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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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Weber, along with David Cole and David Irving, who were all pretty heavy-hitters in the revisionist scene back in the 90s, have all accepted the reality of the extermination program for some time. I'm not sure about Weber, but Cole and Irving, also accept 'limited' gassings at Auschwitz. For this reason among others the IHR has kind of fallen out of favor with most deniers. CODOH has more or less taken its place. 'Scholarly' Holocaust denial these days is basically just Carlo Mattogno who puts out a book like every two months (though to be fair large chunks of his books tend to be copy-pasted from his older books), with a little help from Jürgen Graf and Thomas Dalton. As you say, there's also Jim Rizoli I guess but he's a total clown. Ryan Faulk (the Alternative Hypothesis) is also dipping his toe into denial lately but he's not doing a very good job of it.

Interestingly there's actually something of a laundry list of 'former deniers.' Eric Hunt (a schizophrenic who once tried to kidnap Elie Wiesel) was probably the biggest name in denial in the early 2010s because of a number of revisionist documentaries he produced which got a lot of exposure on youtube back before they banned all that stuff. In 2016 he caused kind of a stir when he decided that the Holocaust happened after all and revisionism was bankrupt. There's also Jean-Claude Pressac who was sent to Auschwitz archives by French denier Robert Faurisson in hopes of disconfirming the extermination once and for all and instead ended up convinced that it actually happened. There was a pretty prolific/well-known blogger and poster on the various denial and anti-denial forums back in the day who went by "the Black Rabbit of Inlé" and who also ultimately decided that the evidence supported an extermination program.

I know about Cole's turnaround but Irving is news to me. Mind sharing source?

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=jyav1uh0KqA](This is Irving speaking in 2016, the audio is not great but I think decipherable)

This is from his website, where he talks about Jews at Auschwitz being gassed on a "small scale"

Probably worth noting that Irving was never really a "professional" denier. He never wrote an actual book focusing on the Holocaust, it was all tangential to his main interests. Irving's main thing was specifically denying the use of some of the specific buildings in Auschwitz as gas chambers, and I think he still holds to at least some of that. So it's not totally clear to me to what extent Irving ever denied the Holocaust in toto.

Interesting, thanks!