he kind of like he's winning yeah i mean you know i don't know he's the trial didn't stamp out his ideas you know the movie didn't stamp out his ideas we didn't stamp out his ideas he's still there you know certain people can still watch that movie and apparently that documentary as well and say Yeah, that's my guy.
He looks good in this.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's because they're determined to.
It's because they're deliberately reading those texts against the grain, but they're still doing it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
Well, a bit of an anticlimax there, but I don't know.
This was a bit of a difficult one to get together and plan and assemble.
I was just going to talk about the 2016 movie for 45 minutes.
It was going to be fine just to get some content out there.
And then it turns out when you step into Holocaust and now you're just stepping through shit all the time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway.
So.
let us know how you feel about you know what we discussed here if you want to hear us do the sydney sweeney we can do the sydney sweeney episode if you want to hear us do the episode of the daily show with do or not and i can walk through all the little rhetoric pitches that's just be really annoying to do, but I can do it.
