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Rise of Holocaust denial driven by pernicious, AI-driven social media

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Originally published by The Free Press.

As the algorithmic age takes Holocaust denial mainstream, historians must admit a bitter defeat.

When the two of us met at Harvard 15 years ago, one was a professor teaching modern history, and the other was an undergraduate interested in the future of artificial intelligence.

The elder of us had published a succession of books concerned with one of the most important and intractable questions of the 19th and 20th centuries: Why did the successful economic and social integration of the Jews after their emancipation or westward emigration produce such a vitriolic backlash?

I (Ferguson) had written a history of the Rothschild banking dynasty and a biography of Siegmund Warburg. I had studied the German hyperinflation of 1923 and its corrosive impact on the Weimar Republic. I had written books about the two world wars, one of which — “The War of the World” — offered a novel interpretation of the Holocaust as one (the worst) of in a series of episodes of mass murder.

I not only lectured on these issues at Harvard and other universities, but I also sought to reach the widest possible audience by engaging in journalism and broadcasting, producing more than 30 hours of documentary television for PBS and Channel 4 or the BBC in Britain.

My animating goal was to ensure that citizens learned the lessons of history — including the vital lesson that antisemitic rhetoric can be translated into genocidal reality if it is adopted by a modern state.

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Yet today I see this hatred normalized, the Holocaust trivialized. Popular and influential conservatives such as Tucker Carlson and the Conservative Political Action Conference crowd now tolerate traffickers in Nazi revisionism.

And the poison being peddled to young conservatives by radicalizers such as Nick Fuentes is even worse than traditional Holocaust denial. They don’t so much deny the Holocaust as mock it and celebrate it.

A 27-year-old Rumble streamer who first earned far-right fame by attending the Charlottesville, Virginia., white supremacist rally in 2017, Fuentes presents himself as a history-savvy truth-teller.

In contrast to competitors crouched over webcams in Red Bull–strewn bedrooms, he projects a retro talk-show vibe — suit and tie, tasteful set, warm lighting, high-end camera.

Five nights a week, his million-strong legion of followers gathers to see Fuentes spend two to three hours reacting to the news and opining on pop-culture drama before engaging directly with fans via “superchats” they pay him handsomely to read on-air.

But when you ask one of them to explain Fuentes’s ideas, the answer is usually hopelessly vague. “You’ve just gotta watch for yourself,” they reply, attaching a video longer than “Lawrence of Arabia.”

This is a tell — a sign that the true attraction isn’t evidence or arguments, but instead the emotions Fuentes arouses. If you watch a three-hour lecture about history or science, you can summarize the key points to a friend,........

© New York Post