The Holocaust Denier Who Infiltrated Hollywood Conservatism

[There are updates at the end of this post.]

Well, look, when the left-wing media lands a punch, you got to take it, fair and square. Turns out one of the few open conservative activists in Hollywood has been hiding a past life as a Holocaust denier. He once recanted, but it was fake. He’s still mealy-mouthed on the subject. This is from the Guardian, a socialist newspaper in the UK:

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To those who knew him, or thought they knew him, he was a cerebral, fun-loving gadfly who hosted boozy gatherings for Hollywood’s political conservatives. David Stein brought right-wing congressmen, celebrities, writers and entertainment industry figures together for shindigs, closed to outsiders, where they could scorn liberals and proclaim their true beliefs.

Over the past five years Stein’s organisation, Republican Party Animals, drew hundreds to regular events in and around Los Angeles, making him a darling of conservative blogs and talkshows. That he made respected documentaries on the Holocaust added intellectual cachet and Jewish support to Stein’s cocktail of politics, irreverence and rock and roll.

There was just one problem. Stein was not who he claimed. His real name can be revealed for the first time publicly – a close circle of confidants only found out the truth recently – as David Cole. And under that name he was once a reviled Holocaust revisionist who questioned the existence of Nazi gas chambers. He changed identities in January 1998.

Yuck-o. And bad for the cause of freedom too, because you know full well the media will try to tar us all with it. That’s how it works. Oliver Stone makes a documentary rationalizing a Soviet Union that slaughtered gazillions in the name of oppression; Sean Penn kisses the backsides of tyrants like Castro and Chavez — hey, no problem. They still work and win praise — and certainly no one tries to pin their foolishness on run-of-the-mill Hollywood Democrats, nor should they. But one creepoid on the right, and we’ll soon start to hear, “Well, that’s what they’re all like, deep down.” See if we don’t.

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I don’t think I ever met this fellow Cole or Stein or whoever he is but he invited me to his events a couple of times. I always weaseled out of them. He’d tell me there’d be “plenty of booze and loud rock ‘n roll music,” and I’d think, “Well, I already have enough booze…  and man, I hate that music!” I never had any reason to doubt who he was though, and I surely would have attended something he organized if he’d been playing Sinatra. So what?

The left is always going to accuse us of racism and various other forms of bigotry. They have to. It’s all they’ve got. We don’t have to fear that and we shouldn’t throw conservatives under the bus when they make a remark that’s ill thought out or misconstrued. But true bigotry — and that’s all Holocaust denial is; bigotry — true bigotry is poison and needs to be kept out of the movement. It’s an offense to truth, an offense to decency and an offense to the God in whose image we’re made.

Cole says of the right wingers who are now deserting him: “I don’t blame them for jettisoning me. Everyone is scared to death. They don’t want this to range beyond Facebook.” And he adds: “I don’t expect many people at my birthday party this year.”

Too right.

[Update. Eric Golub, of Republican Party Animals, the group Stein/Cole claimed to head, feels Cole/Stein used the Guardian to tell a slanted version of his exposure. Here’s Golub’s version — which, under the circumstances, we can assume is more trustworthy! Golub is the son of a Holocaust survivor, btw.]

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[Postscript: Roger L. Simon just called to tell me he had looked Stein/Cole up on IMDB – under David Abravenel Stein. He has a nice list of credits on documentaries about the Holocaust — and none of them seems to be real! When you follow the links they go nowhere. There’s no other record of them. So I guess when they call this guy a Hollywood conservative, the emphasis should be on the “con.”]

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Cross-posted from Klavan on the Culture

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