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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   32883 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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David Cole has quit Takimag:

I had several reasons for leaving Takimag but one was that I was told not to criticize Elon. I'm happy to have traded my paycheck for the freedom to do so.

{snip}First I was told to not criticize Musk. I actually said okay. Then I was told not to criticize anything on or about X. I even said okay to THAT, silly as it was. But my compliance led to even MORE demands for self-censorship, and that's when I was like, "fuck this, I'm out."

He's enjoying his freedom from The Crowd:

Rightists one week ago: Raise $800,000 for a woman who shouted "Fucking N-GG-R N-GG-R N-GG-R N-GG-R" on a playground. FIGHT THE WORD POLICE! NEVER CANCEL ANYONE OVER WORDS!

Rightists today: "Comey said '86?' IMPRISON HIM! DESTROY HIM! Bad hurty words can cause GENUINE HARM!"

This is why I don't miss my column. Writing for this crowd requires stupidity (mindless rah-rah cheering regardless of contradictions), insincerity (knowing the contradictions but catering to the morons anyway), or scolding (which by my own admission was what I'd started doing).

This follows the end, earlier this year, of the Unz Review. Of course the website still exists, though I have no reason to go there after Steve Sailer, the last interesting writer, left. If you believe Unz, he quiet quit:

I’d actually been thinking of suggesting the exact same thing if Steve has indeed stopped posting here. {snip} Since it’s now been more than a couple of weeks since Steve’s last post

This was probably a (well-deserved) gesture of disrespect toward Unz for his descent into increasingly conspiratorial beliefs, ultimately culminating in Holocaust-denial.

I still remember fondly how I would read UR and Takimag in the 2010s. Too bad they succumbed to brainrot and audience capture.

Run Unz's article on Holocaust Denial is excellent actually, and takes a different approach than the usual Revisionist introduction but is very strong in its own right. It also provides some context on the early Holocaust Revisionist movement and its outgrowth from libertarian circles which is very interesting.

Cole, like many disillusioned members of the right-wing commentariat, is really telling on himself here. If all you can do is churn out Takes on this week's story to an undifferentiated mass of readers, you will eventually come to see them as a giant lump of aggregate stupidity, and caricature accordingly. I assume this explains most of the phenomenon - I wouldn't want to make a guess at how much is internalized self-loathing for one's writing career terminating in what is essentially slop (that is to say, Takes).

This was probably a (well-deserved) gesture of disrespect toward Unz for his descent into increasingly conspiratorial beliefs, ultimately culminating in Holocaust-denial.

Unz has been like that for a decade at least. This is more likely connected to Sailer's newfound career opportunities with Passage et al.

Antisemites will say "If you were kicked out of 100 different bars, maybe you're the problem." Maybe the reason so many writers, Richard Spencer, Richard Hanania, Anatoly Karlin, David Cole, along with of course the liberals, never Trump conservatives, etc., regard the populist right readership as a giant lump of aggregate stupidity has something to do with said readership.

Richard Hanania, Anatoly Karlin, David Cole, along with of course the liberals, never Trump conservatives, etc., regard the populist right readership as a giant lump of aggregate stupidity has something to do with said readership.

It's hard to take the criticism seriously, when you propose any of these people are supposed to be barometers warning against aggregate stupidity.

Care to elaborate? I haven’t really read them.

Two ex-wignats, one guy mindbroken by Russia's failed blitzkrieg, and a former holocaust revisionist who changed his mind after seeing a gas chamber (apparently he just... hadn't thought about that?) are not exactly the cast of the Level Headed Good Judgement Hall of Fame. A casual browse of David Cole's spittle-flecked twitter feed may help to confirm that impression.

one guy mindbroken by Russia's failed blitzkrieg

Are you talking about Hanania or Karlin here?

Karlin

My point is that far-right people once looked up to them. Particularly Spencer, the original king of the Alt-Right. If you can't get on in mainstream society and then join a fringe political movement whose leaders wind up thinking you're stupid and crazy, maybe you're the problem.

My point is that far-right people once looked up to them.

If it makes you feel better, anyone who ever hyped Hanania up took a massive hit to their credibility from me, it was clear from the start he has nothing interesting to say. But you're clearly not making that point, as you have a track record of putting him forward as someone worth looking up to yourself.

Richard Spencer had no organic relevance to the first wave Alt-Right. That short-lived moment coalesced out of things like GamerGate, rather than the irrelevant swamp where Spencer lurked. Functionally none of them knew who he was, and if told, would have called him stupid and crazy. But after Trump started gaining momentum in the early 2016 election cycle, CNN dug Spencer out of a landfill because he had once used the term a decade earlier, and practically gave him his own show called "FACE OF THE NAZI ALT-RIGHT WITH NAZI ALT-RIGHT KING RICHARD "NAZI" SPENCER".

Rather like exactly what you're doing here.

Hanania in particular. It baffles me that anyone takes that creature seriously.

Why, because he looks weird?

I think he‘s smart and feisty. You guys complained for years that Scott is too nice, but when a guy gets a little combative, then you‘re offended.

What are the public intellectuals you guys approve of, anyway?

For a more concrete criticism, the goal of getting a more combative Scott Alexander would be to get someone who was smart and interested in the truth to not flinch from the truth. That's the problem with Hanania. He isn't.

This weekend's example is this quote:

Pinker: Woke classes make up 3% of what is offered at Harvard. The rest of the time, students are learning about the Roman Empire, quantum mechanics, or the functioning of the brain.

I'm sure there's some exceptionally technical read where Pinker's actual quote wasn't strictly lying; I'm sure this student exists, and their AI tool might even be more than an Excel spreadsheet with Copilot use. But ignore for now the unsolvable question of whether the sentiment analysis was calibrated correctly, or whether the 150 courses focusing on woke bullshit might not be the best use of literally thousands of dollars of student debt.

You know, I know, and Hanania knows that not every single bit of left-wing propaganda marks that out in sharpie on its forehead. Pinker is not very clear what "about a third of these had a discernible leftward tilt" is referring to, and whether it's the 5000 courses for the Arts and Sciences (aka 1600+!), or just the 3 or 6% of 'woke'-topic courses (which would be, bluntly, a lie; you can leaf through the course catalogue and find more than 50 course that obviously lean left). It's not even an accurate summary of what Pinker said, and it's certainly not interested in examining what Pinker actually spelled out rather than what Hanania wishes were the case.

Ok, well, 'public intellectual plays game-of-telephone to munge data, doesn't bring any skepticism to dubious claims', yeah, we've all seen it. But there's another half of the tweet, and it's the sort of writing Darwin would put out.

A movement that wants to abolish the intellect as a response to woke is a cancer.

Does the conservative movement want to abolish the intellect? Well, Hanania wants that to be his thesis; why bother engaging with anything else!

Or for another example, from Will DEI Make Airplanes Fall Out Of The Sky, where Hanania quotes a Spirit Airlines exec saying:

As importantly, these 1,500 hours can all be earned flying small, single engine planes in rural areas, or even flying hot air balloons. During the years of building these hours, most applicants do very little to train themselves in the career they plan to enter, such as flying big jets into New York and Chicago.

I've got complex feelings about the 1500 hour rule, but this is a commercial exec making claims in his commercial interests, not a factual analysis, and those claims are not actually true. No airline would accept a pilot with that sort of experience -- and most would consider significant balloon experience a demerit -- but even if you're trying to Well Akshully about the strict terms of the 1500 hour rule, it includes 75 hours of instrument flight time that you can't get in a hot air balloon by definition (IVR-certified lighter-than-aircraft count as 'airships'). More critically, flying big jets into New York and Chicago are not the career an airline pilot will be entering, and a large portion of new ATPs come to the exam with recent experience with stuff that is like the regionals that their career will actually start with in a big airline.

Even when he has claims that could have defensible versions, he does this sorta thing. A certain class and theme of paranoid is becoming accepted on the conservative sphere? Maybe, though you have to draw a bit of a post-hoc description. "Unfortunately, Gribbles are more upset about the approval of life-saving vaccines than any other [ed: emphasis added] aspect of the pandemic response, showing that podcasts and a community of paranoid individuals all doing their own research is not an acceptable replacement for medical experts." I betcha I can name something they care more about! There's another (paywalled) bit that, and it's kinda hilarious how aggressively he avoids mentioning the then-current scandals about late Biden pardons.

He does it even when it's stupid, pointless, meaningless shit.

It's the same reason that Yglesias and Matthews are so appalling. It's not that they're wrong; it's that the sounds coming from their mouth are nothing more than noises they think most likely to persuade some portion of their readers. I had the same criticism back when he was aiming this at the left, and I've bashed right-wing writers here and elsewhere for doing the same thing, I'm certainly not going to find it more appealing because he's aimed at the other direction today.

I appreciate the attempt. I guess we just disagree on the charitability threshold, specifically the distinction between being wrong and lying. Of course I agree that the woke problem is not limited to 3% of Harvard’s output, but being wrong on this, and making a few flippant tweets, does not make hanania a bad faith actor.

And “Avoiding mentioning” is not a crime sufficient to establish mens rea. I also think Darwin should have been treated more charitably, so there you go.

Why, because he looks weird?

Yes, that's definitely part of it. Hanania has gone off about how he hates the Republican masses because they're fat and ugly. Meanwhile, he's more visually repellant than any Person of Walmart I've ever seen. He's like the Platonic Ideal of what generations of fantasy writers have been groping towards, when they want you to know a character is a contemptible pussy you should hate just from the initial description. Every time I see that PFP, my lips curl into a feral snarl. I feel like a dog that is sensing that the stranger knocking on the door is a corruption demon in a skinsuit.

Richard Hanania makes the Devil from the Constantine movie look like wholesome Brad Pitt.

I think he‘s smart and feisty. You guys complained for years that Scott is too nice, but when a guy gets a little combative, then you‘re offended.

"Combatative" is all he is. The man is a LOLcow, farming engagement by using his own idiot takes as bait. Even before I saw what he looked like, he gave me a consistent impression that he was the human hardware equivalent of AI slop. I don't think I've ever seen something he wrote that made me feel like a concious mind was having thoughts and trying to communicate them. Even on topics where I did, or used to, agree with him, there was something off, some failure of the intellectual Turing Test. If we could get a Neuralink installed to observe the process, I would bet money that Hanania goes vibes->wordcel vomit. "Mexican twinks are hot, therefore yay immigration." "Fat daddies are yucky, therefore boo Trump."

And that's what Hanania comes down to: vibes. He's junk food for people like Trace, who want to imagine that they're ivory-towered, neutral intellectuals, but can't shake the vibe that makes them heavily tilt the scales. His "feistiness" lets them get that ArrDrama hit of being a total bitch while pretending to be chaste maidens. His appeal is entirely a function of aesthetic preference for pseudointellectual slop in a sweater vest. Which is hilariously ironic coming from a viscerally disgusting creature whose entire oeuvre consists of LOLcow vibes-posting.

Ironically this is the kind of comment that makes me like Hanania more out of contrariness, because this sort of bile itself is repulsive.

It was fun to channel John Oliver for a minute.

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What?

His take on Putin's interview with Tucker is a classic:

https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1755750991964913902

I still go back to it from time to time.

Really? That? It's kind of exactly my problem with him. Very much a "written for Twitter" piece. It could have been a single snappy-if-kinda-vacuous sentence, but instead it's putting just enough vague wordiness into pretending to be an essay, so you can imagine there's some real knowledge and insight there, if you already wanted a reason to think badly of Putin.

How does that post not trigger your bullshit detector? The person who wrote it clearly doesn't actually know anything about Russian or Ukranian history. If they did, they would have actually worked it in in a meaningful way.

But I'm sure it was great for engagement farming. People can both dunk on Putin and argue about the history.

Having never seen a photo of Richard Hanania, I just now googled him. I guess he looks kind of smarmy. But not even 10% as bad as you make him out.

I mean "Richard Hanania makes the Devil from the Constantine movie look like wholesome Brad Pitt." Come on man. No he doesn't.

I used to like him before I knew what he looked and sounded like, back when all I knew about him was his pretty good breakdown of the Afghanistan debacle, where he did a fair amount of work and before most of his now infamous antics.

His book on US foreign policy also seems remarkably interesting., partly because he is now covering for the same people he was criticizing back then.

He is smart and hard working, yes, however, there are mysteries. Consider this video interview of him.

Give him a listen. Do you find him sympathetic or trustworthy etc?

He made my skin crawl lightly before his implausible turn to 'enlightened centrist'.

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I see, you make fun of his appearance because he made fun of your friends‘ appearance. His point about the low caliber of right-wing discourse stands.

What else? „lolcow“… if you could look into his brain argument… wrong vibes… „total bitch“ . You‘ve convinced me he‘s actually more correct than I originally thought.

His point about the low caliber of right-wing discourse stands.

The discourse I'm familiar with is pretty high caliber, while Hanania is there throwing schoolyard insults, and crying when anyone returns fire. He is wrong, and a hypocrite.

Could I get a brief explanation of who David Cole is, and why anybody should care?

He's a jew who did some holocaust denial work in the 90's. It's of great cathartic importance for some people here to notice and comment on his woes.

Republican Party Animal (an actual banned book, have to pirate it on libgen) is fairly entertaining. I found the bit about how the CA GOP types he was hanging out with (before being outed as David Cole) were legitimately surprised by Romney/Ryan losing and having a post-election meltdown to be interesting given that I considered that election to besuch a foregone conclusion that I barely paid attention to it.

before being outed as David Cole

I think it's warranted to add that explicit death threats from Zionist terrorist groups were the reason he changed his name and identity and left the US for a longer period.

They had internal polling that adjusted for the longstanding bias in polls for overestimating Democratic performance. Given that adjustment, Romney would have won big in the electoral college.

That adjustment was not valid for Obama. Polls broadly correctly estimated Obama's performance. He is not the median Democrat and applying a "median Democratic candidate" correction factor was a bad idea.

Obviously Romney loses. But he and his staffers are blindsided. Supposedly he didn't even have a concession speech written, because he was certain he was going win Florida and a handful of swing states.

But he and his staffers are blindsided.

So they actually believed that the GAE's Deep State will permit the first African-American president to go down in history as a one-term disappointment and failure?

If we were to go with your framing, perhaps Romney and his fellow old-style Republicans did presume the Deep State would work for them and not Obama, because they had good heuristic reasons to believe so at that time.

Never read the book, but those GOP types were definitely way high on their own supply in retrospect. Having been there at the time, I would say that in the right-coded media of the day, there was a commonly shared perception that the Obama campaign was weak and that much of his campaign was artificially inflated, whereas the Romney campaign, despite suffering the traditionally-perceived pro-Blue bias, was doing better than reported. Regardless of the perceived weaknesses of Obama the incumbent (and I believe he did lose a significant amount of votes from 2008), they paled in comparison to the actual weaknesses of Romney the candidate as revealed by the voters.

The replay of these dynamics in subsequent presidential elections has been an endless source of fascination to me personally, though I have long since given up on personally having any decent idea who would emerge victorious as I have lost both the ability and the desire to separate the signal of actual voter sentiment from the noise of propaganda.

Well, I can definitely understand pursuing a parasocial internet vendetta. I hate-read a few authors and feel my share of schadenfreude when things go badly for them. But for a top-level like this, I'd ideally want the self-awareness to realise that not everybody knows who this person is, and the understanding that their importance may not be immediately obvious.

David Cole never denied the Holocaust.

David Cole denies the Auschwitz extermination camp story, that makes him a Denier according to any mainstream position. His position on Auschwitz would be illegal in Europe for example.

Technically that part is true, yes.

Did I get the wrong David Cole at Taki mag? Or are you arguing for some specific definition of Holocaust denial?

@2rafa is correct. You can read Cole’s own description of his changing beliefs on the Holocaust here.

Here’s an excerpt relating to his current beliefs, which he has held since the mid-90s:

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

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

Deniers never cite Korherr either.

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

Why?

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

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

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

Korherr, with unfettered access to all SS documents, definitively concluded that as of the beginning of 1943, slightly over 2.4 million Jews had been killed in the Reinhard camps

It should be noted that the Korherr report says no such thing at all. The Korherr report says explicitly that the 1.2 million Jews were resettled through the camps of General Government, which is what the Revisionists say happened. And Richard Korherr himself wrote a letter to Der Spiegel in the 1970s clarifying that he specifically asked what that number referred to, and was told it referred to resettlement.

So the document directly states what the Revisionists say happened, Richard Korherr confirmed that was his own interpretation of that number in the 1970s, and the "2.4 million Jews had been killed in the Reinhard camps" is not stated in the report whatsoever, that's just the mainstream position begging the question.

David Cole is just relying on the fact that his audience doesn't know better, so they'll believe him when he just lies about what the Korherr report says.

David said "Deniers never cite Korherr either" is his typical style of outright lying when he knows his audience won't have background knowledge to verify what he's saying. Here's the Revisionist work on Treblinka Ctrl + F "Korherr"- 17 results with good discussion.

I’m not hugely familiar with him but my recollection is that you’re both kind of right. In the early-mid 90s when he was associated with Jim Goad and the Answer Me! counterculture zine circle he was essentially a ‘classic’ holocaust denier, probably mainly out of edginess.

By the time he was writing for Taki he believed (and as far as I know believes) that at least 3-4 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust by various methods that were ultimately the fault of the Nazi government. That probably still counts as denial for Deborah Lipstadt types but neither I nor actual Holocaust deniers of the “only 200,000 died of typhus, the rest either didn’t die or never existed” variety would consider it thus.

Cole takes a very rare position held by, maybe, 2 other people, which is that he is an Auschwitz Denier but a Treblinka Believer. He doesn't believe the Holocaust story at Auschwitz, which would make him a Denier according to any mainstream standard. It's also strange because an "extermination camp" at Auschwitz would be fundamentally more plausible than the Treblinka story. For example, Auschwitz at least actually had real crematoria which could be used to cremate large piles of body (according to Revisionists, not nearly enough but still). But Treblinka had nothing like that at all.

There's very scant evidence that "Treblinka" even existed at all. The total absence of evidence regarding Treblinka is beneficial for the Mainstream, because the large amounts of physical and documentary evidence at Auschwitz and Majdanek have made it easy for Revisionists to reconstruct what actually happened. For example, "oh you said this room was a gas chamber at Auschwitz, but according to all these construction blueprints we found, they all say it's a morgue. If this was just a fake morgue where's the real morgue?" The mainstream says it was really a gas chamber that was a fake morgue according to construction documents and also a fake shower room, the Revisionists say it was a morgue which is what construction documents say it was. So Revisionists have it easy at Majdanek and Auschwitz, but there's basically no evidence regarding Treblinka making it harder for Revisionists to make a more solid case. But of course the inverse is true, it's much harder for the mainstream to make a case but they have political power so they don't need to rely on solid evidence to retain hegemony over the interpretation of those camps.

David Cole vastly overstates his own contribution to Revisionism- he never published a single page in the mountains of volumes of Revisionist research, much less on the camps he "Believes" which are the most ridiculous of all frankly. David Cole's hybrid-position was just a convenient way for him to distance himself from Revisionism while retaining his ego with respect to his prior positions. "I was right about Auschwitz but I totally believe the Holocaust story at Treblinka!" There's a reason almost nobody in the world holds that position.

David Cole vastly overstates his own contribution to Revisionism- he never published a single page in the mountains of volumes of Revisionist research, much less on the camps he "Believes" which are the most ridiculous of all frankly.

Come on. The published word isn't the only word that matters. He made a direct-to-video documentary and local report on the Auschwitz camp back when distribution via VHS was the norm.

David Cole's primary contribution was that, while presenting as a sincere Jew who was studying the Holocaust, he got Franciszek Piper, who was head of the Auschwitz Historical Department, on camera to admit that the Auschwitz Gas Chamber shown to millions of tourists was not an original structure, it was "restored" post-war in Soviet-occupied Poland. The Soviets converted an air-raid shelter to a gas chamber and presented it as all original. That is the reason for certain anomalies, like the infamous Wooden Door that attracts the mockery of low-level Deniers- ("A wooden door with a window to a gas chamber?"). This was immediately after Cole was told by the Auschwitz-trained tour guide that it was an original structure.

But he was never a serious researcher. Piper only admitted what Revisionists had already known. I won't discount the value of that moment, but he just hasn't made any contributions to Revisionist research. He has brought publicity and that's the extent of his contribution.

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There's very scant evidence that "Treblinka" even existed at all.

Sure, except the antisemitic Polish resistance having people manning the station there, the complaints from locals about foul, disgusting smoke, the bone fragments found in the soil there etc, the secretly recorded interviews of perpetrators, the admissions from SS who worked in Auschwitz etc.

True, the Polish resistance was operating in the area. Yet there are 0 contemporary reports of a 120-day straight open-air cremation operation. Imagine cremating 5,000 people+ per day in the immediate vicinity of several Polish villages and a civilian rail-line with 0 contemporary reports of such an operation.

According to GPT 4o, the smokestack from an open-air fire large enough to cremate 5,000 people (only a single day's requirement at Treblinka) would be so large it would be visible from Warsaw and even Lublin! But nobody said anything about the 24/7 raging infernos.

It's a silly story.

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ultimately culminating in Holocaust-denial

Alas, that was merely a step in the downward trajectory that resulted in Unz releasing a lengthy series of ever more unhinged schizoposts alleging, essentially, that the entirety of modernity itself dating back to the 18th century was a Talmudic conspiracy, finally synthesizing both religious and ethnic antisemitism in a way, dare I say, that only a Jew could. It was sad to see, but it was also inevitable, probably many years ago, given who he surrounded himself with and hired.

{snip}First I was told to not criticize Musk. I actually said okay. Then I was told not to criticize anything on or about X. I even said okay to THAT, silly as it was. But my compliance led to even MORE demands for self-censorship, and that's when I was like, "fuck this, I'm out."

Taki was always the most well connected person on the (or adjacent to) the dissident right. His great (all inherited) wealth and connections to pretty much the entire right wing establishment in the UK and the neocon right in the US (who humored him and loved him as an eccentric even as he frequently slammed them in his pieces) meant he was essentially immune from cancellation; at the height of Takimag (after Richard Spencer’s editorship) he was still regularly published in The Spectator despite having published and written hundreds of columns that would have gotten any other writer or editor fired. He was at every party. He was astoundingly well-connected; whenever he said anything about the Jews (which was semi-often) many of the most powerful Jewish people in Britain - all his friends, of course - would quietly ensure that the usual censure never really happened to him. He was finally cancelled from The Spectator only when handed a 12 month suspended sentence by a Swiss court for attempted rape (and then only after the full and final conviction) in 2023.

That same network was of course also his weakness. He couldn’t and can’t stand his friends being criticized. He is at his heart a lecherous old libertine, a ‘racist liberal’ par excellence, a man who lived a life of unfathomable hedonism and excess with zero real consequences and who has had a tremendous time doing so. Cole was amusing for a time, but he can’t threaten the real relationships Taki has; that’s just not who his employer was.

Wow, didn't know all that! Thanks.

I actually wrote one piece for Takimag 15 years ago. Just one, after 5 failed submissions to his daughter who managed the site at the time. Something about BART lunacy in SF.

Notable that Taki's 88 years old.

Really? I used to read High Life in the Spectator but I always thought the character was made up. Life stranger than fiction, I suppose.

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