Republican Party Animal

The “Bad Boy of Holocaust History”

Blows the Lid Off Hollywood’s

Secret Right-Wing Underground

Copyright 2014 © David Cole

978-1-9362-3992-4

Feral House

1240 W. Sims Way Suite 124

Port Townsend, WA 98368

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David Stein brought right-wing congressmen, celebrities, writers and entertainment industry figures together for shindigs, closed to outsiders…Over the past five years Stein’s organization, 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…as David Cole.… He was once a reviled Holocaust revisionist who questioned the existence of Nazi gas chambers.

—The Guardian

Over the past five years, David Stein has made a name for himself as a leader for Hollywood’s conservatives…But it turns out Stein had a bizarre secret.

—Gawker

From the annals of Weird Hollywood comes the unmasking of a leading Hollywood Republican.

—The Huffington Post

You don’t often get to say “Jewish Holocaust denier,” so let’s take a moment…now that we know the backstory, why did Cole become Stein?

—The Wrap

I did not sleep last night. David had to know this would come to light at some point. This is a horrendous thing that David did. As you may be able to tell, I am quite shaken by this.

—Gary Aminoff, Vice Chairman,

Republican Party of Los Angeles County

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. The Acceptable Level of Tell-All Book Dickishness

2. The Meta-Ideologue

3. The Jewish Revisionist

4. So Just What the Hell Do I Believe, Anyway?

5. Public Enemy

6. The Idiot’s Creed

7. Sarah May and My First Death

8. Both Sides Now

9. The Beast and My Second Death

10. A Time of Peace

COLOR IMAGE SECTION

11. The Soup Nazi Changes My Life Forever

12. The Red Devil

13. Alone Again, Unnaturally

14. Scatty

15. Friends of Abe

16. Table for Jew?

17. Pros and Cons

18. The Republican Party Animal

19. Other Losses

20. Devil Does Your Dog Bite?

21. Big Fucking Babies

22. My Third Death

23. “Get Him!”

Epilogue

Appendix A

INTRODUCTION

It’s 3 p.m., May 10, 2013. I’m at my favorite bar in Culver City. It’s generally a quiet place. Couches, tables, no loud music. It’s my favorite “first date” place. And I’m waiting on a reporter from the JTA, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. She’s late. I go outside, in part to stretch my legs, and in part because I don’t want to start drinking yet, and it’s not really possible these days for me to be in a bar without drinking (that’s not an attempt to make a charming, Dean Martin-style quip. I actually do have a very serious alcohol problem). So I go outside to wait.

No sign of her. I only know her appearance from a small thumbnail picture next to one of her news articles, and it was way too small for me to make out the details. So pretty much any white thirty-something woman walking toward the bar could be her. Oh, damn. This one walking up right now is SO cute! Please let it be her. Up until two weeks ago, I’d been living a life filled with free drinks and pretty girls. A pretty girl would really lift my spirits right now. But the attractive woman goes straight past me. That’s how my luck’s been running these days.

I go back inside. Typically, professional reporters are on time. So I don’t know if I’ve been hoaxed, or set up for a beating (which has happened before, many years ago). I need a drink. The first interview I did after I was “outed” as the notorious “Holocaust denier” David Cole had been with the Guardian (the large-distribution UK paper). And that reporter had picked up my tab. Now I’m going to have to start my own damn tab.

“Gimme two glasses of Pinot Noir,” I say. I want vodka, but it’s best to start with wine so I can stay lucid. I gulp the first one down at the bar, and begin walking back to my table with the other glass. “Wait a minute—is your name David?” The bartender has no idea of the hidden import of that question. Yes, my first name is David. I have no clue what my last name is anymore.

“A woman called for you. She said she was running late. She’ll be here in about fifteen more minutes.”

Well, so much for only having one more glass. I order another, and take both to my table.

Twenty minutes later, she shows up. She’s sporting a permanent grimace, reminiscent of Martin Short’s “Ed Grimley” character from the 1980s. It had been eighteen years since my last “hostile” interview. I considered the interview with the Guardian the previous week to be “hostile,” but only in the sense that it was about the fact that my former colleagues viewed me as a monster worse than pedophile Hitler strangling a puppy. Considering that my only offense was having taken controversial positions on World War II history in my early twenties, I almost found their anger funny. Definitely overblown, and somewhat funny. But the Guardian reporter was not hostile on a personal level; he was actually very kind and gentlemanly, and he wrote a fair piece. In fact, several of his sources from my former Republican Party allies were angry with him after the piece came out, because he didn’t paint me as pedophile Hitler strangling a puppy.

But this reporter, the JTA one, was giving me odd vibes. It was the lateness, and the grimace, and the fact that as she was typing she was wolfing down a plate of hamburger sliders she ordered from the bar, looking part of the time at her ancient laptop, and part of the time at those messy, grease-dripping burgers and fries.

I don’t like watching people eat in a sloppy fashion; it repulses me. I don’t even like to see people eating with their hands, period. And now I’m distracted, more so than usual. As my mouth is on auto-pilot, speaking of things I can talk about in my sleep—politics, Auschwitz, the fashion model who destroyed me, and other related matters—my mind is elsewhere, thinking about how much stank must lurk between the keys of that filthy old laptop, from years of grease and food bits embedded by the dirty fingers of this person to whom napkins are apparently an undiscovered invention.

I’ve held my tongue about the Holocaust for eighteen years. And now, there was a part of me that just, on principle, didn’t want to hold my tongue anymore, about anything, no matter how trivial. I wanted to blurt out, “That keypad must smell like shit, you snarly-lipped Ed Grimley-looking fuck.”

But I held my tongue, and stayed on auto-pilot.

It’s easy for me to go on auto-pilot.

I’ve done over two hundred interviews in my forty-four years. From 1989 through 1995, I did lots of “hostile” ones. They were practically all hostile. I was David Cole the evil “Jewish Holocaust denier.” But that was eons ago. I’d grown soft. Since reinventing myself as David Stein, the GOP “Party Animal” writer, strategist, and event organizer, I’d grown used to softball interviews. Fellow conservatives and libertarians interviewing me for their radio shows, TV shows, blogs, podcasts, whatever. Easy stuff. The Guardian interview brought back a lot of memories, and I’d actually been planning how I’d handle the one with the JTA differently. Two rules: don’t be a fucking idiot and talk for three hours (as I did with the Guardian). You’ll give the reporter too much to work with. Stay focused on the important points, and then say your goodbyes. Second rule: restate your one most important talking point again and again and again. If you hammer the reporter with the one point that means the most to you, the one thing you want to communicate, it’ll make it hard for her to leave it out of the piece (not impossible, but hard).

And I had my one point. Funny enough, it’s the same point I want to communicate to you, in this introduction. I don’t want to be here. I’d been living a wonderful life as David Stein. I didn’t want it to end. And now I have nothing, and I’m not particularly enjoying it.

The grimacing reporter asked me a bunch of questions, and I peppered my remarks, every ten minutes or so, with a reminder of how much I didn’t want to be doing this, I didn’t want to be David Cole again. Even as she stood up to leave, without paying for my drinks, I reminded her one last time of that main talking point.

And that’s why the piece was killed. The JTA didn’t want a sad reluctant Cole/Stein. The story of a man left with nothing to show for eighteen long years is perhaps the type of story that might engender sympathy for the affected person. And sympathetic is not how the JTA wanted its readers to see me. They wanted a gloating smarmy sociopath reveling in his situation. I couldn’t give them that, and I can’t give you that.

I’m writing this book because my few remaining friends tell me I have an interesting story to tell. So why not tell it? My dad killed Elvis, I was in the national media as the “Jewish Holocaust denier” by the time I was twenty-one, I appeared on the highest-rated TV shows at an age when most people were attending keg parties at frat houses, I had a bounty put on my head by a violent extremist group, I was beaten to a pulp for my views, to avoid getting killed I publicly recanted everything I said in my youth, I faked my own death, and I resurfaced as one of the biggest GOP “party organizers” on the West Coast, hobnobbing with the likes of Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, John Boehner, Clint Eastwood, and many others, before being “outed” as my former self.

Yeah, it’s probably an interesting story. And if you don’t like it, please recall the point I made again and again to the grimacing JTA reporter—I don’t want to be here. I’d prefer having my old life back.

1.

THE ACCEPTABLE LEVEL OF TELL-ALL BOOK DICKISHNESS

I’m not going to say I’m a good man. I’m not going to say it, because I’ve always felt that it’s not up to us to define ourselves as good or bad. Most people tend to think they’re good at heart. Most people rationalize away the things they do that are thoughtless, petty, cruel, or injurious to others. Every person I’ve ever met who’s said about themselves “I’m a good person” has been trying to convince themselves as much as they were trying to convince me. But what I will say is that I’m a good-natured man. That’s a different animal. Whatever thoughts might be going on inside my fevered mind, I always come off as easygoing and cheerful.

It was my good nature that made me successful running a political event-organizing group. It was my good nature that helped me mediate disputes, deal with character clashes among members, and generally keep things moving smoothly in a field populated by egotists, individualists, agitators, provocateurs, and the occasional dumbass.

When I began working with best-selling author and KABC talk show host Larry Elder in 2012, he would repeatedly tell me that the reason for our partnership was not my writing skills, which he admired, nor my filmmaking/editing abilities, which he always put to good use, but rather my good nature. “You always seem to be happy and loving life,” he would tell me.

Larry is a lawyer as well as a brilliant political thinker. He has a mind like a steel trap. So it was a feather in my cap that I fooled the shit out of him with that whole “happy and loving life” thing.

I’ve taken a long route to make a small point: I will most likely come off as an asshole in this book. The question that faces anyone who writes a “tell-all” autobiography is, what do you tell? What’s off limits, and what’s in play? How much of a dick do I want to come off looking like?

If you’re going to write a book like this properly, everything has to be in play, as long as the author has the ability to be as tough and revealing when it comes to himself as when it comes to the assorted characters he’s interacted with. That’s usually the hard part, but not so much for me, as I love to tell stories in which I come off as a bastard or a fool.

I have the benefit of playing the “reluctant author” card, as I would not be doing this book had I not been outed. The “reluctance” card can buy me the ability to be a bit more dickish, especially against the people whose machinations put me in this spot.

It’s a good hand to play. But just how much dickishness-entitlement does it win for me? A lot. As long as everything I write is true.

During my years as “Jewish Holocaust denier” David Cole, I was often accused of spreading “hate,” to the extent that entire college campuses would hold “anti-hate rallies” if I spoke on campus. The truth is, I neither denied the Holocaust, nor did I ever spread hate (except when referring to Nazis, who I do, indeed, hate). So great a “hater” was I assumed to be that a $25,000 bounty was placed on my head by the Jewish Defense League, whose leaders, before dying in prison after plotting terror attacks in retaliation for 9/11, assured the world that they wanted me dead in the name of “fighting hate.”

In the second part of my life, as Republican Party Animal David Stein, I was also accused of “hate,” due to my hundreds of articles slamming radical Islam and warning of the consequences should it go unchecked. Now, rather than being called anti-Semitic, I was called Islamophobic. But my writings about Islam never contained one word of “hate” for anyone other than the modern-day Islamic equivalent of the Nazis. So great a “hater” was I assumed to be that I received death threats from Muslim extremist Jameela Barnette, who, before being killed by police after launching a Christmas Day “jihad” in 2011, sent death threats to “Islamophobes” in the name of “fighting hate.”

With three decades of “hate” accusations under my belt, it would be natural to assume that my destruction came about at the hands of a political foe. And there’s the irony—David Stein’s “assassination” was completely apolitical. I was “outed” because I stopped financially supporting a young woman. A most ignominious end. After having been denounced by governments and attacked by terror groups, after decades of resisting, regrouping, and reinventing, after all that, my demise came at the hands of a hundred-pound fashion model.

Even I think that’s funny.

The book you’re about to read is the end result of that demise. And I did everything I could to avoid writing it. When I learned that the model, Rose Elizabeth “Rosie” Tisch, was going to out me, I begged her to rethink her actions. I told her that if I was “outed,” an autobiography would be my only option for bringing some semblance of order to the detritus of what would be a ruined life. I let her know that I’d write an honest book—warts and all. Including the times when I’ve been an ass, and including the times when I’ve been a halfway decent guy, as when I helped her sister, country-rock singer Julia Garlington (whose band, Married By Elvis, had been an opening act for Blake Shelton) leave the high-priced prostitution ring in Atlanta where her declining fortunes had taken her.

I pleaded with Rosie, “Can’t we just be done with each other and go our separate ways?”

No dice. She was determined. Her desire to destroy me was greater than her concern about her own reputation, or her sister’s. Now there’s “hate” for you. As someone who’s been repeatedly, and falsely, accused of “hate” over the past thirty years, I’ve learned to appreciate it when I see it.

Considering the extent to which the “hate” label has followed me throughout my life, the fact that this book was, essentially, born of hate, is oddly appropriate. I hope you’ll enjoy it, all the same.

David Christopher Cole is about as non-Jewey as a name can be (can you guess if my mom is a religious Jew?). My biological father, Dr. Leon Cole, was an apparently brilliant surgeon and researcher who also apparently killed Elvis. He has been pegged in many books as the doctor who got Elvis hooked on, and illegally supplied him with, drugs. Whether this is true or whether Elvis’ surviving MDs use my dad as a scapegoat because he’s dead and can’t defend himself, I have no idea. I do know that my biological dad and Elvis were close. Elvis gave him a pink Cadillac…later to be confiscated for child support after he and his wealthy Beverly Hills family abandoned me and my working-class mom.

In photos, my biological dad looks cruel and unforgiving. At a time (1968) when your hair was the calling-card by which you were judged, my dad had a crew-cut that you could plane wood on. It was a haircut that screamed “fuck you, hippies.” To be fair, that was probably the type of hair people wanted to see in their doctor. Still, there’s an unkindness in his face that makes me think he probably forced Elvis to sing for him before handing over the Quaaludes. It wouldn’t surprise me if my dad also insisted on stepping on Elvis’ blue suede shoes before giving up the codeine.

I grew up in L.A., a native Angeleno (the building where I was born is now the Church of Scientology headquarters, but back in the day it was Cedars of Lebanon Jewish hospital). I attended majority-black public schools. It was in junior high school that I first learned the value of intelligently strategizing one’s way out of a problem.

At Palms Junior High, I was probably the smallest white boy. I was so small, in fact, that the gangbangers never bothered me. I was not even on their radar. They were far more concerned with the Latino gangs across town. But the white kids were another matter entirely. If you were a white bully, and you went to Palms, there’s no way you’d bother a black kid, because the retaliation from the gangs would be swift and merciless. So guess who got the brunt of the abuse from every blond übermensch bully at Palms? For my first few months there, the daily arm-twistings, punchings, and lunch-money extortions were making my life unbearable. But I could also see that the other small white kids—the ones suffering as I was—were handling it poorly. They were letting it break them, they were regressing, they were retreating. They were becoming “Goths” (we didn’t call it that back then) and weirdos. They were essentially saying “this world is cruel and unfair, so I’ll make my lot even harder by purposely making myself less popular so I can sit alone all day and wallow in self pity.”

That would not be me. Palms was filled with gorgeous women. I wasn’t about to cede the field because a few Ricky Schroder wannabes enjoyed pounding me every day.

So I strategized. And I realized that the girlfriends of several of the hardcore black gangbangers really seemed to like me. They thought I was cute. In theory, I suppose I was—I was a tiny little blond kewpie doll with big curly hair, blue eyes, and a talent for telling jokes and dancing about like an idiot to get laughs. I also realized that these girls held quite a bit of sway over their horny boyfriends. So I told a few of these young black ladies that I may have to leave the school because of the constant torment from the white kids. And they told their boyfriends. And the next day my main tormenter was found beaten senseless and tossed into a dumpster behind the cafeteria. Problem solved. No one ever laid a finger on me again.

In later years, I would use this story time and again while lecturing conservatives over the sheer, utter futility of whining about how the media is “biased” and “unfair.” Tough shit. Some stuff in life is unfair. I wanted to be six-foot-five. I’m five-foot-six (on a good day, including shoes). Boo-fucking-hoo. Poor me. Get over it.

2.

THE META-IDEOLOGUE

David Cole’s efforts have made him into something of a media star. He is an oft-sought guest on radio and TV talk shows.

The Jerusalem Report

At 23, David Cole is becoming one of the leading spokesmen for the Holocaust “revisionist” movement. He is outspoken, he is determined, and he is Jewish.

The Detroit Jewish News

[David Cole’s work is] powerful and dangerous.

Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies, Hebrew University

Among the more fascinating and pathetic deniers is David Cole, himself a Jew.

The Los Angeles Times

Don’t we need to know about Hitler, Hussein, Arafat, and Cole? David Cole stays on the front page, along with others who pose a threat.

Phil Jacobs, Editor, the Detroit Jewish News

There’s a lot of ‘joy and rejoicing’ right now in ‘revisionist’ camps because of David Cole.

Professor Deborah Lipstadt

I can’t think of any other Jew who has gone so far in aiding and abetting the enemies of the Jewish people.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center

You are the Antichrist.

Phil Donahue, to David Cole, on-air.

Mr. Cole has obviously invested a great deal in researching his subject and I admire his tenacious curiosity. Again, I thank you for sharing this documentary with myself and other members of Congress.

United States Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (D–Ohio)

I was impressed by the objective and logical way David Cole spoke about the Auschwitz gas chambers. Congratulations!

Zsolt Rabia, Foreign Policy Advisor to the President of Hungary (currently Public Diplomacy Coordinator, NATO)

I have a claim to fame about which I’m genuinely proud. In a world in which everything has already been done by someone else, having something completely unique attached to you is kind of cool. According to Google, I’m the only person ever to be dubbed a “meta-ideologue.” I was given the name by Dr. Michael Shermer (more on him later) and Alex Grobman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, in a Los Angeles Times article in November 2000. (The Times added that I’m “fascinating and pathetic,” and I’m not really sure I can dispute either of those terms.)

So what the hell is a “meta-ideologue?” Shermer explains it thusly: “An existentialist on a quest to understand how ideologues invent their realities.” And that is, indeed, me. Shermer was one of the dimmest bulbs I ever met in my professional life—Homer Simpson with less paunch and a modicum of additional hair—but he called this one right. After high school, I decided that I was going to write a “great American novel” (because no one had ever had that idea before) about political ideology. Left, right, and that interesting spot on the political spectrum where far left and far right intersect, typically bonded by a shared hatred of Israel.

In 1988, I started conducting interviews with people on all sides of the ideological spectrum. And I started hanging out with them, to witness them in their “native habitats,” so to speak. I manned a table at the National Lawyers Guild convention, and at a John Birch Society conference. I helped organize a concert (hosted by Susan Sarandon and featuring Public Enemy and Sinead O’Connor) for a leftist group called Refuse and Resist, and I arranged a screening of a film with Charlton Heston produced by hard-line anti-abortionists (after manning an abortion clinic “defense action” with the Fund for the Feminist Majority the previous day).

What I was looking for, what I wanted to learn, was the common thread that draws people to embrace political ideology, left or right. But the more I studied left and right, the more I started to dislike ideologues in general. I felt better than them, superior, intellectually. That was youthful arrogance talking. It never occurred to me that later in life I’d come to be seen as an ideologue myself. Frankly, in 1988 I’d have laughed at the idea.

I was surrounded by left and right ideologues when the Cold War ended, and I was able to witness firsthand how both extremes handled the greatest seismographic political shift in my lifetime. The “mainstream” press, as always, was focused on how the end of the Cold War would affect the right: “What will right-wingers do now that they don’t have the Russkie boogeyman to kick around anymore,” they wondered. As usual, the press missed the better story. The right actually dealt with the fall of the Soviet Union quite well, not just because it was perceived by them as a victory, but because it didn’t affect other core conservative causes (low taxes, abortion, “traditional values,” etc.).

The left, however, was shaken to its core. There had been two bedrock issues advocated by the left in the 1980s. The largest issue was what I refer to as the “Butter Battle Belief,” which I named after the insanely stupid Dr. Seuss book, which claimed that the differences between the Soviet Union and the West were as insignificant as buttering bread. (In The Butter Battle Book, intolerant fools nearly go to war over the fact that one side butters its bread on the top, and the other side butters on the bottom.) In its essence, the “Butter Battle Belief” held that the Soviet bloc was no better or worse than the free world, that the people behind the Iron Curtain really, really loved being there, and that “Ronnie Ray-gun” was going to blow up the world with his anti-communist fanaticism.

1989 pulled the rug from under that fantasy.

1989 also short-circuited the left’s other major issue of the 1980s, the very legitimate fight against racial apartheid in South Africa.

I became focused on examining the left’s reaction to 1989. They tried a few quick fixes. Abortion rights was always a crowd pleaser, especially when Operation Rescue was using children to blockade abortion clinics (because nothing says “I care about kids” more than ordering your own to climb under cars as human speed bumps). But the 1990 Webster decision by the Supreme Court, which affirmed the basic tenets of Roe, took the wind out of the left’s sails. Eventually, the ideologues on the left would discover “global warming,” and once again they could believe they were saving the world. But by that time I’d become distracted from my initial project.

My interest in Holocaust revisionism started innocently enough—with a single letter. I’d read about a man named David McCalden, who had been fighting the city of Manhattan Beach in Southern California to get atheist displays included in the various Christmas and Hanukkah trappings that appear each year in city buildings. I read that McCalden was a militant atheist, an Irish nationalist, and a Holocaust revisionist (the term “denier” had not yet been coined, so revisionists were called revisionists even by their foes). McCalden had co-founded the largest revisionist publishing house in North America, the Institute for Historical Review, in Orange County, California.

I found McCalden’s ideological mix fascinating. Atheist, Irish nationalist, Holocaust revisionist. Racist? Maybe, but he had a non-white wife. And there were rumors that he was a closeted gay. It was a mix I’d yet to encounter as I profiled ideologues. So I wrote to him. I asked for some info, some literature. Instead, I got a personal visit. But he didn’t come to proselytize; he came to fight. He thought I was a “Jewish infiltrator” trying to cozy up to him for nefarious purposes. He already had that suspicion when he drove to my house, and when he saw the mezuzah on my door, he went totally apeshit. I tried to convince him that I was not working with or for anybody. I just wanted to know what motivated a guy like him.

I must have been convincing, because he believed me. He gave me some literature, and took off. And I read it. Incredibly amateur crap. I took everything and put it aside. I had no interest in revisiting it.

But one name stuck with me—Fred Leuchter, who had supposedly conducted a “forensic examination” of the Auschwitz gas chambers and found no evidence of cyanide residue. Leuchter was described as an engineer, a foremost expert in execution equipment (in fact, he held no engineering credentials). About two months after meeting McCalden, I was watching Dateline on NBC and they profiled Leuchter. They raved about the guy (no mention of his Holocaust work, just the execution stuff). They presented him as an authority. And I thought, “wait—is this the same Leuchter who claims there’s no cyanide residue in the gas chamber walls?”

I read through the revisionist literature. It provided no answers, but it left me with several questions. The problem was, mainstream historians would never address revisionist concerns, and the revisionists, for the most part, were sloppy and (mostly) ideologically motivated.

I went back to see McCalden, but just my luck, the poor bastard had upped and died of AIDS after giving it to his wife as well. I guess those gay rumors must have had merit, not that there’s anything wrong with that (well, to be fair, I think the whole “giving AIDS to your wife” thing was pretty wrong).

McCalden’s social circle consisted of his Holocaust revisionist buddies and his atheist buddies (there was a fair amount of crossover). The atheist guys were a pretty decent bunch—not racist at all. Plus, as I used to self-identify as an atheist in my youth (I don’t any more), I fit in very well with them. One of the atheist guys, the man entrusted with dealing with McCalden’s massive collection of books and files (maybe three thousand books, and at least a hundred huge file boxes of papers), decided that they should go to someone a bit more rational than some of the well-known names in the revisionist field. (McCalden’s wife, who would hang on for another year before passing, wanted the stuff out of her house.)

So overnight, I “inherited” one of the largest libraries of Holocaust books in L.A. And lots and lots of correspondences—almost twenty years’ worth. I spent months reading everything. I rented an apartment with two stories so that I could devote one entire floor just to the books. And I read every single one of them, making notes, bookmarking pages, and indulging in what would become, in less than a decade, the lost art of reading hard-copy books without a computer in sight.

The correspondences were instructive, too. Thousands and thousands of letters and faxes. The documents let me know who in the field was a nutcase, and who seemed to simply share my intellectual curiosity. The ones who seemed to be decent and rational, I reached out to. Through McCalden’s associates, they had all heard the wild story of a Jew who was interested in revisionism. They were eager to finally meet me.

3.

THE JEWISH REVISIONIST

There are two principles I live by when I decide I want to accomplish something successfully. The first principle is, “just do the fucking work.” I adopted this rule after several years of observing the clown-car-crash that is the movie business. One of the things that becomes immediately apparent to anyone growing up in L.A. is that there are two types of people in “the biz”—those who just go out and do films, and those who make a veritable career out of pitching projects. The “pitchers” are the cancerous lesions of this town. All they do is bend everyone’s ear over and over again asking for money for some amazing dream project that will never happen. If you’re one of those habitual pitchers, please know—everyone hates you. No one likes it if they run into you. You’re just an annoyance, and the city would be better off without you.

Then there are the folks who actually just go out and do things. It’s better to complete an imperfect ninety-minute film than to search for twenty years for the money to make that asinine “dream project,” which would very likely be no better than the mediocre ninety-minute film the “doer” just completed.

The other principle by which I live is the old saw “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” I find it best to work in fields where I’m surrounded by ninety percent idiots, because I can accomplish more that way. The field of Holocaust history, as I found it in 1990, and politics, as I found it in 2008, were perfect for me. My one eye beat most of the tin-cup-holding blindies who populated those fields.

I first realized that I was perfectly cut out for the Holocaust revisionism field when I discovered the obvious manhole in the floor of the supposed gas chamber at the Auschwitz main camp. The manhole was typical of an underground or semi-underground air-raid shelter. If a cave-in occurred, if the doors were blocked, the manhole was an escape hatch to allow the soldiers in the shelter to make it to safety. I was also the first person to note that the “gas chamber” locks from the inside, not the outside. Ever since Poland had freed itself from the Soviet yoke, revisionists and non-revisionists alike had gone there to study the camp site. And no one had ever seen the manhole, or the door lock, as obvious as they were. No one.

I was where I belonged. A one-eyed king.

I also happened to enter the Holocaust history field at just the right time. Several things were in play. The freedom of travel and research in Poland, not possible during the Cold War years. And the amazingly inept, self-defeating criminal trials of Holocaust denier (yes, denier not revisionist) Ernst Zündel in Canada throughout the ’80s, which made a lot of people who would have otherwise ignored revisionism think twice about the reliability of the Auschwitz story.

Blame Canada!

In the 2012 season of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, the catchphrase was “you can’t be half a gangster.” And what the Canadians learned in the ’80s is that you can’t be half a fascist. On the one hand, they continually prosecuted Zündel for what he wrote about the Holocaust; they charged him criminally for writing a pamphlet expressing an opinion (now that’s some good fascism there, boys). But on the other hand, they allowed him to mount a defense every bit as free as any criminal defendant in the U.S. Leave it to those affable neighbors to the north to try to be gentle fascists.

In the 1980s, Germany and France, like Canada, had “outlawed” Holocaust revisionism. But the Canadians, in their desire to be a kinder, gentler type of repressive nation, decided that even though it was totally cool to imprison authors, it was totally uncool to deny them a fair and by-the-book trial, including the right to defend themselves with the vigor of O.J. Simpson.

See, that shit won’t work. If you’re going to imprison an author because you don’t want his ideas to spread, don’t let him mount a vigorous and unrestricted defense of his ideas. Either let the “dangerous” author continue to churn out his books with his basement mimeograph machine in anonymity and peace, or throw him in jail and never allow him to speak again. Go the freedom route, or the fascist route. Never try what the Canadians did, because the can of worms they opened would, eventually, lead to more serious people like me getting involved in the field.

Ernst Zündel was a German who emigrated to Canada in 1958. Zündel loves Hitler. I mean, he really loves Hitler. But, and this is the point that I have a hell of a tough time communicating to people, he loves Hitler because he’s certain, he knows, that sweetie-pie Adolf was framed. That mustached little munch-kin couldn’t hurt a fly. Zündel really, sincerely believes that. He’s nuts, but he’s not dangerous. Zündel’s name would not be known if he hadn’t been subjected to two criminal prosecutions by the Canadian government.

In Europe, if you’re arrested for being a Holocaust revisionist, you can’t mount the defense of “but I’m right.” You can’t use “truth” as your defense. You can’t argue your beliefs in court. Essentially, you can only beg for mercy, plead guilty, or plead insanity.

But every time the Canadians put Zündel on trial, they put no restrictions on his defense. He was allowed to plead “not guilty because I’m right.” And so, throughout the course of his trials his legal team was allowed to grill Holocaust historians, survivors, and “experts” of all kinds.

This is one of those moments in which I fear that I lack the language skills to properly express the completely self-defeating lunacy of what the Canadians did. Their desire was to silence Holocaust revisionism. To do that, they gave Zündel the opportunity to do something that no one else had ever had—the ability to grill historians under penalty of perjury.

There is not a field of history in which disputes don’t exist. And those disputes are handled in the normal way—one historian publishes a book or paper, another critiques it, maybe one guy calls the other guy a liar, maybe the other guy claims that the first guy is a liar for calling him a liar. So on and so on. These things are not decided in court.

But thanks to the Canadians, their prosecution of Zündel, an outright denier, gave Zündel an opportunity that no other partisan in a historical dispute had ever had—the ability to grill hostile witnesses on the stand. In its attempt to silence revisionism, the Canadian government ended up putting it on the fucking map. Zündel and his exceptionably able and well-funded legal team took the Canadian blunder and ran with it. Thanks to the Canadians, it wasn’t Zündel on trial, but the Holocaust.

The Zündel team was able to grill Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg (arguably the most important Holocaust scholar in the history of the field), who was forced to admit, under cross-examination, that there had never been a plan for what he called the policy of the extermination of the Jews. He was forced to admit that he had never physically studied the remains of the “gas chambers” at Auschwitz or Majdanek. He admitted that Holocaust revisionism aids historians by challenging their beliefs and bringing about the discovery of new information, and, most startlingly, he admitted the existence of a reliable Nazi document stating that Hitler had decided to put off any decision about the “final solution” until after the war.

Auschwitz survivor Arnold Friedman was forced to confess that he had never seen any gas chambers at Auschwitz, and that the stories he wrote about were based on rumors that others had told him. And famed Auschwitz survivor and escapee Rudolf Vrba admitted on the stand that his account of what he saw at Auschwitz was actually “an artistic picture,” not factual evidence. His “eyewitness testimony” regarding the gas chamber? “It’s what I heard it might look like.”

Zündel was able to hire Fred Leuchter, the aforementioned “execution equipment expert,” to conduct a forensic test of the rooms at Auschwitz that were claimed to be gas chambers. As I stated earlier, Leuchter was not an actual engineer, and his tests were faulty. But, because of his work, which wouldn’t have occurred without the Zündel trial, other, more expert revisionists began doing forensic examinations on those rooms.

Zündel was convicted, but the conviction was soon overturned. So what did the Canadians do? They did it all over again.

And to think, these people gave us John Candy.

The star witness at the second trial was Hilberg’s protégé Christopher Browning, who was forced to admit under cross examination that, in his translation of the Wannsee Conference protocols (which I’ll discuss in the appendix), he had “inaccurately” translated the document to obscure the fact that in the original German, it stated that the Jews would eventually be freed.

This is not to say that the people like Robert Faurisson, the French denier who appeared for the defense, came off any better. Faurisson admitted he’d never bothered to look into the mass killing of Jews during the months following the invasion of Russia. But no one expected Faurisson to be bright. The story was that the respected experts and the survivors had to make humiliating admissions under oath.

The result of all this tumult was that Holocaust revisionism became “a thing.” In its desire to destroy revisionism, the damn Canucks had put it on the map, with daily, breathless headlines in every Canadian paper, carried by wire services all around the world. And I thought that as long as revisionism was going to be “a thing” with or without my participation, the “thing” could probably benefit from having a guy with no ideological fanaticism enter the field to sort the wheat from the chaff and take the wheat out of the hands of people like Zündel.

If you associated with revisionists, you would never be accepted into the “mainstream” camp. But frankly, there was no choice for an honest researcher but to associate with revisionists. They’d been the ones collecting evidence during the Zündel trials, only a portion of which was actually used. I could read the “mainstream” point-of-view in a hundred books. But I needed to mix with the revisionists and deniers in order to win their trust. Because they were the ones with vital pieces of evidence.

I earned Zündel’s trust because I was willing to be seen with him publicly. To this day, there are those who say, “but did you have to appear with Zündel in public?” Yeah, I did. I never said anything in support of his views, but I supported his right to be free from prosecution for simply writing a book, and I still do. On that subject, I’d stand with him again today.

Once the revisionists came to trust me, I could start to go to work. It wouldn’t be long before I’d clash with them. But as I said at the beginning of this chapter, I was now able to “just do the fucking work.”

4.

SO JUST WHAT THE HELL DO I BELIEVE, ANYWAY?

Since my “outing,” the question I’ve been asked most frequently is, “what do you believe these days about the Holocaust?” It’s a question I detest hearing, and, more so, one I detest answering, because it’s a question I’m being forced into facing by virtue of my exposure as Cole, and it’s a question that might bring me harm by virtue of my answer.

When I recanted my own work in 1998, it was because I was happily embarking on a new life. With that new life now ended, I can’t find a reason to be anything but honest.

If my personal history has taught me anything, it’s that I have a knack for finding myself in (or getting myself into) “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situations. This is one of them. If I put the history chapter up front, I’ll be criticized for ramming my views down the readers’ throats. If I put the chapter in the back, I’ll be attacked for hiding my views. My instinct was to stick the history stuff right here. Fortunately, the decision was not mine, and the folks paying for this book wanted it to be an appendix. I say “fortunately” because that means you can send them the angry letters instead of me.

Therefore, my detailed discussion regarding my views on the Holocaust are in Appendix A. This book will not now magically turn to that for you. You’ll have to do it yourself. My apologies for not crafting this book so that the Diving Bell and Butterfly dude could navigate it without assistance.

You want the really quick condensed version of my views? Auschwitz was not an extermination camp. Auschwitz and Majdanek in Poland, and Dachau, Mauthausen, and the other camps in Germany and Austria, were not extermination camps. They were bad, bad places. People were killed there. Jews were killed at Majdanek by shooting, and Jews were killed at Auschwitz in 1942, most likely due to decisions made by the commandant in defiance of orders from Berlin.

However, Auschwitz was not the totality of the Holocaust. Not by far. Serious revisionists (David Irving, Mark Weber, and hell, I’ll throw my own name in there) don’t dispute the very provable mass murder of Jews (by shooting) during the months following the invasion of Russia. And at a camp like Treblinka, there is a massively strong circumstantial case to be made that the Jews who were sent there were sent there to be killed. It’s circumstantial because very little remains in the way of documentation, and zero remains in the way of physical evidence. But revisionists have never produced an alternate explanation of the fate met by the Jews sent to camps like Treblinka and Sobibor, with empty trains returning. However, accepting that Treblinka was a murder camp but Auschwitz wasn’t means that the Holocaust was not as large in scale or as long in operation as the official history teaches. So taking Auschwitz out of the category of extermination camps is seen as lessening the horror of what, even shorn of Auschwitz, was still a horrific situation.

There’s no “conspiracy theory” at work here. I’m as far from a conspiracy nut as a person can be. The progression here, the creation and promulgation of bad information regarding the Holocaust, is as easy to understand as the plot in a Chuck Norris film. It really is quite simple.

The evidence of the mass murder of Jews was largely buried or erased by the Nazis long before the end of the war. At the war’s end, what was there to show? What was there to display? And something had to be displayed. World War II is a war with an ex post facto reason for being. The war started to keep Poland free and independent. At the end of the war, when Poland was essentially given to the USSR as a slave state (not that there was much the U.S. could have done to stop it from happening), none of the victorious powers wanted folks to start asking, “wait—sixty million people dead, the great cities of Europe burned to the ground, all to keep Poland free, and now we’re giving Poland to Stalin?”

So Hitler’s very real brutality against the Jews had to become “the reason we fought.” Except, those brutalities began in earnest two years after the war started. But why quibble? Russia had captured Auschwitz and Majdanek intact (more or less), and the U.S. had captured Dachau totally intact. So, those camps became representations of a horror for which almost no authentic physical evidence remained. At Auschwitz, an air raid shelter was “remodeled” to look like a gas chamber (as the museum’s curator admitted to me in a 1992 interview). At Majdanek, mattress delousing rooms were misrepresented as being gas chambers for humans (as the museum’s director admitted to me in 1994). And at Dachau, the U.S. Army whipped up a phony gas chamber room to give visiting senators and congressmen in 1945 a dramatic image of “why we had to fight.”

A good amount of revision has occurred on its own. At Auschwitz, in the early nineties, the death toll was revised from 4,000,000 to about 900,000. I hope you understand that no amount of revising that I could do could possibly revise more than that. Even if I were to say that not a single soul was killed at Auschwitz (and I’d never say that, as it would be incorrect), going from 4,000,000 to 900,000 is way more of a revision than going from 900,000 to zero.

And at Dachau? Eventually, by the 1970s, the Dachau museum admitted that the “gas chamber” was never used. The fact that the “phony shower heads” were created by the army prior to the visit of U.S. dignitaries in ’45 is the biggest open secret in the field. The current claim at Dachau is that the room was “decorated” with dummy shower heads, which replaced the real shower heads and thus made them useless, in order to fool the victims, and once they were inside, gas pellets were thrown in from chutes in the side wall. And the half-measure “revision,” that the chamber was “never used,” really needs to be meditated on for a moment to grasp its stupidity. We’re supposed to believe that the Nazis took a working—and very necessary—group shower room at the camp, and replaced the working shower heads with fake ones, because they wanted to fool the victims into thinking they were walking into a shower room, which they would have thought anyway if the original shower heads had simply been left intact, and then the Nazis decided not to ever use the gas chamber, but now the room was unusable as an actual shower because the real shower heads had been replaced by fake ones, fake ones that were supposedly necessary to fool victims into thinking that they were walking into a shower room which is exactly what the victims would have thought they were walking into without the fake shower heads because the room actually was a shower room which could have still been used as one in between gassings if not for the dummy heads that replaced the genuine ones.

I’m reading your mind right now, because I’m all psychic and shit, and I can see that about seventy-five percent of you are thinking, “okay, maybe you’re right. But why bring it up? What good can it do? Even if some of the history is faulty, why make a big deal about it? Maybe some Holocaust claims were overstated, but isn’t a little overstatement worth it to fight fascism?”

And here’s where it gets interesting because of my unique situation, having been banned from GOP and conservative circles. Most conservatives are called “global warming deniers.” And indeed, many conservatives, including all of my former friends and colleagues, are skeptical of man-made global warming. As am I.

Now let’s examine that for a moment. What’s worse? Denying that Auschwitz was an extermination camp, or denying that the entire world will end due to “global warming?” Not to lessen the genuine horrors of the Holocaust, but, c’mon, be honest here—denying something that will lead to the end of the world is a bit worse than denying any one racial or ethnic group’s past suffering.

In other words, if my former colleagues are indeed denying a truth that, if ignored, will kill everyone on the planet, they’re a bit worse than I am, no?

But, of course, my former colleagues would say “we’re not denying a truth. We’re presenting evidence to counter the notion of man-made global warming. We’re simply presenting facts to show that warming has flatlined since 1998, and that the models that predicted the melting of the Himalayas and the submerging of New York have been proven wrong. We’re not ‘deniers,’ were just trying to present evidence to show that the officially accepted models might be incorrect.”

To which the left would reply, “But why bring it up? What good can it do? Even if some of the science is faulty, why make a big deal about it? Maybe the risks of global warming were overstated, but isn’t a little overstatement worth it to fight for clean skies and oceans?”

Conservatives deal with the “you’re a denier” charge, and the “why bring it up? What good can it do?” question every time they try to talk about the flaws in global warming theory. Welcome to the club. That’s exactly what you get when trying to correct flaws in Holocaust history. I’d suggest you read this section a few more times until you see the parallels, but that would be wasted typing.

And speaking of finger-exertion, please feel free to go to Appendix A for a more detailed exploration of my views.

5.

PUBLIC ENEMY

The first time I had to face the possibility of my interest in revisionism becoming public was in 1989. McCalden told me he was going to a debate at a Beverly Hills temple. Irv Rubin, loveable and murderous head of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), was going to be debating a Jewish leader who didn’t approve of killing people. I’d seen Rubin on TV slapping around anti-Semites (the guy was built like a golem). It sounded like a fun evening.

Sitting in the rear of the temple where some of my childhood friends had been bar mitzvah’d, I anxiously awaited the invigorating back-and-forth. I saw McCalden enter the temple, quietly, from the lobby. Within five seconds, a half-dozen JDL guys piled on him. They dragged him into the lobby and put his head through a plate-glass window. He was tossed onto the sidewalk. Of course, I immediately stood up and said, “That was uncalled for! This is a house of God!” Well…actually, no. I just sat there in a meek cowardly silence. The debate went on as planned, but after Rubin told the crowd that the guy he just beat up was a “Nazi,” he won over the audience for the rest of the night.

The next day, McCalden called me. He asked if I saw the fracas. I didn’t call him back.

Then I saw reports on the incident in two local papers. “Neo-Nazi David McCalden burst into a local temple during services and attempted to rip up the Torah, while shouting ‘heil Hitler.’ Security escorted him out.”

Now I was angry. It had nothing to do with McCalden or Rubin. It’s the media. This would mark the first time I’d witnessed a media lie personally, the first time I’d seen something with my own eyes, only to see the press completely fabricate a report.

I called David back. “Yes, I saw what happened.”

“Would you be willing to give a deposition to my lawyer? I’m suing Rubin for my hospital bill.”

Oh, sure! What more would I want out of life than to make Irv Rubin angry at me.

“Would the deposition be seen by Rubin?”

“Of course.”

Maybe it was McCalden’s Irish lilt, or maybe it was the principle of the thing, or maybe it was the fact that I’m an idiot, but I agreed. I gave the deposition.

Thankfully, I never had to worry about testifying, as McCalden wouldn’t live long enough to go to trial. (If I were Sarah Silverman, I could totally get away with exclaiming “thank you, AIDS!” But I’m not, so I won’t go there.)

I had crossed a Rubicon of sorts (or, I suppose, a Rubincon). I’d been willing to publicly speak up on a revisionist’s behalf. And I was a twenty-year-old Jew. Revisionists began to take an interest in me, and my interest was in reading and watching everything they had to show me. So much crap. But, as I’ve already said, there were interesting nuggets, and many unanswered questions.

If the Rubin/McCalden deposition was my first experience dipping my feet in the tumultuous waters of going public as a revisionist, the 1991 Mermelstein trial was the time I found myself inspired enough to forge ahead boldly. In 1981, the Institute for Historical Review (under McCalden’s directorship) had launched a terribly stupid publicity gimmick—a “reward offer” of $50,000 to anyone who could prove that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. Dumb idea. A survivor named Mel Mermelstein took them up on the offer, and when he was not awarded the money, he sued. The IHR prepared a vigorous defense, including massive inconsistencies in the various accounts Mermelstein had provided about his time in Auschwitz. But it was all for naught, as the judge in the case did not allow any such discussion, choosing instead to take “judicial notice” of the gassing of Jews at Auschwitz in 1944 (essentially, that means “for the purposes of this trial I declare the official history to be factual and not up for debate in this courtroom”).

The IHR was thus prevented from making a case. A settlement was reached for $90,000, and a letter was delivered to Mermelstein apologizing for giving him “distress.”

The judge in the case had craftily avoided a Zündel-style fiasco by prohibiting any discussion of the veracity of Mermelstein’s claims in a trial that was directly centered around the veracity of Mermelstein’s claims.

By the time I entered the scene, things had gotten a lot more interesting. Revisionist Bradley Smith, writing in the IHR’s quarterly journal, had called Mermelstein a “demonstrable fraud.” Mermelstein promptly sued for libel, malicious prosecution, conspiracy to inflict emotional distress, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

There was little doubt that Mermelstein and his pricey lawyers assumed they’d get a judge like the first one. They were wrong. They got Judge Stephen Lachs. Judge Lachs had been appointed to the Los Angeles County Superior Court by Governor Jerry Brown in 1979. Lachs was politically liberal, he was Jewish, and he was openly gay. In fact, Lachs was the first openly gay judge to be appointed to any court in the U.S.

Liberal? Gay? Jewish? The Mermelstein team thought it had scored a grand slam. And the revisionists were sweating Zyklon.

Pre-trial hearings began in 1991. Sensing that the trial could prove interesting, I approached Judge Lachs asking for permission to film the proceedings. He met with me in his chambers. I was impressed by his demeanor; he was a scholarly, thoughtful man. He was a strong believer in public access to trials. He told me that if both sides in the case voted against my request, he’d have no choice but to turn me down. But, he assured me, if only one side says no, he’d use his authority as judge to allow the videotaping.

I already had the IHR’s okay, so it was a done deal. And I told the revisionists that, in my opinion, this judge would be fair and impartial.

And boy, was he ever. Even before the trial began, Lachs allowed the IHR’s lawyers to grill Mermelstein over whether or not he was legally a “public figure,” which is a highly important factor in any libel suit. Attorney Mark Lane (author of the bestselling 1966 critique of the Warren Commission, Rush to Judgment) aggressively grilled Mermelstein, whose exasperated lawyers finally conceded the point and declared him a public figure.

It was clear that this judge was not going to play favorites. Indeed, several days later, Judge Lachs threw out the bulk of Mermelstein’s case. With most of their case gone, and with the public figure determination making the chance of victory almost nil, the Mermelstein team withdrew the rest of their complaint and retreated.

The case never even got to jury selection.

It’s not that I took any pleasure in seeing Mermelstein, a man who had suffered greatly in his youth, beaten down on the stand. But he had initiated the suit expecting to be given preferential treatment, and the judge refused to do that. I was inspired by the conduct of Judge Lachs. He had every reason to be biased, and he had the power, as the judge in the first case did, to enforce his biases in order to influence the outcome of the trial. He didn’t. In fact, he did everything he could to be objective. He took his job seriously.

This was a man I wanted to emulate. I believed that if I could likewise detach my biases and emotions, I could shed a little light in a field dominated by partisans and prejudices. I decided to launch full steam ahead into aggressively pursuing and publicly presenting my work.

I’m not kidding myself. The revisionists and deniers also took an interest in me, initially, because I was the first Jew to devote serious time to the topic. But if I was initially accepted because of my Jeweyness, I soon became sought after because I did decent work. Holocaust revisionism needed a guy like me, with no ideological baggage and no desire to profit. David Irving, a great historian in his early years, became corrupted by the fact that he relies on the field for a living. He’s a true revisionist, not a denier. But you can’t make money without having either a devoted ideological constituency or mainstream appeal. Irving profited by catering to the fringe deniers, while still trying to get the same kind of mainstream book deals he got before expressing his opinion on Auschwitz. It was a fool’s quest. The more he hung out with the deniers, the less any mainstream publisher wanted to touch him. The more he tempered his views to attract mainstream publishers, the less the deniers trusted and supported him.

The irony of my conservative “friends” abandoning me is that I was doing the Breitbart “citizen journalist” thing long before the term “blogger” was coined. I got the director of the Auschwitz State Museum to admit on camera that the room displayed as a “gas chamber” is a post-war reconstruction (he believes that it had been a gas chamber at one point, but he could provide no proof of that. He admitted that the room in its present state is not proof of anything but an air-raid shelter). By the way, I got that admission from the museum director not by taping him secretly, but by just asking him. Another thing the people before me hadn’t thought of doing (true, I was wearing a yarmulke and “presenting” as a Jew, as if my Jewface alone wouldn’t have been enough). On a later trip, I got Tomasz Kranz, research director of the Majdanek State Museum, to admit that the “gas chambers” shown at that camp were simple clothing and mattress delousing rooms.

I spent weeks climbing in and out of ruins, at every camp site that still existed. After four trips and five years of research and interviews with survivors and scholars, I created a list of the most serious unanswered questions regarding the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Majdanek, Dachau, Mauthausen (Austria), and the small camp of Stutthof (near Gdansk). It’s a laundry list of structural anomalies, logical inconsistencies, and impossibilities in the official story regarding these facilities. My aim wasn’t so much to publish this list, but to use those questions to get the kind of “peer review” without which I could never consider the issue settled in my mind. The revisionists and deniers agreed with my findings…of course they did. So what? I needed to run this info by people who could critique it.

Needless to say, anyone with the credentials to critique my work was not answering my letters.

In 1991, the first national media organization called. It was CBS News. They wanted to interview me on the Dan Rather-hosted primetime show 48 Hours. I met with Judy Bernstein, the segment producer, at the Sofitel hotel in Beverly Hills. We had tea in the lobby.

I learned a lesson I’d learn again—you never get much out of the network folks regarding what kind of show they’re planning to do. And rightfully so. I’m the performing monkey; it’s not my place to know anything beyond the dance they want me to do.

“So, what do you want me to do?”

“We want to follow you around. A day in the life of David Cole.”

“Well, a day in my life isn’t very exciting. I wake up, masturbate, eat a little something, and read for the rest of the day, making notes and studying diagrams, blueprints, and old photos. Sometimes I’ll walk up to In-N-Out for my dinner. End of story.”

In actuality, I knew enough to leave out the “masturbate” part.

“My point, Ms. Bernstein, is that there’s not much to ‘follow around.’”

She leaned in close. “Look, David, technically, ethically, I can’t tell you to specifically plan something explosive just for us. We can only report, not incite.”

CBS News is the TV equivalent of Superman. They are forbidden by their elders from interfering with human history. Was I speaking with a TV exec or a Brando hologram?

“But, the thing is, David, we’ll be out to shoot in two weeks. Here’s the exact date. If you do have anything explosive to show us, on that specific date, we’ll cover it. Not that we’re asking you, mind you. We’re just saying, if, by some amazing coincidence, you happen to have something newsworthy going on on this exact date, early afternoon, say, 1 p.m., it would really fit into our plans.”

“Well,” I replied, “let’s see if fate is kind to us that day.”

I got the message. Create something newsworthy. We don’t want to film you eating a double-double.

The task was surprisingly simple. With all of the ideological groups I had been joining and studying for the past two years, I knew exactly what to do. There was an accredited conservative student group on the UCLA campus, the “National Traditionalist Caucus” (NTC). The NTC was based in New York, run by a fat stuttering creep named Don Rosenberg (a Catholic, not a Joo). The kids at the NTC UCLA chapter were crazy, I loved ’em. All they wanted to do was drink beer and bleed poor Rosenberg to death, asking for money for events they’d never do. They were as “traditionalist” as I was Peruvian. They made me their chapter leader, which is how, during my ideology-studying days, I got into the offices of Focus on the Family, Governor Pete Wilson, and former U.S. Treasurer Bay Buchanan (Pat’s sister).

I’d also had my first real taste of event planning through the NTC. In 1990, Rosenberg hired me to organize a “say no to drugs and yes to family values” black-tie shindig at West Hollywood’s exclusive Mondrian Hotel. Our “celebrity guests” were Dustin Nguyen, Khrystyne Haje (a.k.a. “the redhead from Head of the Class”), and Kellie Shanygne Williams (a.k.a. “the girl Urkel was in love with on Family Matters”). Williams had to drop out, but we had a bit of luck because we’d reserved the beautiful outdoor patio overlooking the city, while Rob Reiner had reserved the bar for a cast party for his mega-flop TV show Morton and Hayes. All of Reiner’s people wanted to be outside by the pool, so we “inherited” a lot more celebrities.

At the same time that I was organizing Rosenberg’s NTC fest, I was helping radio host Tom Leykis (then at KFI in L.A.) organize a pro-choice event (I supplied Malcolm Jamal Warner as a guest speaker, while Leykis rounded up Molly Ringwald and Paul Williams). But the NTC soiree was the first time I was fully in charge of an event, and I had established a bit of authority among the NTC members.

It was with this in mind that I approached my friends at the UCLA NTC chapter with this proposition: “How would you all like to be on national TV?”

Naturally, everyone was thrilled. I told them, reserve a stage on campus for a Holocaust event on this particular date. Make sure you have every permit you need. And then, a day or two before the event, spread the word that you’re bringing a Holocaust revisionist on campus for a “debate.”

“But who’s the revisionist?”

“Me!” We laughed for five straight minutes. I revealed my Holocaust work, which was previously unknown to them, and we agreed: it was a plan. I called the CBS producer. “Great news! I was invited onto the UCLA campus for a debate that just so happens to be at 1 p.m. on the very day that you’ll be in town with the crew.”

“Well, we certainly got lucky, huh,” she replied. I’m sure she had the same shit-eating grin on her face that I did.

The woman I was dating at the time was an attractive but stern recently separated redhead named Karen. It was my first time dating an older woman (she was ten years my senior…she was—gasp—in her early thirties!). Karen was great in bed, but she never trusted a word I said, because she thought, because of my youth, that I was some kind of “player.” She was skeptical when I told her things might get ugly the day of the event. I knew that the NTC kids had put fliers up by the campus Hillel and Jewish Student Union buildings, and I told Karen to expect a few protesters.

“Who’s going to bother to come out to protest you,” she replied.

Karen had no idea of the emotions this issue can stir. I thought I had an idea…but even I was in for a shock.

The day of the event, I rendezvoused with the 48 Hours crew at UCLA. They wanted me to walk through the campus to an interview I had at the Daily Bruin, and then walk to the outdoor stage where I was to speak, with them following me the whole time. I’ve never looked at “candid” shots in news shows the same way. There was the on-air correspondent, the producer, the camera guy, the boom-mic guy, and an assistant, all following me around, as I’m supposed to walk “normally,” with every person on campus turning their heads.

I did the interview at the Bruin. The “invisible” crew and I walked across campus to the stage. We were on a hill, looking down. I damn near crapped myself. Five hundred angry protesters. Signs saying “David Cole go home!” “David Cole is a Nazi!” “David Cole is a traitor!” “Cole go to Hell!”

And Irv Rubin and his JDL, out in full force. And not a security guard in sight.

I turned to Bernstein. “I can’t do this; they’ll kill me.”

“But you have to! This is what we’re here to cover.”

“I can’t do it. I can’t. I mean, I have no desire to die today. I’m sorry.”

I turned and walked away. The crew didn’t follow me. They walked down the hill to interview the mob.

On my way back to the parking lot, I encountered Karen, who had just arrived. “Sorry, Karen, but I can’t do the speech. There are hundreds of angry protesters, and they’re screaming for blood.”

“You are SO full of shit. I knew you were putting me on. There’s no protesters; you just wanted to look like a big man. We’re done.”

“No, seriously, I’m in danger.”

“I’ll bet there never even was a 48 Hours crew, either. You fucking liar. What else have you lied to me about? Are your feelings for me a lie too?”

“ALRIGHT. FUCK. C’mon, I’ll do the fucking speech. Just promise me this,” I told her. “Walk over separately from me. I don’t want anyone in the mob knowing we’re together, for your safety.”

“Oh, aren’t you some big fucking gentleman.”

Karen and I walked toward the stage from separate directions. I regret that I never got to see her face when she saw the mob. I snuck toward the back of the stage. The 48 Hours crew was there, as was the local Fox News affiliate. Then Judy Bernstein did a really sneaky thing. She ambushed Irv Rubin by having him shake my hand without telling him who I was (he’d never seen me in person before).

“This is David Cole,” she gleefully told him, after the shake. His eyes glowed red. He’d never shaken hands with a revisionist before. “You fucking Nazi,” he hissed at me, as the camera rolled. He was too angry to even speak in sentences. “You…fucking…fucking…Nazi.”

He pushed me hard in the direction of the stairs leading down to the stage. I righted myself before falling, and scurried down toward where I’d be speaking. One of the NTC guys was trying to introduce me, but the crowd wouldn’t let him be heard. Finally he gave up and just motioned for me to come up. The 48 Hours crew and the Fox crew were on opposite sides of me, shooting.

I started to speak. The yelling and chanting from the crowd was too much. I didn’t have a mic (the NTC boys hadn’t thought it necessary to provide for one). I just stood there, trying to be heard. Within two minutes, a chili dog flew out of the crowd and beaned me in the face. The crowd cheered. I recall thinking to myself, “I sure could use a Pepsi to wash that down.” And, of course, the next thing that came flying at me was a large soft drink (thankfully, in a cup, not a can).

I was covered in chili, ketchup, cheese, beans, and Pepsi. I began to think retreat was the only smart move. I didn’t even get a chance to weigh that option. Within seconds after the Pepsi hit me, one of Rubin’s goons jumped onto the stage and started beating me. He hit me square on the nose and mouth, and then he began wailing on my upper chest. I fled, to cheers and chants of “Nazi go home!”

The crowd didn’t follow me, because Rubin was now up on stage demanding answers from the NTC kids as to why they brought me on campus in the first place. The Fox News crew stayed there, but the 48 Hours people chased after me.

“David, we have to get an interview!” Bernstein said excitedly. “You look incredible, I mean, you know, for the drama, for what you’ve just been through.”

Although my instinct was to get cleaned up, especially because I couldn’t tell if my nose was bleeding or if it was just the chili and ketchup dripping from my face, I understood her point. We found a secluded part of the campus, and we did the interview.

The Fox News affiliate ran the footage of the mob and the beating, and the incident made the front page of the Daily Bruin for two days straight. But 48 Hours cut everything about the mob, the beating, and my gunk-encrusted interview. Isn’t that fucked up…I went through all that for them, and for nothing.

I wasn’t supposed to look sympathetic. And the protesters weren’t supposed to look like animals. The actual events didn’t fit the theme of the show. For the record, I never put myself in another situation like that again. I would still find new and creative ways to fuck myself, but I’d never again do any public speaking except in a controlled environment.

Still, if the footage wasn’t broadcast, it was a hit within the halls of CBS. Soon after the UCLA incident, I heard from the producer of the Montel Williams Show (which was taped at the L.A. CBS studio). Montel was the new kid on the TV block, and he wanted to prove he could handle serious topics like Donahue did. Montel had hired away one of the best daytime talk show producers in the biz—Marilyn Kaskel—who had been responsible for making Geraldo Rivera’s daytime show a huge (if maligned) hit. She’d produced the episode that degenerated into a brawl between white supremacists and black audience members; this was the infamous incident where Geraldo got his nose broken.

In the pre-Jerry Springer days, there was still a desire on the part of these daytime shows to be “serious.” Post-Springer, it would degenerate into shows about lesbians and baby-mamas and fightin’ hillbillies. But in late ’91 and early ’92, there was still a desire to address real topics.

Kaskel told me she wanted to produce a serious show about revisionism. The Institute for Historical Review’s Mark Weber and I would face off against an Auschwitz survivor from the 1944 period (the period that I claimed was not an extermination period at Auschwitz), and a mainstream Holocaust historian.

Could it be? A chance to seriously debate? A chance to put my work in front of people on the “other side?” I was all set to say yes. But I had a few reservations, as you might expect, considering that I was speaking to the woman who produced the show where Geraldo got his nose broken.

I had two demands, which I wanted answered in writing:

1) No JDL. Period. I see one JDL guy, I leave.

2) The audience has to be random. The audience for the Geraldo brawl consisted of skinheads and black people. It was set up for a confrontation. I wanted a completely randomly chosen audience, people who had no idea what the topic would be.

To my surprise, CBS agreed. Kaskel had deluded herself into believing that I was a crank. She didn’t need to stack the house. As she saw it, I’d say hateful things, and the audience would hate me back.

At the time, the Montel people taped five shows in one day (a different audience for each), to run one-by-one throughout the week. I was scheduled for the fifth and final show. When I arrived, they were in the middle of show number four, about serial rapists. They sent me into makeup. I was sitting in the chair a long time with no one coming in. Finally, an assistant came in to usher me to the green room. “But, I didn’t get makeup yet,” I told her, assuming there’d been an oversight. “I know,” she said, staring down, “the makeup girl is Jewish and she refuses to touch you. Do you mind going on without makeup?”

“Did she do the makeup for the serial rapists?” I asked.

“Yeah, she did,” the pretty young assistant answered, looking a bit embarrassed.

I wanted to let this poor woman off the hook. “Actually, I hate wearing makeup, so it’s fine. Honestly!” I wasn’t lying, I hate makeup.

In the green room, Montel couldn’t have been nicer or more gracious, to both me and Weber. I had ridiculously assumed that I was going to be sitting at a table, with my feet obscured, and I was so paranoid about a sneak JDL attack that I wore my white running shoes (you know, for easy escape) with my brown suit. Montel laughed in a very sincere, pleasant way, letting me know I’d be sitting on a chair on a riser, no table. He asked me if I had a change of footwear to go with the suit.

“Nah,” I joked, “maybe I’ll start a style trend—white sneakers and dark suits.” Mentally, I made a note not to cross my legs once onstage, so as not to make my mistake so obvious. And, of course, once the cameras started rolling and I got lost in the subject matter, I crossed the living shit out of my legs for most of the show.

The episode opened with a montage put together by Ms. Kaskel. It was the familiar footage of the British burying the typhus victims they found at Bergen Belsen, the horrible scenes of skeletal bodies being thrown into pits. Of course, Kaskel didn’t represent it that way. The narration claimed that we (Weber and I) “say that these pictures aren’t real.”

Weber and I had to eat up valuable time after being introduced to fight Kaskel’s straw man, pointing out that we absolutely do not just “believe,” but know, that those pictures are indeed “real.” We had to explain that the footage was British, not German, from Belsen’s liberation in 1945, and that the horrific typhus problem was a separate matter from whether or not Jews were killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz in 1944.

From that point on, the show went amazingly well. Kaskel, to her credit, had stuck to the agreement. The audience was random, and, far from being booed, Weber and I were repeatedly applauded. Making it worse for Kaskel was that the historian she brought on to debate me and Weber, Dr. Michael Thaler, refused to speak to us or acknowledge that we were there (there goes my peer review). And then we came to the survivor, Ernest Hollander, then sixty-seven years old. A Czech Jew, Hollander had been sent to Auschwitz in 1944, exactly the period I was disputing, killing-wise. He survived, as did his brother Alex. But he’d been personally told that his brother Zoltan had been killed by the Nazis that year.

Naturally, Ernest was not pleased that I was disputing a 1944 killing program. I did not attempt to fight back against his insults. Whether or not Jews were being “exterminated” in 1944, the truth is that Hollander and his surviving brother lost everything they owned and were put in a camp at the hands of a tyrannical, vile group of people. I had nothing but sympathy for him, and I think the fact that I didn’t lose my cool resonated with the audience. If there was one thing I was not coming off as, it was “hateful.”

At the end of the show, several random audience members said they wanted to continue the discussion in the parking lot, and I held court there for a good half-hour, answering more questions. It was a hell of a good night, proof that if the deck isn’t stacked against me, I could hold my own.

It was not a good night for Marilyn Kaskel. Furious, she came up to me and Weber after the show, quite literally growling “you think you won, don’t you?”

It wasn’t just me who thought I’d “won.” My future arch nemesis Dr. Michael Shermer, who I would end up “debating” on the Phil Donahue Show two years later, agreed. In his 2007 book, Why People Believe Weird Things, Shermer wrote, “Montel Williams had taped a program on April 30, 1992 [it was actually taped earlier than that; Shermer is referring to the air date], but it was pulled from major markets because, according to the deniers, they looked too good and the Holocaust scholar offered nothing better than ad hominem attacks. I saw the show, and the deniers were correct. If it had been a fight, they would have stopped it.”

Shermer is wrong that it “was pulled from major markets” In fact, it aired everywhere but in L.A., where it was preempted by the L.A. riots. But Shermy is on target about how well Weber and I did.

Following the show’s April 30 airing, CBS received a flood of angry phone calls. How dare the network give me a “fair” forum. The episode was pulled, permanently, from rotation, and removed from the CBS video and transcript archive service.

But it did air once. And guess what? Some dude was watching the episode in Brooklyn and he was like, “Hey—that Ernest Hollander guy is the spitting image of my friend who just emigrated from Eastern Europe whose name is also Hollander.”

You guessed it. Zoltan Hollander was alive and well. Zoltan thought that his two brothers had been gassed at Auschwitz in 1944, just as Ernest and Alex believed that Zoltan had been killed that same year. Zoltan ended up on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain after the war, Ernest and Alex on the Western side. And both were assured by their governments and historians that their loved ones were dead. So don’t even bother looking. When Zoltan came to the U.S., he didn’t even try to see if Ernest and Alex were alive. They were 1944 Auschwitz Jews, and we all know that was the “worst killing period of all.”

I was on the show to argue that Auschwitz was not gassing Jews in 1944, and the survivor the producers brought on to refute me turned out to prove my point. It didn’t prove that I was a hundred percent correct; it proved that at least what I was saying should have been taken seriously. If the random 1944 survivor brought on the show to say I was nuts ended up proving my theory, either the Montel producers had the worst luck on earth, or I wasn’t nuts. I certainly wasn’t spewing “hate.”

The Montel Show taped a special edition featuring the reunited brothers. Not only was I not invited, or thanked, but I was denounced by Ernest Hollander—the guy who found his brother because my theory was correct—as a “bum.”

The media was less kind. In covering the story of the Hollander reunion, the Associated Press stated: “Ernest Hollander thought his older brother was killed in a Nazi concentration camp. On the other side of the world, in Yugoslavia, Zoltan Hollander thought the same of Ernest. But thanks to a televised debate between Ernest and neo-Nazis on a talk show, and the sharp eyes of an immigrant from Yugoslavia, the Hollander brothers and younger brother Alex have found each other after more than half a century.”

So I’m a “neo-Nazi” now? You can comb through every word I said on that show and you won’t find anything that is even slightly “Nazi.” I was there to talk about Auschwitz history. But calling me a neo-Nazi made it so much easier after the Hollanders reunited.

On the reunion show, Williams reported that he had been deluged with complaints about having me and Weber on the show, including threats of lawsuits by Jewish organizations. Yes, indeed. Because why risk more families being reunited? Twenty-two years ago, there were still many possible such reunions, with many survivors still in their sixties and seventies. Now, not so much. So good work, everyone.

A front-page article on the Hollander reunion that appeared in the Northern California Jewish Bulletin commented that the Hollander family “will in a sense get to rewrite their history—a painful irony given that the topic of the show on which Ernest appeared was Holocaust revisionism.”

Where’s the irony? They were appearing on a show about the possibility that much of what we think we know about Auschwitz is wrong, and it turned out that a very important part of what the Hollanders thought they knew about Auschwitz was wrong.

A similar “unsurprising surprise” occurred on the Phil Donahue Show in early 1994. Philly, who refused to greet me before the show, had planned an “ambush.” I was to show my footage of the gas chamber anomalies I found in Europe, and he would then hit me with REAL footage of a gas chamber. “Take THAT, denier!”

To his credit, Donahue’s producer Brad Hurtado, currently a producer at True TV (Bravo, TLC, MTV), who had worked tirelessly to make this show happen (against the wishes of some at NBC), allowed me to show as much footage as I wanted, uncut. That was a very brave move, although he might have believed, as did Donahue himself, that the “gotcha” ambush would negate anything I showed.

As my footage ran, I narrated it from the stage. When I was done, all Philly could sarcastically say was, “Well, you’re a real Columbo, David.” The audience laughed derisively.

I replied, “Now wait a minute, wait a minute, excuse me, Phil. Why don’t you ask why anyone else hasn’t brought this up in fifty years since the war was over? Why haven’t there been other ‘Columbos?’”

After returning from a commercial break and introducing my “debating partner” Dr. Michael Shermer (more on him shortly), Donahue announced that he was going to counter my footage with some clips of his own. “Let me show you this film,” he solemnly told the audience. Smugly, he crowed, “I’ll be curious to know what Mr. Cole feels about this.” Donahue rolled his “gotcha” footage.

“Here is the gas chamber,” Donahue proclaimed.

Of course, he was showing footage of the phony Dachau “gas chamber,” the one that the Dachau museum itself admits was never used. Which led to this exchange:

Me: “They just showed the Dachau gas chamber in that footage. Is that gas chamber ever claimed to have killed people, or not?”

Donahue: “There’s a sign, there’s a sign, at the, at Dachau, notifying tourists of that fact.”

Me: “That it was not used to kill people.”

Donahue (agreeing): “That it was not used.”

Me (frustrated): “So why did you just show it in the clip?”

Donahue (looking nervously offstage at his staff): “Oh, I, I, I, I’m not at all sure that was Dachau.”

Me (pointing at Donahue animatedly): “Wait a minute, no, wait a minute. You’re not sure that was Dachau? You show a clip on your show, and you’re not sure it was Dachau?”

As they go to commercial, you see Donahue rip off his mic and bolt up from his chair, pointing a finger at me. That’s when he called me “the antichrist.” What you can’t see is that, once we’d cut to commercial, he went over to producer Hurtado and began berating him for the botched “gotcha” moment. Donahue was incensed. He’d bungled the moment, and, like any great general, he blamed it on his staff.

I was interviewed for three hours by Timothy Ryback (co-founder of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague) for the New Yorker (“Evidence of Evil,” November 1993). To his credit, Ryback (barely hiding his disdain) did at least take my questions to the authorities at the Auschwitz Museum, who no doubt loved hearing about me again.

Last year, a young revisionist agitator from California, David Cole, who makes much of the fact that he is Jewish, visited Auschwitz to undertake his own site assessment.…David Cole also toured a “fake” gas chamber…Cole noted, accurately, that the crematorium chimney is a freestanding structure, in no way connected to the ovens. One entrance to the gas chamber does not have a door, or even any evidence of hinges. Inside the chamber, a tight rectangular space with a low ceiling, there are marks where walls have obviously been removed. To one side, there are pipes where a bathroom once stood. In the center of the room is a manhole with an iron cover.

Jerzy Wróblewski, who is the director of the Auschwitz Museum and therefore is ultimately accountable for all preservation work at the Stammlager and Birkenau, is painfully aware of the questions about the authenticity, but he says that he has neither the time nor the resources to deal with all the issues that the museum confronts both in its day-to-day operation and in its long-term plans.

I couldn’t exactly call that answer satisfactory. If “questions about authenticity” are not worth the museum’s “time and resources,” what is?

Ryback had to concede: “Given the scale of the extermination process at Auschwitz, the material evidence—official documents, photographs, internal memos, and directives—is surprisingly scarce.”

In late 1993, Mike Wallace called me. At home. On a Sunday night. While I was watching 60 Minutes. Wallace wanted me on 60 Minutes. I heard him out, and thought about it for a few days. I’d been watching that show my entire life. And if there’s one thing I know, it’s that Mike Wallace chooses his “heroes” and “villains” before the piece, and he massages ten hours of recorded video into a neat little fifteen-minute ball that fits a narrative he already decided upon.

I felt certain that I would be the bad guy.

I called him back a few days later, and told him I’d pass. I explained that I prefer not to do shows that are edited in post, especially after my experience with 48 Hours. His last words to me were, “Well sir, if you don’t want to come on and explain yourself, you’re a fool.”

Well, guess what happened with 60 Minutes? As it was CBS again, they had the rights to footage from 48 Hours and the Montel show. So Wallace profiled me anyway, but only by using pre-existing, CBS-owned footage.

In the clip of my Montel Williams appearance, Montel looks at the camera and asks if the Holocaust is “a myth.” “Is it a myth?” he asks, while staring straight ahead at the camera. Cut to me nodding in agreement. To the millions of 60 Minutes viewers, it looked as though I nodded in agreement after Montel asked if the Holocaust was a myth. Of course, the clip had been altered. The producers of 60 Minutes took a nod that I gave at the very beginning of the show. My nod is in response to this sentence from Montel: “David was recently under attack by members of the Jewish Defense League, while he was speaking on the subject, because David is Jewish. Thank you very much for being here.”

And I fucking nodded.

Nearly eleven minutes later, Montel looks at the camera and asks if the Holocaust is a myth “or is it truth? We’ll find out when we come back.” The camera then pans the audience as the show breaks for a commercial—I’m not shown nodding or doing anything else. After the break, the “myth” question is not put to me, or to anyone else on the panel.

To 60 Minutes viewers, it appeared as though Montel asked the “myth” question to me, and that I nodded in agreement. A total fabrication, courtesy of America’s number one prime-time news program. After weeks of trying, I finally got through via phone to 60 Minutes head honcho Don Hewitt, whose response to my complaint about the misleading edit was “sue us.” I was not in a position, time-wise or money-wise, to sue CBS News. And besides, the damage was done. If four months from then they had added a quick retraction at the end of a show, what fucking difference would it have made anyway?

When I was interviewed for the Jerusalem Report, Israel’s then-highest circulation biweekly newsmagazine, I made certain that the interview was audiotaped to ensure accuracy. When the interview was published, I was quoted as saying that the Holocaust is a “fantasy.” Once again, this was the exact opposite of my position. I contacted Sheldon Teitelbaum, the Jerusalem Report senior reporter who had interviewed me, and I demanded to know where the “fantasy” quote came from, as I had never said it, and it was not on the audiotape of the interview.

Mr. Teitelbaum was brazen enough to send me a faxed response with the following admission: “The word ‘fantasy,’ I suspect, may have been chosen by a copy editor who interpreted reality in this fashion. The quotation marks were not intended to signify a quote from you. This offending phrase works as a transgression against Strunk & White, who warn against using quotation marks to signify sardonic word usage.”

Just roll that one sentence in your head a few times: “The quotation marks were not intended to signify a quote from you.” He was shameless enough to send that to me in writing. Teitelbaum cynically added that his editors don’t have to worry about defamation laws because “they are not in U.S. jurisdiction anyway.”

When the University of Texas at Austin campus newspaper, with the vocal support of UT Austin Chancellor Robert Berdahl, decided to ban an advertisement for one of my documentaries, I wrote an Op-Ed in defense of the film, which the Daily Texan printed. This caused a major controversy that was covered by the Associated Press. The article by AP Southwest Bureau writer Pauline Arrillaga quoted my Op-Ed as stating that the Holocaust was “a hoax, fabricated to drum up support for Jewish causes.” The problem was, that quote didn’t appear anywhere in my Op-Ed (nor in anything else I had ever written), and the sentiments expressed in the phony quote were the complete opposite of my position.

I sent a letter to Ms. Arrillaga asking about the origin of the phony quote. Ms. Arrillaga responded: “Yes, the ‘hoax’ line did not actually appear in your Op-Ed. We mistakenly attributed it to you due to faulty background information.” Ms. Arrillaga, who did not explain what she meant by “faulty background information,” went on to say that if I wanted the false quote corrected, it would be up to me to contact each one of the newspapers that carry AP stories (1,700 at the very least).

Do you see the pattern here? The false quotes and misleading edits have a theme. The Holocaust is a “myth,” a “fantasy,” a “hoax.” That’s what the media wanted to portray me as saying. But I never said those things. Not in print, not on TV, not in private correspondences. Because those things don’t represent what I believe.

I appeared on a few more shows, enjoying it less and less every time. When the Morton Downey Jr. Show called, I didn’t even have to think about it before saying no. But Mort’s producer, Rob Chickering, asked me to come to Texas to do Mort’s radio show (I was already heading to Dallas to do a morning show), so that I could see for myself what a “changed man” Downey was. I cautioned Chickering that I don’t do “theater,” only serious interviews. But, I took him at his word, and he was right—Downey was respectful and straightforward on the radio show.

They won me over. I went to Palm Springs to do Downey’s TV show, and, of course, it was the old Mort: rude, angry, combative, insulting. He got in my face, shrieking “Nazi!” “Self-hating Jew!” “Skinhead!” I just stood there at my podium, amused by it all. He couldn’t get a rise out of me. At one point, I looked at him and said, with a smile, “Wow, you were really nice to me on your radio show.” That threw him. He stammered for a few seconds before belting out his unfortunate comeback: “Well, uh, that’s because the AUDIENCE couldn’t SEE what a PIECE OF CRAP you are.”

My laughter egged him on. He got right in my face: “I can’t BELIEVE what a Nazi you are. I can’t BELIEVE what a piece of scum you are. I can’t BELIEVE what an a-hole you are.”

I turned to the camera and said, “I can’t believe I’m doing this show.”

That was the clip Greg Kinnear played on Talk Soup. He appeared to be as amused by it as I was.

The only thing I was guaranteed by my contract was a copy of the show. When I never got one, I called Chickering. He told me to fuck off and hung up.

Apart from my TV appearances, I did a speaking tour of Ontario (Canada) with David Irving, who got pissed that I had top billing at every stop. I even returned to UCLA, more successfully this time, lecturing in a closed-off classroom at the invitation of a teacher. I lectured in Munich, Berlin, and Paris, and eventually Tokyo, and I was interviewed by at least two dozen publications, from the New Yorker and Jerusalem Post to the Globe and Mail (Toronto), New York Times, and the AP.

I never accepted money as a historian or lecturer. I thought that if I accepted even a dollar for writing or speaking about the Holocaust, it could be seen as a corrupting factor, something that my foes could claim was the “real reason” I was being a “traitor to my people.” I’d be Judas getting his thirty gold pieces. So I had an iron-clad rule—no money.

When I did the Phil Donahue Show, I was contractually obligated to get paid. So I just never cashed the check. When Tony Kaye, director of American History X, offered me $2,000 to do a cameo as a Holocaust revisionist in his film, I turned him down. One time, after a speech in Orange County, an elderly gentleman approached me to shake my hand, and he shoved a bunch of bills in my palm for “my good work.” I offered them back, explaining that I never accept money. The poor old guy looked so crestfallen; what could I do? I took the money and thanked him profusely, and that evening, having dinner with a colleague at some random Newport Beach diner, I left the entire chunk—$200—as a tip. The waitress had been very nice, and I’m sure she needed it more than I did.

Needless to say, my rule about not getting paid made no difference to my foes.

In late 1994, I made my fourth and longest research trip to Europe. But the futility was becoming more and more apparent to me. In the fall of 1994, the JDL put its first bounty on my head, but it was only $4,000, and it was made on the Internet, which, at the time, I absolutely dismissed as a viable means of communication. The JDL threat was posted on their website with the title, “Who is David Cole and Why Should He Die?”

The night before Thanksgiving 1994, I got the living shit beaten out of me by three guys as I was walking back from my local grocery store with items for the next night’s dinner. They kicked the crap out of me without taking my wallet or groceries. When I woke up, I saw them driving away. I couldn’t have been out very long.

Okay, I thought, maybe I ought to take the threats more seriously.

The press had also been upping the ante. No longer content with just misrepresenting my work, the guardians of all the news fit to print were now declaring me the worst monster on earth. Yehuda Bauer of Hebrew University, the foremost name in Holocaust history, called my work “powerful and dangerous” in the Jerusalem Post. When the Detroit Jewish News, at the time the nation’s largest-circulation Jewish weekly, put me on the front cover in a very unflattering profile titled “Rebel Without a Cause,” the paper received so many complaints that the editor, Phil Jacobs, wrote an editorial the next week explaining that I had to be on the cover, because I was the greatest threat to the Jewish people since Hitler. The highlighted text, in large print in the center of the editorial, read: “Don’t we need to know about Hitler, Hussein, Arafat, and Cole? David Cole stays on the front page, along with others who pose a threat.”

Think about that for a moment. Hitler, Hussein, Arafat, and Cole. A mass-murdering tyrant who’s dead, a war-mongering dictator surrounded by an army, a terrorist protected 24/7 by a legion of defenders, and me, living alone in West L.A., having neither killed anyone nor having any protection against anyone who might want to kill me.

As an aside, in preparation for this book, I found out that Jacobs had himself been ostracized by the Jewish community and threatened with violence after writing a piece exposing an apparent child molestation ring and cover-up at a Baltimore synagogue. Out of curiosity, I contacted him and asked whether the experience led to a different understanding of the kind of incitement that could possibly get a person killed. His reply:

David—I wish you only the best. As we are in the month of Elul, if I have caused you any pain, I pray for your forgiveness. Have a Shabbat Shalom. Phil

I don’t hold a grudge, and I accepted his apology. But still, going back to 1994, I was beginning to get genuinely, and I would say legitimately, frightened.

Also, things were becoming strained between me and the revisionist community. During my fourth research trip to Europe, I undertook an examination of the Natzweiler-Struthof camp in Alsace-Lorraine. Alsace-Lorraine is a part of Germany that France “took back” after World War II because it “used to be theirs” centuries ago. Yes, that’s the same France that tells Israel it can’t seize land won in a war, even if that land “used to be theirs” centuries ago. Ah, the French…you could smell the hypocrisy if not for the fact that their disdain for bathing produces an even worse stank.

No revisionist had ever been allowed inside the supposed Natzweiler gas chamber, where nearly a hundred Jews were said to have been gassed in 1943. Natzweiler wasn’t a camp for Jews; it was a camp for French resistance fighters. But the region’s resident Nazi mad scientist, Dr. August Hirt, decided he wanted to have a Jewish skull collection, because, well, “fuck you I’m insane, that’s why.” There was a genuine paper trail indicating that the gassing/skull story was true. So why didn’t the Frenchies allow people inside the gas chamber complex? The rest of the camp was preserved as a museum, but the gas chamber building, located away from the camp proper, was off limits.

I had to get in there. Why wouldn’t I want to? I didn’t care where the evidence would lead. I never did. I just wanted to know the facts.

In anticipation of the trip, I had procured for myself some World Jewish Congress “diplomat” credentials. They’re not actual diplomatic credentials in any official sense; they’re just something the WJC sold to make Jews feel big (and it probably helps you get a better table at Carnegie Deli). But here I was, using them to actually get in to a gas chamber.

For two hours, my translator was on the payphone outside the camp, talking to one government ministry after another (these were the days before cellphones, kids). Finally, after going through three different ministries, I received permission to enter under supervised conditions. The guards were contacted by the government, and I (and my translator, my assistant, and two French revisionist publishers) were let in.

Well, damned if it wasn’t a genuine gas chamber. It was an SS tear gas training room that was refitted to be a homicidal chamber. It was a logical choice, as it already had a good ventilation system and a gas-tight door. The amazing irony is, here was a real gas chamber, shut off from the public. Whereas at Dachau, the fake one was the main attraction. Yeah, perfect sense.

After studying additional archival materials in Paris, when I got back to L.A., I published my findings. Nutty nutbag denier Robert Faurisson, who had never cared for me (and vice-versa), was incensed. Not only had I dared to reveal a genuine still-existing gas chamber, but I’d done it on his home turf. He began spreading rumors that I was a World Jewish Congress “infiltrator,” because of the credentials I openly used to force the French government to allow me to examine the building.

I’d had enough. I penned a 9,300-word exposé of Faurisson’s decades of poor historical research and outright lies and fabrications. Surprisingly, some revisionists took well to my piece. Naturellement, Faurisson didn’t, and he began trying to get people to “take sides.”

At the ’94 IHR conference, a group of revisionists protested outside, passing out fliers claiming that I was a “Mossad double agent.”

By the end of ’94, all signs pointed to the idea that it was time to move on.

6.

THE IDIOT’S CREED

The “take away” from 1994 was that I was banging my head against a wall. There’d be no pounding sense into the revisionists, and no being treated fairly by the non-revisionists. So why was I even doing this? What was the point? The feeling of futility was overwhelming.

It’s important to remember how things were in 1994. I don’t think younger folks can grasp how small and relatively unknown the Internet was at that time. In those days, the very idea that a fellow could go off and start a little independent website and get millions of hits was the stuff of fairy tales. There was no YouTube, no Blogger, no WordPress. In those days, you had to be published. Hard-copy published. You needed someone, some entity, to carry your work. And as I continued to clash with the revisionists, and as the mainstream press continued to lie about and misrepresent my work, it didn’t take a rocket Zionist to figure out that 1995 would be an even more frustrating year for me if I kept on the current path.

I had given it my best shot. I’d tried to present an honest, straightforward case for my views, and I had thoroughly failed.

I did one high-profile thing in early 1995—I went on a speaking tour of Japan. A glossy Vanity Fair-style magazine published by Japan’s largest publishing company, Bungei Shunju, had run a revisionist article by a prominent Japanese brain surgeon. As you may imagine, brain surgeons don’t necessarily write good history articles, much as I couldn’t write a good article about brain surgery. Because of the high-profile nature of the magazine and the publishing house, the international outcry about that one rather weak revisionist article was huge. Volkswagen pulled its ads; U.S. diplomats complained. To “atone,” the publishing company dissolved the entire magazine, and fired every single employee, right down to the cleaning staff.

What a wonderful lesson in why fighting “Holocaust denial” is so important. If too many of those types of articles are allowed to be published, it might usher in a fascist world in which window cleaners are punished for the political views expressed in an article written by someone they’ve never met. The powers of “tolerance” got their way in Japan.

Many Japanese citizens were stunned. “Why did everyone have to be fired, why did the entire magazine have to fold, because of one small article? What was so dangerous about what was said?” So, a few academic types in Tokyo arranged for my speaking tour.

I was exceptionally well-received. And the women, dear God the stunning young women, most of whom thought I was tall and handsome (suckers!). But after enough speeches, I became uncomfortable, because the young people who would come to see my talks at Tokyo University and Waseda University were open to my work only because they were blank slates. To these Japanese kids, the Holocaust was so distant, so unknown, I could have told them anything (very few Holocaust history books had ever been translated into Japanese). I did my best at my speeches to be as non-polemical as possible. I wanted them to hear both sides, to get an idea of exactly what the controversy was. I would even give out a reading list of non-revisionist books to check out.

Another problem: while in Tokyo, I was approached by a representative of the PLO (traditionally, Japan had been warmer to the Arab nations than to Israel, although that has changed a bit since the early ’90s). This young PLO organizer just LOVED my work! Oh wow…the PLO is a fan. Allow me some space to jump for joy. Up until that moment, my main concern was white supremacists who would exploit my work. That meeting in Tokyo really drove home the point that I had something bigger to worry about.

The PLO guy, who had approached me after one of my speeches, asked if I would do a special speech at his HQ.

“No,” I said, and I walked away.

I did nothing public—no TV, no radio, no print—after the Japan trip.

“If I don’t know about it, it doesn’t exist.” This is the Idiot’s Creed, the driving intellectual principle of the moron. The Creed allows idiots to sail through life uninterested in acquiring knowledge or learning anything new, because, as the Creed states, there is nothing new to learn. The idiot already knows everything.

Sadly, I saw the Idiot’s Creed in full bloom among my former Republican allies in the months since my outing. People who’d never explored the Holocaust beyond seeing Schindler’s List were suddenly experts on population demographics during the war, the uses of cyanide gas, and ventilation shafts in remote camps in the Polish countryside.

There is one expression of the Idiot’s Creed in regard to my current situation that appalls me to the extent that I thought it deserved its own chapter. And that’s the notion that there is some hard line in the sand between Holocaust revisionists and “real Holocaust historians.” In fact, there was a lot going on behind-the-scenes during my revisionist days. I’m sorry to burst the bubble of the idiots, but some of the people who excoriated me publicly admitted privately that they lied about my work and defamed me, and some of the most respected figures in the field privately assisted me with my work.

I’d recommend the idiots skip the rest of this chapter. It’ll only make them confused and flustered.

DR. CARLOS HUERTA

How do I begin to describe Dr. Carlos Huerta? Orthodox Jewish rabbi. History professor. Mathematics professor. That’s pretty good. Wait, there’s more. Vietnam vet. Major in the U.S. Army. Oh, and he was the chaplain at West Point, and the front-lines chaplain who accompanied the 101st Airborne into Iraq in 2003, staying with the unit for several years as the insurgents’ attacks escalated. Since retiring from the army several years ago, he devotes his time to his rabbinical work and to helping soldiers who have PTSD.

None of the superficial, fair-weather conservative friends I used to have could in any way call this man an anti-Semite or a bad guy. Most of my former “buddies” will never have one-millionth of this man’s character, humanity, heart, and bravery. Before I knew just how quickly my “pals” would desert me, and how cruel they’d be to anyone in my former circle still willing to speak to me, we’d get together for our GOP beer blasts toasting exactly the type of people exemplified by Dr. Huerta. People in the military, people of faith, people of valor.

Just to be clear, I’m only writing this chapter because I received Dr. Huerta’s permission to speak of our time together. I’ll betray a hundred confidences in this book, but not his. Had he said no, you wouldn’t be reading this section.

Carlos is someone I wouldn’t have met had I not been putting myself out there in the media. When I first began corresponding with him in 1993, I knew of his work. He was something of an anomaly. He was a Holocaust scholar who was actually pushing for the inclusion of revisionist materials in Holocaust education classes. He was not a revisionist, nor is he now. But he was interested in interacting with serious revisionists in a bid to strengthen Holocaust history as a whole. He’d initially floated the idea of including revisionist materials in Holocaust courses in the 1991 issue of Martyrdom and Resistance (published by the International Society for Yad Vashem), in an article titled “Holocaust Revisionism in the Classroom.” He’d revisit the theme several times over the next few years.

One of Carlos’ points was that the reason Holocaust educators need to become familiar with revisionism is that the revisionists are not always wrong factually, but deniers like Faurisson use actual facts in order to extrapolate, to force, a broader and incorrect conclusion. According to Carlos, “the flaw (in revisionist literature) is not necessarily in fact but rather in use of that fact.”

From Conservative Judaism (a scholarly journal published by the Rabbinical Assembly and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America), fall 1994:

When one learns that there was testimony at the Nuremberg trials of mass electrocution, soap making from human fat, use of devices that could instantaneously vaporize 20,000 people, and that all of these were since discredited, it is not hard to make the jump to challenge all the other data presented at the trial.

The (classroom) environment must always be an honest one. If there are points that the educator is not equipped to address, he or she should admit that fact. If there are legitimate points that Holocaust revisionists make, and there are some, the Holocaust educator must openly admit to them.

Dr. Huerta reached out to me in 1993. Carlos had seen in me exactly the type of revisionist with whom he wanted to engage. In September 1993, he explained his point of view very concisely:

In your last fax, you mentioned that I was on the other side of the fence in this debate on the Holocaust, and you are right. I am not afraid of revisionism as some people are. I think that revisionism has spurred some research into the Holocaust that might not been done if revisionism did not make the challenge. I also believe that Holocaust revisionism will stand or fall on its own merits, and I am not afraid to investigate to see what those merits may or may not be. I am also not afraid to expose revisionists’ ideas to those people that also would be willing to investigate them. That is why I welcome as much information as possible.

One month later, he expressed a desire to work with me. It wasn’t that we saw eye-to-eye on the historical details; it was that he understood my motivations, and he had the same desire that I did—take away the ability of the deniers to frame the debate, by shoring up the history and clearing out the stuff that wasn’t accurate. I was being offered the chance to hone my skills with a true professional, and someone of unassailable credentials, as a scholar, and as a Jew. But there was more to the man than his credentials. There was his essence, the soul of a historian, a truth-seeker in the greatest tradition of rabbinical teaching.

On October 11, 1993, he faxed me this proposition:

There is something I must tell you that you will probably not like. The discovery of truth is a long, hard, and slow process. Anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something. I know you are anxious to hear what I might have to say about your work, but I must ask you to be patient. You will not get any great revelations from me, but rather more questions than answers. I know of no other way to find truth but by slow, meticulous, backbreaking work. I suspect that your eagerness wants answers quicker than they naturally can come. If you are willing to join me digging at the beach with a teaspoon, and continue to do so until we hit something, then maybe, just maybe, we might find treasure.

It was the greatest offer I’d ever received, from anyone. I kept my working relationship with Carlos private, as did he. We began going over all of my questions, all of my data, all of my work. He never tried to “instruct.” Rather, he questioned, and he forced me to learn how to better question myself. It was an intellectually invigorating period in my life.

Occasionally, Carlos (who was in Jerusalem at the time, teaching) would share a tidbit of info from within the Yad Vashem inner circle that would give me a reason to smile beyond the ongoing historical research we were doing. In February 1994, he wrote:

There is some backlash on the video you sent me (about Auschwitz). I saw a brochure a couple of months ago from Yad Vashem announcing a class in Polish that was to be conducted by Yad Vashem on the Holocaust. What made this class so interesting was that the class was to be composed primarily of Auschwitz tour guides. Yad Vashem felt that the guides were passing out bad info at the site. I think this is a direct result of the video you sent me.

I was pleased to see that. I took a lot of crap for going public with my Auschwitz videos. But I doubt anyone would have taken action against the inaccurate and misleading information being given out by the tour guides had I kept my research to myself, or had I reached out privately. All bureaucracies are the same, whether a government, a university, or a state museum. Usually, they need to be pestered and goaded into making changes.

Events would soon bring Carlos much closer to California. Which brings me to my favorite story about him. Like many orthodox Jews, he has a big family. In 1994, the Clinton administration was hurting for chaplains, and it was pursuing qualified potential chaplains and offering them very lucrative offers. Carlos loved teaching, but the fact was, his family would benefit more from what he could earn re-joining the army as a chaplain. He already held the rank of major, so no promotion would be needed.

The army assigned him to be chaplain at Fort Sill, in Lawton, Oklahoma (a.k.a. “a town with no Jews”). Although this duty would take Carlos away from his family for extended periods of time, in the long run it would be of great benefit to his children in terms of providing for their education and well-being.

Carlos invited me to meet him in Lawton, to bounce around ideas regarding Holocaust history. I flew to DFW, and then boarded a rickety twin-engine craft to Lawton (no biggie. If you’ve flown on LOT, the Polish airline, as many times as I have, you fear no domestic U.S. plane). The plane was nothing but recruits. A toothless Texan sitting next to me turned and said, “Joinin’ up, huh?”

That’s all I wanted, spending an hour chatting with Goober.

“Yep,” I replied. “Isn’t it great that Clinton started that whole ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ thing? I never thought I’d be able to serve.”

Goober never tried to speak to me again for the duration of the flight. I am such a bastard sometimes.

After I got settled in at my hotel, Carlos took me on a tour of the base. And then we went off-base to have dinner. Driving through Lawton, there weren’t many options. There was one main drag, with about a half-dozen chain restaurants on it.

“Oooh,” I exclaimed, “there’s a Red Lobster! Let’s eat there.”

I love Red Lobster. When the only one in L.A. closed about ten years ago, I openly wept.

“Absolutely,” Carlos said, as he pulled into the lot.

You remember that he’s an orthodox rabbi, right? And here I, in my complete obliviousness, have decided to go to Red Lobster.

As we sat in our booth and began talking, the waitress came to take our orders. I ordered my fried seafood heart-attack-special, and Carlos bashfully asked if he could have some Saltine crackers.

And that’s when it hit me. I’m so stupid. I’m so, so stupid. He’s orthodox. He can’t eat anything prepared in that kitchen. He can only have Saltines because they’re Kosher and they’re sealed. I looked up at him. I was truly ashamed.

“Carlos, I’m so sorry. I didn’t think. I’m so selfish.”

Rather than getting angry, he smiled at me and put his hand on my shoulder. “David,” he said, “there are no restaurants in Lawton with kosher kitchens. Only the base has kosher food, and it’s very limited. You’ve been flying all day; I wanted you to have whatever you wanted.” He did everything he could to make me feel like I hadn’t been as much of an idiot as I had, in fact, been. We had an invigorating dinner of intellectual dialogue, fried fish (me) and Saltines (him). He was even concerned that the waitress wasn’t going to get the tip she deserved, because of the fact that he didn’t order, so he kicked in about five times more than the norm.

That’s Carlos. Kindness and humility radiates from the man. I was still not ready to stop calling myself an atheist, but every time Carlos and I would talk, the man’s humility would strike me in a way I can’t describe. He didn’t throw his religion in your face; he let you see his faith through his actions.

These days, after having been threatened and attacked by the atheist Jews in my GOP circle, and after having my work stolen by Breitbart.com editor Ben Shapiro, who uses his yarmulke and Jewishness as a “get out of jail free” card every time he screws someone over, I have a newfound appreciation for Carlos. When I got back to L.A., I began sending regular “Kosher Care Packages” to Carlos, culled from the finest foods available at L.A.’s many Kosher markets.

Carlos sent me a secret manuscript about revisionism that he was working on, for me to edit and critique. I’ve never told anyone about this before. To be very clear, it was not a “revisionist” manuscript, but rather a fascinating exploration of the topic. I also assisted him with research and background materials for a booklet he was asked to write for the Department of Defense called “Holocaust Revisionism.” The book was commissioned by the department in response to the horrific murder of two black civilians by two soldiers at Ft. Bragg who were neo-Nazi Hitler-worshipping skinheads. Dr. Huerta did an excellent job of explaining how the extremism behind Holocaust denial does, indeed, very closely intersect with racism and neo-Nazism. But he also took great pains to point out that the extremism often associated with deniers and their supporters is a completely separate thing from actual, serious Holocaust revisionism:

They (revisionists) do not dispute the fact that large numbers of Jews were deported to concentration camps and ghettos, or that many Jews died or were killed during the Second World War. Revisionist scholars have, however, presented considerable evidence to show that there was no German program to exterminate Europe’s Jews, that numerous claims of mass killings in “gas chambers” are false, and that the estimate of six million Jewish wartime dead is an irresponsible exaggeration. In short, revisionists do not deny the Holocaust, they just want to redefine it.

My work with Carlos was cut short by his wife’s tragic and untimely passing. I didn’t speak to him for a while after that. Soon, he got his assignment at West Point, and then Iraq. We lost touch completely.

He was very pleased to hear from me when I contacted him for this book. He gave me permission to recount our time together, and he expressed his sadness regarding the manner in which my life had been turned upside down by the “outing:”

It is sad that all you have built up during the last few years you have to leave behind. However, you are smart and talented and I know you will land on your feet. I know that this is farfetched but your skepticism would make you a great mathematician or physicist. Hell, you would be a damn good attorney.

Carlos is remarried, and enjoying his retirement with his large family. He had a profound influence on my life. If I can consider this book a “mid-life summing up” (in the improbable event I live to ninety), I would say that knowing Carlos Huerta was one of the few things during my first forty-five years about which I can’t be cynical. It was an honor.

DR. MICHAEL SHERMER

Michael Shermer deserves a detailed chapter. My experience with Shermer mirrors other experiences I had at the time with “mainstream” figures who would knowingly lie about me and my work, but the Shermer example is the only one I can prove through recorded phone calls.

Shermer is the media’s go-to guy for the selective skepticism of hipsters who hang out in coffee shops in Silverlake. “Fuck, man, isn’t the whole, like, ‘religion’ thing retarded? Fuckin’ morons and their (air quotes) ‘gods’ are, like, so full of shit, man. Why do idiots have to (air quotes) ‘believe’ in fantasy and shit. (pause, sips coffee) Hey man, this global warming is killing us all because of fuckin’ corporate greed. People gotta believe in global warming, man, or we’re all doomed. I read it online.”

Oddly, this is also the selective skepticism of the mainstream media. So, naturally, Shermer, champion of “rationalism,” is as ubiquitous in the media as late-night infomercials. And just as useful.

Shermer is one of the most dishonest human beings I’ve ever known. Oh, and he might be a rapist, at least according to the accusations of some fellow Skeptics. He’s recently (summer 2013) been accused of being a rapist and sexual predator within the “skeptic” community. So keep that in mind as you read on…

Shermer contacted me in 1993. He was excited about learning of this “Holocaust revisionism” thing. He was impressed by my knowledge on the subject (and that of Mark Weber, my debate partner on the Montel show), and he wanted to dive head-first into the issue.

Shermer is the kind of man who possesses a specific type of intelligence. He’s incapable of thinking outside already-established parameters. But within those parameters, he can do quite well. Shermer got his PhD (in history of science), married, bought a house, got a nice big doggy for the backyard, and got himself a job as an adjunct assistant professor of history of science at a small college in Eagle Rock, California.

He and I were very, very different, in almost every way. But we had ambition. Mine was to conquer what I saw as the remaining gaps in Holocaust history. His was to create a best-selling “skeptic” publication. It was the early ’90s, the age of the “‘zines” (the hip name for home-produced magazines). Home computers had put professional magazine creation in the hands of anyone who wanted it. Things were still mostly hard-copy. The ’net would end up killing the ’zine trade, but in 1993, ’zines were all the rage.

And Shermer put out one hell of a nice-looking ’zine: Skeptic. But as good-looking as Skeptic was, it had a rival, the Skeptical Inquirer, an older publication published by the United Atheist Alliance, the bitter rival of Shermer’s Allied Atheist Allegiance.

After Shermer contacted me, we hung out a few times. The first time I was at his house, he asked me if I’d like any coffee. I drank coffee religiously in those days (my pre-alcohol days), so I said yes. And Shermer proceeded to re-heat a pot of coffee that was stone cold, presumably brewed that morning, hours ago.

“Uh, can you maybe brew up some fresh?”

“No need, it’s just as good reheated.”

Sometimes, it’s the little things that matter as much as the big ones when you’re trying to gauge someone’s intelligence. Here was a supposed “scientist” with no concept of how fresh-brewed coffee gets worse when it gets cold.

After getting the chance to hear my views one-on-one, and after I shared some of my private documents, he was ecstatic. He felt that this topic, Holocaust revisionism, would be the golden goose with which Skeptic could lay eggs all over the humiliated face of the rival Skeptical Inquirer. From a letter dated December 28, 1993:

I am disturbed by the distortion of your position in the general press, as you note with regard to the New Yorker article.

Whatever books and/or articles and past issues you can send in this regard would be most appreciated. As my friend and Skeptics Society member Leon Jaroff at Time told me regarding his essay last week, public debate (on the Holocaust) is called for now. I agree.

We are, by the way, planning a print run ten-times are [sic] normal size for this issue (from 6,000 to 60,000) because I believe the subject is timely enough (Schindler’s List and all that) to justify a broader marketing of Skeptic. Thus what we are doing takes on even more significance.

Another disturbing fact I have encountered is the unwillingness of my fellow historians to debate you in the media. They do not wish to appear on television or on the radio in a “debate” or “split-screen” format because it might look like you have a legitimate position to debate. We do not feel this way at Skeptic and, in fact, it is our job to investigate extraordinary claims and confront them head-on in public debate. Thus, if you receive media calls in which they are looking for someone to debate you it would be acceptable if you gave them our number.

Did you get either a chuckle or a shudder when Shermer wrote that the subject of the Holocaust “takes on even more significance” because it can help with the “broader marketing” of his magazine? That’s how Shermer viewed the significance of the Holocaust: by his magazine’s sales. Also, that last sentence…Shermer knew that I’d been doing national TV shows for three years, and he obviously wanted in on that exposure. After all, unlike me, he had something to sell.

After another month or so of speaking about the Holocaust, Shermer expressed his unambiguous opinion of me, in a letter from January ’94: “Based on our conclusions, I would certainly not call you a Holocaust denier, since you admitted that at least a million [Jews] could have been killed without gas chambers, and this could be considered a Holocaust. Thus, you are a true revisionist.”

I saw the man as an opportunist, yes. But I was willing to trust him. I always prefer trusting people and getting reamed up the ass, as opposed to being automatically distrustful and being left forever wondering if I’d alienated someone who could have been a good friend or colleague. So, for now, Shermer had a friend in me.

And then came the call from the aforementioned Phil Donahue Show. The producer, Brad Hurtado, desperately wanted me on the show. But NBC wouldn’t greenlight the episode unless an opposing “expert” would agree to debate me. And, of course, no one would. After the humiliating massacre on the Montel show, none of my opponents wanted to risk another pantsing. I remembered Shermer’s offer to be my “debater” if any media called. Sure, this was a thinly-veiled desire to boost his magazine sales, but Hurtado was desperate. I called him.

“Look, I have a guy, a PhD, who will agree to appear on the show to debate me. But, two things. One, he’s not a Holocaust historian, he’s a science historian. And two, we’re friends, and he’s not going to call me a denier or a Nazi or a hater. If that’s what Phil wants, he’s not going to get it.”

Hurtado, to his credit, wanted so badly for the episode to happen, he agreed. I knew I could get Shermer on the show. But I wasn’t done yet. I’m an opportunist, too. For four years, I’d been looking for the peer review that I felt was imperative in order to field-test my work. If Shermer wanted to be on national TV with me, he’d have to give me a little something.

I called him immediately after getting off the phone with Hurtado. But I didn’t let him know that I’d already secured Hurtado’s okay.

“Hey Michael. I think I can bring Brad around. But here’s my concern; you’ve only been studying this issue for, maybe, three months, at most. It’s been my entire life for five years. How, exactly, do you plan to debate me?”

“I’m just going to have to cram a lot of reading into the next few weeks.”

“I have a better idea. Let me make a proposition. I will write out for you every single point I’ll bring up on the show. Basically, I’ll show you my hand. Now, you’ve got contacts who would never speak to me, never take my call. But they’ll talk to you. Especially if you tell them that you’re going up against Cole on national TV, and you need some ammo. So what do you say? I give you every point I’ll make on the show, and you take those points to every mainstream Holocaust historian, and you get the ammo to demolish me. Deal?”

“Deal.”

Finally, I had a chance for my work to be reviewed by the people who were ducking me. As I saw it, it was a three-way-win. Hurtado would get his show, Shermer would get to promote his ’zine, and I’d get peer review.

The next day, I faxed Shermer the points, which I had written as questions, to make them less threatening to the historians Shermer was going to contact. Anything I might talk about on the show would be from that list. Shermer was true to his word, not out of some innate sense of honesty, but because he didn’t want to look bad on TV by not having answers to my questions. He showed them to Michael Berenbaum (then-director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and its research institute), Sybil Milton (senior historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), Henry Friedlander (a Holocaust survivor who, for a quarter of a century, taught history in the Department of Judaic Studies at the City University of New York), and Alex Grobman (founding editor-in-chief of the Simon Wiesenthal Annual).

For the next few weeks, I’d ask Shermer how his “fact finding” expedition was going. “We’re working on it, David, we’re working on it,” Shermer would reply. NBC flew us to New York on the same plane, and we stayed at the same hotel. Sadly, I did not yet drink, so the mini-bar in the room was wasted on me. Michael amused himself by dropping the small liquor bottles onto the roof of the building next door. And no, I’m not making that up. He told me he found it “amusing.”

We had dinner together that night, to discuss the show. I asked him the results of his attempts to get Berenbaum, Milton, Friedlander, and Grobman to address my points. Michael told me, bluntly, that they were unable to address them at all. In fact, he said, these foremost “experts” seemed stymied by the issues I raised regarding Auschwitz and Majdanek.

“What are you going to say tomorrow?” I asked him point-blank.

“I’ll tell the truth.”

“You’ll tell Donahue that you weren’t able to get answers to any of my questions? From the biggest names in the field?”

“That would be the only ethical thing to do.”

Well, “ethical” is easier said than done. When we got to 30 Rock, we were quickly separated. I was stuck in Chris Farley’s dressing room (at the time, Donahue and Saturday Night Live shared dressing rooms), and while I amused myself by wandering onto the SNL stage to deliver a monologue (it’s crazy how lax security was pre-9/11), Shermer was in the Donahue green room. When Donahue came in, well—I’ll let Shermer describe it (from his book Why People Believe Weird Things):

Five minutes before the show, the producer came into the Green Room, panic-stricken. “Phil is very concerned about this show. He is in over his head and is worried it might not come off well.” In the weeks prior to the show, I had prepared a list of denier claims and constructed sound-bite replies [Shermer is of course lying here; the list came from me], so I assured the producer that I was ready to answer all the deniers’ claims and told him not to worry.

Donahue opened the show with these words: “How do we know the Holocaust really happened? And what proof do we have that even one Jew was killed in a gas chamber?” …It was obvious from the start that Donahue was, indeed, in over his head. He knew little about the Holocaust and even less about the debating style of the deniers. He immediately tried to reduce the discussion to accusations of antisemitism.

…This sort of patter went on for another fifteen minutes, with Donahue continually returning to the issue of antisemitism, and Smith and Cole desperately trying to make their points that the Holocaust is debatable and that the camp gas chambers and crematoria were not used to kill prisoners. David Cole showed some of his footage from Auschwitz and Majdanek, and began discussing Zyklon-B trace deposits and other technical matters. Assuming that this was over the heads of his audience, Donahue switched to trying to associate Cole with the noted neo-Nazi, Ernst Zündel.

Donahue: David, you are familiar, and know, and have traveled with Ernst Zündel. Is that so?

Cole: No, I have not traveled with Ernst Zündel.

Donahue: Did you meet him in Poland?

Cole: I met him in Poland. I met him twice in my entire life.

Donahue: All right, what did you do, have a beer? I mean, what’s travel mean? [Audience laughter.] You met him in Poland. He is a neo-Nazi. You don’t deny that?

Cole: No, I’m sorry Phil. This is not about who I’ve met in my life. I just met you. Does that mean I’m Marlo Thomas? [Loud audience laughter.] This is about physical evidence. This is about Zyklon-B residue. This is about windows in a gas chamber…

I jumped in to try to redirect the discussion back to the point: “History is knowledge and like all knowledge it progresses and changes. We continually refine our certainty about claims.…And that’s what historical revisionism is all about.” Meanwhile, David Cole left the studio, disgusted that he had not been allowed to make his points. Donahue said, “Let him walk!”

Thinking that I had done fairly well in analyzing the methodologies of the deniers, I was comfortably awaiting the next segment when the producer came running over to me. “Shermer, what are you doing? What are you doing? You need to be more aggressive. My boss is furious. Come on!”

When I stormed back to Chris Farley’s dressing room to collect my things, I decided to brew some coffee in Farley’s coffee machine (because what better way to calm yourself down than with coffee?), but I was so worked up, I spilled most of the coffee on Farley’s leather easy chair. There was no cleaning up that stain. To this day, I don’t know if Lorne Michaels or NBC held it against Farley that he spoiled his fancy chair. He was fired soon after for his substance abuse issues. But, for the record, and to get it off my chest, the dark stains on the chair weren’t from him.

The next day I was at JFK, pissed off and tired. And there’s Shermy. We were on the same flight back. I didn’t go up to him. I started reading a newspaper. He came up to me, sheepish, bashful.

“Can we talk?”

“We had a deal, Michael. I got you on the show, and you promised to tell the truth about the talking point questions I gave you.”

Sherm gave me the same story he told in his book, about being bullied by Donahue and Hurtado. I believed him. He’s a weak-minded guy, and this was his first time doing this kind of show. I had no reason to doubt his story of being bullied, and I still don’t. I told him it was okay, we were still friends. We sat together on the flight. We talked all the way. He promised me that he’d rectify his mistakes on the Donahue show in his “landmark” piece about revisionism for Skeptic magazine.

Sure, what the hell. I’ll trust the guy one more time. We continued to work together, me supplying him with information, documents, and books for his vaunted article, and he still completely unaware that coffee tastes like shit when reheated after reaching room temperature.

After having learned that neither Sybil Milton, Henry Friedlander, Michael Berenbaum, or Alex Grobman could address any of my points regarding the gas chambers, Sherm got even worse news post-Donahue when he interviewed Raul Hilberg and Berenbaum at length, on tape (he supplied me with the transcripts). Hilberg flat-out stated that the British-obtained “confession” of Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Hoess was written by the Brits in English, with absolutely no input from Hoess, who was tortured into signing a document he was completely unfamiliar with, and which he could not read. “He didn’t even know what was in it,” Hilberg admitted, “but he signed it. They forced him to sign it anyway.”

And Berenbaum? He admitted that he hadn’t examined, not once, the “gas chamber” evidence in his own museum.

Frustrated with how little the “experts” knew, Shermer suggested to me that we try a scientific experiment, gassing dogs in the manner the Jews were supposedly gassed at Auschwitz, using the type of cyanide gas that was available in 1944.

“You want to gas dogs?” I exclaimed. “We’ll be running Bow-wowschwitz.” It was a funny line, although when I recounted the conversation to my girlfriend, she came up with an equally good one: “Barkin’ Belsen.” All the same, I nixed the dog-gassing idea. All I needed was to have the animal rights people on my ass.

Shermer published his Skeptic piece. I had trusted the man to make right on his promise to be fair, and to speak honestly about the fact that Hilberg, Berenbaum, Milton, Friedlander, and Grobman had admitted they had no answers to my questions. It would be the last time I’d ever trust the word of Michael Shermer.

In the article, Shermy outright called me a racist. Worse, he claimed that my assertion that I’m not a racist had been “contradicted from within my own ranks.” No mention of how Hilberg, Berenbaum, Milton, Friedlander, and Grobman had admitted that my points had stumped them. Sherm did mention one of my points, about the supposed Majdanek gas chamber with the plate glass window, no locks on one door, and the other door that locks from within and opens into the room. And although he had seen my footage from that camp many times over, he claimed that the reason the room didn’t look like a homicidal gas chamber was because I was in the wrong room. Shermer suggested that “Cole was observing the original wooden barracks…which could explain the window and lack of locks.”

Durp! Stupid ol’ Cole. He done mistook a wooden room for a brick one.

I took a deep breath, and decided to call Shermy for one of our friendly chats. Only this time, I decided to tape record the conversation. The following is transcribed directly from the audio:

Me: “That part where you claim I was in the wooden not the brick building during my investigation, makes me look stupid, like I didn’t know wood from brick.”

Shermer: “Well, it sorta came down to, that was the final segment of the article that needed to be done, and uh, uh, with, with like, one night to go, uh, and, and that was, the best I could do.”

Me: “What do you mean, the best you could do?”

Shermer: “That was the best I could do to answer your questions. Either that or leave them out entirely, which I didn’t want to do.”

Me: “But you realize though, at this point, that that wasn’t the wooden barrack that I was in. You realize that we’re talking about the brick building and not the wooden barrack.”

Shermer: “Yeah.”

Me: “And you know that I could have told you that, if you’d just asked me.”

Shermer: “Right. [pause] Well, I didn’t.”

Me: [laughs] “So, if you were going to mention my work, you had to put something in there…”

Shermer: “Yes…” …

Me: “…as a kind of an answer…”

Shermer: “Yes…” …

Me: “…even if you yourself don’t really think it’s a legitimate answer.”

Shermer: “At the time I wrote it, that’s what I was thinking.”

Me: “Well…”

Shermer: “That was written at, like, three in the morning, when I had to turn it in, like, the next day…” …

Me: “Mmm-hmm…”

Shermer: “So…”

Me: “Just so we’re clear, because we have talked about these things before, you do realize that that really isn’t an answer to my question.”

Shermer: “Right.” …

Me: “Well, isn’t there anything better you could have done?”

Shermer: “Well, I couldn’t get any other answers, from anybody. On those questions.”

Me: “Well, couldn’t you have said, ‘Cole’s questions, while not necessarily leading to the conclusion Cole has made, are still as of yet unanswered?’”

Shermer: “Well, you should say that.”

Me: “But I’m askin’, maybe you could have said that.”

Shermer: “Yeah, yeah I could have.” …

Me: “You say [in the article], ‘revisionists like Weber, Zündel, Irving, Cole, and Smith have tried to convince me they are not racists and have no political agendas, but they have been contradicted from within their own ranks.’ But then you don’t go on to explain anything, any kind of ‘contradiction,’ about me, even though you just included me in that grouping.”

Shermer: “Yeah, I was sorta lumping everyone I had covered in the article…”

Me: “But that’s not fair to me.”

Shermer: “Yeah, that’s true. That’s right.”

Me: “I mean, you don’t think I’m racist…”

Shermer: “No, I don’t.”

Me: “But, you do understand that that might give the impression I am, for people who read it who don’t know me…”

Shermer: “Yeah, yeah…it would.” …

Me: “I mean, honestly, that’s not really fair to me, is it?”

Shermer: “I would agree.”

Me: “That it wasn’t fair to me.”

Shermer: “Right.”

Me: “You yourself didn’t find some kind of solution to my question about the small levels of Zyklon B traces in the ‘homicidal’ gas chambers as opposed to the [high levels of traces in] the delousing ones.”

Shermer: “Not really, no.” …

Me: “So you still couldn’t really find any answers for that.”

Shermer: “Right.”

Me: “But you didn’t pass that on to your readers.”

Shermer: “Well, again, David, it was not my goal to make you look good.”

Me: “At the very least, you can say that my questions about the [gas chamber] forensic issue have not really been answered yet.”

Shermer: “I would say that’s true. I don’t know that there aren’t answers, I just know that I haven’t been able to get them.”

Me: “From any of the people you’ve asked.”

Shermer: “Right.”

Me: “Maybe they have them [answers], and just chose not to tell you.”

Shermer: “No, I mean, Grobman sent ’em off, I sent ’em off, I haven’t heard anything back in writing. When I had talked to Sybil Milton, she was very short, uh, with me, very busy, same as Henry [Friedlander]. Now, Berenbaum, I think doesn’t, I’m sure he doesn’t know. I think his knowledge is limited, from what Grobman has said. From what Grobman has told me about Berenbaum, he’s kind of on the weak end of the top scholars…I don’t want you to get mad, because you are, but…”

Me: “No, okay, but, can’t you at least see my point a little bit about that?”

Shermer: “Yeah, I do. As I have already stated previously, I don’t think you’re a racist or anti-Semitic.”

Me: “I just want to get an honest answer on this. You admit that you slanted the article.”

Shermer: “What do you mean by slanted?”

Me: “That you engineered it with a few omissions here and there, and a few oversimplifications here and there, to make the revisionist position on the gas chamber/genocide issues seem a little less strong than it could be if you had been a little more objective.”

Shermer: “Yes.”

Me: “You do admit that?”

Shermer: “Yes.”

Me: “And the only question I have is, why?”

Shermer: “Because that’s the way I wrote the article.” …

Me: “You oversimplified things so as to make your side seem a little stronger.”

Shermer: “I think it is very strong…(pause)…maybe not on the gas chamber part, yeah.”

Me: “I want to revisit what you told me in New York, just briefly so that I know I have it straight. When you gave my questions to the people at the museum…”

Shermer: “Yes…”

Me: “Those people again, it was Berenbaum, and…”

Shermer: “Sybil Milton…”

Me: “And who else?”

Shermer: “And Michael Berenbaum, and Henry Friedlander, Alex Grobman…”

Me: “Did they say anything along the lines of, these are valid questions, these are at least valid questions, these are questions that are important?”

Shermer: “Yes. Hilberg’s remark was that the whole field of Holocaust scholarship is fraught with amateurs, and it needs…yeah, that’s it.”

Me: “Well, that’s the work I’m doing, to combat that amateur…”

Shermer: (interrupting) “At least you’re not dead, by any means. You know it’s, I mean, really, the article is just a preliminary if, if, the cards fall into place, and I have the time, I’d like to do a whole book on the subject…”

Me: “Just you, or maybe you and Grobman?”

Shermer: “No, it would just be me. Definitely just be me. He just was helping me out and stuff. I mean, I even, just to show you, I got a lot of pressure to not call you guys revisionists. I mean, a lot. And I didn’t cave in to that. I stuck by my guns.”

There’s your “man of science,” skeptics. He lies, he defames, he makes stuff up, he slants his data, and he’s brazen enough to admit it privately.

When I recounted my experiences with Shermer at an IHR conference in the fall of 1994, a fellow revisionist, Richard Darman, decided to call Shermer and record a conversation of his own, to see if Sherm was as duplicitous as I was painting him to be. This, as with the other transcript, is taken directly from the audio:

Darman: “Well, David Cole is not racist, is he?”

Shermer: “No. And I didn’t say that about David. He’s not the least bit racist…”

Darman: “But in your article you listed a bunch of…”

Shermer: “Yeah, I’d already listed a bunch of racists, a bunch of them together, and I threw Cole into that bunch because I was listing everybody I had interviewed, and that was probably the biggest, uh, misleading, the most misleading thing I said in my article. I should have left Cole out of that.”

Get ready for the money shot…

Shermer: “Maybe Cole’s right. I think the whole gas chamber story is probably, in terms of physical evidence, the weakest link in the whole story. To me, it doesn’t matter whether the gas chamber story is completely true or not. Maybe it could be modified, for all I know…”

Darman: “But I think the gas chamber is a really powerful symbol…”

Shermer: “Yes, I think it is, and probably the Jews have used that a lot, I mean, all groups do that. The blacks are using slavery to their maximum benefit these days, for victimhood.”

Darman: “I understand that you had done some interviews with Hilberg and Berenbaun?”

Shermer: “They were both remarkably ignorant of the details of Cole’s questions. This is called a, the problem of paradigm shifts, you see. Until somebody says, ‘Hey, that’s anomalous data that’s not explained by the current paradigm,’ and they push it, then nothing’s going to happen. So it could be, maybe the revisionists are right, however, just, nobody’s asked the questions.”

I hope you get the import of that last paragraph. Shermer admits that the exact thing I was doing is how old paradigms are replaced by sounder ones, and yet the thing he privately lauds me for doing is the very thing he publicly defamed me and lied about me for doing. In other words, publicly attack the guy who’s trying to advance our understanding and challenge “paradigms” filled with “anomalous data.”

A year later, Shermer worked with the Institute for Historical Review to make a video “debate” with Mark Weber, in front of an IHR crowd. Shermer admitted (finally) that I was right about Majdanek and possibly right about Auschwitz. Of the Majdanek “gas chamber,” Shermer said he is “certain” that it was “not a homicidal gas chamber.”

“How is it that some people can get away, so to speak, with revising the Holocaust?” Shermer asked, while revisionists cannot? “The problem you’re having as revisionists is that you’ve been labeled. The assumption is that there’s an ideology behind the questions you’ve been asking. You’ve been labeled…the label has stuck there.”

See what he did? The previous year he’d called me a “racist” while acknowledging it’s not true, and now he’s bemoaning the fact that revisionists are “labeled.” Essentially, he’s saying, “It’s too bad you guys can’t be heard because guys like me label you.”

Shermer would never leave me alone. I was included in detail in a chapter of his 2007 book Why People Believe Weird Things, in which Sherm changed a quote in which I called myself a “revisionist” so that I called myself a “denier.” He also devoted nearly twenty-five pages to me in his 2000 book, Denying History, co-authored with Alex Grobman (the guy with whom he said he’d “definitely” not collaborate with on a Holocaust book).

While preparing for this book, I Googled ol’ Shermy.

Holy shit—rape! Rape is bad. Rape is really bad. May I humbly suggest that rape is worse than saying there were four extermination camps instead of six? In mid-2013, Shermer was accused of rape by fellow big-name skeptic PZ Meyers. Meyers is not the one who was allegedly raped. Rather, he apparently decided to break his silence about a female skeptic who was, supposedly, raped by Shermer, and who feared coming forward.

Myers is a scientist whose blog, Pharyngula, was named by the journal Nature as the top-ranked blog by a scientist. He received the American Humanist Association’s 2009 Humanist of the Year award and International Humanist Award in 2011. He draws a lot of water in Skepticville. And not only has he broken the silence in the community regarding Shermer’s supposed rapeyness, but other skeptics have apparently learned the victim’s (as of this writing) undisclosed identity, and confirmed that she is a person of good reputation within the community.

I can’t say a damn thing about the charge. But, seein’ how I’m writing a book and all, I reached out to my old frenemy, for the first time in nearly twenty years.

Hi Mike,

It’s the guy you never get tired of attacking, David Cole. I’ve been keeping up with this whole rape accusation thing, and, of course, I have no special knowledge beyond what I’ve read. But, and here’s the reason I’m writing to you, I’m just damn, terribly curious. And curiosity is good, right, Mike? So here’s my curiosity. Has this experience, you know, the whole rape accusation thing, made you any more sympathetic, or perhaps given you a bit more empathy, regarding the things you said about me? How you branded me a “racist” (the modern equivalent of calling someone a “witch”). How you admitted you lied. And how you refused to retract your accusation even after admitting you lied.

So I’m interested in asking you if your current dilemma has perhaps birthed in you some small regret for having lied about me.

I have no knowledge of the truth or lack thereof regarding the accusations made against you. If they’re true, there is no punishment that is too harsh for you. But if they’re false, well…it kinda stinks having folks print lies about you, huh? Is this a “chickens coming home to roost” moment for Dr. Michael Shermer?

David Cole (Stein)

His reply:

Hi David,

Thank you for the frank and forthright letter. To cut to the chase and answer your question, yes the libelous and defamatory comments being made about me has [sic] made me more sympathetic and understanding to how I have interacted with creationists, Holocaust revisionists, New Age gurus like Deepak Chopra, and others, and in fact, all of the people I have debated with in all of these fields have been, for the most part, unfailingly polite to me and far more thoughtful and reasonable than any of the people in the FTB/athiest [sic] community and how they have treated me.

I don’t think you are a racist David, and I’m sorry for the things I said about you.

So, yeah David, the chickens have come home to roost, so please accept my apology for some of the things I said about you. I hope you are doing well. What are you doing these days, and what was the deal with that political group a few months back?

Michael

Well, that’s a nice little coda to the Shermer story. An apology, and a realization that the Shermer chickens have come home to roost. But the fact is, it’s not Shermer’s chickens coming home to roost, but the “skeptic” movement’s. As long as he was destroying people like me, “skeptics” were fine with any lies he told. But now that he’s accused of having raped and/or sexually harassed fellow skeptics, and lying about it afterwards, the “skeptics” are up in arms.

As a guy who’s been publicly lied about by Shermer for two decades, you’ll forgive me if I’m taking some amount of schadenfreude here, not about Shermer, because he’s either a rapist or a man falsely accused of rape, and in neither possibility can I take any joy, but about the skeptics, those smug, arrogant types who equate revising historical claims with promoting ghosts, psychics, Bigfoot, and creationism.

You pricks are getting what you deserve. You deserve Shermer, and you deserve as much division, disarray, and general misery within your ranks as life can dole out.

JOHN SACK

It’s funny to recall that there was a time when I could hear the name John Sack and not think of The Sopranos (New York mob boss Johnny Sack). But there was once a helluva guy named John Sack. From his New York Times obit:

John Sack was a pioneer of New Journalism who was best known for his reporting from the battlefields of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. Mr. Sack contributed to Esquire magazine for 45 years.

While he employed new journalism’s literary techniques, he was credited by critics with sticking to the facts. In M (New American Library, 1967), Mr. Sack followed an infantry company from its training at Fort Dix to battle action in Vietnam. Praised for its mix of compassion and objectivity, the book grew out of an Esquire cover article, “Oh My God! We Hit a Little Girl,” which remains the longest article to appear in the magazine.

Some of his other books proved more controversial. While writing Lieutenant Calley: His Own Story (Viking, 1971), an account of how William H. Calley Jr. came to be convicted for massacring Vietnamese civilians in My Lai, Mr. Sack was indicted on federal charges involving his refusal to give evidence, but prosecutors dropped the case.

Mr. Sack was also a writer, producer and correspondent for CBS News.

In summer 1995 I was told he wanted to meet me in Huntsville, Alabama.

The meeting was arranged by a loveable but kooky Protestant minister and theologian (and revisionist) named Bob who told me I could stay at his rather sizeable home, and he’d “broker” the meeting. Even though I was “retired” by then, it was difficult to resist getting to spend a week with John Sack.

Man, did I hate Huntsville in August. I’m assuming it’s what it’ll be like for me in hell when I’m sentenced to an eternity of living in the devil’s ball-sweat.

I asked Sack why he had such an interest in meeting me. He explained that after the publication of his 1993 book An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans, in which he claimed that the communists in Eastern Europe used Jews to run a network of a thousand “revenge” camps in Poland in 1945 for Germans in which more than 60,000 civilians were murdered, he was all of a sudden branded a “Jewish traitor.” After forty-five years as a respected journalist, this one book got him slandered, censored, and threatened.

Sack had heard about my story. He wanted to talk. And we did. For a full week, Sack and I went over every detail of my work.

It was a good week, and it didn’t stop there. Sack would routinely come to L.A. to continue our talks. The guy was a handful. Exactly the type of loud, socially-obnoxious New York Jew I’d grown up with. He was having prostate problems, and I recall one night, at my favorite (now long-defunct) Westside fish restaurant Delmonico’s, he was yelling at the top of his lungs about how his prostate cancer had made it impossible for him to masturbate.

I put him in touch with the IHR’s Mark Weber, who invited him to speak at an IHR conference, and damned if Sack didn’t accept. I connected Sack with Mark on the condition that he leave my name out of anything he might write (I was retired, remember). Sack wrote about his experience at the IHR conference in Esquire:

Despite their take on the Holocaust, they [revisionists] were affable, open-minded, intelligent, intellectual. Their eyes weren’t fires of unapproachable certitude and their lips weren’t lemon twists of astringent hate. Nazis and neo-Nazis they didn’t seem to be. Nor did they seem anti-Semites.

I wanted to say something therapeutic, to say something about hate. At the hotel [where the conference took place], I’d seen none of it, certainly less than I’d seen when Jews were speaking of Germans. No one had ever said anything remotely like Elie Wiesel, “Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set aside a zone of hate—healthy, virile hate—for what persists in the Germans,” and no one had said anything like Edgar Bronfman, the president of the World Jewish Congress. A shocked professor told Bronfman once, “You’re teaching a whole generation to hate thousands of Germans,” and Bronfman replied, “No, I’m teaching a whole generation to hate millions of Germans.” Jew hatred like that German hatred, or like the German hatred I saw on every page of [Daniel Goldhagen’s] Hitler’s Willing Executioners, I saw absolutely none of.

The Holocaust deniers say—and they’re right—that one Auschwitz commandant [Rudolf Hoess] confessed after he was tortured and that the other [Holocaust] reports are full of bias, rumors, exaggerations and other preposterous matters, to quote the editor of a Jewish magazine five years after the war. The deniers say, and again they’re right, that the commandants, doctors, SS, and Jews at Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and whole alphabet of camps testified after the war that there were cyanide chambers at those camps that all historians today refute.

Americans who don’t know if one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand or one million of our own soldiers died (and certainly don’t know that fifty million people died in China) know exactly how many Jews died in World War II. Once, said Michael Berenbaum, the former research director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, “the Holocaust was a side story of World War II. Now one thinks of World War II as a background story [to] the Holocaust.”

John Sack only got interested in this subject because of the hatred he got for writing An Eye for an Eye. I’ve tried to explain this to my fellow Jews a hundred times, rarely with success. The whole “branding Jews as traitors” thing is really self-defeating. At the very least, have a sense of proportion and reserve that bile for the Jews who actively defend Hamas, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, etc. But people who write about history, like me and Sack? You don’t have any bigger fish to fry? “Yeah, let’s get them thar history writers.” Because Lord knows Jews have no other enemies.

DAVID MILLS

Revisionism brought someone else into my life who would play a large part in my post-revisionist years. The name David Mills might be familiar to you. He was a writer for NYPD Blue, The Wire, ER, Homicide, and Picket Fences, and a co-producer of ER and NYPD Blue. His last project was the HBO series Treme.

When I met him, he was a writer for the Washington Post. In 1994, he came out to L.A. to interview me. I knew of his work. He was a damn fine journalist—one of the best.

He was as light-skinned a black man as a black man can be. Normally, I wouldn’t mention his race, except it’s what helped propel him to fame as a journalist. In 1989 he published an explosive interview with the rap group Public Enemy, in which one of their members went off on an insane tangent about Jews being wicked and evil.

Public Enemy had assumed they were “safe” saying those things around a black man. But Mills was a journalist first and foremost. So he ran the quotes. And guess what? He was tagged as being a “sellout” and an “Uncle Tom.” Next, he confronted Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam over their repeated claim that “Jews ran slavery.” Mills wrote what is still, today, the authoritative piece debunking that nonsense. Again, cries of “sellout” and “self-hater.”

Mills hadn’t called in advance for an interview, he just showed up at one of my speeches in September 1994. The fact that I knew who he was impressed him. We went to the bar at the hotel where I was speaking. We talked for hours. He told me it was 50/50 that his editors would run the interview, but that it was worth the trip to meet me. I was flattered. And then he added, “I’m moving out to L.A. next year to write for TV. I’d like to look you up. Let’s hang out.”

I hate to say it, but I was cracking up inside. You know how many times I’ve heard this or that writer say “I’m gonna write for TV (or the movies)?” It’s an impossible dream. So, in my mind, I thought, “Good luck, Mills. Stick with journalism. You do it well, and it’s a paycheck.”

Well, damned if I didn’t get a call from him just a few months later. “Hey Dave, I’m living in L.A. now and I’m writing for NYPD Blue and Picket Fences.”

I sat there in disbelief. Is he making that up? That kind of trajectory never happens.

My doubts were soon dispelled. He brought me onto the lot. We started hanging out regularly. He wanted to collaborate on something, some kind of Holocaust film. He said he was in talks with HBO for a three-picture deal. He wanted me in on it.

An important point I’d like to make: David Mills and I agreed on almost nothing. He was a political leftist. We even disagreed on what constitutes a good screenplay. But he wanted to work with me because he believed there was no better authority on Holocaust history. When I think of all the times he put my name at the gate at the lot on Fox, I’m floored. He never hesitated for a moment to be associated with my name. Even though I was living as Stein, my ID was still Cole. So Cole is what had to be at the gate, and this was only a year or two after Cole had left the public stage—in other words, it was still fresh. This leftist bastard with a lot to lose career-wise showed more character than any of my fair-weather Republican friends.

Mills and I pitched several projects to HBO. None stuck. That’s the nature of the biz. Mills was particularly obsessed with doing a biopic of George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the “American Nazi Party” in the 1950s. I told Mills that I didn’t think the idea was viable, because Rockwell was a minor figure and largely forgotten. In retrospect, I think Mills was ahead of his time in getting that project in front of HBO, as it’s become a popular trend these days to do overblown biopics of relatively minor real-life characters (The King’s Speech, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Domino, The Hoax, American Splendor, Grey Gardens, Into the Wild).

Mills and I fell out of touch after his career sputtered to a halt with the huge-budget NBC mega-flop Kingpin in 2003. Kingpin was supposed to be the “Mexican Sopranos,” but minus HBO-style language and violence. It was a giant failure. And, true to form, the network execs blamed Mills, rather than their own poor decisions.

Mills went into exile. Another similarity between us.

When I read, in 2010, about his comeback with Treme, I was elated. When I heard he died, I took comfort from the fact that he went out in the best possible way, back on set, writing and producing his own show for a network slightly less evil than NBC. He died on-set. It was a brain aneurysm; he was dead before he hit the floor. He was forty-eight years old.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

My interaction with Christopher Hitchens was brief. Unlike the lengthy and collaborative relationships I had with the other people in this section, Hitchens and I only spoke about four times. It’s worth bringing up, though, because it’s instructive to see where Hitchens’ curiosity took him.

Hitchens contacted me in 1993. At the same time, he also contacted Mark Weber of the Institute for Historical Review, and Robert Faurisson. From me, Hitchens wanted to know how my doubts regarding physical evidence at Auschwitz could hold up against the confession of the commandant, Hoess.

After our first conversation, I sent him everything I had on the Hoess confession. Weber and Faurisson did the same. The next time I spoke to Hitchens, he thanked me for the material, and he had a few follow-up questions.

Writing in Vanity Fair (“Whose History Is It?,” December 1993), Hitchens didn’t hide his surprise regarding what he discovered during his foray into revisionism:

The revisionists sent me an article by a Frenchman named Robert Faurisson, which claimed that Rudolf Höss, one of the commandants of Auschwitz, had been tortured by the British into confessing to a fantastic and unbelievable number of murders. This statement, specially mounted and reproduced, is an important exhibit at the Holocaust Memorial.

I then got in touch with [Deborah] Lipstadt and [Christopher] Browning for their responses, which were surprising: “Höss was always a very weak and confused witness,” said Browning, who has been an expert witness at trials involving Auschwitz. “The revisionists use him all the time for this reason, in order to try and discredit the memory of Auschwitz as a whole.” And Professor Lipstadt directed me to page 188 of her book, which is quite a page. It says…that while the memorial stone at Auschwitz itself lists the number of victims—Jews and non-Jews—at 4 million, the truer figure is somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million. Since Höss was the commandant of the place for only part of its existence, this means that—according to the counter-revisionists—an important piece of evidence in the Holocaust Memorial is not reliable. A vertiginous sensation if you like.

Did you notice what Browning did there? He blamed revisionists for using the Hoess testimony, even though it’s the Holocaust Museum (and just about every book on Auschwitz) that uses it as a main piece of evidence.

If revisionists concentrate on physical evidence and don’t use the Hoess “confession,” we’re evil deniers. And if we do use the Hoess confession, we’re evil deniers. Double-bind par excellence!

Hitchens’ formidable curiosity had been piqued. In the years to come, he would go on to vigorously defend revisionist David Irving after Irving’s monumental biography of Goebbels was dropped by its publisher. In May 2001, Hitchens wrote in the L.A. Times:

Would it surprise you to know that:

1) there were no gas chambers or extermination camps on German soil, in other words, at Belsen or Dachau or Buchenwald;

2) there were no Jews made into soap;

3) the “confession” of Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, was extracted by force and contains his claim to have killed more Jews than was “humanly” possible?

These are, however, the now-undisputed findings of all historians and experts on the subject. And if they are sound, then it means that much “eyewitness” testimony is wrong.

In the Times piece, Hitchens admitted that Irving is a “fabricator” who has some kind of “death wish,” constantly sabotaging himself. (I’ve known Irving for twenty-two years; the latter is absolutely true, and the former is occasionally true.)

No less than Henry Kissinger called Hitchens a “Holocaust denier.” Daily Beast senior writer Max Blumenthal wrote a condescendingly hostile piece titled “Dance, Hitchens, Dance” for The Huffington Post (May 2005). Blumenthal also assailed Hitchens for the fact that Faurisson included his name along with mine in a 1994 list of Jewish revisionists (Hitchens, though a strident atheist, had a Jewish mother). Even a respected figure like Hitchens could not wade into the revisionism controversy without being pummeled.

I want to cycle back to the present day. In my (former) conservative circles, there was a wing I called the “smug atheist” wing—die-hard atheist Jews. I know the “smug atheist” mindset well, because I used to be one of them. I was doing that routine on national TV in the days when Bill Maher was still best-known for D.C. Cab and Seth MacFarlane was watching ABC’s Dinosaurs lamenting that there must be a more obvious way to rip off The Simpsons. Frankly, it’s the only thing I’m truly sorry about from my talk show days.

In the weeks following my outing, the smug atheists in my former circle were confronted with claims that Hitchens, a god to conservative Jewish atheists, was sympathetic to revisionism. The smug atheist belief system simply couldn’t handle that. The “chief” of the smug atheist faction, Emmy-winning composer Boris “Bobo” Zelkin (you’ll be encountering that name again later on), posted that Hitchens position was merely that revisionists should be “vigorously and academically debated.”

Like all ideologues, Bobo Zelkin couldn’t bear to face the truth, which was that Hitchens defended the worth, the value, of Holocaust revisionism many, many times. It doesn’t mean he was one. It just means that he saw Holocaust revisionism as valuable.

On a May 1996 episode of The Charlie Rose Show, Hitchens not only defended revisionism, but he was actually able to wrest a grudging admission of its value from the guy who’d been brought on to debate him, the New York Post’s Eric Breindel:

Hitchens: “I also quote Raul Hilberg, who you, I know, know is one of the senior historians of the Holocaust story—in many ways, the original historian of it. His book in 1961, The Destruction of European Jewry, is considered to be the standard. He said to me, ‘Look, David Irving has made me go back and look at things again. David Irving has made me re-examine things I thought I knew for sure. David Irving has made me go over some ground, ask me how I know things, and I welcome this kind of challenge.’”

Breindel: “Well, this is true, but there are levels of the game. I mean, I assume that there are serious scholars, or people you would find serious in the sense that they unearth new information, who publish in, for example, the journal of The Institute for Historical Review, which dedicates itself primarily to proving, for example, that there were no gas chambers at Nazi death camps. There has been scholarship, Christopher, in those journals. Let there be no doubt about it. They have uncovered train records that many of us who study this field didn’t know existed. They go to the actual archives.”

On his own site, in 2003, Hitchens wrote of his curiosity regarding revisionism: “I also became aware, through conversations with Deborah Lipstadt, Christopher Browning and other ‘mainstream’ writers on the subject, that there was a ‘grey area’ of what might be called Holocaust mythology: an area where it had to be admitted that certain long-held beliefs were in error.” Speaking in Canada in 2006, Hitchens stated:

(If) one person gets up and says, ‘You know, about this Holocaust, I’m not sure it even happened. In fact, I’m pretty certain it didn’t. Indeed, I begin to wonder if the only thing is that the Jews brought a little bit of violence on themselves,’ that person doesn’t just have a right to speak, that person’s right to speak must be given extra protection. Because what he has to say must have taken him some effort to come up with, might contain a grain of historical truth, might in any case get people to think about why do they know what they already think they know. How do I know that I know this, except that I’ve always been taught this and never heard anything else?

There’s one part of that 2006 speech that resonates with me these days. Hitchens said, “My great friend John O. Sullivan, former editor of the National Review, and I think probably my most conservative and reactionary Catholic friend, once said—it’s a tiny thought experiment—if you hear the Pope saying he believes in God, you think, well, the Pope’s just doing his job again today. If you hear the Pope saying he’s begun to doubt the existence of God, you think he might be on to something.”

All of my former friends knew and respected me as a sane, rational guy. I get nowhere in life on my looks; smarts and charm are all I have. And when my “colleagues” learned of my past, not more than five of them actually expressed curiosity that I might have been “on to something.” “Hmm, a pro-Zionist and anti-Islamist conservative Jew whose writing and investigative skills are considered above par by everyone in the circle said this about Auschwitz. I wonder if his arguments have any validity.”

Five people. Out of over two thousand. Everyone else either condemned me as a “Nazi,” or begged me to recant my “stupid” views. Only five people were willing to entertain the possibility that I might have been “on to something.”

Hitchens was a rare breed. People with his intellect, curiosity, and principles don’t come around very often, especially in my life.

7.

SARAH MAY AND MY FIRST DEATH

A less accomplished and far less intelligent industry contact I made during my revisionist days was a guy I’ll just call Liam. He had written me a fan letter in 1993. Turns out, he was an actor of some small renown who was trying to make an indie film. His real name was Bill, and he was a third-generation Texan living in L.A. But he had decided that he’d get more “juice” in the biz if he changed his first name to Liam and started speaking with an absurdly fake Irish brogue.

And it worked. Because people in the industry are morons. And, therefore, morons have a better chance of making it than smart people. Because smart people have to make the effort to figure out morons. But morons are already on the same level as other morons. It’s like how two ants can instinctively communicate.

So, in 1997 “Liam” was producing his film, a Tarantino-knockoff (as every moron was doing back then…hell, many of them still are). In his fake brogue, he called me: “Hellooooooo laddy! ’Tis Liam. Would ye like to work on me film? T’would be an honor indeed t’have ye on board.”

Well, this is your lucky day, breakfast-cereal leprechaun. I have little else to do.

Liam’s film wasn’t that bad, comparatively. And he had money behind it. We went to work.

When she walked into the audition for Liam’s film, I didn’t immediately smell trouble. No “love at first sight” crap. But she nailed the audition. I mean, she was amazing. Sarah May was a dual American/Canadian citizen who’d moved from British Columbia to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Pasadena. She’d graduated with honors and she was really, really good. Not my type, not even close. I prefer blondes or redheads; her hair was brown. I like blue or green eyes; hers were brown. Tall women make me self-conscious of my height, and she was about 5’9”. But we bonded during the callback, when she confessed that she was insecure about her chances out here. I told her she was very talented, and not to give up. I told her that we all have insecurities. To prove my point, I stepped out of the four-inch hidden-platform shoes I always wear when conducting business (they raise me from a lowly 5’6” to a respectable 5’10”). “See? I have insecurities too. But I’ve never let it stop me from taking chances and pursuing the things I’m interested in.”

Sarah reached into her shirt, and pulled out the Victoria’s Secret “fake boobs” she kept in her “fake boob holder” bra. I’d revealed my shortness, she revealed her flatness. You couldn’t write a better “cute meet” scene.

She didn’t get the part. Not enough credits, and she wasn’t SAG (she was ACTRA, the Canadian SAG). But we became inseparable. I was really, really growing to like this person. She made me a mix tape—a fucking mix tape. No girl in high school, not even the ones I slept with, had ever done that. And it was a great mix. Bob Marley, Don McLean, Radiohead, The Cure (my favorite remix of “Close to Me,” with the horn section), Des’ree’s “I’m Kissing You,” and The Tragically Hip (a Canuck band now associated forever in my mind with Sarah).

We worked feverishly on her career. We got her a great agent. But she still couldn’t get over those damned insecurities. At an audition with a major Pasadena playhouse for the role of Lady Anne in Richard III, she responded to the director’s praise by asking if this was some kind of hidden camera prank show in which the worst actors are told they got the part. She and I had stayed up all night rehearsing for the audition (like her, I’d been doing Shakespeare since my teen years). I was waiting for her outside the theater, and she came out, crying. She knew she had it, and then blew it. I held her.

Eventually, she moved in with me (before meeting me, she’d been getting by in L.A. as an au pair for a wealthy couple in the Hollywood hills). I loved Sarah very much. And Sarah loved clothes. Dear God, did she love clothes. And why not? Her slender (practically androgynous) 5’9” body was exactly the type that the gay men who run the fashion industry make clothes to fit. Clothes shopping with Sarah always elicited a tide of dirty looks from other female shoppers. I had little in the bank, but I had really good credit at that point in my life.

These were good times. But leave it to Irv Rubin and the Jewish Defense League to throw a turd into my beautiful punchbowl.

For some reason known only to him, Irv Rubin chose December 1997 to reissue his earlier bounty on my head ($4,000 in 1994), this time upped to $25,000. And this time on an Internet that was much bigger and larger in scope and use than it was in 1994. I’d been out of the revisionist game since 1995. Why now? What the hell?

Here’s the text that accompanied the “reward offer:”

He has managed to stir the gullible masses with hatred, lies and deception. Just like a low-lying snake that slithers from dark place to dark place, he spreads his venom to innocent victims.

This is David Cole, who takes pride in his demonic occupation: Holocaust denier of the Six Million Jews.

Cole is a young Jewish man with an evil plan: To alter history and to deny documented facts. A revolting and horrible monster is this so-called Jew.

He rubs shoulders with the neo-Nazi criminals who do their evil deeds for Adolf Hitler and who, to this day, continue to spread anti-Semitism through the guise of Holocaust revisionist denial.

What is a David Cole? Is it a sickness? Is it a mental disease?…After all, this Cole mania that the media have played on, don’t you think it’s time that we flush this rotten, sick individual down the toilet, where the rest of the waste lies? One less David Cole in the world will certainly not end Jew-hatred, but it will have removed a dangerous parasitic, disease-ridden bacteria from infecting society….

Cole’s denial is really a denial toward his own people. He hates the very fact that he was born into this world a Jew. But more than anything else, his denial is an enormous crime against humanity. This despicable low-life beast is worse than the Julius Streichers and Joseph Goebbels. He is more evil than they were—because he is a Jew! This pathetic excuse for a human being is a neo-Nazi traitorous sell-out to his own Jewish people.

An evil monster like this does not deserve to live on this earth. All the news stories about his life only encourage Cole to feed his sick ego even more, bringing attention to his depraved lifestyle. Cole is an abominable psychopath who must be stopped. . . . Just as we must get rid of this monster, Cole, we must also get rid of the word “revisionism” from our vocabulary. This awful word and Cole, too, must be eliminated altogether. There is no argument. There needs to be no more debates, only the elimination of the Holocaust deniers. Cole is a sickness, a horrible aberration that is spreading like a cancerous sore.…This world would be a happier place, indeed, when all the Jew-baiters and Jew-haters have disappeared, especially the most vicious hater of them all, David Cole.

So extreme and outrageous were the JDL’s actions that even the Anti-Defamation League, which despised me with a passion, seemed nearly sympathetic to me on its website.

In late 1997, a document entitled “David Cole: Monstrous Traitor” reportedly appeared on the Web site of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a Jewish extremist group. The JDL’s statement went far beyond criticizing Cole for denying the Holocaust, asserting in no uncertain terms that the JDL wished to “get rid” of him. At the document’s close, the JDL offered a “monetary reward” for the location of David Cole, implying that it was prepared to take immediate, possibly violent, action.

I knew Irv Rubin would never kill me himself. He simply wanted to motivate someone else to do it for him. My guess as to why Rubin reinstated and upped the bounty almost four years after it was first put up is that he understood the Internet’s growing clout and power. In 1994, no one cared. But now was the time to put it out there. Millions of ordinary (and insane) Americans were on the ’net.

Sarah didn’t like the idea of the bounty. Neither did I. Mainly because I knew that someone would eventually take Rubin up on it. Rubin wanted my home address to add to the bounty notice, so that people would know where to find me. And I knew that I had way too many lowlife friends who had my address…someone would eventually sell me out.

I had to get that bounty removed.

My friends said, “go to the police, sue him. Death threats are illegal.” Yes, they are. But a criminal or civil trial would have only drawn more attention to the website and the bounty. And how would that have helped me?

No, some good old-fashioned strategizing was needed here. So I called Irv.

“Hi Irv. Look, what can I do to get that bounty removed?”

“You fucking Nazi scum, renounce your fucking evil anti-Jewish hate-mongering work.”

“Done. How would you like me to do that?”

“What?”

“I said I’ll recant. Fully. If you’ve noticed, I haven’t done a thing publicly with revisionism for over two years. I’m done with it. I’ll gladly recant.”

Anyone who knew Irv Rubin knows that he was never at a loss for words. He was now.

“Okay you scum-sucking Jew-hater. You need to go on EVERY SINGLE TALK SHOW you did as a denier, and you need to recant and thank me publicly for showing you the light.”

“Irv, c’mon. You’ve been doing talk shows longer than I have. You know I can’t book myself on 60 Minutes or Donahue or 48 Hours. That’s not in my power. They don’t let guests book themselves.”

“Okay, then…how about…(long pause)…you deliver to me a signed, notarized document recanting your views, crediting the JDL with showing you the light, and apologizing to every Jew the world over for your self-hating evil. And send a check, too.”

“Done and done, Irv. I’ll get it in the mail tomorrow.”

That night, I wrote the recantation. The next day I was flying out of LAX to join Sarah in Vancouver. Before heading to the airport, I got it notarized and put it in the mail with a check. And Cole was gone. For good, forever.

The recantation was Cole’s “death.” I had already left revisionism, so I figured why not “kill” Cole, especially if it saves my actual hide. Once someone like Cole recants, there’s no going back. Your credibility is shot. If you try to recant your recantation, people will always wonder, “was he lying then, or is he lying now?” I agreed to the recantation not just to get the bounty removed, but to burn all Cole bridges. I knew that the revisionists who were already getting pissed at me in 1995 would truly hate me when they read what I gave Rubin. I wanted to “kill” Cole in a way that would make it impossible for me to go back. Now that I was living with Sarah, it wasn’t just my own neck that was in danger (especially with the JDL’s fondness for planting bombs and torching houses). I wasn’t about to put Sarah in jeopardy. The Cole chapter of my life had to end. Rubin received the recantation and triumphantly put it online in January 1998.

I was happy. Rubin was happy (true to his word, he withdrew the bounty). Sara was happy. Happy times ahead! Right?

Sarah and I had a great time in Vancouver. We returned to L.A. to get back to work on her career. We got a cat, and started furnishing my place to be a little less “bachelory.” I honestly didn’t have a clue what I was going to do to earn a living, or to pay for Sarah’s clothes habit. I explained to her that, for the time being, our daily excursions to Banana Republic and Club Monaco and Guess would have to be scaled back. She said she understood.

A few weeks later, she sat on my bed and looked at me sheepishly. “I used your credit card to order something through the mail. I’m sorry.” I smiled and told her that once is okay, but it can’t happen again. We hugged.

And then came great news. Sarah had been cast in a major Disney film, set for a Christmas 1998 release. It was called I’ll Be Home for Christmas, and it was positioned as the breakout starring role for Home Improvement midget Jonathan Taylor Thomas. It co-starred Jessica Biel, in her first starring role. And Sarah was cast as Biel’s girlfriend Sierra. It would film in Vancouver.

Sadly, when shooting began, Sarah’s role was reduced to two words. The rumor was that Biel’s “people,” who were grooming her for stardom, thought Biel looked “fat” next to the rail-thin Sarah. Losing the role was a huge defeat. Sarah couldn’t even get into SAG, as she’d been hired as a Canadian.

To say that Sarah became depressed and medicated after that disappointment would be an understatement. Through some clause in Canada’s healthcare system (at least back then), Sarah (being half-Canuck) was entitled to free therapy in L.A. Her therapist, an absolute quack, began trying to convince Sarah that she was schizophrenic. She referred Sarah to a psychiatrist to get a bunch of things prescribed. I went with her. He put her on a junkie’s wet dream of pills. Privately, I told her that I felt none of them were necessary. She was just going through a “down” period, and it was understandable. But Sarah, like a good little Canadian, believed in obeying authority. Follow the doctor’s orders. Take the pills.

After several weeks of me holding her hair as she violently wretched into our toilet and sitting in bed with her as she shivered and cried, she had become practically agoraphobic. The only thing that would give her any pleasure was when she’d receive clothes from her folks up in British Columbia.

Our nights had come down to sitting around watching shows I hated, most notably Friends and Ally McBeal. Jesus I hated that one. Eventually, Sarah and I began going out again, and shopping, as before. But she had changed. There was a coldness to her. She had a girlfriend who was supplying her with pot, which Sarah was using while on Paxil. It was not a good decision.

One day, as we were opening our mail, I saw her open a letter, and quickly crumple it up and throw it away. She was such a fine actress, but that one moment came off as “false” (in the acting jargon sense, referring to when a performance lacks believability).

“What was that?”

“Oh, just junk mail. Nothing.”

Later that night, I went back to the trash can. Something wasn’t sitting well with me. I fished out the crumpled letter. It was from Banana Republic. Her recent mail-order ensemble was going to be delayed for a few weeks.

“Mail order ensemble?” We shop in-store. What “mail-order ensemble?”

Sarah had been running a scam, using my credit cards to order clothes via the catalogues of her favorite stores, having the clothes shipped to her folks, who would then send them down to her at my place as though they were gifts from them. I hadn’t noticed the extra charges because, frankly, there were already so many charges each month for our in-store visits to those overpriced deathtraps, I never noticed the catalog orders from the same stores. My fault, my stupidity. She had sworn to never again use my cards without permission. I had trusted her.

I sat on the edge of the bed to ask her about the charges. I was calm. I could never yell at Sarah. But inside, I was very upset.

She knew she was caught.

“I’m leaving. I feel nothing for you anymore” she said.

“But we’ve been through so much. You can’t just declare it over like that.”

“Yes I can. I’ve already made preparations to go back to my au pair job.”

“But…”

“Look, it’s probably the Paxil and everything else. I just don’t feel anything for you anymore. I’m leaving, I’ve decided.”

I hoped things would be better the next day. Was this just a bargaining tool to divert the discussion from her theft? Was I supposed to beg for forgiveness for not wanting my money stolen?

A few days later, she left. I couldn’t bear to see her move out, so I stayed away. When I came home, all traces of Sarah were gone. Other things were gone, too. She stole stuff. A hundred stomach-punches from Irv Rubin couldn’t have disabled me more. In fact, I got a nosebleed. A fucking nosebleed. I’d been hit in the nose three times during my revisionist years, and not once did it bleed. I’d never had a nosebleed in my life. But then and there, staring at her empty closets and dressers, my fucking nose started to bleed.

I sat on my bed and tried to cry. But I couldn’t. I just sat there, in an empty house. I doubt I moved for hours, until I got tired enough to lie back and go to sleep.

Sarah’s favorite song by The Tragically Hip contains this verse:

Clearly entranced, you’re leaning back now,

Defanged destroyer limps into the bay.

Down at the beach, it’s attracting quite a crowd,

As kids wade through blood out to it to play.

I couldn’t go back to revisionism after my “recantation,” and I couldn’t work as a “serious” historian because of my rep. I was indeed a defanged destroyer, limping back to square one.

8.

BOTH SIDES NOW

When Sarah left, something inside me snapped. I changed in one very radical way—that whole “never accept money” thing disappeared, to the extent that I could no longer grasp why I’d been that way in the first place. I needed money, badly. I was living completely on credit, and the bills were coming due. Sarah had left my house in disarray. She had taken a lot of stuff that wasn’t hers, primarily various pieces of movie memorabilia that she knew were valuable.

With “never take money Dave” gone, I decided to figure out how to get a decent income. But what could I do? I’d “killed” David Cole. I couldn’t go back to that. Plus, Irv Rubin was still alive and kicking. If I even tried to resurface and be my old self, he’d just try to kill me again (and he’d be angrier now, as he’d feel publicly humiliated for having accepted my “recantation” at face value).

No, Cole was as dead as a doorknob. I was living as Stein, but nobody knew Stein from a hole in the ground. I’d laid down no footprints for him yet. And I wanted to protect Stein from any problems. I liked the name and I wanted to keep it.

So, time for a few creative pseudonyms, and some rather ruthless profiteering.

I knew Holocaust history backwards and forwards. My time as a revisionist, with the skeptical reporters, the hostile TV and radio hosts, the probing letters of inquiry from the likes of James Randi and Christopher Hitchens, the debates with other revisionists, and the appearances at college campuses filled with wary audiences, had forged me into a one-man encyclopedia on the subject.

Sarah had left in August, and I spent about two months pining and whining. I turned thirty that September, and it was the piningest and whiningest birthday I ever had. But by November, I’d emotionally moved on, thanks in part to a new best friend I’d made in a beautiful young transplant from Nebraska named Deb, a super-intelligent goth-girl (blessedly not an actress) who would end up becoming instrumental in my financial recovery.

Deb taught me how to use a computer. In my entire life, I’d never touched one. I liked reading “real” books, and writing by hand. The computer opened the path to direct mail, as I could now easily print my own catalogs, mailing address labels, etc. With my new computer skills, I could now sell things to whoever I wanted. So what’s a knowledgeable but disgraced Holocaust revisionist to do? Play both sides. And make some decent scratch.

I created two pseudonyms—one to sell books and videos to Holocaust studies departments around the world, and one to sell books and videos to revisionists. Naturally, because I’m a douchebag, both pseudonyms had to be in-jokes. My college and university pseudonym was “Cal Tinbergen,” taken from my favorite early-1980s horror film, Forbidden World. In the film, Cal allows his own cancerous liver to be cut out of him while he’s still alive so that it can be fed to the mutant that’s terrorizing the research colony on one of Jupiter’s moons.

I’m not saying it was a good film.

And then I created “Desmond Boles” to sell to revisionists. The in-joke there was that one of my favorite Italian zombie film actors, Ugo Bologna, who played “Mr. Desmond” in the seminal zombie film Nightmare City, also played “Dr. Bowles” in the creatively-titled Zombie.

Neither of them were terribly good films, either, although Nightmare City is one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorite movies, serving as the inspiration for the Tarantino/Rodriguez “Grindhouse” film Planet Terror, and if Tarantino likes something, it must be g…oh, wait. No, forget that.

“Cal Tinbergen” sold films through “The Tinbergen Archives.” Desmond Boles sold films through “Contrarian Press” (I actually really liked that business name). I started making safe, completely unchallenging Holocaust documentaries for colleges and universities, and unsafe, revisionist documentaries for the other side. It was so damn easy, as I had years and years of collected archives, maybe only thirty percent of which I’d ever used publicly during my days as a revisionist. Hundreds of hours of footage from my trips; thousands of pages of documents I’d copied at archives and universities around the world. I truly thought I had enough to keep this “pseudonymous playing both sides” thing going for a year. In fact, I had enough to keep it going for four years.

Needless to say, things got surreal. One of my archived films showed what I believed to be the first Nazi experiment with gas chambers, at an insane asylum in the town of Mogilev, in Minsk, in 1941. The Nazi doctor in charge was Dr. Albert Widmann. In 1994, when I discovered the footage sitting in the U.S. National Archives, I set about trying to authenticate it. There had always been rumors of such footage, supposedly shot so that it could be sent back to Berlin for Himmler’s approval. The records of the postwar trial of Widmann were at the time only available in two places in the U.S., one of them being the UCLA Research Library. My good fortune—it saved me an out-of-town trip.

I became convinced that the footage was genuine, and I wrote to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. I exchanged a series of faxes with their film archives director, Raye Farr. I wouldn’t speak with her over the phone, for fear that my incredibly unique voice might tip her off that I was Cole (Cole’s “death” was still fairly recent at that point). In several faxes, Farr told me that the experts she spoke with believed the “gassing” footage was a Soviet fake, staged to use against the Germans at the Nuremberg Trial.

I actually disagreed. Funny—me believing the footage was genuine, Farr claiming it’s a fraud. Talk about role reversal.

“Cal” sold the footage to almost every Holocaust studies department in the Western world. And then “Desmond” used Farr’s faxes (which he claimed to have bought on the Holocaust “black market”) in order to sell the “fraudulent” footage to revisionists as an example of staged Soviet fakes.

And so it went. For several years, I would sell materials to both sides. Using a complex series of DBAs, both “Cal” and “Desmond” had their own business accounts, and the money was pouring in. As my own views had become more complex when I left revisionism, I didn’t think I was completely lying, as I partially agreed with both the mainstream and the revisionist positions. But since I knew that those two “sides” could never be brought together, I realized I’d have to cater to each one individually.

I’m not going to evade the question of “moral responsibility.” And by that I don’t mean exploiting revisionists and mainstream historians. In their own way, they all asked for it, by stubbornly adhering to ideology, embracing evidence that supports their beliefs, and dismissing evidence that challenges it. I had no respect for either side. Their ideological blindness had opened them up to exploitation.

By “moral responsibility,” I’m talking about making a profit on the back of one of the most horrific events in human history. Millions of Jews weren’t tormented and killed so that I could make a buck. I could deflect the issue by pointing out that lots of other Jews (and non-Jews) have made healthy profits from Holocaust-related media and materials. I’d be correct. But it would still be a deflection. At the time I made peace with my conscience by reminding myself of all the years I’d refused to take a dime. “I tried to be the Buddhist monk of Holocaust history, and what did it get me? Death threats and destitution!” But that, too, was a deflection.

The truth is, I can’t defend it. The only thing I can say is that after I was forced out of the field by the death threats of the JDL and the lies of people like Shermer, I had to emotionally divorce myself from the subject matter. It’s where I am now regarding politics. I no longer care about it. When you’re so deeply attached to a subject, and you’re cast out of it, you have to train yourself not to care about it any more, or else you get torn up with longing and regret. I’d grown cold to Holocaust history just as, right now, I’ve grown cold to politics. It’s the only way I can cope.

But unlike my revisionist work, which I’ll still defend, and unlike my conservative work, which I’ll still defend, I can’t defend the period in between.

“Desmond Boles” was able to deplete the revisionist side rather quickly. It was an older demographic, and, frankly, they were dying off pretty quickly. And a lot of those geezers still wanted VHS tapes. It was a pain to mass-copy VHS tapes. In fact, I would reuse old tapes I had around the house, stuff that I’d recorded in the 1980s and ’90s.

One time, for whatever reason, the copying process failed, and I sent this poor old revisionist guy a video with episodes of The Simpsons on it. Now come on, hate me as much as you want, but you have to admit that’s funny. This guy orders a film that was probably called something like “The True History of Auschwitz,” he puts the tape in, and it’s Homer Simpson. That’s just plain funny.

But as “Desmond” was slowing down with the revisionists, “Cal” was on fire. His films were selling like hotcakes. As you might expect, I never did my own narration—Deb did that. At this point there wasn’t a major college or university that wasn’t using at least one of my films—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford, NYU, CUNY, Brandeis, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, UCLA, Vanderbilt, Boston College, you name it, my films were everywhere.

I had a strong contempt for my audience, because the films were terrible. And nobody complained. They didn’t complain because these bland, safe films reinforced what they already believed. It was “comfort food” to these folks. My lack of passion could be seen in every single one of those films. One evening, having finished laying down narration with Deb on one of “Cal’s” films, I realized after she left that I’d forgotten to get her to record a significant closing paragraph. I didn’t want to trouble her with having to drive back because of my own absent-mindedness. So I thought, well, I could present the closing spiel as on-screen text…but that would take WORK. Screw that.

Just then, an old buddy of mine, a hulking three-hundred-pound black dude, stopped by. I asked if he could record about six sentences of narration for me. He was fine with it. “Do you want me to record any more?”

“Nah—Deb did the rest.”

A little concerned, he asked, “won’t the viewers be startled that at the emotional climax of the film, the narrator’s voice changes from a soft-spoken twenty-five-year-old girl to a deep-voiced middle-aged black man?”

“Nope,” I replied, “they won’t even notice. They’ll be in the blissful state of mind that ideologues reach when they’re being fed their intellectual morphine.”

And damned if not one of the thousands of professors who bought that film ever brought up the narrator’s sudden climactic gender change. Not one.

Whereas “Desmond” never had to be in any close contact with the revisionists (the revisionists are a non-demanding crowd. They have very few people to serve them, so they don’t typically make a fuss if something goes wrong. I never even sent that “Simpsons” guy a replacement video), the professors were much more demanding. They wanted more than videos—they wanted study guides, classroom plans, etc. I mean, it’s all about them teaching their classes on auto-pilot, right?

By 2001, I felt safe to speak to them on the phone. Cole had made his last TV appearance in 1994. I doubted that any of them would recognize my voice. Initially, I would speak to them as “Cal Tinbergen.” But I soon started rethinking that strategy. One reason was that it was a very difficult name to communicate. People kept thinking I ran the “Tim Burton Archives.” The main library purchaser at Harvard was a woman with a very strong Southeast Asian accent. I never knew her actual name. Over the phone, it sounded like “Plasmagoo.” Honestly, that’s what it sounded like. I’d call the purchasing office and ask for Plasmagoo, and she’d reply “Thees Plasmagoo, hello Meester Tininbringing.”

Also, a weird phenomenon was happening. As my bland films were receiving wide acceptance, a lot of people were talking about them. And they weren’t talking about David Stein. I wasn’t going to hide behind “Tininbringing” my entire life. I needed to get Stein’s name in on the action.

Fordham University patron Sidney Rosenblatt added “Tinbergen’s” films to the university’s prestigious Rosenblatt Holocaust Collection. Dr. Bill Nichols, professor of cinema at San Francisco State, screened one at the Visible Evidence conference of documentary filmmakers and scholars. WWII vet Leonard Sattler (103rd Infantry) screened one at a conference of liberators, and former UN Ambassador William vanden Heuvel added “Tinbergen’s” films to the catalog of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, which he chairs.

In the most surreal moment of all, Laurence Moss, an economics professor at Harvard and Tufts, claimed to have actually visited the “Tinbergen Archives” (you know, the thing that existed entirely in my head). In a 2001 article in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, which Moss edited, he wrote:

The Tinbergen Archives in Los Angeles, California are a monument comprised of books, lectures, and films—a monument that exists for the sole purpose of honoring the dead. Established to inform succeeding generations about this “century’s greatest crime,” the destruction of most of Europe’s Jewish community, it “preserves the history of the Holocaust and the blessed memory of the Six Million who lost their lives so cruelly and unjustly.” Mr. Cal Tinbergen, the Director of the Archives, has assembled media of all types to fortify “the fight against bigotry and hatred.”…I admire the clarity of Mr. Tinbergen’s vision about who he is and what he does.

If big-timey professors are going to write things like that, they might as well write them about Stein. I made Stein “Tinbergen’s” managing director. From then on, all Tinbergen business went through Stein.

The final nail in “Cal’s” coffin came in the form of one of those wonderful coincidences life throws your way every now and then. I had always joked that Forbidden World, the film from which I took the name “Cal Tinbergen,” was so obscure, that the only person who might possibly get the reference is Allan Holzman, the guy who directed it. And why should I be afraid of ever crossing paths with him? He does low-budget horror films.

Well, actually, it turned out that Holzman was now doing Holocaust documentaries! The one guy who could get the Cal Tinbergen reference was now in the same field.

It was time to ditch Cal. It was 2001. Stein could stand on his own.

If I’m careful, I thought, I’ll be fine. I had to speak to a lot of professors over the phone, but I wasn’t going to be doing any media. There were times when the routine was frustrating, especially those times when this or that Holocaust history professor, not knowing that he was actually speaking to David Cole, would mention my old work with a sneering “yeah, that Jewish denier kid was actually on to something about Auschwitz, but we just can’t talk about that stuff publicly.”

I remember having a phone conversation with a professor from Boston University, a good customer, in which he was complimenting me on “Cal’s” film about Dachau. Somewhat solemnly, he said “You know, there are times I wish we could just tell the world that the ‘gas chamber’ at that camp was built by our troops after the war. But we can’t encourage denial.”

“Yes, too bad,” I replied, “we need to safeguard those secrets.” Meanwhile, in my mind I was throttling the lying prick.

I collaborated with Ellsworth Rosen, public relations director of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies (Greater Boston’s Jewish Federation), on the film Bearing Witness: American Soldiers and the Holocaust, narrated by legendary newsman Morton Dean. My main job on that one was supplying historical footage from my archives, something I was asked to do several times that year, including for a documentary on George Stevens, and one on the Warsaw Ghetto.

Stein was becoming so well known, I even received a death threat from a neo-Nazi! Immediately seizing on the profitability of that, I decided to send a copy of the letter to the entire Tinbergen Archives mailing list, explaining to them why this letter demonstrated the need to contribute to the good works of the Tinbergen Archives. That death threat brought in a hell of a lot of money.

Turns out, the white supremacist who sent the threat to me, John Frederick Steele II, head of the Southern California-based “Brandenburg Division” of the Aryan Nations, was arrested in November 2002 for possessing weapons and bomb-making materials.

Repeat after me: This is why Dave uses pseudonyms.

My Tinbergen Archives mailing list had become a hot property. Although only about 12,000 names strong, it was aggressively sought-after because most of the names were West Coast Jews (the typical Jewish mailing list consists of the same old East Coast names). I was repped by Negev Direct Marketing, the largest Jewish mailing list broker in the world, and I was able to trade my list for dozens of others, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance, the World Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Historical Society, and the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous. I also made some decent cash by selling the list to Jonathan David Publishers, Elderhostel, and MBI. By the end of it, I had a mailing list that included the home addresses of Spielberg and Streisand (and filmmaker Wes Craven, who actually wrote a fan letter to “Tinbergen”).

Trying to go “mainstream” was costly, though. In 1999 I got it in my head that I was going to shop around a big-budget film project about the rescue of the Danish Jews during the war. That story had always fascinated me. On the surface, it can easily appear to be a straightforward good guys vs. bad guys story. Evil SS trying to send the Danish Jews to the camps, heroic Danes ferrying them, Dunkirk-style, to safety in Sweden. And indeed that’s true—the SS was evil, the Danish Jews were innocent, and the Danish gentiles were (generally) heroic. But that’s not the part that interested me. My fascination with the story stemmed from the fact that the Danish Jews were saved by the “HNIC” (“Head Nazi in Charge”), Dr. Werner Best, the plenipotentiary of Denmark (the Nazi who Hitler put in charge of ruling occupied Denmark).

It was Dr. Best who tipped off the Danish resistance to the fact that the SS was coming to seize the Jews. Best was a fascinating character—a long-time Nazi who’d been the party’s lawyer back in the early days. As a reward for his years of loyal service, Hitler awarded him the plum post of plenipotentiary of Denmark. Far from the front lines, far from violent resistance, and ruling over what Hitler referred to as a “soft occupation,” Best could just relax and live large in a palace while other, less-fortunate Nazis were freezing and dying on the Eastern Front.

Typical for a lawyer, Best was a pencil-pusher, not a soldier, not a fighter, not a brawler. He’d help craft the laws that gave Hitler dictatorial powers, but he never had to experience the real-world effects of those laws.

In 1943, three years into the “soft occupation,” Himmler demanded the Danish Jews. (Estimates on numbers vary, as Denmark had become home to many refugee Jews, who went uncounted. A figure of 10,000 is generally accepted.) Dr. Best wavered, in part because such a move in a country where Jews were well-integrated could cause unrest among the population. But also, Best was now faced with actually having to do something horrible to innocent people. This wasn’t sitting in an office writing legal theory with the window shut to the outside world. Now Best had to personally send men, women, and children to brutal concentration camps.

So he tried to strike a moral bargain with himself. He agreed to Himmler’s demand, but then he tried to ensure that the Jews got out before they could be seized. Best thought he could walk a tightrope between good and evil. Generally, I think Best represents a majority of humans; not gutsy enough to stand openly for what’s right if it might cost them their jobs, but still not wanting harm to come to innocent people. I found Best to be one of the greatest “gray area” characters I’d ever researched, and, it occurred to me that it would be a plum role for the right actor. This was a man even more complex than Oskar Schindler. I went to Copenhagen and interviewed people who knew him (he lived until 1989, having been spared execution after the war when the resistance revealed his role in the rescue), so by 1999, there were still many people who had known him personally.

Not too long before he died, I spoke to celebrated musician and comedian Victor Borge, a Danish Jew who ran an organization dedicated to commemorating the rescue. He gave me Vidal Sassoon’s number (don’t laugh; Sassoon, who was Jewish, was keenly involved in Holocaust remembrance projects). Sassoon loved the idea of the Danish film. He told me he had potential money contacts, but I’d need a complete screenplay by a WGA writer.

Borge also gave me actor and comedian Joey Bishop’s number (again, don’t laugh; he was also keenly involved in Holocaust remembrance projects). But Borge warned me—“never, NEVER call Bishop during Wheel of Fortune. He watches it religiously, and he’ll be very cross if you interrupt him.”

The day I called Bishop, I checked every TV listing available to make sure that Wheel was not being broadcast anywhere in the world at the moment I called. Not on broadcast TV, not on cable, not on satellite. I dialed the number.

“WHO THE FUCK IS INTERRUPTING WHEEL OF FORTUNE? WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU? WHY ARE YOU INTERRUPTING MY FUCKING SHOW?”

“Uh, Mr. Bishop, my name is David Stein, and Victor Borge gave…”

“FUCK OFF. I DON’T CARE WHO GAVE YOU MY NUMBER. NOBODY INTERRUPTS WHEEL. GET LOST.”

Click.

I didn’t have “being told to go fuck myself by Joey Bishop” on my bucket list, but I should have, because I would’ve enjoyed crossing that one off. For the life of me, I have absolutely no idea on what station he was watching Wheel at that moment. I really thought I’d been thorough.

Regardless, I had Sassoon’s advice to find a WGA writer. Through a mutual friend, I was hooked up with a young lady named Kimberlee Crawford. She had a single WGA credit on her resume—an episode of Nash Bridges. But she was willing to work for scale, and she was willing to be paid in installments.

And more than that, she understood the project. I didn’t make the decision to hire her lightly. For two months we spent day after day together discussing the film. She knew what I wanted, and I could see that she would write exactly the type of film I could take back to Sassoon. In late ’99, we signed the papers with the WGA, and I gave her the first installment of $10,000.

And she vanished!

Initially, I just assumed, well, she’s a writer, she’s probably gone into seclusion to work on the script. But after four months went by, I contacted her agent, and the Guild, and I realized it had been a scam. She took the money and flew the coop!

I can’t lie; I was impressed. Angry, sure, but impressed. It was a good con. It was what’s known as a “long con,” the kind where you put in more time to get more money (as opposed to a “short con,” which is all about taking twenty or thirty bucks off someone, by, you know, sending them a Simpsons tape instead of a Holocaust video). She’d worked me well. And because of the WGA contract, I was legally committed to submit to WGA arbitration before taking legal action.

Of course, the arbitration thing was a con of its own. When it’s producer-as-complainant, the WGA draws the process out so long that eventually the statute of limitations on suing expires. I began the arbitration process in mid-2000. By 2004, they were still sending me paperwork. As of 2013, it still hasn’t happened, not that I care anymore.

The Danish film had been a good idea, and although it bore no fruit, at least I got to annoy Joey Bishop. And that’s a plus.

The disaster of the Denmark project aside, by mid-2001 I was doing quite well. Stein was running the Tinbergen Archives, the ghosts of Sarah had been fully exorcized, and the financial crater she left in her wake had been filled many, many times over. Cole was “dead,” even if not quite buried. In December 1999, L.A. Times reporter Kim Murphy tracked Cole straight to my house for a piece she was writing regarding the political persecution of revisionists. I politely declined to participate, even though the piece she wrote turned out very fair. But that was the last time I had to deal with Cole. Stein had “footprints” now. 2001 was shaping up to be a great year.

And then came the 4th of July.

9.

THE BEAST AND MY SECOND DEATH

The Beast was my ideal woman, physically speaking. I won’t refer to her as anything but The Beast in this book, because that’s how I came to refer to her in real life. And also, she was a very sick, troubled woman. We met on a hot July 4th afternoon at a fireworks display. She was from Michigan, on vacation for the summer to test the waters for a possible move to L.A. She had booked a three-month rental based on price, not location, and now she found herself stuck in the worst part of town. We got to know each other quite well rather quickly, as I would insist on accompanying her to her rental place at the intersection of Freebase and Huff. And the more I got to know her, the more obvious red flags I missed. Okay, I didn’t miss them, I chose to ignore them. Huge difference there. My relationship with The Beast would lead to my second death, another suicide, and the only time I actually physically faked my own death (that’s a step or two beyond just walking away from a previous persona).

The Beast had been born to a crack- and alcohol-addicted mother in the worst section of Detroit. Her mom may very well have been the last blonde girl in that part of town, and considering how blonde The Beast was, her father (one of many random guys her mom screwed for crack money) probably had a blonde gene somewhere inside him too.

When The Beast was a baby, her mom would leave her at crack houses as collateral. The Beast’s grandparents tried to “cure” the mom of her addiction by chaining her in the basement of their house. She escaped after pleading with The Beast to go get granddad’s hacksaw. The mom ended up dying on the street, and The Beast was raised by her grandparents, who hated each other. The grandpa, an auto-worker and part-time gun dealer, was an atheist. The grandma was a super-devout Catholic. They spent every day yelling at each other. That was normalcy around that house.

Have you identified how many red flags there were regarding The Beast’s ability to be in a normal relationship?

I’m not going to hand you any fiction about how I thought “love” could overcome all of those obvious problems. I’ll be very straightforward—The Beast presented something I’d had precious little experience with: a woman who had absolutely no desire to spend my money. At that point in my life, I had more money than I’d ever had, but she could not have been less interested. She wanted sex. Constant, never-ending sex. She was the biggest fan of oral sex since my high-school girlfriend. Money was simply never an issue. The Beast wanted me, and I found her to be the most beautiful woman I’d been with since my teen years.

She was a model and actress who had moved to L.A. to pursue her dream. Unique story, right? At that time, “Stein” had zero influence in “the biz.” So it wasn’t even like she was with me for career connections. We’d have sex before dinner, after dinner, in her big-ass Chrysler before auditions, in her big-ass Chrysler after auditions.

The Beast was not rail-thin, and I loved that. But she didn’t. She wanted to be as thin as humanly possible. She began taking ephedra, the now-banned and highly dangerous (and addicting) dietary supplement. Ephedra can cause mood swings and psychosis. Have you just seen another red flag just go up? If so, thank you for paying attention.

I was paying attention, too. With her pre-natal problems and her family history of addiction, I kept imploring her to stop taking the ephedra (which was available at any Target). I’d do my best to reassure her that she was absolutely perfect as she was. And I meant it. And she’d tell me she’d quit, but that would always turn out to be a lie.

But all things considered, our first year together was great. Not only had the ghost of Sarah been vanquished, but the body had been exhumed and dumped in a ditch. The Beast and I had great times together, going sailing, visiting Detroit (the surrounding areas aren’t really that bad…just stay away from the Hiroshima-like center), and having sex at every available opportunity (yes, I know I’m revisiting that point, but after Sarah and her “Paxil kills my sex drive” excuses, I really, really needed this).

The Beast even got a part in a Gary Busey/Sean Young film. For a girl from Detroit with no L.A. credits, that was actually pretty cool. And it paid. The Beast did several paying gigs. Wow, I’m not only not losing money, but the household is making money because of someone other than me. I’m not being bled dry, and I’m having sex every waking hour.

I don’t excuse the fact that I ignored the warning signs. It would be my undoing, sure. But I don’t think, in retrospect, I’d have preferred to spend 2001 through 2002 any differently.

Although I’d been David Stein officially since Sarah left, I couldn’t actually “be” him, legally. I had no actual connection to the name, and no desire to legally change my name, either. I’d made a pledge to myself, after the JDL death threat, to never again work under a name that could be traced to my home or family. The appeal of being Stein was that it was a name completely pulled out of thin air, and a wonderfully common name at that.

I had discarded all of my Cole IDs, credit cards, etc. And now, dating The Beast, I needed to emerge from the shadows. Due to absolutely no chicanery on my part, I happened to have another totally legit, legal name: David Harvey. When my step-dad officially adopted me when I was about seven years old, I received an amended birth certificate. So I had two—Cole and Harvey.

In 2001, I officially became David Harvey. I’m glad I didn’t care for the name, because David Harvey had but two years to live.

The Beast had gotten a nice little apartment on the Westside, $750 a month. Anyone who knows the L.A. Westside will understand how good a deal that was, and anyone from Manhattan just keeled over from a heart attack. She paid for it with her job as manager of a Hollywood Video store (remember video stores?). Even though she had her own place, we’d still spend each night together, either at her place or mine. But by mid-2002, her behavior had started to become erratic. She got into a physical altercation with her Iranian apartment manager, and she was served with an eviction notice. She asked to stay with me at my house until she could find another place. Call me an idiot for agreeing, but what the hell else could I have done? I tried to speak to Muktar Maloof or whatever the hell the manager’s name was, but it did no good. He wanted her out.

So I let her move in, with the understanding that it would be temporary. Which of course is an unenforceable agreement; once you allow someone to take up residency in your house, you can’t just kick them out. You have to legally evict them, and that process can take months. The Beast knew that.

Now things REALLY started to go downhill. She got into an after-hours fistfight with a female employee at the video store, rolling around like two female Godzillas, knocking over display cases and shelves, leaving the store in shambles. The next day, the Hollywood Video district manager called her in. I went with her for support. We watched the security camera footage of the scuffle. It was brutal. The other girl outweighed The Beast three-to-one, but damned if The Beast didn’t beat the crap out of her.

It was, and I’m putting this lightly, troubling to see such a violent side to her.

The district manager told us what he told the other girl. Resign, and we give you a letter of recommendation for your next job. Or refuse to resign, and we fire you. Both combatants chose to resign. For The Beast, it was moot, as she’d never have another job in L.A. anyway.

The Beast still didn’t want money, though. She decided that she wanted something very, very different—I’d have to marry her and give her kids. “Well, sweetie, I don’t think I’m ready to get married, and I don’t think I’m ready for fatherhood,” I said.

The next thing I knew, I was on the floor. She had me in a headlock and was punching me in the eye. My frail little 5’6”, 130-pound frame just laid there, stunned, as she walked back to the couch and sat down, looking victorious. “You WILL marry me, or I’ll kill you.”

Rinsing a washcloth in cold water for my eye, The Beast standing next to me at the sink, I returned to the couch. “Honey, this isn’t how it’s supposed to work. You can’t beat someone into proposing. Let’s just calm down and we’ll deal with this tomorrow.”

“If you don’t propose, I’m going to tell my grandpa you raped me. You know him—his heart is giving out, he loves his guns, he hates his life. He’s got nothing to lose. He doesn’t even LIKE you because you wouldn’t go hunting with him when we were in Michigan [that was true]. If I tell him you raped me, he’ll fucking KILL you.”

I believed her. When she and I were leaving Detroit on our most recent trip, her granddad took me aside at the airport. “Lemme speak to Dave alone for a sec, sweetheart,” he told her in his thick Michigan accent. We went into a corridor. He looked me in the eye and told me that if I ever did anything bad to his little girl—SMACK—he hit me square in the face. My first thought was, I was surprised he didn’t sock me in the stomach. There’d be no physical sign of that. But my cheek was red and bruised as I got on the plane. I’m assuming he wanted The Beast to know what transpired.

I did take the “rape” threat seriously. Over the course of a two-day-long period where neither one of us left my bed except to pee, I established a compromise. We would wed in two years, on the condition that she would seek counseling for her violent temper and ephedra addiction. As I saw it, I was buying myself some time. But things progressed from bad to worse. Over the next few months, she began hitting me with greater frequency. And she began telling me at night that she was going to slit my throat. Threatening to stab me became her constant mantra. And me cowering and begging for mercy became my normal response. Oddly, though, the sex remained incredible.

Things would get worse in early 2003. One night, after I’d cooked dinner for her, she claimed that her back was hurting from the length of time that I took between the main course and the desert. So I got a severe elbow to the stomach in retribution for her aching back. And I kinda snapped, and said, “I’m leaving. I can’t take this any more. Have my fucking house. I’m going.” And I went to get my shoes.

As I was heading for the door, she came at me with my landline phone. She dialed 9, and then 1, and then she punched herself in the face three times in rapid succession. I ran over to her, grabbed her arm. “Okay, okay, you win, I won’t go. Please—stop.” She hung up the phone. She told me that if I ever tried to leave again, she’d do what she just did, and I’d go to jail.

She had lucked into discovering the thing I was more afraid of than her grandpa. I’m petrified of going to jail. I have a hundred percent clean record, and—whether this is myth or reality—I assume that jail for a dainty little guy like me means rape. And communal toilets. More than that, I assumed that having an accusation of domestic violence on my record would mean the end of my future endeavors. Yes, I knew I had a hidden past as Cole, but nothing criminal.

Little did I know that I would, over a decade later, be expelled from a party that held my non-criminal past against me while continuing to support those with actual criminal histories. I had not yet learned to think like a politician. For some odd reason, I thought that being accused of actually hurting someone would be worse than writing about history. Stupid me.

But the point had been made. If I leave, she’ll fake domestic abuse. And whereas her grandpa might have never actually come after me, the cops would have been duty-bound to arrest me. And if I fled, I’d be a wanted man whose very act of fleeing was “proof” of wrongdoing. The Beast had played one hell of a good hand there. And I folded.

There are many people in this world who would have simply called The Beast’s bluff. You see them all the time on Cops. “That bitch dun punchted herself,” followed by the police saying “Sorry sir, but by law we have to arrest you.” Followed by Billy Bob McToothless doubling down with “Git outta mah house,” followed by a tasering and a high-pitched scream.

And at the other end of the spectrum are those who suffer for years, even decades, in domestic violence situations. Never calling the police, cowed by every threat, always giving in. Typically, these are women, and the abusers men. But not always. Not in my case.

I realized I had to find a “third way”—a middle ground between escalating the violence and becoming accustomed to it. I spent the next four months trying to figure out my exit strategy. At this point, my blood pressure was so high that my doctor wanted me to go on one of those blood-pressure lowering medications.

And still, it got worse. The Beast was a finalist for the CBS reality show Big Brother. We went to the final audition together (she did not allow me to be out of her sight at that point). This was a big deal. Lawyers, CBS executive weasels, casting director weasels, a roomful of people the world would be better without. They told The Beast “we need to ask you some questions, which you must answer truthfully.”

No problem there. What were they going to ask? Are you a natural blonde? She was. Are those triple-Ds implants? Nope. But that’s not what they asked.

“Have you ever been convicted of a felony?”

Her “no” didn’t come as swiftly as I thought it would. In fact, it didn’t come at all. She looked more nervous than I’d ever seen her. The lawyers looked impatient. The CBS execs looked like fucking worthless weasels (but, to be fair, that’s the standard look sported by all network TV execs).

The lawyers: “We need an honest answer. If you don’t tell us, you’re out of the running.”

The Beast: “I stabbed my previous boyfriend.”

Dave (in his head): “So THAT explains her constant stabbing references.”

Trying to spin the situation positively, she claimed that she hadn’t been trying to stab the poor bastard, just one of his beloved collectible comic books. But he held it up to his chest, and, well, you know, the knife just went in.

As I would find out later that day, back at home in front of the computer, she had been convicted—not just accused, but actually convicted—of the crime. Well, I suppose that teaches me to date a crack baby without first running a criminal background search. If you take away one piece of advice from this book, it should be this: Don’t date a crack baby without first running a criminal background search. You’re welcome.

I had been counting on that Big Brother gig, because I could have fled while she was locked up in that house with cameras taping her 24/7. But CBS wouldn’t use her after her admission.

The next two months were brutal. I started sneaking photos of my bruises, using my little camcorder. And she held me at knifepoint twice, both times as I lay sleeping, waking up to find a butcher knife—my own butcher knife from my own kitchen—at my throat. Oddly, my only thought during the first knifepoint incident was, “I remember buying that knife at Target. I was going to use it for veal cutlets.”

I suppose the knife at my throat was karmic revenge for liking veal.

The Beast was over the edge. I was too. I was down to 115 pounds, barely able to eat. I couldn’t get beyond my fear that if I left, she’d make a fraudulent claim of domestic abuse, as she’d shown me she was perfectly capable of doing. Plus, if I left, she’d still be in my house. Lord knows what she’d do to it with me gone. Every night, before bedtime, she’d let me know that if I ever managed to get away, she’d find me and kill me and my parents.

The sex had stopped by that time. In part because I’d become paranoid about accidentally knocking her up, and in part because, after the stabbing conviction was exposed, she decided that there should be no more secrets between us and revealed her obsession with auto-erotic asphyxiation. Yes, people actually do that. She’d put a plastic bag over her head, as I finger-pleasured her. She’d pull off the bag right before she passed out, but she made sure I knew CPR (which I did) in case she didn’t pull it off in time.

It was time to go. I devised a plan. Two stages. Stage one, get her the fuck out of my house. Get her to willingly give up residence. Once she does that, she can’t move back.

Stage two, I take off. Permanently. In a way where she doesn’t even try to find me. Because I’d fake my own death.

Boy, I’m clever. That’s a GREAT plan. What the hell could go wrong with a plan as simple and linear as that?

Phase one was easy. Deb had introduced me to her fat lazy editor friend Francisco “Frank” Roel. “Fat Frank” I called him. He was a fat bald redheaded Mexican national who had been brought to this country illegally as a small child. You know how lazy this guy was? The amnesty that Reagan granted illegals like Fat Frank would have made him legal, and all he had to do was fill out some papers. But the amnesty deadline was twenty years. By 2006, Fat Frank had yet to do the one small task that would have allowed him to ditch the fake social security number he’d been using since his teens.

Don’t get me wrong—this is not meant as a slight against Mexican immigrants (legal or not). They work like hell for low wages. I mean, I grew up in L.A. Conservatives might never like admitting it, but without Mexican immigrants, this town would be screwed. I’m just talking about this one dude. Fat Frank. But lazy as he was, I saw potential in him. He wanted to be a film director, and he had a great eye. Plus, we were about the same age, and we loved the same films. He wasn’t dumb—far from it. He was just what the British call “work shy.”

Deb had told him that I had money. I paid off a couple of his bills, and asked him for a favor. I needed him to pretend to be an employer who was hiring me to do a massive project about the history of San Diego. If I told The Beast that I’d been hired for a history gig in San Diego, she’d follow me. Fat Frank played his part to perfection. I told The Beast that for the next three months, we’d be living in corporate housing in San Diego.

We packed up all our stuff, and moved away. I’d gotten her to willingly relinquish residency in my house. And my cousin from Israel and her kick-ass IDF husband came to live there.

Phase one complete. The Beast has left the building.

Phase two was more complex. I had to plan my “suicide.” The Beast and I would go out every day—she refused to leave my side—and I would pretend to be taking notes about the city (for my “job”), when in fact I was looking for a lifeguard station with a mail slot big enough to shove my wallet and suicide note through. I chose drowning as the best manner of fake death. If you walk into the ocean to kill yourself, the authorities will not waste any valuable time or resources looking for you. The ocean is the only place where you can truly just vanish, without wasting people’s time and money.

After several days, things were going quite well. I had two suicide notes finished—one to leave with the lifeguards, one to leave with The Beast. And I did something else: I stopped withholding the desire to cry. The Beast had seen me begging for mercy, screaming at her to stop, and curling up in a fetal position of submission. But I’d never cried. The last few days with The Beast, I would actually cry, like a little girl, every time she’d hit me. It freaked her out. She’d never seen me do that before.

The night I planned my demise, I told her I had a late night interview with a Native American casino owner as part of my “history of San Diego” project. She hadn’t let me out of her sight in months, but it was 1 a.m. “Sweetie, I’ll be back shortly,” I told her. “I’m worried about you…you cry all the time these days. I don’t want you to do anything crazy,” she replied.

YES! She sees it coming.

“No worries, sweetie. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

I went to the front desk. I gave the clerk an envelope with The Beast’s name. Inside the envelope was $2,000 and my suicide note.

I went outside. My friend Dawn Cochran, a Kim Basinger-lookalike from L.A., was waiting for me, waiting to drive me to my place of death. “It’s a fucking horrible thing to have to do,” I told Dawn. “A fucking horrible thing.” She drove me to the lifeguard station I’d scouted. I put my wallet and suicide note through the mail slot. I left my shoes by the door. And I walked into the ocean, making sure there was a straight line of footprints. David Harvey was dead.

Dawn and I spent the night at a seaside motel. The next day she drove me to LAX, and I flew to Vegas.

This is one of those things I’m not going to waste my time explaining further. Anyone I’ve known who’s been in a long-term abusive relationship dreams of escaping. But most find it difficult, because most people can’t just walk away from their lives. There are kids, or finances, or a job. I was lucky. There were no kids, my money was hidden in DBA accounts under other names, and I had no job. I could walk away. But The Beast’s pledge to file false domestic abuse charges against me if I did had been a constraint. Walking away in the manner I did kept me not only safe from abuse, but safe from any false charges.

And in all honesty, it couldn’t have gone better. The next morning, the lifeguards called the San Diego police department. SDPD officers visited The Beast. It was open-and-shut—a suicide.

Case closed.

Ah, but this is MY life we’re talking about. There are always complications. The detective who caught the case in San Diego was a young female cop named Estrella, and she became convinced that I was not dead. Why? Because my suicide note was “too long.” Fuck you, Estrella. I’m a wordy prick and I wrote the note as I would have written it had my intentions been genuine. Estrella convinced The Beast that I was still alive.

Estrella became the Latina Javert to my Jewish Valjean. She never even bothered to search The Beast’s criminal history, so obsessed was she with bringing me to justice. But in the end, Javertina’s fanaticism actually helped me. The Beast, now convinced I was alive, began leaving voicemails and emails for me apologizing for everything—the threats, the beatings, the self-inflicted black-eye and the threat of false charges. That’s all I needed; I had my proof. And then, another stroke of good luck—the case got kicked up to LAPD, and the detective in charge called me, leaving a voicemail message that basically said, “SDPD is full of idiots. Look, just let me know you’re alive and we’re done. You haven’t actually committed a crime.”

So I called him, and the conversation went like this:

“Hi. This is David Harvey.”

“You’re not dead, right?”

“Nope.”

“Have a good day, sir.”

Done and done. I even got a call from a humbled Estrella, letting me know that my wallet, shoes, and Harvey ID were in a San Diego Police Department evidence locker and I was free to come get them.

They remain there still.

10.

A TIME OF PEACE

After confirming my non-death to the LAPD detective, I decided to vanish. I got a long-term deal at an extended-stay place in El Segundo, a tiny beach city next to LAX. Its small size and isolation made it the perfect place to hide.

The good thing about the Homestead Suites was that no lease was necessary, so I couldn’t be traced. I told only a few friends where I was, and since those were the friends The Beast knew I’d tell, she pursued them relentlessly for months trying to find my location. July 2003 to September 2004 was fourteen months of blissful solitude by the ocean. My blood pressure returned to normal, I was able to sleep well again, and I discovered the miracle of booze, owing to the fact that there was a Trader Joe’s down the street, and I was curious about that “Two Buck Chuck” I’d been hearing about (ah, for the days when I could still get drunk on wine alone).

There’s not much to write about my El Segundo year, because nothing bad happened. In fact, I’m grateful for that period. The Beast returned to Michigan. She’s a happily married mom these days, her full figure indicating that ephedra is no longer a part of her life. Good for her.

When the weather cooled down in El Segundo, I started to get restless. At the time, there was a huge hubbubabaloo about Mel Gibson’s father. The Passion of the Christ was about to open, and Mel was getting pressure from Jewish groups to renounce his dad, portrayed in the media as a “Holocaust denier and anti-Semite.” It’s funny to look back to 2003 and recall a time when it was Mel’s dad who was considered the unstable one.

With no source of new income at the time, dollar signs flashed in my eyes when I read that Mel’s wacky dad wasn’t talking to the press. “I can make him talk,” I said to myself. “I have ways.” Because I knew a little secret from my revisionist days: anti-Semites love talking to Jews. It validates them, because you know, since we run the world, they must be important if they merit our attention.

Mel’s dad’s name is Hutton. I got his home address from one of my revisionist friends (Hutton was a frequent purchaser of revisionist books). I wrote to him, as Cole. I told him I wanted to give him the opportunity to tell his story, and Mel’s story. I recounted my own history of persecution. I can be a charming motherfucker when I need to be, and it worked.

Plus, he was a fan of my old work. He knew of Cole quite well. He invited me out to the suburb of Houston where he was living. I took Fat Frank along to shoot the interview. The eighty-something Hutton Gibson opened up like a porn star ready for her close-up. The guy gave me hours of great footage. Intimate details of his life, his views, and, of course, Mel. Hutton then took me and Fat Frank on a tour of the “Gibson Compound” in Tomball, Texas.

Suffice it to say, when the first of Mel’s public run-ins with the law and with sanity occurred, I was not surprised.

When I was preparing to release the footage, after Mel had suffered enough meltdowns that the evidence of the source of his “issues” (which my interview with his dad rather clearly spelled out) would have been highly sought after by the media, I just didn’t have the heart. The elder Gibson had called me begging me not to make the footage public. He’d just moved from Houston to live with Mel in Southern California, and apparently Mel realized that the interview was the last thing he needed circulating publicly.

Hutton’s a very nice man. Screwy as Woody Woodpecker, but nice. I probably won’t release the footage while he’s still alive.

By fall of 2004, memories of The Beast had faded, and I decided it was time to go back to L.A. and start working again. Leaving El Segundo meant no longer having access to the trains and subway, which meant less self-sufficiency, as my well-known aversion to driving had become much stronger now that I drank. Fortunately, fate was more than willing to step in with a solution.

“I need a car.” Fat Frank was always very direct. I liked that about him. “My car just got booted and impounded, and it’s too much of a junker to excuse what it would cost to get it back. I need a new one.”

With Frank, like me, it was always about playing an angle. Frank again showed his talent for being direct. “If you get me a car, I’ll drive you everywhere you ever need to be. It’ll be like having a personal chauffer for life.”

Well, I’m not about to pass that up. But I’m also not about to spend a dime of my own money on a guy like Fat Frank. He was a scavenger, still living the life of an illegal alien with no Social Security number who grew up in Vegas learning to get by through begging, borrowing, and stealing. I liked him a lot, but I’d never turn my back on him.

But he had a very sincere desire to make films. He had a good eye for directing, and had already done several films that sold like hotcakes in the rapidly growing bilingual market. And me? What else am I going to do but make films? I was intrigued by the idea of finally churning out a few things that had absolutely nothing to do with the Holocaust. No more “safe” Holocaust films, no more revisionist Holocaust films. It was time to move on and leave the Holocaust behind.

But fate said, “Not so fast there, asshole.” Because truth be told, if I wanted to get Fat Frank a car without spending my own dough, it was time to revisit the revisionist trough.

I’d always stayed in touch with revisionist Bradley Smith, even during my days in exile in El Segundo. I like Bradley. I’ve known him since 1989. I’ll know him until the day one of us dies. We don’t agree on everything, but he’s a lifelong friend. And now here I came, because Fat Frank needed a car.

Bradley informed me that several prominent revisionists—Germar Rudolf, David Irving, and Ernst Zündel (to be precise, Zündel’s a denier not a revisionist)—were facing lengthy prison sentences for their “crime” of writing about history. Zündel was already in a hellish situation. He had beaten the Canadian government every time it tried to prosecute him, but in 2001 he’d had enough, and retired to the hills of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. He and his wife Ingrid had a house there, and Zündel pretty much limited his duties to tending to his website. Naturally, the Canadian government and its national intelligence agency, CSIS, couldn’t let a miscreant like Zündel get away. Post-9/11, they had new powers to go “full fascist” on him (finally). They slapped what’s known as a “security certificate” on Zündel, which is Canadian-ese for “now we can do whatever the fuck we want to you with no charge or trial.” The U.S. promptly shipped him back to Toronto, and Zündel was stuffed into a six-by-ten foot cell, 24 hours a day, the lights always on, watched constantly by guards, with no trial, no charges, no sentence.

At the same time, revisionist Germar Rudolf, living in Chicago and married to an American woman with whom he’d fathered a child, was facing deportation to Germany. Rudolf was living here legally. Indeed, he was the perfect German, so damn anal about paperwork. He’d paid for the best immigration lawyers to make sure everything he did was within the law. But the Germans, anxious to imprison an author in order to prove that they’re no longer the type of fascists who imprison authors, were unhappy. They wanted Rudolf back.

Meanwhile, arrogant hot-head historian David Irving was facing trial in Austria for being a revisionist. I was less interested in his case. He goes looking for trouble. Zündel and Rudolf, like me, had tried to flee from it. I sympathized with them a bit more. But Irving was facing jail time for expressing an opinion about history, and that was still a travesty.

To be clear, money aside, I’m quite passionate about the topic of the criminalization of Holocaust revisionism. In 2004, when I heard that a rally was being organized in Sacramento to draw attention to those cases, I contacted the organizer, a gay Nazi chef (how many times do you get to say those three words at the same time?) to offer some advice. And advice was badly needed, as the “Goosestepping Gourmet” was one of those nuts who refuse to temper their extremist language even if it harms their cause. In an email, I tried to explain to “Julia Heild” that he wasn’t going to be of any help to the beleaguered revisionists by refusing to use the word “Holocaust” (this gem of a guy was an actual full-on denier). I attempted to explain that if he didn’t temper his language and act strategically, his actions would be for nothing.

It’s funny that I thought I could reason with an ideologue. Me, of all people—the “meta-ideologue.” I should have known better. In fact, the “rally” (which of course I did not attend) turned into a giant brawl, not among revisionists/deniers and Jewish activists, but among different factions within the revisionist/denier community.

Needless to say, like a lovesick fanboy, “Emeril Lagasschamber” put my email online. It was discovered by my GOP colleagues after my outing in 2013 and touted as evidence that I was still “active” in revisionism in 2004. The funny part is, those bozos didn’t know the half of it. I did much behind-the-scenes work from 2004 through 2006 to help free people thrown in prison for simply writing a blog or a pamphlet.

That’s one reason I can no longer respect most of my former conservative pals. They rant and rave about fictional upcoming “Obama FEMA death camps” for dissidents, but here I was, living in the real world, fighting for actual dissidents imprisoned in actual prisons for thought crimes, and I got pilloried for it.

But back to Fat Frank and his car. I went to Bradley to see if he could round up some money for a documentary publicizing the Rudolf and Zündel cases. I would work on the film anonymously, and Frank could help me edit. Bradley came through with a nice little wad of cash from his backers. And Frank got his car. And I got yet another wonderful bit of unappreciated irony—I was coming to the aid of two legal immigrants (Zündel and Rudolf) in order to buy a car for an illegal immigrant.

“Dude,” Frank said one evening, “you think we can get even more from these revisionists? I mean, we really ought to purchase some heavy-duty equipment. Like one of these expensive HD cameras. I know just the model we need.”

Frank the scavenger. He smells money and he becomes like a raccoon who won’t leave the yard of the person who fed him. But was I any different? Of course I was…I had a genuine Social Security number and I wasn’t fat and bald. So that makes me better.

We made a nice, tight little film about Zündel and Rudolf. I even sent Frank to Toronto to gather interviews with Zündel’s friends and foes, including noted Canadian journalist Bill Dunphy, Zündel’s greatest adversary, who had to admit that his imprisonment was wholly unjustified.

The final film was good. So good, in fact, that not only Bradley, but Zündel’s wife, offered us more money. I sent Bradley and Frank to Pigeon Forge to deal with Ingrid Zündel directly. Before their trip, I told Bradley, “never, NEVER let Frank be alone with Ingrid. He WILL try to make a separate deal. He WILL try to get money for himself. Never let him out of your sight.”

“Will do, kid,” Bradley answered. “You can count on me.” He forgot those instructions the moment he left my house.

Ingrid Zündel did indeed pledge a fat wad of money to my endeavors. And Frank indeed made a separate deal, pledging to use his Mexicanness to help spread revisionism in the (rolling “L”) Latino community, and pledging to use his film directorness to create a “revisionist film festival” in Pigeon Forge. Both promises were, of course, pure bullshit, and discarded the moment he cashed the checks. But with the money I got, I bought all the fancy equipment Frank told me to get. We were now rather well-stocked.

I did one other thing for the Zündels before moving on. I arranged a symposium on the campus of the University of Colorado, Boulder, to “raise awareness” (ah, the power of such an idiotic cliché in a liberal town like Boulder) of Zündel’s fate. We had several ACLU speakers, plus Zündel’s lawyer, and of course Ingrid. Fat Frank did all of the in-person dealings with the university, as, for me, this all had to be strictly anonymous. I wanted no one to know that David Cole was doing anything (not just anything with revisionists, but anything at all).

As a last gesture, I created a “manifesto” of sorts for the imprisoned revisionists (Germar Rudolf had lost his battle to stay in the U.S., and was by that time rotting away in a German prison, getting a wonderful lesson in how free states differ from fascist ones). I called the manifesto (excerpted here) “Historians Behind Bars,” and I gave it to Bradley, who—to this day—is the only person who knows that I wrote it. Stunningly, he has managed to keep that secret.

There are many fine organizations the world over that focus on the free speech rights of writers, journalists, and dissidents. However, many of these organizations, including Amnesty International, actually favor imprisoning Holocaust “revisionists.” Amnesty International has, by its own admission, lobbied governments to make Holocaust “revisionist” books, speeches, and Internet postings illegal. Many other free speech organizations remain silent on the question of anti-revisionist laws.

The Jews who were persecuted and killed by the Third Reich were victims of an authoritarian state that censored books and imprisoned authors. To censor books and imprison authors in the name of the victims of the Holocaust is a travesty. Employing fascist methods to honor the innocent victims of fascism is lunacy. Enacting fascistic laws in order to fight fascism is, by definition, self-defeating.

The French government has found anti-revisionist laws quite useful in eliminating pesky political opponents. It is a crime in France to “diminish” the Holocaust by not giving it the proper emphasis when speaking or writing about it. This ill-defined, subjective statute makes it easy to prosecute someone for the narrowest of reasons. Using this law, the French government has been able to prosecute political foes on the right (anti-immigrant politician Jean-Marie Le Pen), and the left (Ginette Skandrani, co-founder of France’s Green Party).

Advocates of anti-revisionist laws claim that these laws are needed in order to keep Holocaust skeptics from having an audience, yet in almost every case in which these laws have been enforced, they have only succeeded in giving the prosecuted revisionists a much greater audience than they otherwise would have had. Here is one example:

Chemist Germar Rudolf was an apolitical young doctoral student at the prestigious Max Planck Institute in Germany until, in 1993, he was hired by the defense team of a prosecuted German revisionist to prepare a chemical analysis report for the revisionist’s upcoming trial. In retaliation, the German government arrested Rudolf, froze his assets, seized his books and computer, and sentenced him to fourteen months imprisonment. No longer able to finish his degree or find work as a chemist, and facing massive legal expenses for his upcoming trial, Rudolf was forced to rely on sympathetic revisionists to raise money. Rudolf became a full-time revisionist writer, arguably the most qualified scientific professional the revisionist community has. So what good did his prosecution accomplish, other than to drive a young would-be chemist directly into the arms of the aging revisionist community, giving them a new, young, energetic, and academically qualified spokesperson?

The Germans are prosecuting Ernst Zündel for material he posted on his website while he was a legal resident of the United States. The German government’s legal theory is that even though Zündel’s writings were lawful in the country in which he was living, the fact that the Internet “brought” Zündel’s words into German “territory” therefore gives Germany jurisdiction to imprison him. Amazingly, the governments of the U.S. and Canada have supported Germany’s right to imprison Zündel for “speech crimes” that were not committed in Germany, and that were not crimes in the country in which Zündel was living. This is an exceptionally dangerous precedent.

It should be mentioned that Ernst Zündel faces up to ten years in prison (not counting the three years he’s already served: two years in Canada, in solitary confinement in a six-by-ten foot cell, and one year in Germany awaiting trial). Germar Rudolf, currently awaiting sentencing in Germany as well, also faces up to ten years. To put these sentences in context, Mounir el Motassadeq, who was convicted in 2005 for his role in the Al Qaeda “Hamburg cell” that carried out the 9/11 attacks, received only seven years.

When writers whose only “crimes” are Internet postings about history, controversial, offensive, or inaccurate they may be, face more prison time than a terrorist implicated in the murder of over three thousand people, something has gone terribly wrong.

The Bizarro World of the Zündel case is difficult to describe, because most people won’t believe you if you try. At the same time that Zündel was locked away in his tiny Toronto cell with no charge or trial, Canada had granted permanent residency and a teaching position to Léon Mugesera, the former Rwandan government official accused of having launched the Rwandan genocide of the early ’90s that cost an estimated 800,000 lives.

Roll that around in your head a moment. Zündel, whose crime was denying a previous genocide, was locked up. Mugesera, who caused a current genocide, was free. Zündel, never accused of anything but writing pamphlets, was in solitary. Mugesera, who called on Hutus to slaughter Tutsis, and who was wanted in his home country as a war criminal, was teaching in Quebec.

Make sense? There’s more. At the same time, it was revealed by the Toronto Sun that Grant Bristow, who had supposedly run a Canadian “white supremacy” organization in the ’90s, was actually a paid mole of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), who had been encouraged to harass and commit crimes against Canadian Jews in order to draw attention to “hate groups.” The CSIS was the organization that imprisoned Zündel.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International, in 2003, refused to intervene on Zündel’s behalf for being locked up with no charge or trial, while—at the exact same time—it took up the cause of suicide bombing advocate Ibrahim Alloush (who ran a website that encouraged Muslims to become “human bombs”), after Alloush was arrested in Jordan.

This needs to be spelled out, to properly express the insanity of it all. Zündel, a writer and denier of a genocide that happened when he was two years old, was imprisoned in solitary by the Canadian government. Mugesera, who created a genocide, was allowed to walk free by the Canadian government. The CSIS, which imprisoned Zündel admitting he’d never committed any acts of violence or harassment against Canadian Jews, was itself committing acts of violence and harassment against Canadian Jews through its paid mole Grant Bristow. And Amnesty International agreed that Zündel deserved to be locked away with no charge or trial for his Holocaust views, while at the same time fighting for the release of Ibrahim Alloush, who was trying to kill Jews now.

There’s an insanity here, and it boils down to how easily manipulated today’s Jews are on the Holocaust. Jews have become obsessed with the “war on revisionism,” and it creates an ethical blind spot that is at once alarming and embarrassing. I saw this insanity after I was outed. My Jewish (former) friends said I was worse than Hitler. Yes, that’s a quote from several of my Hollywood conservative friends. Worse than Hitler, in the same way that Zündel was “worse” than Mugesera and Alloush.

It’s an interesting phenomenon that I call the “We Love Dead Jews” principle. Long-dead Jews are beloved by the world. Jews living today, not so much. In France, you’ll go to prison for “insulting the memory” of dead Jews (from the Holocaust), but you can totally publish a book advocating the destruction of Israel. In Germany, “defaming the dead” is the actual law by which Holocaust revisionists are imprisoned. But go ahead and advocate killing every Jew in Israel. That’s allowed.

It’s no coincidence that some of the most anti-Israel European countries have the strongest anti-revisionism laws. It’s a ruse. And Jews fall for it. “Sure, they support Hamas and the ‘boycott and divest’ campaign, sure, they allow terror cells to thrive within their borders, and sure, they call Israelis war criminals and occupiers and barbarians. But if you dare revise anything about Auschwitz, they’ll put you in jail and throw away the key! What FRIENDS!”

The vilification of revisionists is all-too-often used by anti-Israel nations to prove they’re not anti-Semitic. It’s this warped sense of injustice, and my anger at Jews for allowing themselves to be gamed so easily, that led me to anonymously help imprisoned revisionists in the early 2000s. I’d do it again.

“Jewpiter the Clown.” Because who wouldn’t trust this guy as a Holocaust historian?

“Larry, I think this is the beginning of a mutable friendship.”

“No pictures at FOA events” (said Sinise as he realized that rule was totally being violated).

Me and former Rep. Thad McCotter, the André 3000 and Big Boi of GOP politics (“Outkast,” get it?).

These were daily headlines during the Zundel trials.

At Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1992.

A “bucket list” moment: shirtless at an event with a sitting congressman, a Reagan Administration official, and a Bush Administration official.

On the Donahue Show, lit with a special “Hepatitis C” lighting gel.

Fan art from one of my GOP friends.

Reason #1 why I stayed away from the Internet until 2001.

Frienemies forever: me and Mikey Shermer.

Me, Rosie, and Tipjar Mike, dressed as James Bond villains at a theme party (I was “Drax” from Moonraker).

A rarity – Jon Voight sober and thoughtful at an FOA event.

I was Budd Schulberg’s final collaborator…on a film he didn’t actually do.

It’s almost like Nick Searcy knew how much he’d regret being my friend and colleague.

My goal in life: giving GOP men the opportunity to see something new.

In politics, it’s never what you say, but how convincingly you point.

11.

THE SOUP NAZI CHANGES MY LIFE FOREVER

Fat Frank was true to his word regarding being my driver. I still had to pay for gas, but what the hell? It wasn’t my money that paid for the car, so I was okay with it.

With revisionism squarely behind me, and The Beast back in Michigan, married and with a kid, I felt this was truly a new beginning. Anything was possible. Plus, I was drinking a lot, which made even mundane matters much more fun.

Speaking of drinking, one of Fat Frank’s best friends was Larry Thomas, the actor who portrayed the iconic “Soup Nazi” character on Seinfeld. Larry relied on Frank much the same way I did. His alcoholism was so severe that his license had been suspended following a DUI in Burbank, in which—according to the judge—Soup Nazi had blown the highest level of blood alcohol in the city’s history. Larry got a “hard” suspension: he couldn’t even drive to work.

So Frank was his chauffer, too. The Soup Nazi being driven around in a car paid for by people who are often referred to as actual Nazis. Do I even have to point out yet another unappreciated irony?

Frank and I were working on a TV pilot and an indie film by day, and at night we’d pick up Larry from his court-ordered AA meeting for an evening of hard drinking. He was making the bulk of his money doing autograph shows ($20 for a signed “no soup for you” photo, $40 for a signed “no soup for you” ladle). When Larry was happy, he was a lot of fun to be with. But he was also a man wracked with rage. Rage over his divorce, rage over his career, rage over the fact that billionaire assholes Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David had refused to let him use the character when Progresso approached him with a half-million dollar contract in the ’90s.

There were two things that could quell Soup Nazi’s temper—the attention of pretty women, and booze. Hey, same here! What a fucking coincidence.

I’d received an invitation to attend a book-signing event at the legendary Hollywood hangout Boardners. And there would be free wine. When Frank, Soup Nazi, and I entered Boardners, we were frisked. The bouncers found Soupy’s flask (why wouldn’t he go to an AA meeting with a flask?). Very politely, they told him that they’d have to keep it up front until we left. Fine, right? What bars allow outside liquor?

Inside the event, I could see Soupy was getting angry. I’d known him long enough to recognize the tell-tale signs. Veins of rage popping in his forehead, arms folded in fury, deep, loud breaths of pure anger. I walked over to him.

“What’s the matter?”

“Those FUCKING bouncers are going to piss in my flask. I fucking KNOW it.”

“Larry, why would they do that? All they did was tell you it would be kept at the front of the bar until we left.”

“Those fucking assholes…I could see it in their eyes. They’re gonna piss in my flask and it’ll be a huge joke to them when they give it back to me.”

“Larry, the opening is the size of a pinhole. How could they even get their piss in there?”

“A funnel.”

“So, they carry around a funnel just to piss in people’s flasks.”

“Yes. Yes they do.”

To Larry, this made perfect sense.

Fat Frank and I stepped away to talk.

“Look, we have to get him his flask back. He’s just going to get angrier and angrier,” Frank said.

He was right. It was a sensible idea to subdue Larry’s rage. This is a guy who’s an expert martial artist, and when he gets angry, he gets punchy. And not the good kind of punchy. I mean “smash the window of his own car with his bare fist” kind of punchy (that had actually happened, before he lost his license).

Frank and I were in agreement. We needed to get Larry his flask and leave. And we needed to get him drunk and get some girls talking to him. But I was a little pissed myself. I mean, the whole point of coming to this event was the free wine. And now, because of neurotic Soup Nazi and his fucking flask, I’m going to have to go somewhere where I’ll have to pay to drink?

Fat Frank understood, and he proposed a compromise. Down the street on Hollywood Boulevard is a bar called The Room. With the financial stability that the money he swindled from Ingrid Zündel had brought him, Frank had been able to rent space in a real apartment (as opposed to the couch-surfing he had done his entire adult life up until that point). His roommate—the person who was actually renting the two-bedroom apartment—was a very talented young comic actress named De Anna Brooks. De Anna was bartending at The Room. We’d walk over there, she’d slip us some free drinks, we’d get Larry dunk, she’d talk to him (she was very cute), and Soup Nazi’s fury would be extinguished.

It was a plan.

It was also the decision that would alter my life forever. I can’t imagine what direction my life would have taken had we not gone to The Room that night. If I’d have known where things would eventually end up, I’d have called a cab and left.

Frank and I were both anxious to get to The Room. Inside, we saw De Anna at the bar. Her manager wasn’t around. Excellent—she won’t have to hide the free drinks. Sitting at the bar, talking to De Anna, was a young blonde. I couldn’t have cared less. We stepped to the bar. Frank took De Anna aside to explain the situation. She immediately began plying Larry with booze, and Larry was talking to the blonde. He was happy. Mission accomplished. Frank and I toasted each other. Now we could just enjoy the night.

No, blondie, don’t try to talk to me. You’re supposed to talk to Larry. See, Larry Thomas! The Soup Nazi! He’s famous. Go talk to him. All night I deflected the blonde’s attentions, to the point that I never even bothered to really look at her. At the end of the night, Soupy’s face of fury has been replaced by the face of a contented drunk. As we headed outside at closing time, blondie asked us all to exchange info. We did. And she was out of my mind the minute I got into Frank’s car.

Now why the fuck did I have a voicemail message from Blondie at 10 a.m. the next morning? Alright, well, before I call her back, I might as well look her up online and see who the hell she is. Turned out, “blondie” was Amanda Jordan, a well-known burlesque dancer with quite a following. And damn was she stunning. I’d never been in a burlesque club in my life. I’d never been in a strip club in my life. That lack of experience caused me to conflate the two. “Is she a stripper?” I wondered as I dialed her number.

She wasted no time.

“You wanna have lunch? Let’s have lunch!”

Damn, she’s quick.

At lunch, she bombarded me with loaded lines that even “I Am Sam” would have caught. “Wow, it must be so hard for a man as brilliant as you to find women he can actually talk to.” “If you’ve been Cole and Stein, what name would your children bear?” “I think I’m ovulating around you.” I can be dense, but I’m not that dense. This was the first young woman since The Beast who was really making an effort. A major effort. I was honored. And I felt nothing.

One of the things I detest about celebrated “manly man” writers like Hemingway and Chayefsky is that they’d write about their sexual impotence, as though anyone gave a shit. I never wanted to be that kind of guy. Oh, and I also never wanted to be impotent.

Amanda and I dated. I tried, I tried terribly hard to be, well, hard. We went to Vegas. We arrived late, and The Rio had given away our room, even though I’d already paid for it online. So, as good hotels do, they bumped us up. We got the honeymoon suite. Top floor, Jacuzzi, floor-to-ceiling windows, private elevator. And Amanda Jordan, one of the hottest and most desired women on earth.

I couldn’t lose.

Yes, of course I could. This was my first time trying to be with a woman since The Beast. I gave it my best shot. Amanda wasn’t on the pill, and every attempt we made to, um, “apply” a condom resulted in me going all gummy-worm. It was sad. I really did try my best. Finally, in a last attempt for this horny twenty-five-year-old girl to receive at least some bit of sexual pleasure, she pleaded, “cum on me, lover. Jerk off and cum on my chest.”

“Uh, nope, that ain’t gonna happen either. Let’s turn in.”

I was fully defeated. As I drifted off to sleep with Amanda in my arms, I began wondering if I should look into Viagra. But, from what I’d read, it can damage your vision, and my vision was already so bad—and way more necessary to my life than sex—that I decided it wasn’t worth it.

By the way, I only mention the impotence thing because it was going to factor into the worst decision I ever made in my life—the decision that would eventually lead to my personal destruction and the writing of this book.

Amanda had dreams of being more than a burlesque dancer. She wanted to be an actress (wow, how novel). I’d promised Amanda I’d help her with a short film she wanted to do. A friend of hers, a prominent horror film director, had promised her that if she could complete a twenty-minute short, he’d include it in his upcoming horror anthology, which would star the likes of Robert Loggia, Jeremy Irons, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers legend Kevin McCarthy. Amanda would star, but we needed to cast two additional roles. Fat Frank would direct.

Frank and I spent several days opening submissions from actors for Amanda’s film. On day two we opened Paulie’s. Paulie Rojas—a Mexican-American Audrey Hepburn. Stunning beyond belief, and too young to legally drink. A theater student at USC, she had submitted to Amanda’s film even though none of the parts really fit her. I admired that.

“Dude, we HAVE to see her,” Frank beamed.

“We’re not going to do that, Frank. She’s wrong for the part. It would be a waste of her time.”

“Yeah, but she’s beautiful! And she’s from Mexico! I’m from Mexico! I want to meet her.”

“Buddy, you’re technically old enough to be her dad. Let it go.”

But Fat Frank didn’t let it go. He called her in to audition, and I was so incensed that I sat in on the session to monitor everything that was said. This was an audition, not a dating service. Frank behaved, because I was there. When she was leaving, I felt guilty. Frank had wasted her time, for his own pleasure. I wanted to see if there was something I could do to make the experience worth her while. She’d told me she had no acting reel. I offered to edit one, free of charge.

In a rather surprising turn of events, Paulie and I became best friends. I credit my impotence, because I felt nothing for her sexually. Paulie had no guys in her life like that. Everyone was after her in some way. But for us, it was all innocent fun (well, except for all the alcohol consumption). She introduced me to her college roommate Natalie Miston, another stunning young actress, and we had one hell of a fun platonic threesome. Dinners out, road trips, karaoke, heavy drinking, and more drinking still.

Paulie was not just a good actress, but an exceptional one. In her senior year at USC, she was awarded the highest honor presented annually to a member of the BFA program—the Ava Greenwald Memorial Award. The judges who handed out the award that year included actor Joe Mantegna and April Webster, the biggest casting director in the industry. Before Paulie even received her diploma, talent agencies were fighting over her.

I enjoyed helping Paulie with her career, because she had such tremendous potential. But the most important thing to me was the personal bond. I couldn’t recall anyone I’d ever had that much fun with. After the revisionism years, the Sarah years, and The Beast years, it was wonderful to be able to do nothing but laugh and drink and dance with such a close friend. There’d be times we’d laugh until we could barely breathe. And, if Paulie would overdo it a bit on the drinking for her tiny ninety-pound body, and such overdoing would indeed occasionally happen, she could always count on me to sit in bed with her as she slept, holding her hand and not wanting anything else.

Paulie came from a very wealthy Mexico City family. Her grandfather, Roberto Caňedo, was a legendary actor from Mexico’s golden age of cinema, and her father was one of the most brilliant men I’d ever met. He helped run Mexico’s largest political polling organization. Paulie’s older sister and younger brother were equally bright. During times when my own family was out of town, I’d spend Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Years at Paulie’s folks’ place.

For almost two years, this was my life. These were fun times. But everything was about to change, and very much for the worse. The chain of events—Soup Nazi gets pissed over his flask, I meet Amanda, I agree to cast her film, and I meet Paulie—was about to lead someplace really unpleasant.

12.

THE RED DEVIL

Part of me wishes I’d feigned illness to avoid going to Paulie’s senior showcase that night in spring 2007. But since it was the most important night of her college years, the night that the graduating theater majors strut their stuff for friends and family, I doubt I could have forced myself to miss it, even if I’d known what it would bring into my life.

Natalie and I showed up at the theater a good hour early. There would be wine, but not until after the show. That was okay—I was not yet at the point where I am now, having to be drunk all the time. I could wait.

Keith Carradine was there, too. His daughter was a classmate of Paulie’s. I got to tell him about my obsession with Emperor of the North, and my belief that his role on Deadwood was a career re-inventing moment for him. He was gracious, ably hiding the fact that he didn’t give a shit about my flattery.

As Carradine walked away, I was struck by a vision. A six-foot-tall redhead with an amazingly big smile. I didn’t want to look away, but I had to. “Politeness Parrot” or “Manners Manatee” or “Etiquette Eel” or one of those idiotic anthropomorphic animal “educational” characters they threw at us in elementary school in the ’70s had always instructed, “staring is rude.”

Maybe it was “Courtesy Cow.” I don’t remember. But I recalled the lesson. Staring is rude.

But I couldn’t look away. She was just…gorgeous. I had to show some self-discipline. Whoever she was, it was none of my business. I was there for Paulie.

Natalie and I took our seats in the theater. Paulie was magnificent as always. Such a fine, fine actress. So young, so talented. And the audience had its share of industry scouts. At that moment, I would have wagered my entire life savings that Paulie would be the “next big thing.”

After the show, everyone adjourned to the lobby again. Ah, wine! Paulie came into the lobby; lots of hugs and congratulations. Maybe ten minutes later, the redhead came over. Paulie brought Red right past the other girls, to me. “David, this is Rosie.”

I struggled for a moment to recall the name. “Oh, Rosie, the girl you went to India and Thailand with last summer.”

Rosie Tisch was several years older than Paulie. She wasn’t part of our circle. In fact, I got the vibe that that exclusion was on purpose, and the only reason she’d accompanied Paulie on the trip to India and Thailand was that she could afford to (like Paulie, her family was well-off).

Rosie was a USC theater grad. She was going on and on about everything she’d heard about me, and all I could think about was that I seemed, against all odds, to be getting an erection. To me, this was big news. Startling, even.

We exchanged numbers. Rosie had been told that I was an ace at helping actors with their careers: finding agents, getting managers, handling websites, etc. She wanted to keep in touch. When I got home that night, I looked her up on Paulie’s MySpace friends list, and I saw that she had a boyfriend. And not just any boyfriend. Imagine a combination of Brad Pitt, Paul Bunyon, raw, distilled machismo, and sensitive guitar playing.

That was Jack. The dude was a midwestern lumberjack who looked like he could punch a tree in the air, Popeye-style, and it would come down as neatly-stacked cordwood. I imagined that his fishing trips consisted merely of him staring into the water until the fish obediently jumped into the boat.

In short, I said to myself, “fuck this, I can’t compete with Macho McGee.” And I made the effort to forget about Rosie. And I did. For, like, a week.

In between punching cows into ready-to-eat steaks, Jack had served notice to Rosie. He was done. He was leaving L.A. He gave her an ultimatum: she’d either have to abandon her acting dreams and follow him back to whatever godforsaken Frances-McDormand-from-Fargo town he came from, or it was bye-bye. Rosie was devastated. As Paulie told me, nothing bad had ever happened to her. Her life had been so charmed that her nickname at USC had been “Princess Rosie.” It was a running joke that bluebirds would dress her every morning. No family member of hers had ever died in her lifetime, and she grew up on what could only be described as an enchanted estate in Valley Center, a forest community near San Diego.

And now, for the first time, she knew sadness. And she was not handling it well. Granted, she was only twenty-five. But by the time I was twenty-five, I’d had my heart broken more times than I can recall, plus—you know—getting beaten up, threatened, bounty on the head, all that crap. The thing is, as I would come to understand later, it was not the loss of LumberJack per se that upset her. Rosie would turn out to be the least sexually interested woman I’d ever met. It was that he chose something over her. He left her. That, she couldn’t stand.

Paulie was the only one of the girls in the circle who liked Rosie. Natalie, who had known mainly struggle and loss in her life, was not a Rosie fan. And she let me know it. She warned me, repeatedly, about this person. And I, true to form, just had to learn certain lessons on my own.

Paulie would bring Rosie over to my place with increasing frequency. She told me that Rosie loved food—food was the only way to cheer her up. Lots of food. Massive plates of food. I was skeptical.

“Food? Are you serious? She’s so rail thin, I could chuck her like a fucking javelin.”

“Believe me,” Paulie said, “she can pack it away like nobody I’ve ever known. Her metabolism is insane.”

The first time I decided to put Paulie’s “food cures Rosie’s ills” recommendation to the test, I took the girls to my favorite “conveyor belt sushi” restaurant in Brentwood. The sushi sails by you on a little conveyor belt, and you grab what you want as it goes by. A neat little gimmick—something I first encountered in Tokyo. Rosie had been crying over LumberJack, and she learned a very important lesson that night, which was that I don’t like to see women cry. I told her the entire restaurant was hers: “just keep eating away until you’re done,” I said.

By the time Rosie was done, the conveyor belt was barren and the sushi chefs were calling it a night. Like Homer Simpson at the all-you-can-eat fish restaurant, the staff had thrown in the towel; this person was a bottomless pit.

Rosie and I started hanging out more and more. Soon, it was every day. She needed career help, sure. What young actress doesn’t? She’d had the chance to go to Milan as a teenager to pursue modeling in the big leagues, but she’d turned it down. Her sheltered, spoiled childhood had made her hesitant to leave the “enchanted forest” where she grew up. She wanted to get her acting degree. Her folks paid her way into USC, and her dad—a top administrator at the San Diego VA—even got her a totally unwarranted handicapped placard so she could park anywhere on campus (to be fair, if they had accurate names the streets off campus would be called Murder Avenue, Aggravated Assault Drive, and Stranger Rape Lane).

Now at twenty-five, Rosie had come to realize her error. She should have become a top model first, and then segued into acting. Her six-foot height made casting difficult, as most male actors tend to be shorter than that.

A few days after we started hanging out, she brought me to her place. Of course, it was a Brentwood penthouse, nineteenth floor, ocean view. What else should I have expected? Daddy paid for her share of the rent, and her roommate paid the rest.

I became close to Rosie for two reasons. One is that I was relieved to know that my feelings of sexual excitement for a woman could return. It’s kind of a big deal, once you’ve experienced impotence. And the other, I’d say larger, reason was that the more I got to know her, and the more I heard stories from Paulie and Natalie about her, the more I became fascinated with the fact that she’s, well—and there’s no delicate way of saying this—evil. Calculating, devious, and as smart as a whip. She would tell me that if she hadn’t been a model, she’d have been a lawyer. She missed her true calling. I’m not a half-stupid guy, but I could never win an argument with her. That, too, turned me on. I felt I had met my match.

As I met Rosie’s extended circle of friends, I realized that none of them liked her. In case I had thought that the stories about her that Paulie and Natalie told were merely the products of feminine jealousy, they were confirmed to me by her male friends as well.

In Rosie I saw a reflection of myself—calculating, yes. Needy, yes (but in different ways). The difference was that I’d seen much more of life than she had. I’d come to create my own standards of when it’s okay to exploit a situation, or a person, and when it isn’t.

Another similarity was that Rosie and I both enjoyed sexual self-gratification. Rosie wasn’t terribly fond of having relations with anybody except Rosie. And I wasn’t exactly looking to push the sexual envelope with her, either. The story of “Amanda and the Flaccid Dick” still weighed heavy on my mind. Rosie turned me on, sure, but I wasn’t looking for a repeat of the Amanda situation. Frankly, I was just grateful for the boner.

Before long, there wasn’t a day we weren’t spending together. Rosie would cost me $200 a day, minimum. Most of that was food. But there were also the things that daddy wouldn’t pay for, like hair extensions, car repairs, parking tickets, new outfits, plane trips and hotel expenses for modeling gigs that didn’t cover them, and acting expenses. Dear God, the acting expenses. Headshots, demo reels, and mailings to agencies. Rosie was pissed that she couldn’t get into SAG. That brought back memories of Sarah, and how her exclusion from SAG helped demoralize and depress her. Rosie and I found a corrupt casting director in Santa Monica who was selling SAG vouchers for an exorbitant amount. I’ve never bought drugs in my life, so this was the closest to an “illegal back-alley deal” I’d ever come. Cash payments. For three weeks straight. More money than I care to say. Thousands and thousands of dollars. But it worked. She was now union.

I also paid her way into AFTRA. Not in a back alley, though. A retarded donkey could get into AFTRA if it clopped up to the head office with an envelope of cash strapped to its saddle.

Little good any of this did for her career. There are too many short-guy actors. Most are my size. Stand ’em next to a woman who’s six feet tall without shoes, and they look like a Dinklage. I could toss money around left and right…it didn’t help.

If I was throwing money at Rosie, I was spending it wisely on Paulie. I organized and helped fund a Spanish-language film specifically designed to show off her skills to the Mexican film market (all of Paulie’s previous credits were English-language). It was the only time I’d ever put my own money in a film, and it was worth it. Paulie was electrifying. She won best actress and we won best film at several festivals.

But things were unraveling. Rosie was jealous that I was “wasting” my money on Paulie. Paulie was jealous that Rosie now had the overwhelming bulk of my time. Surprisingly, being surrounded by twenty-something girls resulted in drama. There’s absolutely no way I could have foreseen that. I mean, what am I, Einstein or something?

Paulie, Rosie, Natalie, and I went to Vegas for my thirty-ninth birthday. Rosie’s parents, smarting from the recession and grateful for the relief they were getting with my financial support of their daughter, let us use their time-share at the Polo Towers on The Strip. It was one of many times Rosie’s parents would do me that kindness. Waking up on the afternoon of my birthday, I was greeted by the finest sight that any man has ever had the privilege of seeing.

The girls presented me with a gift—a large framed collage of all the times we’d had together over the years. I was genuinely moved. We spent the week seeing shows, getting drunk, and having fun. This would pretty much be the last time there’d be peace in the group.

Paulie was jealous of Rosie always getting so much more attention. Rosie was jealous of Paulie’s skyrocketing acting career (which, to be fair, was giving Paulie a big head). It became clear that they were going to make me choose. Paulie was like a sister to me, and the best drinking buddy I ever had, but Rosie was the like-minded evil genius, and we felt the kind of kinship that supervillains do when they hang out together.

I met Rosie’s old roommate, who’d known her since she was a teen. He confirmed that she’d always been a malevolent force. Once, when he had to go to the hospital due to what would turn out to be a serious neurological disease, she’d abandoned him without a ride. When his tremors became more severe, she wouldn’t allow him to be seen when her model friends came over to their apartment, lest her attractive pals be forced to lay eyes on a defective inferior.

He flat-out warned me—get away while you still can.

I ignored him.

Over the next few months, Rosie continued to do what she could to make sure the “Paulie problem” went away. Her machinations included following me, Paulie, and Paulie’s mom to Vegas when I wanted to treat them to a trip to repair our frayed friendship. Showing up unwanted and unwelcome, Rosie trailed us until Paulie snapped at her and made her cry, leading to me being in that most cinematic of moments—follow the crying woman I’m attracted to, or stay with the good friend who made her cry. I chose unwisely. After that ill-fated trip, things were never the same. I knew my time with Paulie had passed. The last text I ever got from her read, “I’m sorry I’m not Rosie.”

September 2008 Rosie threw me a huge fortieth birthday party, on the condition that Paulie not be invited. No worries—she wouldn’t have come anyway.

To her credit, Rosie threw me a hell of a birthday bash. A full banquet, magicians doing close-up magic, and Emilee doing a striptease and lap dance for me. But the best part of the night was that my birthday ended up making Oliver Stone furious.

Anything that messes up Oliver Stone’s day is a good thing. And that my fortieth could bring just a little annoyance to that overrated conspiracy-mongering hack was a better gift than all the booze I got. I had hired Stone’s son, Sean, to direct a featurette for me. Sean Stone, who inherited his mom’s good looks and his dad’s batshit craziness, had directed the featurettes for most of his dad’s DVDs, and when I met him he was twenty-three years old and looking to do a project that wasn’t related to his father.

I liked Sean, but he’s fucking crazy. Worse than his dad. He’d ramble about demons, UFOs, the “Illuminati,” Bigfoot, Morlocks, teleportation, lizard aliens, and rabbis controlling the world from a bunker under Jerusalem. But he was a nice kid and he brought an incredibly expensive bottle of whiskey to my party, so rant away you crazy fuck.

As night turned to morning, and as the party had dissolved into a mass orgy of bodies piled on Rosie’s bed, Sean was so busy getting blown by one of my incredibly drunk female friends that he totally forgot that he parked in a 6 a.m. towing spot on Wilshire Boulevard. After sleeping off the BJ, he awoke to see, from Rosie’s nineteenth floor window, that his car was gone.

He had to call daddy to tell him that he was stranded and the car was gone, all on account of blowjobs. You could hear Oliver’s angry voice on the other end. It was a thing of beauty.

“You stupid sonofabitch! I buy you a fucking car and you let it get towed because you’re too busy getting your dick sucked, and now I have to send a fucking car to pick your stupid ass up? What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

No present—no present—could have given me more pleasure than envisioning Oliver Stone’s fat red face exploding in anger over his son’s irresponsibility.

Sean would clumsily try to have sex with several of my female friends over the next year, but through a combination of his incompetence (he actually tried the “yawning and stretching arms” technique on one young lady, and I thought that only happened in the movies) and his absolute batshit craziness, he managed to strike out every time.

In 2012, Sean traveled to Iran and converted to Islam. The Iranian government paraded him around like Moonshine, King of the Monkeys, using him as a propaganda tool against America (“big time Hollywood director’s son embraces Islam and Iran, hates Israel”). My buddy Mark Tapson at David Horowitz’s FrontPage Mag wanted to eviscerate him in a column, but I asked Mark to take it easy. “Sean’s as Muslim as Porky pig,” I told him. “He’s not any religion, he’s not any ideology; he’s just insane. He’s a spoiled rich borderline schizo.”

Mark, as decent a man as I’ve ever known, heeded my advice and held off.

Later that year, Sean appeared on Iranian TV and denounced American women as “whores.” I called him on it, emailing him with a question: if American women are whores, what can be said of men who take advantage of them in a drunken state? “It takes two to get a blowjob from a drunk party chick, buddy. At least the last time I checked,” I wrote. He defriended me and blocked me on Facebook.

I guess Iran really is the right place for him, after all.

13.

ALONE AGAIN, UNNATURALLY

Now began what I call the “codependent phase.” I’ve never liked the word “codependent” (too pop psychology for me), but I guess there’s no other way to describe it. Rosie had driven away all of her college girlfriends, my good friend Deb had gotten married and moved away, and I had severed ties with Fat Frank after he stole five hundred dollars from me (by collecting on one of my debts in my name and keeping the money).

I had Rosie, and she had me. I had my own personal fashion model, and she had a walking ATM. We really did enjoy each other’s company, I think, but it was not nearly as exciting as you might expect. Sure, with her in tow, I could get into any club on earth, but we never went clubbing, just eating. Eating, eating, eating. That’s all she ever wanted to do. On the bright side, she was politically conservative much the same way I am (not in a “religious right” way), so she enjoyed (well, “appreciated”) my diatribes. And the fact is, I do enjoy the sound of my own voice (I mean, someone on this planet has to), so the daily Rosie feedings—her stuffing her face, me yakking away—weren’t altogether unpleasant.

We went to Vegas frequently, usually staying at the timeshare. We took a helicopter ride through the Grand Canyon, spent some time at a new Indian casino and resort in Palm Springs (where my friend was entertainment director), but mainly it was daily feedings.

But she was loyal. As long as the money flowed, she wouldn’t leave. Several times, I decided I needed a breather from the routine, and every time, there she was, begging me to come back. Since I’m trying to be as honest as I can in this book, I’ll freely admit, I liked that part of it. After two years of The Beast’s emotional craziness, I considered this a better bad situation.

I’ll cop to another thing—we had an agreement, Rosie and I, that the money would stop flowing if she found another guy. Now, I can intellectually defend that agreement. I doubt any man would want to financially support another man’s girlfriend. But I fully realized the subtle coerciveness. Rosie would never give up the money. Essentially, I had taken her off the market. Even though in her modeling gigs she mixed with guys way more handsome than I (a few of them actually straight), she understood the repercussions of fooling around with someone else.

We tried a separation of sorts. In mid-2008, she met a tragically handsome six-foot-six broke fashion model/actor. She told me she wanted to give him a shot. So I walked away. Guess how long she was able to stick it out with pretty-boy-wonder? About a month of Taco Bell and McDonalds later, she was back. To put it tastelessly, my money was my dick, and her stomach was her vagina, and I was stretching it to outsized proportions so that no other man could ever satisfy her.

I gained a new dependent when Rosie’s half-sister Julia moved to L.A. Julia had Rosie’s face, but whereas Rosie was a tall, rail-thin, redheaded glutton, Julia was average height and curvy, with jet black hair and an aversion to food (owing to her tendency to put on weight). Julia had gained some level of fame as a well-respected country-rock singer. Her band, Married by Elvis, toured with Blake Shelton, and for a while was doing quite well in Nashville.

But there’s something about the women in that family. Rosie and Julia shared the same mom. The mom’s maiden name is “von Zumwalt” (I think that’s Irish). After Julia’s dad blew his brains out, mama von Zumwalt married a wealthy guy several decades her senior, and they had Rosie. Julia ended up marrying a wealthy Jewish guy several decades her senior. You may be sensing a pattern here.

As Rosie was spending my money on food and her acting career, Julia was blowing through her husband’s money on clothes, nightlife, and her music career. She hired famed Nashville music video director Glenn Sweitzer to do a video for her single “Longneck Gamble.” Sweitzer is one of the biggest in the biz; from Tim McGraw and Keith Urban to Kelly Clarkson and LeAnn Rimes, Sweitzer was the go-to guy for country and country-rock videos. And his services did not come cheap. The von Zumwalt girls exacerbated the situation by using the video as an excuse to fly out every damn one of their childhood friends to Nashville to be extras. The result was a disturbingly mediocre video.

Still, the gals had fun, and Rosie left Nashville after the shoot to join me and her mom in Vegas. Fun times. It’s always fun and games until the Jew’s money runs out.

Julia’s lavish Nashville lifestyle had bankrupted her husband, and the once-proud businessman had to sell both of his houses and live in a handyman’s shack in the parents’ “enchanted forest.” And Rosie’s parents were themselves slowly going bankrupt. As the recession came on full-force, the parents had a clear understanding of one thing—if not for my daily support of Rosie, they’d be living in a shack themselves. To their credit, they expressed their gratitude regularly, not just by letting me use their Vegas timeshare, but by sending me baskets of home-grown enchanted fruit, bushels of enchanted nuts and berries, and boxes of enchanted ties, socks, shirts, and hats.

I liked the mom a lot. Whenever she was up in L.A., I would take her and Rosie to dinner. The mom was a very sweet person, but easily bulldozed by the girls, especially Julia, who had learned to use her biological father’s suicide to her advantage by threatening to off herself whenever she didn’t get her way (this would never be a Rosie tactic—everyone who knows her knows she’s way too narcissistic to ever harm herself).

Rosie’s parents told Julia they’d continue to support her if she got a “real” job. So while Julia was in L.A., my job, along with buying her dinners and lunches (which wasn’t so bad, as she eats like a bird), was to use my considerable skills at deception to fabricate a work history for her so that the previous five years of her resume didn’t consist solely of “moderately-successful country rock star.” Several fake “corporate” websites and forged letters of recommendation later, and Julia was back in the workforce.

By the end of 2008, I was finding my routine stifling. Wake up, get food with Rosie, drink heavily, go to sleep. It was boring as hell. Rosie wasn’t even turning me on anymore. It had become a deadly dull routine. I needed something new. I had become infuriated with the political direction the U.S. took that year, and the fawning worship of a totally unqualified presidential candidate (to be fair, I don’t think any Republican could have won in 2008, with the severity of the recession at the time). And this unqualified left-wing nanny-statist had a “super-majority” in the Senate.

Maybe it was time to turn my talents to politics. Over the years, I had written about two dozen conservative Op-Eds for the L.A. Times, which—if you know the Times—is like getting an insulting cartoon of Mohammed in the Tehran Daily. The Times despises conservatives, and my success at writing things that even they couldn’t pass up was something I was quite proud of.

I’d never written under my own name. I used my revolving series of pseudonyms, including Cal Tinbergen (lengthened to “Caleb” to avoid Google recognition of the movie character), Christopher Cole, and Marlon Mohammed, a crackhead who stole $200 and a camera tripod from me in high school before dying in a gutter. I collected on his debt by co-opting his name for several Op-Eds that I knew the Times would only run if they came from a black Muslim. In one Op-Ed, following 9/11, “Marlon” argued that Muslims ought to shut up about their hurt feelings over being “profiled” and fight the terrorists and murderers in their midst (the people whose actions in the name of Islam lead to ordinary Muslims being profiled and getting their delicate feelings hurt). One of “Marlon’s” Op-Eds was, in fact, credited with launching the group “Muslims Against Terror” in the immediate wake of 9/11.

Another pseudonymous piece in which I raked the NAACP over the coals inspired a segment of the Jim Lehrer NewsHour show on PBS, a segment on CNN, a chapter in the Bernie Goldberg book Bias, and an entire episode of the Leeza Gibbons show, in which the leading members of Hollywood’s politically correct racist wing (Danny Glover, Edward James Olmos, and Anne-Marie Johnson) came out to attack the piece. One of Tinbergen’s pieces advocating the merciless bombing of Afghanistan after 9/11 was distributed to members of Congress by a conservative group, and one of Chris Cole’s pieces was singled out for public scorn by jobless loser (I mean, “performance artist”…sorry, I get those terms confused) John Fleck.

In all of the above cases, I could take no public pleasure from those victories. Nor could I cash any of the checks from the Times. Maybe it was time to start being political in my own name. Well, one of my own names. Well, the name I was living under at the time, even though I still couldn’t cash checks made out to it. It gets unnecessarily complicated, doesn’t it?

I still had one more Holocaust feature to complete.

Nuremberg was the most entertaining clusterfuck I’d ever had the pleasure and severe misfortune of being involved with. Even Rosie didn’t emerge from it unscathed, as the project would ultimately lead to her being roughed up by the violent niece of one of America’s finest screenwriters. Sadly, I was not present to see Rosie knocked on her ass by a fat lady. And that may very well be my biggest regret regarding the film.

Nuremberg started innocently enough. In 2005, burlesque dancer Amanda and I were in Vegas for NATPE (the annual convention of TV production executives). We were there to promote her, as an actress. She was, objectively speaking, really, really bad at acting.

She and I were speaking to a distributor of documentaries, and I happened to mention a few of my “safe” Holocaust films. He’d heard of one—the one that had the “gas chamber” footage in it—the footage I believed was real, but which Raye Farr at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum suggested was a Soviet fake.

Farr was like me, an opportunist. I hate to say it, but the Holocaust field is full of them. It comes from the fact, as I discussed earlier, that everything is generally taken uncritically. People’s tendency to suspend skepticism and criticism when shown “Holocaust remembrance” materials has led to the field becoming a Petri dish for opportunists. I alerted Farr to the gas chamber footage in 1995, and by 1996 she was breathlessly promoting the film that contained the gas chamber segment—a 1946 documentary called Nuremberg, directed by noted Depression-era filmmaker Pare Lorentz (a man often referred to as “FDR’s filmmaker” for his role in directing pro-New Deal documentaries).

In June ’97, the L.A. Times ran a piece about the “discovery” of Nuremberg, and how important it is that the film be seen (concerns about fabricated Soviet footage had mysteriously vanished from the discussion). Needless to say, I jumped on that bandwagon too, selling Nuremberg during my post-Sarah “playing both sides” days. But prior to that, back when I had integrity, when I was trying to determine if the gassing footage was genuine, I’d contacted Lorentz’s widow Elizabeth. She told me that the film was taken away from her husband by the Truman administration, and that he never had a chance to complete it as he wanted. We spoke for several hours. She told me her husband’s plans for the finished film to the best of her recollection

Cut to 2005. Amanda and I are at NATPE, and the documentary film distributor says almost offhandedly, “Why don’t you restore Nuremberg, David? Why don’t you do the things that Lorentz wanted to do in 1946?”

Ca-CHING! Shit, why hadn’t I thought of that? Ain’t that always the case? You get so distracted by the blonde pot-smoking lapsed-Mormon burlesque dancer, you forget there’s a sixty-year-old World War II film you could be exploiting.

My mind was racing, but Amanda was still my priority. Then the limp dick episode happened, we went our separate ways, and I was like, “Oh, shit, right…exploiting Nuremberg. Totally gotta do that.”

Fat Frank got Whoopi Goldberg to commit to narrating the restored “Nuremberg.” I sent his obese sweaty ass to New York to get the papers signed (Whoopi never flies). Whoopi, bless her heart, didn’t want money (you know, ’cuz it’s a Holocaust film). But she did have one request: that we bring on as co-producer her friend, alternately described as either a cousin or a “money manager,” who had (courtesy of her) a nice little office on the lot at Paramount.

So now it was off to find the money. I arranged a bunch of meetings with potential money people. I wasn’t comfortable with any of them. There was the Persian millionaire in Brentwood…he’d be a pain to work with (“Persian millionaire” is like “rabid cheetah spraying skunk juice out of its ass,” in that, you really, really want to stay clear). There was the German horror-movie producer who I soon found out was a con-artist trying to exploit the project for his own gain. Fuck you, Gunther. If anyone’s going to exploit this film, it’s gonna be a Jew.

There was the millionaire in the Hollywood Hills who said he’d only fund the film if it involved S&M. There was the Burbank production company that existed solely to raise money for films that never got made (magnificent bastards). And there was the son of a major TV mogul who had done so much cocaine, he had no septum left (he loved showing it off in public by passing a napkin from one nostril to the other).

I was approached by Warners Independent, the now-defunct “indie film” arm of Warner Bros. They wanted the film. The interested parties at Warners were the Sloane brothers, Devin and Lance, two diminutive siblings who had been rewarded with prime space on the lot, sandwiched between the offices of Christopher Nolan and Clint Eastwood, because they owned a “screenplay” called Yucatan, which was written by Steve McQueen (“Cancer” Steve McQueen,” not “Slavery” Steve McQueen). Before he died, McQueen had been working on Yucatan as a starring vehicle for himself. I put “screenplay” in quotes because it wasn’t so much a screenplay as a collection of storyboards, paintings, cartoons, and I think there was some macaroni art in there too.

And Warners wanted it. So the Brothers Sloane got a guarantee of funding for any other projects they brought in. Their office was small, though. There was only room for one couch, which I occupied alone, me and my empty briefcase (it’s always good to make them think you have “important” documents with you). So one Sloane sat in an office chair, and the other sat on the exercise bike by the wall. That’s the image that sticks with me from the first meeting—the Sloane on the bike, his tiny legs dangling in the air. His dangling legs made him look like a pixie, I thought. A paunchy little pixie dangling in midair. These are the things that go through my mind when a major studio is trying to make a deal with me.

In the end, even with all of their sweet talk and toadying, I passed. Too many cooks. Too many short men. There was only room for one diminutive profiteer on Nuremberg.

The failure of all those damnable pitch meetings, and the growing annoyance I felt with Whoopi’s deadweight “cousin,” soured me on the idea of Nuremberg. Once I was with Rosie, the very idea of ever again putting myself through pitch meeting hell repulsed me. And then in 2007 came an unexpected July 4th email from Tom Meyers, executive director of the Ft. Lee Film Commission. For those of you who don’t know, Ft. Lee, New Jersey, was the birthplace of American film. All the old silents were shot there until the business moved west. So the Ft. Lee Film Commission was kind of a big deal. It held large-scale events every year. And Meyers was interested in screening the restored Nuremberg.

The Fort Lee Film Commission is honoring Academy Award winning filmmaker Budd Schulberg on November 1–2, 2007 at a film festival and awards dinner here in Fort Lee. We hope to screen a number of his films throughout the fall leading up to the awards dinner as a way to promote his wonderful body of work over the decades. Perhaps this festival would be a way for you to promote the release of your updated Nuremberg film. Please contact us if you would be interested in using our organization/events as a way to promote your film.

Well paint my ass red and call me “lucky baboon,” that was a stroke of luck. Meyers had it wrong—it wasn’t Budd Schulberg, legendary Academy Award-winning screenwriter of On the Waterfront, Face in the Crowd, A Star is Born, and The Harder They Fall (and author of the seminal Hollywood satire novel, What Makes Sammy Run) who wrote Nuremberg; it was his brother Stuart (who was mainly known for having produced the Today show on NBC in the 1960s and ’70s).

Were these Ft. Lee people really that dumb, to mistake one Schulberg for the other? Or were they trying to be crafty, as Stuart was long-dead but Budd was still alive, in his ’90s, and living near Ft. Lee? Budd they could tout as their honored VIP guest. Stuart, not so much (well, they could still bring him on stage, but there’d be a godawful stench).

What the fuck did I care. I was benefiting from a fortuitous mistake, or from a scam. Either way, the bank of life had just made an unexpected deposit in my account. I now had a venue to show Nuremberg, and I could promise potential investors the VIP treatment at the film commission event and a shared stage with a Hollywood legend.

I went back to the one guy from my months of pitching who was well-connected enough, and dim enough, to let me use him to get the money (the “look ma no septum” guy described earlier). He hooked me up with a gratingly annoying woman in New York who in turn hooked me up with a gratingly annoying woman in New Jersey. That woman was the ex-wife of actor Paul Sorvino. Together, this woman, her boyfriend, and two of their friends pooled their money to give me what I needed—more than I needed, in fact—for the Nuremberg restoration.

I spoke regularly by phone to Budd Schulberg. Still very sharp at 93 years of age, he seemed appropriately baffled that he was being honored for Nuremberg. He knew it was his brother’s film. But what the hell, right? He’s ancient, I’m detached, the Ft. Lee Film Commission gets Budd Schulberg, and the investors get to be the toast of the screening. Where’s the downside? You know, other than the fact it was all a huge lie.

But hey, I tried truth from 1989 through 1995, and folks didn’t like it. This kind of shit is way more popular.

Sorvino’s ex-wife was a pain in the ass. But she was in Jersey, far, far away. The daily, sometimes hourly phone calls were an annoyance, but worse were the frequent “artistic suggestions” she’d make. All of my previous investors had been passive. This woman was aggressive.

“You know what we oughta do, Dave? We oughta make ‘Nuremboig’ a silent film. Just images and music.”

“But…it’s a courtroom drama. It’s footage of the trial. Without words, the film loses most of its impact.”

“Yeah, but dere’s never been a silent Hawlacawst musical befaw. It would really stand out.”

(To myself) “Yes, it would…like the elephant man’s tumorous dick.”

I quickly edited together a test reel of the “silent musical Hawlacawst” concept. Hell, it’s her money (well, her boyfriend’s, but she brokered the deal). As I was editing it I couldn’t stop laughing at the idea of Budd Schulberg at the screening, watching this monstrosity and screaming, “What da fuck am I watching? A musical? Who’s da retard responsible for dis?”

I had put together a great team of musicians to record our original score. I laid down a few completed tracks over the courtroom dialogue scenes, and sent it to Jersey. Some people just have to see a dumb idea in action to comprehend how dumb it is. The “silent musical Hawlacawst film” idea was shelved.

The screening in Ft. Lee went beautifully. Schulberg was there, perplexed but enjoying being in front of a big adoring crowd. The investors were pleased. Being well-connected in Joisey, they went about seeking other venues at which the film could be screened. Sorvino’s ex had a connection to the Garden State Film Festival, a very big film festival in Guido-land, co-founded by dead degenerate actor Robert Pastorelli. I always found it somehow appropriate that one of Jersey’s biggest film festivals was founded by a druggie and apparent murderer (Pastorelli pumped himself full of drugs and died after learning that he was the suspect in his girlfriend’s murder).

But girlfriend-shooting and drug-overdoses aside, the festival had grown in stature, attracting impressive industry names, including Glenn Close, James Gandolfini, Bruce Springsteen, Clarence Clemons, Lainie Kazan, and Kurtwood Smith. The former Mrs. Sorvino told me that the fix was in—since we were bringing Schulberg, the festival director had assured us that we’d win best feature-length documentary, and best musical score.

The New Jersey film festival is fixed? God, that’s so satisfyingly appropriate.

I wanted Schulberg to do an interview for the “special features” section of the Nuremberg DVD, and he loved the idea. We arranged for a room at the festival where we could film him. But I didn’t want to go. I paid for Rosie to go—after all, it would be a good career boost for her to interview Schulberg. I lied like a motherfucker to the investors about missing my flight and not being able to attend. In reality, I was home. Maybe watching TV, maybe drinking, maybe masturbating, maybe all three. Nothing exciting, but at least I wasn’t in New Jersey.

It turns out, I missed out on a lot of fun. A joker had entered the deck. Budd Schulberg’s brother Stuart had a daughter, Sandra, and she’d caught wind of my restored version of Nuremberg. Well, it turns out she had been trying to “restore” Nuremberg too, so that it would better reflect her father’s “creative vision.”

“Wait,” I thought, “her father’s vision was already reflected in the film.” As any film archivist can attest, it was Pare Lorentz, the “FDR filmmaker” guy, who got the short end of the deal by the Truman Administration. Stuart Schulberg got the film he wanted; Lorentz got the shaft.

She was not good-natured about it. I’d totally (and unintentionally) queered her deal. How do you raise money for a “Nuremberg restoration” when one is already playing across the country?

She was pissed. She couldn’t do anything about my film screening at the festival, but she certainly could control her famous uncle. She showed up at the interview for the featurette, plowing through the room like a bowling ball, declaring that Budd would not be allowed to speak with anyone from our project. Rosie, the cameraman I hired to accompany her, and the investors were startled and speechless.

Naturally, they all wished I was there to handle it. But, you know, I had to drink and masturbate and whatever back in L.A.

Budd Schulberg was crestfallen. He’d been looking forward to the interview, and Rosie had laid on the charm. He’d taken a real shine to her. But Superstorm Sandra would have none of it. She ordered her elderly uncle to leave immediately. He tried to argue, but she grabbed him by his arm, “way too forcefully for a ninety-three-year-old man,” as Rosie recalled it, and spun him toward the door.

Rosie approached Budd as he was being forced out, to say goodbye, and to ask if she could take a picture with him as a keepsake.

He smiled and said yes, but Sandra rushed over and pushed Rosie violently. This upset Budd. He dressed her down in front of the room. “She only wants a picture with me. What’s the matta with you?” Sandra hustled him out, yelling at him all the way.

Sandra Schulberg had done the impossible; she’d made Rosie look sympathetic.

I have no idea if Sandra Schulberg ever finished her version of the film. I don’t particularly care. I was finished with Nuremberg. I returned the amount of the budget that was to have covered the featurettes, and I checked out of the project. I’d accomplished what I set out to do; I’d restored the film. I was done.

As a final wonderfully funny coda, as Sandra Schulberg was trying to raise money for her “restoration,” she was lauded in the Washington Post by Raye Farr, the film historian from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, for “discovering” the footage of the gassing (the exact same footage that Farr told me I had discovered in 1996, the footage she claimed was probably a Soviet fake).

Raye Farr…what a fraud, in a field full of them.

Budd Schulberg died in August 2009, age ninety-five. Everyone’s poor intentions aside, Budd got to spend his last few months being lauded at festivals because of Nuremberg, receiving standing ovations in front of huge crowds of adoring fans. His last months were filled with applause and appreciation, and he was happy. Maybe that’ll keep me out of hell.

As I was doing Nuremberg, working with the legendary Schulberg, I was also helping another Hollywood legend, Fay Dunaway, put together financing for a project. This was the long-rumored Dunaway-helmed film adaptation of Terrence McNally’s play, Master Class, about Maria Callas. Dunaway, long rumored to be the most difficult human being in the world to work with, had tried and failed several times to find financing for the film, in no small part because of her temperamental nature. Using my Jew magic, and motivated by the hope of getting Rosie a role, I put together a group of investors who were willing to put up the required dough. I never met Dunaway herself; I worked with the film’s casting director, Fred Roos, and Dunaway’s agent at Paradigm, Andrew Ruf (it’s in Dunaway’s contract that every man she works with must have a name that sounds like a dog howling).

Sadly, the investors I brought in could not deal with Dunaway’s super-powered volatility, and the deal fell apart. As of 2013, the film is rumored to have finally found financing. I pity whoever is involved.

Before my entry into political event organizing, I did a few warm-fuzzy events with no political slant besides warm-fuzziness. In 2007, I hosted a fundraiser and “night of awareness” (I get nauseous even writing that) for the Children’s Movement for Creative Education (CMCE), a nonprofit charity that that helps children in war-torn countries like Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur. The event was held at L.A.’s prestigious Skirball Center, one of the largest Jewish institutions on the West Coast (and boy, are they ever glad to be mentioned in this book). The speakers included Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Rohde of the New York Times, former Newsweek correspondent Stacy Sullivan (media director of Human Rights Watch), three-time World Press Award-winning photojournalist Ron Haviv, and Carl Wilkens, who was the subject of the PBS Frontline documentary Ghosts of Rwanda, which profiled his rescue work during the Rwandan genocide.

I also did a fundraiser for Para Los Niños, a nonprofit family service organization that serves more than four thousand families each year throughout Central, East, West, and South L.A. And I did one for Invisible Children, a nonprofit that raises awareness about child soldiers in Uganda, Sudan, and the Congo. Either that, or it raises awareness of the threat posed by children who are invisible. And if you think about it, what more nightmarish a threat could there be?

14.

SCATTY

Scott Edwards was not a happy man. He was an obese thirty-year-old septic tank cleaner in Oregon with bright red hair on every part of his body except the top of his head. He lived with his mom, and he’d start drinking as soon as he’d get home from his soul-killing olfactory-insulting job, before fastening on the anti-narcolepsy scuba gear he was forced to wear to bed in order not to die in his sleep. His life was not exactly storybook. But Scotty had a dream. He wanted to find people on Facebook who shared his vision of a group for non-traditional conservatives. The kind like him, who prefer a strip club to a country club (indeed, his stated reason for staying in leftist Oregon was the full-frontal strip clubs and the “magnificent brothels”).

I would soon come to call him “Scatty” (because, as a septic tank guy, he worked in poop. Get it? Scatological + Scotty = Scatty! Okay, it seemed clever when I thought of it).

Normally, I would not think that a man like me would ever cross paths with a man like that. But I was fuming about the election of Obama (and the Democrat “super-majority”), and completely burned out on the film business after Nuremberg. So I took to Facebook, searching for “South Park Conservatives”—people who are “conservative” in the way that South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are. (Parker and Stone don’t call themselves conservatives. Rather, they “fucking hate liberals.”)

I don’t mind being defined by what I’m against. And I’m against the left. Fiscally, foreign policy-wise, and (in most cases) socially (as in political correctness, Affirmative Action, blanket amnesty for illegal immigrants, etc.).

And even on those issues in which I agree with the left—gay marriage, abortion rights—I still detest how the left uses divisive, bullying tactics against its foes. You have a sincere belief in traditional marriage? You’re a HOMOPHOBE. You have a sincere (and, let’s face it, biologically sound) belief that a fetus is alive and that abortion is the taking of a life? You’re waging a WAR ON WOMEN. You dare to question whether using an asthma inhaler can alter the earth’s climate? You’re a GLOBAL WARMING DENIER. You have a sincerely held belief that Islamic gender apartheid is just as bad as South African racial apartheid? You’re an ISLAMOPHOBE.

It’s fair to ask why the world’s only “meta-ideologue” would get involved in politics. In fact, once I was outed and my past became known, several of my former GOP chums attacked me for having faked an interest in politics, and that’s not an invalid accusation, based on all of the negative things I wrote and said about ideology in my youth.

“You consider any and every group of people, organized around any group of ideas or beliefs, merely a target to be trolled, infiltrated, manipulated, experimented upon, and generally used for your own aggrandizement and amusement,” wrote one butt-hurt former ally.

There’s a difference between ideology and principle. An ideology is a worldview, what Jonah Goldberg (in his defense of ideology in The Tyranny of Clichés) called “a field guide to life.” In fact, as Scott Galupo of The American Conservative and the Washington Post wrote in his review of Goldberg’s book, “Goldberg’s working definition of ideology (‘a field guide to life that helps you sift your way through new facts and data’) is what Burke referred to as prejudice, which Burke set up in opposition to the speculations of revolutionary thinkers.”

Principle is not the same as ideology. As an example, Islamism—the set of beliefs adhered to by Muslims who want to impose their worldview on others—is an ideology. But opposition to Islamism isn’t necessarily an ideology. It can be, but not by necessity. One can oppose banning women from voting or driving on principle. You can be right, left, moderate, or totally apolitical, and still, on principle, say “that’s a bad and oppressive idea.” The fact that I dismiss ideology and ideologues doesn’t mean I don’t have principles, and it doesn’t mean that I don’t care passionately about them. And, generally speaking, the right side of the spectrum, more often than not, reflects my principles.

I think if I were to choose the one thing I dislike the most, it’s political correctness in all of its forms. Also, I like government to leave folks alone. I think this reflects my own personal aversion to being compelled. My entire childhood and teenage years, I was almost never compelled by my parents to do anything. They trusted my judgment on the big matters (not doing drugs, smoking, drinking, or getting a girl knocked up), so I had practically no boundaries.

To circle back, I naturally found myself allied with the right because of my principles. But I will confess that I don’t have an ideological “worldview,” and political theory bores the shit out of me. Political theory is what purists debate on Facebook while other people are working to win elections.

By the time I found Scott “Scatty” Edwards on Facebook, the ginger poo-cleaner had amassed almost three thousand people on his Facebook page. He’d done nothing to promote it or spread the word—he was a man of small means. But his idea was strong. It was a good concept. People were attracted to it. And they were finding him on Facebook, as I did.

I emailed him, and we began exchanging ideas. We agreed that the idea of a “Republican Party Animals” group could develop very strong legs. Scatty told me he wanted to schedule a meeting of people interested in the concept, to be held in Vegas in June. Immediately, I knew I was not dealing with a man firing on all cylinders. Why Vegas? Yes, it’s a “naughty” town, and my second home. But there were no more than two people in Scatty’s Facebook group who lived there. You want to attract people? Have the event in DC, or L.A.

But it wasn’t my call. Vegas it would be. Rosie wanted to go, and her sister wanted to join us. Rosie’s beleaguered parents let us have their timeshare at the Polo Towers, and we set off. It was the day that Michael Jackson died. We heard about it on the radio while we were on the road. That could have been seen as either a good omen or a bad one, depending on your opinion of musically-gifted pedophiles.

One reason Rosie was so eager to go was that Scatty told us a fellow named John Romano would be there. Apparently, Romano had written the Coen Brothers film Intolerable Cruelty. Scatty wanted me and Romano to be there, because we’d be “representing Hollywood.” Intolerable Cruelty was an intolerably bad film, but the Coens are my favorite filmmakers, so what the hell. I wanted to meet this Romano guy. And maybe Rosie could get a job out of it.

The first night in Vegas, Scatty got drunk and called me mumbling incoherently. Bad sign. Rosie and I MapQuested the address where the “Republican Party Animals” meeting would be. It was a bar, way off the strip. Looks like Dave’s calling a cab.

We pulled up to the location. It was a strip club. The day Rosie Tisch sets foot in a strip club is the day I play for the Knicks. It ain’t gonna happen. Rosie’s sister Julia didn’t give a crap. In another year, she’d be a prostitute anyway.

I went inside first. It turned out, it was actually a strip club that lost its license. And if there’s anything sadder than a side-street Vegas nudie bar, it’s a defunct side-street Vegas nudie bar that resembles a ghost town, with empty booths, vacant poles, and no customers. I promised myself that I wouldn’t judge Scatty; he was doing his best.

He’d reserved a small back room. There were, maybe, fifteen people, including our two local GOP dignitaries, David C. Williams, honorary consular emissary to the Republic of Chile and former vice-chairman of the Clark County Republican Party, and Leo Bletnitzky, president of the Las Vegas Republican Jewish Coalition.

And there was John Romano. He “spoke” before me (which basically meant giving a talk to a couch full of people), and then I gave a talk (to the same couch). Blessedly, after that we adjourned to the Strip. Scatty immediately got drunk and vanished. But Romano had taken a keen interest in me, Rosie, and Julia. Julia had very craftily removed her wedding ring, as was her protocol in these situations. Scatty was in the wind, but Rosie, Julia, and I were having a great time with Romano and his friend Chris Noll from L.A.

The joke had been on us regarding John Romano. He wasn’t the writer of Intolerable Cruelty. He wasn’t the writer of anything. He was a forty-year-old struggling musician. There had been no deception on his part. Scatty had simply not had the brains to understand that the John Romano on IMDb wasn’t the John Romano who joined his Facebook group. In fact, the Romano we met wasn’t a bad guy to know. Despite his total lack of credits, and his lifestyle as a forty-year-old garage-band musician, he did have something interesting in his resume—he was friends with Andrew Breitbart, who had taken him under his wing and made him a blogger on the “Big Hollywood” site.

Rosie’s loss was my gain. No potential for acting jobs, but for me, looking to become more politically active, a friend and protégé of Breitbart was a nice connection to have.

Romano had a striking presence. Loud, overbearing, and almost horrifically vulgar. There wasn’t an orifice on his person that his finger didn’t repeatedly explore. But he was very likeable, a made-to-order “Central Casting” New York Italian alpha male. He was also a failure at everything he’d ever tried to do in his life—actor, writer, artist, musician, travel agent, website broker, and stock market guy. According to his buddy, he married a wealthy older woman for support, and then he met Breitbart, who gave him his first real chance at actually doing something.

Romano’s buddy, who made the trip with him from L.A., could not have been more of a polar opposite. Chris Noll came across as meek, frightened, and reserved. Ever see the movie Up in the Air with George Clooney, where he plays a corporate “hatchet man” who travels the country to fire unfortunate employees? That was Chris Noll. He was the hatchet man for the Fisher Price toy company. Whenever Fisher Price needed to sack a father of five who’d been working for the company for twenty years, they’d send Chris, who struggled daily with the fact that he’d originally come to L.A. to be a writer and actor, not a corporate hatchet man.

I loved the imagery. When the Grim Reaper comes, he’s not going to look like George Clooney. He’s going to be a quiet, shy, reserved, little blond man from the Midwest. When Chris had to deliver bad news at Fisher Price plants all over the country, it was like getting your terminal cancer diagnosis from Mister Rogers.

When Noll wasn’t putting out fires at Fisher Price, he was indulging in his favorite pastime: killing as many of God’s creatures as he could. This meek little corporate shill took his aggression out on any woodland creature that happened to get in his way. He loved shooting animals and eating them. And good for him. In theory, if every “quiet guy next door” with a stifling job that fills him with repressed rage over his unfulfilled dreams restricted his aggression to animals, there’d be far less workplace massacres. And far fewer bears. Because fuck bears, right?

Both Romano and Noll would end up becoming very, very close friends of mine…for a while.

That first night, we all went back to the timeshare. Julia and Chris made out (he would later apologize to me for not knowing she was married, but I couldn’t hold it against him, as Julia never let anyone know in these situations). Eventually, we all fell asleep on the couch in the living room.

It had not been a fruitless week. I realized that Scatty was incapable of doing anything beyond cleaning poo, and I learned something far more important from Romano. He told me about “Friends of Abe,” which I’ll get to shortly.

Romano was a human hummingbird. Never still, never sedate. Head darting around furiously, body sitting, standing, sitting. That he was best friends with Fisher Price’s “Gentle Reaper” Chris Noll was funny. They were total opposites. Within a week of meeting them in Vegas, I was their new best buddy. Hanging out, drinking beers, and listening to their endless litany of insecurities.

Romano: “I don’t know if my music is good enough, Dave. Whaddya think? You heard my CD. Whaddya think? You think I should stick wit’ the music thing?”

How the FUCK should I know. Sure, yeah, you’re amazing. The best. A superstar. Stick with it, follow your dreams, find your path, stand tall, ride a rainbow, reach for the sky, grab the stars. There, happy now? Let me drink in peace.

Chris. “Should I stick with my stifling corporate job firing jolly toymakers, or should I go back to writing and acting, the things that brought me out to L.A. in the first place?”

Yeah, sure. Do ’em both Chris. How the fuck did I become your confidant?

My new best buddy Goombah Romano had two things he wanted me involved in. The first was his grand scheme to split from Breitbart and “bury that cockroach” with a rival site. Romano had read the pieces I wrote for the L.A. Times, and he wanted me as his main writer and editor. “We can fuck this Breitbart asshole over, Stein.” Romano was pissed that Breitbart didn’t pay his writers. Romano wanted to be paid, because having a garage band didn’t bring in the bucks. Go figure.

And then there was Romano’s other bargaining chip—“Friends of Abe,” the super-secret underground network of Hollywood conservatives. Breitbart had brought him in. And once you’re in, you’re in for life (except for me, but I’m getting ahead of myself). Friends of Abe, or “FOA,” was founded by Gary Sinise, John Voight, Kelsey Grammer, Patricia Heaton, and several other Hollywood conservatives. I had heard whispers of its existence.

And now Romano, the vulgar Sicilian hummingbird, wanted to initiate me. There was an initiation process, he told me. You need to provide information for them to do a background check on your accomplishments and credits. You need to stand before the group and explain your reasons for wanting to join. And you have to swear an oath that you’ll never betray the group.

I told Romano about my past life as “Cole” before he began the Abe induction process. I sent him the YouTube video of my Donahue Show appearance, which he declared “awesome.” And then we both declared, “let’s not talk about that shit.” My “safe” Holocaust films had given me a nice IMDb page as Stein. As much as they appreciated the work I’d done as Cole, Romano and Noll both agreed that it was best to bring me in as Stein.

15.

FRIENDS OF ABE

The Sicilian hummingbird was true to his word. I was “initiated” into Friends of Abe in 2009. Romano took me to my initiation meeting. The Abe leaders were sitting behind tables arranged in a square formation. I told a few anecdotes, stated my views, and the best part was, I didn’t even have to feign sincerity. I was sincere, and that was refreshing. And I’m glad I did well, because, from the way the Abes were surrounding and judging me, I kept having the nagging concern that being rejected would somehow involve banishment to the Phantom Zone.

My post-revisionist history of doing “safe,” mainstream Holocaust films made me the perfect guy for the group. After all, I’m a Holocaust guy. And Holocaust guys are special. On the list of people you don’t mouth off to, “Holocaust guy” is just a few notches below Holocaust survivor. Holocaust guys get respect. Take that, Armenian Genocide guys. You wish you had that kind of respect. And Ukrainian Famine guys? Wash my car.

And because of my work with the CMCE and the Rwandan genocide guys, my bio was above reproach. I’m a Holocaust guy who cares so deeply that I even get involved in modern-day holocausts (lower-case, dammit, lower-case. There is only one upper-case Holocaust).

Having a Holocaust guy on your team gives you moral authority. And, for conservatives, I figured that my “Stein” history of doing mushy-headed “love and tolerance” films would make me a most welcome addition to the fold, as people on the right are constantly (and ninety percent of the time unfairly) branded “intolerant.”

The Abes would love me. That’s what I thought. And I had no idea how right I’d be.

The name “Friends of Abe” was a play on the term “Friends of Dorothy,” which was a code for being gay used by homosexuals in the film industry in the ’40s. If two men who thought the other might be gay met at a Hollywood party, one would ask the other, “are you a friend of Dorothy” (referring to Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz). A “yes” answer would mean “your place or mine?”

“Friends of Abe” refers to Abe Lincoln, the first Republican president. It was the same deal as with “Friends of Dorothy,” but in this case, it was a code to help conservatives find each other while on set or at a party.

And now I was in. And my first formal dinner would include an uncomfortable moment with Scott Baio’s penis.

At my first formal Abe event following my initiation, there weren’t many people I knew. But I knew Romano, and he was still in good with Breitbart, so I was okay. The speakers that night were David Mamet and Michigan representative Thad McCotter, who’d go on to become involved in my own Republican Party Animals group. Abe membership got you a free dinner, but not free booze. So Romano and I decided to head to the bar. On the way, he said he had to take a piss. Okay, I told him, I’ll see you at the bar.

“Fuck you, Stein, come into the shitter with me, you fag.” Oh crap, he’s one of those guys, the kind who like to share moments of bodily function for “male bonding” purposes. Even if I wasn’t already disgusted by his constant orifice-picking, I still wouldn’t want to be anywhere near him when he’s pissing. I mean, if I don’t like seeing people touch food with their hands, why would I want to see…something worse.

“Uh, you know, John, lemme just go wait at the…”

“Whatdafuck, Stein? You don’t wanna keep talkin’ to me as I piss?”

Exactly. But okay, I’ll go in with you, you annoying Goombah.

We went into the bathroom, and Romano took the middle urinal, in between Gary Sinise and Scott Baio. “Hey, fuckin’ Sinise and Baio. Lookatus, we’re pissin’ together,” he belted out. “Baio, you know my friend Stein? He’s gonna be a big player around here.”

Neither Sinise nor Baio wanted to jibber-jabber while they pissed, and everyone but Romano seemed uncomfortable that I was just standing there like I’m looking for a glory hole.

“Nice penis, Baio,” Romano blurted out. If the quip was an attempt to break the ice, it had a cringingly opposite effect. The tension in the bathroom was thick enough to crush a urinal cake.

Still, it was worth it to hear the phrase “nice penis, Baio.” Poor Chachi. He and Sinise had to put up with this vulgar creep because he was Breitbart’s boy.

“Hey David, nice to meet you,” Baio said, his voice vibrating from the effort of shaking the last bit of dew from his member. “Good to meet you too,” I replied. I wanted to add, “and indeed, that’s one fine penis,” but I refrained.

Andrew Breitbart didn’t run FOA, but he might as well have. His word was the word of God in that circle. Breitbart could have gotten Kim Jong Il inducted into the group if he’d have wanted to. He could get you in, and he could take you out. Andrew could be petty. He rarely forgot a real or perceived insult, and he demanded kudos and adulation from every member. He had to be the last one seated at every banquet, so he could bask in applause as he strolled to his table.

If Breitbart was the cruel right hand of FOA, Gary Sinise was the heart. Along with co-founders Grammer, Voight, and Heaton, other members included Jerry Bruckheimer, Robert Duvall, Clint Eastwood, Dennis Miller, and Tom Selleck. David Mamet joined after his “conversion” to conservatism. Other FOAs included Mykelti Williamson (“Bubba” from Forrest Gump), Kristy Swanson (the original “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”), character actor Nick Searcy (the balding, irascible guy from every movie you’ve ever seen), Dwight Schultz (“Madman Murdock” from the original A Team), Robert Davi (the pockmarked terrorist from every movie you’ve ever seen), Joseph C. Phillips (The Cosby Show), John Schneider (yee-haw, it’s Bo Duke!), Jim Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ’s Viking Jesus), Bo Derek, Robert Hayes (Airplane), David Zucker (Airplane), Clint Howard (Ron’s brother), Powers Booth, and veteran stand-up comic Tom Dreesen.

But mainly it was Sinise’s show. He put a ton of his own money into it, but more importantly, it was something he loved. He never missed an event. And, in 2009, there were plenty of them. At least two luncheons a month, one beer-drinking party night (second Tuesday of every month at Barney’s Beanery in Westwood Village, closed to the public), and one fancy dinner per month with the cream-of-the-crop of GOP leaders—Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, John Boehner, Karl Rove, Paul Ryan, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Marco Rubio, Charles Krauthammer, Justice Antonin Scalia, Allen West, Michael Steele (then-chair of the RNC), Eric Cantor, Mark Levin, Larry Elder, Tim Pawlenty, Mike Rogers, Mark Kirk, Frank Luntz…hell, you name ’em, they would be at our shindigs.

When I met Congressman Darrell Issa, I was pissed that my Stein identity prevented me from using what would have been the best icebreaking comment ever: “Hey congressman, meet the other guy targeted for death by Irv Rubin and the JDL!”

The Friends of Abe mindset was interesting. It was very defensive, in that there was much complaining about the bullying and repression that conservatives receive in the entertainment industry, which is genuine. I heard some absolutely horrific stories from the below-the-line Abes. One fellow, a camera operator on the ill-fated 10 p.m. Jay Leno show on NBC, told us about how, the day that Rush Limbaugh was scheduled to appear, a casting director took several crew members into Rush’s dressing room to piss on the couch he’d be sitting on.

A former intelligence official who worked as a technical advisor on the CBS drama The Unit told of nonstop harassment from lead Dennis Haysbert, who believed that “Bush and Cheney blew up the Twin Towers,” and who wouldn’t stop hassling the technical advisor until he “admitted the truth about 9/11 being an ‘inside job.’”

The writer of the Jodie Foster vehicle The Brave One lamented how the studio heads criticized the film for being too “pro-Second Amendment,” and removed much the of screenplay’s message about firearms and female empowerment, thus—ironically—making a much more standard “guns and revenge” flick in the style of Death Wish.

John Schneider told the story of how his complaint about doing a scene in which he gives Clark Kent a condom and tells him to have safe sex led to his sudden firing from Smallville.

A writer for a TV sketch comedy show told us how, in October 2008, he was prevented from doing a satirical skit about Obama, and ordered by the producers to rewrite it to be anti-Palin instead. Oh, and the writer in question is black, the only black writer on the show, yet still dictated to and ordered around by the totally-not-racist white writers.

And at least a dozen below-the-line people, on a dozen different TV shows, told of being ordered—at the risk of losing their jobs—to stop working and watch the Obama inauguration in January 2009.

All of these complaints, and the dozens of others that I don’t have space to list, are legitimate. Leftists in the entertainment biz are bullies. But the problem with Friends of Abe was the siege mentality. You can call it commiserating, or you can call it bitching and moaning, but either way, no forward progress is made. The Abes preferred to wallow in self-pity and get drunk, as opposed to doing what the left does, which is make films, TV shows, and music, support each other, and get things done.

To be sure, the Abes could occasionally make an impact. In 2010, we convinced then-RNC chair Michael Steele to use a studio audience for the GOP’s State of the Union response (typically, SOTU responses are delivered by a lonely figure alone in front of a mic, looking like Oliver Twist asking for seconds).

But most of the time, very little got done at FOA. And the GOP preferred using Abe money to Abe ideas. That was understandable; our money was good, but most of the time, our ideas sucked. Our whining was top-notch, though. Several times during my years with the Abes, I flashed back to a newsletter that Zündel sent out in the early ’90s, defending himself from charges that he had befriended a Jew (I think “befriending a Jew” is still a felony in Saudi Arabia, but fortunately it’s legal these days elsewhere). Zündel explained that he prefers a revisionist Jew who actually goes out and does things, as opposed to the self-pitying Deutschophiles who drink themselves stupid every night pining for the “good old days.”

For the record, the fact that most of Zündel’s followers were immobilized drunks was a good thing. And these days, I’ve joined the ranks of the drunken comatose, so I can’t judge others. But that aside, the Abes were mainly about bitching and moaning, pitching and cougaring. When I’d bring a girl like Rosie to a meeting, it would be like a fucking ice cream truck pulling up. People would drop what they were doing to run over. That’s the power of pretty women; they can snap an entire room of whiners out of their inertia. When the Abes would eventually have to choose between me and her, as clever a Jew as I am, I didn’t stand a chance.

16.

TABLE FOR JEW?

One of the funny things about FOA is that table placement is everything. At the VIP banquets, the least popular kids sit in the back. The popular kids are at Sinise’s “captain’s table.” My first banquet, I was put in the back. Okay, sure. I’m a newbie.

The dog-eat-dog nature of the group was displayed to me that night. As I was enjoying my third pre-dinner glass of wine, Sinise’s assistant hustled a guy over to my table. “We have to stick this guy over here, okay?” He clumsily made a place setting between me and the person to my left. “Sorry, but we had to move this guy from one of the front tables.”

“This guy” was Dwight Schultz (Murdock from The A-Team). Poor bastard. He’d been deemed not worthy of the front tables. And here he was, sitting awkwardly with a non-matching chair and place setting, like a kid in a high chair at the grown-up table.

But I was elated. I’d never seen an episode of The A-Team in my life, but I was a fan of Dwight from his work in Fat Man and Little Boy (with Paul Newman), and the very, very underrated horror classic Alone in the Dark (which I’d probably seen a hundred times). And I knew his story. In 1989, while shooting Fat Man, he’d been outed as a conservative. To any liberals reading this, please allow me to point out that in the days before Fox News and Breitbart and Limbaugh, we conservatives were totally at your mercy in the media. When Dwight was “outed” it became headlines in Variety and the L.A. Times and elsewhere. And his career dried up.

Seriously, liberals, you can be real dicks sometimes. You might despise Fox and all conservative media, but the truth is, you brought it on yourselves. Conservatives needed a defense against your bullying.

Dwight’s new seat placement worked out wonderfully for us both that night. I knew more about his non-A-Team work than he did. And he told me about how, at one point, when he couldn’t find a job, when he was completely blacklisted, he considered suicide. He told me that Friends of Abe had saved his life.

That night I received the best possible lesson in why this group is important. Fellowship. And that was Sinise’s goal. I came away from that dinner with a true admiration for Gary Sinise and his work. But fuck if I was ever going to be put at the back table again.

On a personal note, Gary Sinise is one of the kindest men I’ve ever met. Soft-spoken, gracious, and a perfect host. After the first time he met me, he never forgot my name, or what I did for a living, or my history (“Stein’s” history, of course). He began emailing me privately to talk about my Holocaust work. And when he learned what I was doing with my own Republican Party Animals group, we began discussing ways to collaborate.

I was impressed that he quickly became familiar with my work, on his own, with no prompting from me. He saw the trailer for Nuremberg, and he emailed me immediately: “I’ve seen your trailer for your documentary on Nuremberg and wow! This piece looks quite powerful. I was wondering where I might get a DVD of it.”

I thought he was just being polite, but at the next banquet, he again asked if he could buy a DVD. I told him I’d be happy to bring a complimentary one the next time I saw him.

“You better not forget! I really want to see it,” he said.

The next time I saw him, he came right up to me, smiling: “You better have that DVD, buddy! I’ve been looking forward to seeing it all week.” He actually watched it and called me to discuss it afterwards.

We Jews call a guy like that a mensch.

Whereas the other A-listers would breeze on in to our events, have a drink, mingle, and leave, Sinise put his blood and sweat into FOA. He had a genuinely beautiful dream for the group—he wanted to create a place where Hollywood conservatives could meet in private, blow off steam, and network. Sinise envisioned an oasis (he would often use that term) where friendships and deals could be made, in a “safe” environment, hidden from the scorn of liberal Hollywood.

At the same time that I was establishing a presence in FOA, I was laying the cards on the table with Oregon Scatty. I wanted to expand the Republican Party Animals beyond just a Facebook group. I thought we could make the group huge. I knew Scatty couldn’t contribute much, but what did I care? In my hands, the group could do great things.

Scatty agreed. We became partners. And it was the best possible partnership—an incompetent silent partner in Oregon, and a guy in L.A. looking to raise some holy hell against Obama before the 2010 midterms.

But before I could truly expand the Republican Party Animals, I had to get in good with the Abes. At its core, there were two types of people in the group, not counting the A-listers. You had the “Pitchers”—sleazy bottom-feeders pitching projects, looking for money, viewing the room as a resource to be mined, and you had the “Cougars”—wrinkly, suntanned, over-the-hill women, some quite plain, some formerly attractive, looking for male companionship and financial support to supplement the two dollar residual checks they got from having played “bimbo number two” in 1986’s Zombie Debutante Massacre.

The typical FOA event was mainly about everyone sizing each other up. It was coarse, but no more so than non-conservative Hollywood.

The way I saw it, if I wanted to ensure that I’d never again be at a back table, strategizing was called for. If there are only two types of people in FOA—the people who want shit, and the people who have, or who can offer, the shit, I had to be in the second category. You’re either bringing something to the table or you’re taking from it. The bringers get respect.

I was already ahead of the game in that I had nothing to pitch. I just wanted to grow the Republican Party Animals. And now, with FOA, I had a network—two thousand Hollywood conservatives who I could invite to my events.

So that was plan #1—create events; make the Republican Party Animals a sister organization to FOA, but create events very different from what FOA did. Open bars, loud music, and beautiful, beautiful women.

That led to plan #2—Rosie. There was not another girl in FOA even remotely like her. In the days before the Abes came to know me as the Republican Party Animal, they knew me, from day one, as the guy with the twenty-something six-foot-tall redheaded runway model.

I might as well have walked around the room with my ample ten-inch cock sticking out of my pants spewing jiz on my lessers and demanding they thank me for the privilege. With Rosie by my side, those losers knew who the better man was (what’s that crap about pride going before a fall? Nah, that’d never happen to me).

Plan #3 wasn’t even planned per se, it just happened. The Abes thought I had money. They thought I had money because my Republican Party Animals events looked like someone spent a boatload of money on them. And the truth is, I certainly risked a lot of money on them, but I would usually break even or, sometimes, lose a grand or so. But that was between me and my wallet and Rosie, who was growing very antsy about the fact that I had a new “love” in my life, one to which I was increasingly directing my resources.

But Rosie pulled her weight (if unintentionally) in unexpected ways. Turns out, her acting coach, whose classes I paid for, was the same guy who coached Sinise’s then-twenty year old daughter Sophie. The two young pretty girls, the youngest and prettiest ones in the room, took to chatting, as young pretty girls do in a room filled with fat old bald men. Sophie invited us to sit with her and her dad.

Cue Hans Landa voice: “Woooooo, that’s a bingo!” Captain’s table, here we come.

Around the same time, I held the first massive Republican Party Animals event, in fall 2009. The Abe events were “safe.” Pretty banquet room, lots of suits and ties, cash bar. Sure, the RPA wasn’t nearly well-known enough yet to attract the big-ticket guests that FOA could get, but for that first event, I didn’t need a congressman or senator.

I had Emilee.

Emilee was one of my best friends. She still is. She’s not a “political” friend. In fact, as much as I wanted to bring her to Abe events, I couldn’t, because she’s so blessedly distant from politics (lucky her) that she couldn’t have passed for a conservative if she tried (bringing a non-conservative to an Abe event was immediate grounds for dismissal).

Emilee had worn many hats in her life. Actress, model, student, PR person, sales rep, flight attendant, event organizer, and journalist. But at this point in her life, she was all about pole dancing. She’d created a troupe of beautiful young “vertical acrobats” who pole dance “Cirque du Soleil” style. She dubbed her troupe “The VertiGirls.” Em had been booking these ladies left and right, for classy events that wanted non-stripping pole dancers. She was also hosting a Monday night pole dancing and live music show at a local club, The Good Hurt, in Venice.

Emilee was my ticket to showing the Abes why the RPA had a reason for being. I collected three live bands, including John Romano’s garage band, and a band fronted by Abe actor and Breitbart writer Gary Graham (best known as the lead in the TV series Alien Nation, and as the Vulcan Ambassador on Star Trek: Enterprise). Em did the rest. She procured a swanky downtown art gallery, because by holding the event at a private gallery we could bring in our own liquor and drink until morning.

And Em brought the ladies. Her five “VertiGirls.” She set up three huge floor-to-ceiling poles, and one of her girls set up a trapeze above the room. And then there was Anjel…a fire-dancer and fire-breather. The highlight of her act? Limbo-dancing with her crotch on fire.

A totally private event, with all-night free liquor (none of that “beer and wine only” crap. This was a true open bar), three rock bands, five stunning pole dancers, one acrobat swinging from the ceiling to a mix of patriotic songs, and one flaming cooter.

The Abes were impressed. Several hundred of them attended.

We had a few other bits of entertainment—“conservative comedian” (and former Bill Maher writer) Evan Sayet, a dude named Ari David who was running for congress, black conservative activist Ted Hayes, and Eric Gollum, a Washington Times blogger who nearly didn’t get in because the doorman thought he was a giant two-legged mole (this happens to him a lot).

Okay, his real last name is Golub. But seriously, “Gollum” is way more appropriate. To his credit, he gave us a nice write-up in the Washington Times: “This is not your father’s Republican Party. Los Angeles felt like Las Vegas, or at the very least Sodom and Gomorrah (with tax cuts). Welcome to the world of the Republican Party Animals.”

By 3 a.m., Abes were outside the gallery projectile vomiting. I really thought one guy was going to die. We carried him in and some of the girls pitched pennies at him as he lay passed out on a couch. I declared the evening a success.

This was early November 2009. Now, the Abes all knew who I was.

In between dealing with the cougars and the pitchers, Friends of Abe was a pretty nice place to be. I didn’t much mind the caste system, as I was easily able to navigate it. And no one was ever a jerk toward anyone else, regardless of station. Well, David Horowitz (an early member) was a huge dick, but he’s that way to friends and foes alike. Horowitz reacts to a request to shake hands as most men would to a request to grab the penis of a rotting corpse. He doesn’t even like looking at people. He would attend the events and walk through the outskirts of the room as though every person was exhaling Ebola. At first, I thought he might be autistic, but his underlings assured me that he’s just an asshole.

After his FrontPage Magazine ran one of my pieces, I went up to him to thank him at the next FOA event. He nodded, and actually made eye contact, before vamoosing. “Wow—he really likes you,” one of his toadies gushed.

The Abe events provided some funny moments. Pat Boone getting into an argument with Karl Rove over the “Obama birth certificate” issue (Rove: “Just drop it, Pat. He was born here. Leave it alone.” Boone: “That’s just what that Kenyan Muslim wants you to think, Karl. Stop being a traitor!”).

Jon Voight, who would often arrive with a date young enough to be his daughter and looking disgustingly like her, can be quite amusing when he drinks. When we had Paul Ryan at one of the events, it was understood that he was on a tight schedule and had to leave soon. For whatever reason, a giddy and tipsy Voight jumped up on stage and wouldn’t relinquish the mic. He cavorted around on-stage like a loon for damn near twenty minutes, embarrassing the hell out of himself. We ended up getting no more than a half-hour of Ryan’s time before he had to leave for LAX.

Thanks a lot, Midnight Cowboy.

Clint Eastwood was exactly as cold and distant as you’d expect Clint Eastwood to be. He’d arrive in silence, sit at the captain’s table, and no matter how important the speaker, they’d go to him after the speech to pay their respects (you gotta admit—that is pretty cool).

Eastwood only came to those events where the speaker was “important.” When he showed up for a Marco Rubio speech in 2011, that’s when we knew that Rubio had a future. Or so it seemed at the time. Indeed, after Eastwood’s GOP convention speech in 2012, I’m kind of wondering about his future now.

Jerry Bruckheimer’s choices of events to attend were often baffling. Senator John Thune from Nebraska but not Dick Cheney or John Boehner? Oh well, it’s probably just a matter of his busy schedule. It’s not easy being Bruckheimer. As of this writing, he’s holding special screenings for the Abes of his $230,000,000 disaster The Lone Ranger, practically begging the members to come.

Of course, Bruckheimer’s career will survive, certainly more so than that of David Zucker, another longtime member. Zucker, in his day one of the most influential voices in American comedy, had at some point simply lost it. Maybe a mule kicked him in the head, maybe a gypsy curse, who knows. In 2008 he got the brilliant idea to marshal all of the Abe resources to do a film. It was called An American Carol (an anti-leftist version of A Christmas Carol), and it starred such Abe actors as Kelsey Grammer, Robert Davi, Mary Hart (wait, is she an actress?), Bill O’Reilly (okay, he’s definitely not an actor), Kevin Sorbo, James Woods, and, of course, Voight.

Pretty much every extra in the film was an Abe, including several of the L.A. GOP leaders, who got cameos.

It was to be a dawning of a new day on the Planet of the Abes—a secret conservative society working together to make a feature film that would appeal to our own sensibilities. Ah, what wonders the future held.

Except that when the film was completed it turned out to be such a piece of shit that it can literally give you cancer just by watching it. Seriously. People have died. Or maybe they were just sleeping…I never really bothered to check.

Undeterred, Zucker tried again in 2010 with an all-Abe commercial to unseat Senator Barbara Boxer in California. Every person in the thing was an Abe. Though invited, I didn’t take part, because the call-time would have required me getting up very, very early (like, around the time I normally go to sleep). I’m grateful to Zucker for giving the world Airplane, but I’m not that grateful.

Fortunately, the commercial worked like a charm, and today all of California is very pleased to have our beloved Senator Carly Fiorina. Oh, wait, I think I got that backward—the commercial was a steaming pile of crap and Boxer won handily.

I was genuinely pleased to get to hang out with Robert Duvall, one of my favorite actors. If I ever say anything snarky about him, may I find Clemenza in the back seat of the car I’m riding in.

Same with Dennis Miller. Love the guy. Dana Carvey too. Nice fellas in person. Patricia Heaton rarely missed an event. In fact, much like Voight, she could get a little loopy and playful, once dancing for the group on the giant steps of the Reagan Museum Air Force One pavilion. She even engaged in a comedy routine with John Boehner during one of his several visits (they both hail from the same town in Ohio).

Kelsey Grammer would do the Eastwood thing—silently creep in, silently creep out. But unlike Eastwood, he’d have to stand in the receiving line like everyone else to meet our speakers. Only Clint got the personal table visits.

Among the B-listers, Mykelti Williamson was friendly and jovial, but I always had to instruct Rosie to keep reminding me not to mention the stabbing. Look, it’s just my nature. I meet a guy who carved up his ex-wife’s boyfriend with a butcher knife, I’m driven, Tourette-style, to make a joke about it. But, thankfully, I was able to refrain. As he never once joked about it himself, I can only assume he doesn’t have much of a sense of humor about it (nor, would I imagine, does the victim).

Clint Howard, Ron Howard’s…how to phrase this…“unique-looking” brother, was always extremely nice and helpful to me. Jesus, I feel shitty having just made a comment about his looks.

Other B-listers included Bruce “does this plastic surgery make me look like Aunt Bea” Jenner, Fabio, and Robert Hayes, who I used to idolize after seeing him in Airplane.

David Mamet would come to the events with his daughter. Damn, I loved talking with Mamet. Like Duvall, I can’t bring myself to be snarky about him (even though his HBO Phil Spector movie sucked).

Even though I’d heard the term “Bible-thumper” my entire life, I never met someone who actually thumps a Bible until I met Adam Baldwin. I’d grown up really liking Baldwin’s work, from My Bodyguard to Full Metal Jacket to, yes, even D.C. Cab. These days, most people know him from either Firefly or the NBC show Chuck.

I always thought he was a fine actor, with a kind face.

And man, can that sumbitch thump a Bible! About a year after I joined the Abes, Baldwin had a religious “awakening.” And, with the passion of a new convert, he’d bring his Bible to our meetings and thump the living shit out of it.

The first time he did it, I whispered to Rosie, “Holy shit, Adam’s actually thumping a Bible. Ain’t that a sight.”

About three years later, he stopped bringing the Bible. Maybe he “backslid,” or maybe he just got tired of replacing Bibles that became pulverized by his massive fists. I mean, the cost adds up, you know?

B-listers like D.B. Sweeney, Dean Cain, and Kevin Sorbo did a lot of networking. B-minus listers like Neal McDonough and Kristy Swanson, too. John Ratzenberger from Cheers just sort of hung out at the events and chilled (voice-over work pays well, I hear). Speaking of which, voice actor Maurice LaMarche was an Abe. I found it very satisfying that the guy who so effectively voiced the Alec Baldwin puppet in “Team America” genuinely despised the guy in real life.

Along with the genial, talented members, the Abes had their outright lunatics as well, like Victoria Jackson (the ditzy blonde from the 1980s cast of Saturday Night Live whose ditzy blonde routine made her seem about five thousand times smarter than she actually is). Jackson seemed incapable of not making racist or anti-Jewish comments, much to the chagrin of the Abes who tried to use her “talents” in various in-house projects (this was another factor that hindered Abe productivity; it was mainly the nuts who were available for projects. The reasonable and intelligent Abes, like Sinise and Bruckheimer, had lives). Another nut was good old Pat Boone, God bless him—an icon, and batshit crazy. He was our resident “birther” (well, Justified’s Nick Searcy was one as well, but he knew to keep that stuff in our private Facebook group).

John O’Hurley, “Mr. Peterman” from Seinfeld, was a member. I would’ve invited Larry the “Soup Nazi” to join us, but he’s pretty left-of-center (although I think Larry would go anywhere if it meant he could hawk his merchandise and sell autographs).

And then there were the various other non-A-listers in FOA, musicians like Emmy-winning composer Boris “Bobo” Zelkin (who drew a lot of water in the group because he did music for Sinise), voice actors like anime star Spike Spencer, and casting directors like Nancy Foy (the Jurassic Park films, the Blade films, the Miss Congeniality films).

Some Abes occupied categories all their own. Nick Searcy, who would go on to become a very close friend of mine in the group, wasn’t a household name, but you’ve seen him. He’s one of the best character actors in the business, appearing in such films as Fried Green Tomatoes (the bald abusive husband), The Fugitive (the bald sheriff), Cast Away (Tom Hanks’ bald best friend), Head of State (Eddie Murphy’s bald nemesis), and Moneyball (I never saw it, but I’m assuming baldness was involved).

In 2010, Searcy scored a major prize—a co-starring role on the FX series Justified (bald U.S. Marshall Art Mullen). This put Searcy in a unique position in FOA. He wasn’t an A-lister, but he had an extremely lucrative and high-paying network job, and he was actively involved in the group, not detached, like the Eastwoods and Grammers.

When I first met Nick, I had no idea we’d become the good friends we ended up becoming. He loves to project a tough guy/assholeish image, and, in all honesty, it’s only forty percent fiction. Now that I’ve written this book, he will, if we ever cross paths again, almost certainly insert his foot up my ass. And you know what? I’d be okay with that. It would be an honor.

I also became good friends with Larry Elder, the brilliant talk show host and best-selling author (I’d been a massive fan of his years before I’d ever heard of the Abes). Larry doesn’t like dealing with minutiae, so if I thought there was a particularly good Abe meeting coming up, I’d bring him as my guest. A neat side effect of that (and this was not something I calculated or pre-planned) was that having Larry as my guest was yet another ticket to the “Captain’s Table.”

When Larry and I went to the Dick Cheney dinner, we got to sit next to Mary Cheney. Now that was cool. They put Rosie in the back of the room. Six-foot-tall fashion models are great…but Larry Elder is, well, Larry Elder.

Rosie didn’t mind. She wouldn’t have known Mary Cheney from Lon Chaney. Plus, we had a deal regarding Abe dinners. The Abes served prix fixe menus of chicken, fish, or pasta. Not nearly enough for Rosie’s appetite. So, before every dinner, I’d get her the usual $200 meal, and the Abe plate would be nothing more than a small after-dinner snack for her. If she was full, she was content, so I bought her an especially large meal before the Cheney event, as compensation for her having to sit in the back.

As a sign of the Abes’ growing clout, within a few weeks of being sworn in as speaker, John Boehner returned to L.A. to meet for the second time with the Abes. And it wasn’t for our scintillating company. Washington politicos had realized that the Abes can write checks. Why should liberal politicians have all the fun soliciting donations from Hollywood? The Abes were a goldmine of money.

My Republican Party Animals events grew and matured. I’d decided to drop the pole dancers after the 2010 “scandal” in which RNC Chair Michael Steele was crucified for taking some high-level donors to a strip club. I knew, after that, that I couldn’t attract high-level GOPs with pole dancers flailing about. My growing reputation put me on Sinise’s “personal” list of favorite Abes. Whenever there’d be a limited-seating event, or a private luncheon that he’d be attending, only a select group of Abes got the invite, directly from Gary himself. Not bad, as I’d only been in the thing for about six months at the time.

17.

PROS AND CONS

I was riding high in Friends of Abe, and making big plans for Republican Party Animals events. What in the world could possibly go wrong?

Rosie’s roommate in her penthouse apartment had given notice. A big loveable lug of a computer geek, he had come to L.A. years earlier after being hired by MySpace. By 2010, you can probably guess how secure that job was. When he was let go, all of a sudden the cost of his rented bedroom and tiny bathroom seemed a little exorbitant. He left. Rosie started panicking.

It got worse. Rosie’s sister Julia Garlington, back in Nashville (with her husband still living in a shack on the parents’ property), had decided that money from daddy wasn’t enough for her. She became a high-class call girl, working with a service based out of Atlanta. It was the kind of agency used by wealthy businessmen who were willing to shell out big bucks to sleep with girls who look like Julia. Cheating on her husband was nothing new, and this time, at least she was getting paid for it. When Rosie told me about it, the husband didn’t know. Maybe he never found out.

In which case, would me saying “sorry dude” lessen the blow of mentioning it here?

The “your sister’s a whore” thing affected the Norman Rockwell-esque Tisch family much more severely than Julia’s suicide threats. They began redirecting money from Rosie to her sister. That meant a larger burden on me, at a time when I was directing a lot of my resources to the Republican Party Animals. And my savings were, if not drying up, not being replenished to the extent that they used to be.

It didn’t help that I caught Rosie sleeping with the pretty boy model she’d experimented with in 2008. She’d hidden it from me, because our agreement was very specific—I’ll support her, but not if she’s with another guy.

We were at the birthday party for one of Sinise’s assistants at Friends of Abe when I decided to tell her I’d had enough. She was cut off for good. She started crying (of course), stroking my arm and kissing it in a manner so clumsy and non-sexual that it starkly displayed her inherent lack of human emotion. She told me that her vibrator usually sufficed, but she’d had a once-per-year yearning for an actual penis. She promised it wouldn’t happen again (this was, as you may have surmised, a surreal conversation).

I left her car, and stormed back into the karaoke bar where the party was going on. I told Fisher Price Chris Noll what had happened, as I downed enough shots to kill Goliath. He congratulated me on my resolve; I’d finally ended that horrible, unhealthy thing.

Rosie wouldn’t let up, though. Email after email, begging, pleading with me to reconsider. Her financial outlook was beyond bleak. What else could she do? (Well, she could get a job like a normal person, but that wasn’t about to happen.)

Behold, two very dysfunctional humans (from an email exchange, 12/16/09):

Rosie: “I am sorry for avoiding and not addressing the whole truth. I was afraid of losing you. I agree, that sometimes, our relationship is not healthy, but I guess I loved it so much, I could look past it…Sometimes guilt kicks in, since I feel like I owe you soo much.”

Me: “I think I feel much better about walking away now. By your own words, you ‘avoided and didn’t address the whole truth’ because you were ‘afraid of losing me.’ You can sugarcoat it any way you want, but that’s manipulation. I’m not saying it was malicious, but the simple fact is you avoided telling me the ‘whole truth’ because you wanted to keep me around. So now I can walk away clean.”

Rosie: “I’m sorry, and even though I can’t stop crying, I respect and understand your decision. When I said we could try a ‘lite friendship’ I knew that probably wasn’t possible because of how much we care about each other, but I guess I wanted to see if you would be willing to take me back in any way, even if just by starting off slowly.”

Rosie may be unhealthy, but I’m unhealthy and a sucker. I did the arithmetic. I could support her a little while longer. Plus, I’d already inducted her into the Abes, meaning that she no longer needed me to attend the meetings. I’d still have to see her there, probably accompanied by the pretty boy model. And I’d look like a loser. Truth be told, he was a very pretty boy. Made me look like a sad tub of shit in comparison. So yeah, I wasn’t happy with the notion that the Abes would see her with that guy instead of me. I’d lose my “big jiz-spewing dick” status.

And, grudgingly, I did kind of care for her. I didn’t like to see her suffer. She was at a low point, and it was hard for me to walk away. I knew it was all calculation—the crying, the promises to never lie to me again, the incessant flattery. But I did care for her, as much as one monster can ever truly care for another.

So it was back to the old routine.

Some of the burden was relieved when Rosie’s dad decided to buy her a house, as a family investment. He found a depressed three-story property in Eagle Rock. The way he reasoned it, the house would come up in price in due time, so why not lay out the money now.

Fisher Price Noll told me to look on the bright side: “Rosie’s in Eagle Rock now, far from the Westside. She isn’t gonna drive to your place every day for food. I think you’re free from the burden after all.”

“No,” I answered dejectedly, “she’ll come. She knows I cover gas, and she’d drive to Palm Springs every day if it meant getting her daily feeding.”

And I was right. Her move east in no way slowed the $200 meals. If anything, they increased.

And there was another problem. Rosie had come to realize that she had systematically alienated every one of her girlfriends. Her “battle of wits” with Paulie, which was a bit like Adolf Hitler crushing a butterfly (i.e., no match at all), had led to a mass exodus of Rosie’s college girlfriends. Rosie didn’t have a single girlfriend left.

Rosie was slowly coming to the realization that women just don’t like her. Guys, sure. She’d never be short on those. But women? Most of them found her off-putting.

She’d tried to form a friendship with Emilee (my pole-dancing friend). Em tried her best, but she eventually found Rosie to be a phony and a user.

Rosie and I were sitting in her car in my driveway. She started to go on about how she had no girlfriends. What the hell was I supposed to do? Rosie had no girlfriends because she was viewed as foul by other women. Half of that is the natural cattiness of women, and the other half is because she actually is quite foul.

This was the only time I ever saw Rosie cry for real. That evening in her car, she cried because of genuine emotion, not because she wanted something from me.

Another change in 2010 was that John Romano had a massively bitter split with Breitbart. Breitbart fired him as a writer, and Romano went ahead with his plan to start his own site. He still wanted me to edit it and be the main writer. I refused his offer repeatedly. “Blogs are for self-important douchebags who think the entire world needs to know what they think,” I told him. I liked writing for the Times because of the challenge of being a conservative voice in a major paper. But any cretin can blog.

Romano was not much of a writer, but he’d taught himself a lot of Internet tricks. He’d managed to get himself listed as an officially recognized Google news site. That’s a big deal. That guarantees traffic.

Romano took something I’d written on Facebook just for fun, and he put it on his site. And he showed me the traffic.

“You can get dis kinda traffic every day, pal. Write for me! Edit my site. C’mon, Stein, do it.”

Well, I’m not made of stone. I agreed, and it took no more than a few weeks for me to catch the blog bug. I had one steadfast rule—I didn’t write opinion crap. Anyone can write opinion. I wanted to do investigative journalism. And it was a strategy that paid off. Soon, our traffic was rivaling Breitbart’s. And boy, was Andrew pissed. The risk of being eclipsed by a writer he fired was the ultimate insult.

Add alcohol, and you get a very amusing anecdote. One night in summer 2010, at our second-Tuesday-of-the-month Abe night at Barney’s Beanery, I was there with the red demon and my friend Vanessa, a stunning young actress I’d known since before she could legally vote (purely platonic, of course). Rosie left early, and Romano, Vanessa, and I gathered the Abes around for an Irish car bomb-drinking contest. By 1 a.m., we were really, really wasted. Romano needed to piss, but to do so, he had to walk past Breitbart, who was sitting in a booth with Adam “Bible thumper” Baldwin.

I don’t recall who started yelling first. I was too busy looking at Vanessa and wishing I was twenty-three again. But we looked over and saw Breitbart and Romano about to come to blows, screaming like drunken banshees. Baldwin, who stands a massive-shouldered 6’4”, chased Romano away with a pool cue.

Retreating back to our booth, Romano was red-faced with anger. “Motherfucking Breitbart, motherfucking Baldwin, motherfuckers. [long pause] FUCK, I still have to piss.” Scared out of his wits by the prospect of a Baldwin-delivered pool cue enema, Romano whined, “I’m gonna go piss outside.”

I told him not to do that. It was almost closing time, and the cops would be out in force looking to give tickets. Lovely young Vanessa had an idea. “Come with me to the women’s room,” she said (the women’s room was on the opposite end of the restaurant from the men’s room). “I’ll make sure no women are in there, and I’ll stand guard while you pee.”

And there was big brave Romano, shivering in fear of Breitbart, pissing in the little girls’ room while Vanessa stood guard. I’d say I lost respect for him, but the truth is, I never respected him in the first place. I liked him, definitely. I like hamsters, too. But I never overestimate their mental acuity.

By the end of 2010, things were going strong with the Abes, and Rosie and I had a détente of sorts. Julia the hooker, flush with renewed familial financial support, had ceased her hookin’ and was back trying to get corporate work using the phony-baloney credits I invented for her. And my work on Romano’s site had put me on the map not just as the “Republican Party Animal” guy, but as a respected journalist in conservative circles.

Among the benefits of being an Abe were the amazing summer parties, held annually at the ranch of billionaire David Murdock (no relation to Rupert). Murdock, number 130 on Forbes’ list of the 400 richest Americans, is a true Friend of Abe, and he’d let the group use his massive Southern California ranch every summer. You have to see these events to believe them. Over a thousand Hollywood conservatives, open bars every few yards, a staff of hundreds of servers in spiffy white uniforms, massive dinners (not the prix fixe crap that Rosie would always turn up her nose at), and performances from some of the great conservative bands, including Sinise’s own Lieutenant Dan Band, Lee Greenwood, the Lieutenant Dan Band, and Lee Greenwood. Oh, and Lee Greenwood would perform as well.

In 2011, there was a rather significant sea change within the Abes. Sinise began to realize that his CSI show might be in jeopardy. He had always joked with me that he could only fund the Abes as long as he had a network show. In 2011, he decided to implement an important cutback: there would be no summer party—no Murdock ranch mega-event.

No summer party? Whatsoever shall we do?

Dave to the rescue. Dozens of Abes asked me if I could take the reigns and do the summer party through the Republican Party Animals. Twist my fucking arm, why don’t you.

And that was the moment the RPA took off. I had to find an outdoor venue that could hold five hundred people, allowed live music, had food and drinks, and was not run by people who objected to conservatives using their location for an unabashedly right-wing event.

No sweat. I found a great location, on Hollywood Boulevard near Vine. An outdoor pavilion with everything I needed, and a young owner from New Orleans who didn’t discriminate based on ideology. Whereas the previous summer parties were hidden away in the hills of Simi Valley, I was getting us a private spot right on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Now that’s ballsy, and the Abes loved the idea.

I put up the money to secure the location, and I arranged for a veritable who’s who of conservative bloggers and personalities to appear (we had about a dozen speakers). And music—lots of live music. But damn, I forgot to book Lee Greenwood.

Sinise was busy launching his foundation (confusingly called the Gary Sinise Foundation). He started the foundation to help injured veterans, a tremendous passion of his. This is one reason he’s been reluctant to fully come out of the closet as a conservative, because (and don’t deny this) some of you assholes out there would blacklist his charity if you found out he’s a Republican.

I suggested to Sinise that my summer party should benefit his charity. He agreed. But an ill wind was about to blow through the Abes, and I was tipped off to what was coming before most of the other members. It would change the Abes forever.

Sinise put my summer event on the FOA website, and tickets were selling briskly. But I noticed something very odd; Sinise’s assistants weren’t buying any. The people who were the nuts-and-bolts of daily FOA operations weren’t buying tickets. And they weren’t asking for comps either. They just weren’t coming.

But the event benefited Sinise’s foundation. I emailed the assistants. I wanted to let them know they were fully comped—I just wanted them to be there.

I received this reply from Ryan, the most well-liked and hard-working of Sinise’s Abe assistants. Ryan is a particularly handsome and industrious up-and-coming actor, and he’d been the one on the ground keeping FOA running smoothly for Sinise.

Between you and I and to be blunt, I would never support anything that gave to the Gary Sinise Foundation. Unfortunately, you don’t know what I know. I hope you’re well though buddy. Some good times back at FOA. It’ll never be the same. Give Rosie my best! See you around.

All the best, Ryan

Now, I want to make a simple point here. Some people, in the course of my life, have attempted to claim that the discord that inevitably follows me everywhere I fucking go is somehow the result of my actions. And yes, much of the discord is indeed the result of poor life choices on my part. But there are times when discord rears its head in situations where I’m genuinely blameless. I couldn’t have seen this one coming. I thought I’d created the perfect Abe event—great speakers, live music, a venue that can hold five hundred, drinks served until 2 a.m., food served until 4 a.m., and tickets at only $20.

And now I was blindsided by discord, discord I never expected nor planned for.

Dreading the response, I emailed young Ryan back:

Hi Ryan,

I wanted to contact you at a non-Facebook address (I’m never entirely comfortable that FB is 100% secure). I was wondering if I could ask you a question about what you wrote to me. I have another event coming up in September, with much higher stakes than the one on (July) 30th, and it would mean a lot to me if I could ask you a follow-up question regarding your email, with the understanding, of course, that you have no obligation to tell me anything more than what you already did.

I’d also be happy to speak on the phone, or even to meet for ten minutes for coffee somewhere.

Ryan replied promptly:

Let’s do it by phone, that’ll just work best for me as I’m going nuts with other projects.

Hope you’re well, man. Talk with you soon…and thanks for the email.

I spoke to the kid the next day. He’d been drinking. He was distraught. I didn’t like to hear him that way, but the booze made him candid.

In short, there was trouble ahead. Sinise had decided to put the executive director of his foundation, Judith Otter, in charge of FOA. Ryan, and several of the other assistants, had become convinced that the foundation was a scam, not because of anything Sinise did or was doing, but because of Otter, who no one trusted. Otter decided to deal with the situation by firing every FOA assistant except five-foot-tall Matt, who—in the words of Ryan—takes orders well because he’s the kind of kid who grew up getting his head dunked in the high school bathroom every day by the bigger kids.

The assistants were fired by email. Sinise wouldn’t even do it personally.

I was floored. I loved Sinise. What the hell was going on? The one thing that held FOA together was Sinise, his character, and, more importantly, everyone’s belief in his character. But we also loved Ryan.

And who the fuck was Judith Otter?

Ryan continued with his explanation. Otter was extorting Sinise. Otter’s husband, Benjamin Robin, was Gary’s longtime personal hair and makeup guy. Otter and Robin “know something about Gary,” Ryan told me, “something personal, something destructive. A career-killer.”

What that “thing” is Ryan wouldn’t say, even drunk. I still don’t know the big secret (although if it’s that Sinise used to be a Holocaust revisionist, I’ve been there, brother). “This is why Gary won’t ever run for public office,” Ryan continued. “He can’t. If his secret ever comes out, he’d be unelectable.”

This was no small point. Most Abes harbored the belief that one day Sinise could run for office in California as a Republican. Most talk was about the governorship. Sinise was seen as the only potential GOP candidate who might be electable in this state. He’s well-known, soft-spoken, rarely controversial, well-liked throughout the business (even by leftists), and smart. His image is clean, with no scandals in his past. Or so I thought. “It’ll never happen, David,” Ryan told me. “He can’t run.”

The shock of Ryan’s revelation aside, the conversation turned to the dark cloud that was about to envelope Friends of Abe. Using her hold over Gary, Otter had demanded control of the group. “She’s not even conservative. It’s just about money and control. She wants to run all of Gary’s affairs,” Ryan said. The first step was to fire every loyal assistant except tiny Matt. Ryan explained that he had just raised a large amount of money for Sinise’s foundation by taking part in a charity motorbike ride. Otter accepted the money, cashed the check, and, once the money was safe, told Ryan he was terminated.

“Gary wouldn’t even speak to me. After all those years, no phone call, no personal meeting. I was just banished, like that.” As were the other assistants.

None of this sat well with the Abes. We liked the people who’d been fired, and the other Abes, without the benefit of the information that Ryan had shared with me, were perplexed and angry. It was very Stalinesque—one day, all the assistants vanished, with no one allowed to speak of them again. Otter would offer no explanation. All she offered was a proclamation that from now on, FOA would charge dues.

If you’re thinking this didn’t sit well with the members, you’re right. FOA had never charged a fee. And if you’re thinking, “oh, those Hollywood big-shots can afford anything,” you’re sorely misled. The A-listers made up a small minority of the FOA roster. Probably ninety percent of the membership was below-the-line (stuntmen, grips, special effects people, camera operators), or actors who were not yet at the “making a million dollars per film” level.

Plus, there were the pitchers and cougars. And if they were rolling in dough, they wouldn’t be out there pitching and cougaring.

The Abes were getting restless. Otter had decided the best way to let the Abes know who was in charge was to act like a POW camp commandant. Her brusque and insulting attitude drove Abes away by the hundreds. At our height, the group was 2,200. We were now well below 1,800.

The worst moment came when we hosted Allen West, the firebrand first-term congressman from Florida. The majestic banquet room at the Luxe was so near-empty, I was humiliated for the congressman. Otter got the brilliant idea to have the empty tables removed and the few full tables pushed together in front of the dais. The result was that it looked like West was giving a talk to a hippie drum circle (but, you know, minus the hippies and drums). It was unintentionally funny, but nevertheless, I was embarrassed for the guy.

Otter was beaming. She patrolled in between the pushed-together tables, barking orders. Sinise did not attend. The only other time he had ever missed a banquet was when he was down with a bad case of the flu. This time, no explanation was offered for his absence, but it was clear to me why he wasn’t there. It would have been humiliating for him.

But in FOA’s decline, my own Republican Party Animals found its ascension.

18.

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY ANIMAL

Our Republican Party Animals summer event went perfectly. I’d been put on the spot by Ryan’s revelations regarding the Sinise Foundation. All of a sudden, I realized that involving Sinise, Otter, and the foundation was not exactly the good idea I initially assumed it would be. The goal had been to hold a charity auction for the foundation, with a hundred percent of the proceeds going to the organization. Otter was going to bring me literature and special Sinise Foundation wristbands before the event, and various Abes were going to donate movie memorabilia for the auction.

But now I was hesitant. I’d already lost a few paying customers because of the Sinise Foundation connection, and, as discontent had been steadily growing among the Abes regarding Otter, would it really profit my group to be that open about an association with her and the foundation?

Ah, blessed fate, frequently intervening on my behalf. It turned out I had no reason to trouble my little mind about it. Otter showed up too late to pass out wristbands and hand out literature, and not one, not one, of the celebrities who pledged memorabilia for the auction came through. God bless the flakiness of jerks. The celebs still came, just not with any of the memorabilia they pledged.

Even the diminutive Greg Gutfeld of Fox News’ Red Eye, who had promised to donate an item to the charity auction, flaked out. Gutfeld was always an asshole, but, in this instance, his assholishness worked to my benefit.

Corrupt foundations and flaky celebrities aside, the universe was kind to me that night. I had a sell-out crowd, and a perfect out for not having the charity auction.

The universe was not so kind to Scott “Scatty” Edwards, the fat red-headed poo-bah from Oregon.

Scatty wanted me to pay for his trip to L.A. He gave me a laundry list of demands. He wanted a week’s stay in a suite with a Jacuzzi, and transportation wherever he went. I explained the obvious impracticality of that. I was already putting up $6,500 for the venue, plus comping all of the VIPs and their guests, paying for their food and drinks the entire night, and arranging to send cars to pick up the speakers, who were scattered all over the damn place (one was all the way out in Santa Clarita). I wasn’t getting paid, the bands weren’t getting paid, and the speakers weren’t getting paid. And all Scatty was doing was “honoring” us with his presence, having done none of the organizing.

I thought Scatty should’ve been happy being saddled with nothing more than his plane ticket and hotel. And the latter was negotiable. Now that Rosie’s daddy had bought her a house, she had a spare room. I told Scatty he could stay there, free of charge, and it would work out especially well, as wherever I went, Rosie did, so he’d have his ride for the week.

“I’m gonna get laid this time, I know it,” Scatty said. “And I want my own place, with a Jacuzzi, and no other people around.” I knew this grotesque unfortunate was not going to get laid, but Scatty wasn’t going to let the issue rest. I made him a deal. I’d pay for one night—the night of the event (the night he assumed he’d get laid), in Hollywood near our venue, so that he could take a cheap cab ride with his intended and screw away.

Enter Tipjar Mike.

I had two live bands scheduled to play in between the speakers. The “head-liner” was the band fronted by Abe actor Gary Graham. But this time there was a difference. “Hey, man, I gotta new guitar player, and this cat is goooood,” Gary told me in his over-the-hill pretty-boy voice. “Man, this cat can play, dude. Mah band’s in the big leagues now.”

Gary’s new player was Mike Thompson. At the time, I had no reason to give him a demeaning nickname. Because damn, he was goooood. I mean it. Talented as hell. Proof that one really great musician can lift a mediocre band of failed actors from being barely decent to being really enjoyable. Plus, Mike (though no youngster himself—he was in his late thirties at the time) was single and good-looking. And he sported “Wolverine” sideburns, which I assume chicks (and Marvel Comics fans) find sexy.

Oh, and he was a really nice guy. Well, to me he was nice. While most people at our event found him charming and his playing superb, one dude ended the evening wanting to kill him.

Scatty had not been on the level with me. His certainty about getting laid was not the typical self-delusion of a pathetic ginger. He had a plan. He came down from Oregon with a tall blonde fashion model named Brandi Seymour. His plan? The night of the event, she’d see that in Portland he might be a humble nine-to-fiver who lives with his mom, but in L.A., he’s a respected leader in a group of Hollywood conservatives.

Ah, the best laid plans of mice and fat men. After the Gary Graham band finished up, and Scatty and I had some media interviews to do, he couldn’t find his model anywhere. He was furious. This was what he wanted her to see—him doing TV interviews right in the heart of Tinseltown! His fat ginger face grew as red as his hair. “Where the FUCK is Brandi?” He was drunk, I knew that. What I didn’t know was that he had a cocaine problem, and he was high. He was so worked up that Fisher Price Chris Noll thought it best to take him for a walk outside the outdoor pavilion, mainly so his rage wouldn’t kill the mood inside the venue. Chris’ instincts were correct, but, sadly, it turned out to be a bad idea. Because just outside the venue, they found Scatty’s beloved model—making out with handsome guitar god Mike.

Scatty spent the rest of the night sitting alone in a corner getting drunker and drunker, and angrier and angrier, his face soon coming to resemble a ripe red tomato. When he learned that she had gone home with Mike, without even having the courtesy to say she was leaving, he became dangerously unglued.

I let him be. But, to be truthful, I should have had more sympathy for him.

There had been a time when I felt for Rosie as he felt for Brandi. And I would have been mad and drunk (though not coked up) had she ever ditched me at an event. As Scatty realized he was going to have no use for that “fancy Jacuzzi hotel room” (which I hadn’t yet procured because, well, shit—I knew he wasn’t going to need it), I should have been more sympathetic.

One of the new faces at the event was a woman named Stacia Goodloe, heavyset but with a very attractive face and a calm, responsible demeanor (a female version of Fisher Price Chris). She was one of the few who had actually volunteered to help me when she got there, and I was thankful for it. When the venue closed at 4 a.m., about eight of us went to her place in Culver City. Stacia was an avid cook and semi-professional caterer. She whipped up some late night/early morning treats (and more drinks, of course). I barely knew Stacia, but I liked her already. She wasn’t an actress, she had no pretensions, and she lived a responsible life. So we had one thing in common at least (I’m not an actress).

Sitting in her living room at about 4:30 a.m., Scatty began to boil over. “I GOTTA GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE.” He wasn’t so much yelling as he was speaking with the intense guttural vehemence of a man who was about to explode. I called a cab for him, to take him back to his hotel near LAX, and Stacia walked him outside. I put my shoes on to go join them, as I would be paying for Scatty’s ride, and when I got to the front of her building I saw drunk, angry, coked-up Scatty trying to sexually assault Stacia. He was trying to force his tongue down her throat. But she’s a big girl, and she pushed him off before I could get there. With my poor eyesight, I was not a hundred percent convinced I’d seen what I saw.

I gave the cabbie a wad of cash and told him where to go. Stacia confirmed what I saw with Scatty, but she begged me not to make anything big out of it. “Look, he was drunk, angry, and sad. I pushed him right off; nothing happened. I can take care of myself.” Stacia, being new to the fold, didn’t want to create discord.

Now that was refreshing. Someone not wanting to create discord.

Back in Oregon, Scatty would ask me repeatedly if I would reimburse him for one night of his room cost. I couldn’t. I promised Stacia I wouldn’t make an issue of his attempted assault, but no way would that guy get one dime out of me.

The Monday after our summer shindig, Larry Elder (who had been a guest) raved about it on his KABC talk show:

There was a party for Republicans here in Hollywood, on Hollywood Boulevard. Several people told me about it, it’s done by, and take a look at this online, it’s done by RepublicanPartyAnimals.org, and the guy that put it on, David Stein, he’s had one every year for about three years, and it’s gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, and you’d be amazed at how many people were there. There was a great band, and they were just rockin’ it, and it was an outdoor kind of a mall thing, between Vine and, say, Highland on Hollywood Blvd., and several people asked me to go, and I was kind of tired, so I started not to go, but I said, you know, so many people had asked me to go, so I went, and I’m glad I did, it was just a blast. The band was great, and, as I said, it was kind of an outdoor mall thing, in front of all these restaurants, so you could go from restaurant to restaurant to restaurant and get some vittles. It was a very very fascinating gathering of people, old, young, and I’ll tell you, David Stein, who put it together, told me that it started out relatively small, the next year got a little bigger, and this year, it was just massive! I mean, standing room only. People were spilling out into the streets. It was great. (Jokingly) We started to riot because we couldn’t get a table. We started rioting! (In news reporter’s voice) ‘Republicans have gone crazy, Bob! We’re down here on Hollywood between Vine and Highland and Republicans have gone crazy! They couldn’t get tables and they started jumping up and down on police cars!’

With that endorsement, heard by millions of people on ABC radio and online, and with articles in the Washington Times and other publications, the RPA had arrived. From that point on, folks came to me. Future Republican Party Animals events would involve congressmen, Bush and Reagan Administration officials, military officials, and best-selling authors.

Judith Otter at FOA expressed her displeasure that no money was raised for the Sinise Foundation. It’s too bad she wasn’t as displeased with the shrinking FOA membership. By the end of 2011, even I had stopped paying my dues in protest.

Stacia was my new number-two Republican Party Animal. Her cooking skills and helpful, can-do attitude had already come in exceptionally handy at the previous couple of events. Mike the handsome guitar god (I still at that point had no need to derisively nickname him) was way too broke to pay the FOA dues, so he took advantage of the fact that Otter had been looking for new cogs to replace the skilled assistants she fired, with the “benefit” being that volunteers could attend FOA events in exchange for their work. I was really getting to like that Wolverine-sideburned bastard.

But more discord was just around the corner. 2012 would be full of it.

FOA was the first casualty. The A-listers had had enough of Judith Otter’s bullying. It wasn’t that she ever bullied them, it was that they saw FOA dissipating because of her bullying of rank-and-file members.

Voight was the most vocal—Otter had to go.

Up until that point, I had been willing to entertain the idea that what young Ryan had told me about Sinise’s blackmail-influenced devotion to Otter and her husband might have been overstated. But the “coup” against Otter left no doubt in my mind. Sinise made it clear: if she goes, I go. No Otter, no Sinise.

Sinise had always been the heart, the core of FOA. If he left, FOA would be hobbled. If he stayed, same result, because of Otter. Voight proposed that he could take over for Gary. What a cute idea. Now, anyone with any viable suggestions?

FOA was hemorrhaging members. Otter had to go. Gary bid his farewell. No one wanted to see him go, but there was a palpable sense of relief that we wouldn’t have to deal with Otter anymore. And there was a palpable sense of panic that in losing Sinise, we were losing the Sinise money, and the Sinise charm (honestly, he’s the nicest, most disarming guy I’d ever known in my life, and that made a huge difference in getting us “big name” speakers).

Sinise turned the group over to Jeremy Boreing, a struggling indie filmmaker who had often moderated FOA new member initiation meetings. Jeremy is a good kid. Like all young indie filmmakers, he’s broke as shit. Like all young indie filmmakers, he’s single-mindedly obsessed with his own projects. We were replacing a guy (Sinise) with money and the time to devote to FOA with a kid with no money and no time to devote to anything.

Anyone who thought that the departure of Sinise and Otter would lead to the revocation of the FOA dues system was sorely disappointed; the organization needed the money now more than ever. But, we all wanted to do our best to pitch in. I, and dozens of other members, began paying again, as a way of showing support for the new regime.

Plus, it was 2012—the year we were going to throw Obama out of the White House. We were excited, energized, and willing to spend. Several hundred members returned to the fold. It was going to be a great year; we all knew it. To invoke one of my favorite Clark Griswold quotes, we knew that by the end of the year we’d all be whistling Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah out of our assholes.

Sinise had flat-out refused to create an Abe Facebook group. His inability to understand the importance of Facebook at the time is typical of a guy with an actual life beyond politics. But for many of us, Facebook was where we liked to hang out. When Sinise grudgingly started an Abe “message board” in 2011, I warned him that it wouldn’t fly. “Start a private Facebook group,” I told him. To no avail. Explaining Facebook to Sinise was like explaining a tampon to me. Yeah, I know what it does and how it works, and I know it’s widely used, but it has zero importance in my life, and frankly I’d rather not even hear about it.

So, I started a group instead, jointly for the Abes and my Republican Party Animals. It was a kind of “think tank” for the people I knew personally, and for the Washington, DC folks who worked with us.

Bobo Zelkin, the Emmy-winning music guy who worked with Sinise, had tried the same feat a year earlier. And it had imploded, mainly because, while the Abes were always unfailingly cordial with each other in person, there’s something about posting online that makes a person contentious and bullying. Without a decent admin, implosion is inevitable.

Zelkin, a jittery neurotic Jew who makes Woody Allen look like Jason Statham, was unprepared for the responsibility of handling an Abe Facebook group. Everyone fought with everyone. The birthers fought with the anti-birthers, the pro-choicers fought with the pro-lifers, the Romney fans fought with the Bachmann and Cain fans, the secularists fought with the theocrats, and the Ron Paulians fought with the doctrinaire GOPs.

Zelkin couldn’t handle it. Seriously, when I say this guy is jittery, I’m saying he makes Don Knotts look like Charles Boyer. Add in his chronic insomnia and Ambien addiction, and the dude’s a wreck. A very talented and likeable wreck, but a wreck all the same. Things in Zelkin’s group got more heated after the revelation that several FOAs had been in direct contact with Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik, the anti-Islam activist who killed almost a hundred kids because, somehow, that would help Europe realize the dangers of Muslim extremism. Zelkin dissolved the group.

So I showed ’em how it’s done. And the first lesson in showing ’em how it’s done is to never come off as the kind of egotist who’d write something like “I showed ’em how it’s done.” Humility, self-deprecation, and a lack of ego need to be projected, with a firm sense of superiority and disdain behind the façade, because otherwise, if you really are humble and ego-challenged (as Zelkin was), the lunatics will take over the asylum.

The private Facebook think tank I started comprised both Abes and my own Republican Party Animals, but under my control and with a somewhat strict standard for inclusion. I called it the “RPA Speakeasy,” to emphasize its secret nature. Many of these people also spoke at or attended my events:

Bush-era Justice Department official John Yoo, Dr. Walid Phares (at the time, a senior foreign policy advisor to Mitt Romney), two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Michael Ramirez, former CIA operative and Fox News analyst Wayne Simmons, The Daily Caller’s Jim Treacher, the Washington Times’ senior editorial writer James S. Robbins, retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer (Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies), B. Daniel Blatt (the gay conservative blogger), Breitbart.com editor-at-large Ben Shapiro, PJ Media’s Bill Whittle, Colonel Buzz Patterson (the senior military aide to President Bill Clinton who was in charge of carrying the “nuclear football”), Charles Glasser (global media counsel at Bloomberg News), actress and activist Morgan Brittany, bloggers Dave in Texas and Iowahawk, The Center for Security Policy’s David Reaboi, World Trade Center Memorial Foundation board member Debra Burlingame (widow of the pilot of AA Flight 77), Doris Wise Montrose of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, Ezra Dulis (associate editor at Breitbart News), Jeremy Boreing of FOA, Julia-Anna Kavich of the California Young Republican Federation, Nick Searcy, then-L.A. mayoral candidate Kevin James, Townhall.com’s Kurt Schlichter, blogger Kira Davis, Dennis Miller co-host Lisa Dabbs, Republican Party of L.A. County Chairman Mark Vafiades, Huntington Beach City Councilman Matthew Harper, Hollywood Congress of Republicans President Mell Flynn, Mytheos Holt of The Blaze, Noel Sheppard (who runs the popular Newsbusters site), professor and Objectivist author Amy Peikoff, nationally syndicated talk radio host Rusty Humphries, Gary Aminoff (vice chairman, Republican Party of Los Angeles County), Politico.com’s Amy Saylors Kremer, bestselling author Stephen England (Pandora’s Grave), Washington Times blogger Wayne Dupree, Kyle Becker (associate editor at Independent Journal Review), former Navy SEAL and tactical operations expert Craig “Sawman” Sawyer, Larry Greenfield of The Claremont Institute, Katie Pavlich (news editor for Townhall.com, and Fox News on-air personality), the American Enterprise Institute’s R.J. Moeller, and New York Post and National Review columnist Michael Walsh (a.k.a. “David Kahane”).

At its height, the secret RPA “think tank” had 360 members. As you can probably tell from the above partial list, it was an eclectic and intellectually stimulating group. Of course, none of the above folks knew a thing about my past. Only Rosie, Goombah Romano, and Fisher Price Chris Noll knew. No one else.

As my Republican Party Animal reputation grew, so too did my understanding of the various bumps in the road that are inevitable when dealing with political event organizing.

Incompetence.

I was never a political conspiracy theorist—in fact, I consider conspiracy theories something to be studied, like an insect specimen. By the time I was in my ’40s, I’d seen enough of them to dismiss them all instinctively. Reagan’s “October surprise,” Reagan’s FEMA death camps, The Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission, the CFR, Bush Sr. and CIA drug running, Bush Sr.’s FEMA death camps, Bill Clinton and Vince Foster’s death, Bill Clinton planning to use Y2K to suspend the 2000 election, Bill Clinton’s FEMA death camps, Bush Jr. stealing the 2000 election, Bush Jr. blowing up the Twin Towers, Bush Jr.’s FEMA death camps, Obama planning to suspend the Constitution, Obama a secret Kenyan Muslim, Obama’s FEMA death camps…you get the picture.

Let me give you folks a bit of an on-the-ground insider’s view—there are not enough competent people in Washington to pull off any such nonsense. The smart ones are too busy making money as consultants, PR guys, or lobbyists to ever want the system to crash. Sure, there have been genuine cover-ups (Watergate, Iran Contra, Clinton’s blowjob), but, eventually, somebody talks, somebody squeals, and it all comes out. And then everyone involved writes a book.

Because that’s what you do when you’ve been exposed or disgraced. You write a book. So predictable. I’m sure glad I’m above that kind of thing.

Michigan Congressman Thad McCotter was one of the smartest guys in Congress. Articulate, intelligent, and well-versed in all aspects of hipster pop culture. One of his viral videos shows him reciting Led Zeppelin lyrics from the House floor, and his regular appearances on Fox’s Red Eye showcased his dry wit and sharp sense of humor. He was a skilled guitar player, and his large, frightening, egg-shaped Mr. Burns bald head and pointy nose only reinforced the assumption that he had to be smart, because why would God create a man who looks like that without imbuing him with a skill that doesn’t depend on looks?

But as smart as McCotter was, the incompetence of those around him would end up destroying his career.

I’d met McCotter several times at FOA. He was one of those guests who wouldn’t just show up, speak, and vamoose. He would actually hang out. And when the cameras were off, he could be as foul-mouthed as a sailor with Tourette’s. At his first FOA dinner, he opened his remarks by looking at all of us and declaring, “Holy shit, so this is Hollywood.” He acknowledged his friend in the audience, actor Robert Davi, by reminding us all that Davi was in Son of the Pink Panther. “And what a piece of shit that film was,” McCotter added.

McCotter would hang out at the bar after an event. He doesn’t drink alcohol, but he’d sip a coke or iced tea while the rest of us would be getting drunker and drunker in his presence.

One evening at Barney’s Beanery, I spoke to the congressman about my Republican Party Animals, and damned if he hadn’t read P.J. O’Rourke’s 1987 book Republican Party Reptile. I was truly impressed—the guy knew his stuff. Sadly, our conversation was cut short when Emmy-nominated Abe sound editor Lisle Engle (along with his burlesque dancer wife) stumbled over to the congressman, nearly knocking him down, barely articulating a kind of “I love you Thad, man,” declaration.

McCotter decided to move to another part of the bar.

Yet as book-smart and culturally smart as McCotter was, his staff could display an unbelievable amount of incompetence.

In 2011, I was contacted by McCotter’s people. Thad was going to make a run for the GOP presidential nomination in the primaries. He never stood a chance, but that wasn’t the point. Thad was from a hundred percent “safe” district in Livonia, Michigan. He had as much chance of losing his seat as a Democrat does in West L.A. In theory, Thad could have stayed in Congress for the rest of his life. But he figured that a presidential bid, far from being Quixotic, would be a way to elevate his profile. No doubt he’d be the smartest guy on stage during the debates. He didn’t have Cain and Gingrich’s personal baggage, or Bachman and Santorum’s case of the batshit crazies, or Romney and Huntsman’s image as being too moderate.

I spoke with his campaign people. They told me what they wanted. They needed a place for Thad to mix with potential supporters, give a talk, and play music. His guitar skills were an essential part of his image. He wanted an “intimate” gathering, with no more than two hundred people, in a private setting. He wanted food, and an area to give a speech. And he wanted some of the FOA musicians to accompany him when he played (Thad was good, but nowhere near as good as some of the professional musicians I worked with).

I had the people (in fact, I had such a large potential guest list that I’d have to turn people away). I had Stacia to do the food (which I’d purchase, along with the drinks), I had the “backup” musicians. All I needed was a private home where live music was allowed. My old friend Jimmy Lewis, former guitar player for Ike and Tina Turner and Al Green, has a beautiful home in the deep, deep reaches of the San Fernando Valley. His house was set up for music, and his neighborhood was okay with it. Perfect.

I gave Thad’s people a choice. As it’s a fundraiser, would they prefer people pay to get in, or get in for free, get liquored up with complimentary booze, and be charmed into pulling out their checkbooks?

“We want people to pay to get in. Maybe, like, $500 per person.”

“$500 per person? You are aware that my people see Thad all the time? Yes, this is a bigger deal, as he’s running for president, but it’s never cost more than $80 to see him at FOA.”

And then Thad’s people gave me the date they wanted. It was opening night of the California Republican Convention at the Downtown L.A. Marriott. Anyone with money would be there. The only people left would be those without the means to get into the biggest event of the California GOP year.

I begged them to consider changing the date. They refused. I told them, in that case, I couldn’t charge at the door. Thad would have to be extra charming and hope for checks to be written. And I assured them it was unlikely that the checks would be very big.

The gross incompetence astounded me. Why even bother to have a fundraiser when you know all the people with money to donate are elsewhere? But, I love a good challenge. So I put together a fine night. Stacia worked overtime, in part because Jimmy, whose house we were using, had a kitchen that hadn’t been updated since the 1960s (at least).

The incompetence from Thad’s people continued. They rented a car without a GPS. They were almost two hours late. I wanted to yell, “you’re a fucking congressman and you don’t have a GPS?” They kept calling me for directions, because of course I had all the time in the world; it wasn’t like I had two hundred restless guests on my hands.

Thad showed up, mingled, and gave a speech. He flatly refused to try a piece of Stacia’s signature “cheesy poofs” as he toured the kitchen, which was bad form. But he did give a great speech. And then he played, or at least he was trying to, but he and the FOA musicians backing him couldn’t agree on what to play, so they just stood there tootling around like idiots, until Mike the guitar god (still totally unworthy of a derisive nickname) took matters into his own hands, jumping in front of the floundering tootlers, leading them in various rock classics.

Everyone seemed happy, but I doubt Thad made a dime. I warned him. What else could I do?

Oh, and remember what I said about him having a “safe” seat in Livonia? Well, several of his incompetent staffers sabotaged his chances for reelection in 2012 by photocopying the names from the previous year’s petition (in Michigan, even an incumbent still has to submit two thousand names to get on the ballot—an easy task for anyone who regularly wins with the numbers Thad gets). It’s generally thought that the signature photocopying scheme was hatched by a staffer who was pissed at Thad for not loaning him $10,000, and that staffer took advantage of the other staffers’ incompetence to get them to play along.

As a result, McCotter left politics, disgraced and ruined.

In a funny epilogue, when McCotter didn’t qualify, the only people left on the ballot were the imbeciles stupid enough to run against a man assured of reelection. There was the ubiquitous Lyndon LaRouche loon, there was a doctor from India who couldn’t speak English, and there was the only Republican—a 9/11 “truther” who raises reindeer and thinks he’s Santa Claus (his own family told the local papers that the guy is mentally unstable).

Livonia being a “safe” district for Republicans, Santa Claus won. Ho ho ho.

Irritants.

Michael Reagan, Ronald’s oldest son and an author and radio host in his own right, is one of the most affably difficult individuals I’ve ever known. Trying to schedule events with him is like trying to build a tower out of mercury. But what makes Michael funny is that he flakes out for the absolute silliest reasons. In theory, Michael’s excuses could be things like “I’m needed at an important meeting at my dad’s library,” or “my publisher needs to see me.” But no, it’s always stuff like “there are gophers in my backyard” or “squirrels are stealing my bird feeder.” I only did two events with the man, but it felt like thirty. Thirty long, tortuous events.

I would joke to Rosie and Stacia, “if he mentions those fucking gophers one more time, I’m gonna deck him. Hire a fucking exterminator.”

Poor Ronald Reagan. He stared down the Soviet Empire, and his son can’t handle gophers.

Hangers-on.

Of all the cougars in FOA, no one out-cougared Beverly Zaslow. She earned her derisive nickname right off the bat—Beverly “Tudors” Zaslow. Bev was the “executive producer” of two highly celebrated and completely crappy conservative documentaries—Runaway Slave (about black conservatives) and Hating Breitbart (a worshipful paean to the late conservative icon). Rumor was that she slept her way into both EP credits. I can’t confirm that. What I can confirm is that the mid-fifties blonde, married with grown children and living in Washington State, would remove her wedding ring every time she was out here, affecting a backstory in which she was in a horrid marriage with a husband she so very desperately wanted to leave. She did this to me, and to several friends of mine.

She latched onto me because of my friendship with Larry Elder, the only black conservative who didn’t debase himself by doing that horrid Runaway Slave film. She’d feed me a sob story about having nowhere to stay while in L.A. She and I grew up in the same West L.A. neighborhood, though ten years apart. We would have gone to the same high school, but she desperately wanted to avoid attending a majority black school. Ironic, considering that she’s now presenting herself as the (Jewish) voice of black conservatives.

I’d let her stay at my house, but, sensing her manipulative nature, I insisted she stay two doors removed from my bedroom. “Two doors.” Hence her nickname “Tudors.” Fuck, I’m clever. Plus, it was a small, personal homage to the Monty Python character Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson.

Bev was a unique combination of cougar and pitcher. And she had many fans among the older male members of the FOA/RPA circle, due to her reputation—deserved or not—for being an easy lay. And dear God could she talk. I dreaded every encounter. She would talk and talk and talk like women do when men feign interest in their lives in order to get a hand job. But I never feigned interest, and I’d rather have gotten a hand job from the “where’s the beef” lady. But Bev had contacts, so spending hours on end being annoyed by her was just part of my job description.

Stacia and I went to see the pre-release screening of Runaway Slave (it was promoted by FOA), and we sat there, aghast, as Bev stepped on stage after the film dressed—literally—like an Oscar statuette. She wore a head-to-toe gold form-fitting outfit, with arm-length golden gloves.

“Holy shit, she looks like an Oscar,” Stacia said to me. We couldn’t control our laughter.

But if I’m going to give examples of the bad, I should also give a few of the good. Congressman Mike Kelly (Erie, Pennsylvania) was a pleasure to work with. He was part of the wave of GOPs swept into the House in the 2010 midterms. Kelly was a lifelong businessman, and a grandpa, who decided he wanted to get involved in politics. His victory, in a district that had voted Democrat for fifty-two of the previous sixty years, would have been hailed as a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” story had the parties been reversed.

Kelly’s jovial nature, and his common sense, business-savvy approach to government quickly made him one of the more well-known freshmen in Congress. A viral video in which Kelly lectured his fellow congressmen on how poorly they treat small business owners received nearly 1.3 million views. A speech from the House floor about the over-regulation of businesses received over 900,000 views. More recently, his magnificent takedown of a weasely IRS official during hearings about the IRS scandal (the one in which conservative groups were targeted by the IRS for extra scrutiny) received a standing ovation from the gallery, and the video has, so far, received almost a half-million views.

Kelly is the only congressman I worked with who took the time and effort to send me not only a thank-you note, but also a beautiful set of House of Representatives glassware. That was truly classy.

Another person who was a pleasure to work with was U.S. Navy Commander Jennifer (J.E.) Dyer, who served in Naval Intelligence from 1983 through 2004, beginning her career under Ronald Reagan and finishing it serving in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. Commander Dyer now writes for The Weekly Standard, HotAir, and Commentary. I thought she might be intimidating, because she has every right to be, but she was very friendly and easy to work with.

But in the “not incompetent, annoying, or childish” category, my favorite guy was Larry Elder. He was the Republican Party Animals’ number one fan. After his first appearance at one of our events, he never missed another. We ended up becoming very good friends. That I’ll never speak to him again is a tragedy for me, perhaps the thing out of all I’ve lost that stings the most. That he and his publishing company ripped me off using my “outing” as an excuse is a huge annoyance. But damn do I miss his company. More on that later.

My friendship with Goombah Romano quickly nosedived. I left his site after he made and then withdrew an offer of full partnership. We were rivaling Breitbart in traffic. It’s what Romano had wanted, and it’s what I’d given him. I politely told him that if the offer of partnership was rescinded, I would leave. He seemed gracious enough. I started my own site, his traffic plummeted, and he began stealing my content.

He actually admitted it, and, like a scorned goombah, begged me to come back. I told him we couldn’t speak until he paid me for the stories he stole. He thanked me for being “a gentleman” about the theft, but he said no deal to the payments.

We stopped talking.

A month later, I was at an Abe event, holding court with Rosie and about five other Abes. In came Romano, sauntering up to my table with all the swagger of a man you’d never think hides in girls’ bathrooms. Thinking all was forgiven, he tried to say hello. I ignored him. He grabbed me playfully by the neck as I was sitting, jostling me while saying, “C’mon, Stein, c’mon, get over it, pally, c’mon, ol’ buddy.” Call it short guy syndrome, but I don’t like being jostled by a bigger guy. I barked out, “Get the fuck away from me, John.”

Call it short guy syndrome, but I felt comfortable saying that because the other guys at my table were Adam Baldwin-size, so I knew I was covered.

Romano stepped back, literally spitting his words, stammering Shatner-style. “You…fucking…Holocaust denier. You…piece of shit…denier! Fucking…denier!” Naturally, everyone at the table was incensed. How dare he call David Stein, FOA’s resident Holocaust guy, a “denier.” One six-foot-three Abe sitting with me rose to his feet and ordered Romano away. Romano, as he always does, fled. He left the event and he left Friends of Abe entirely.

Sicilians. Their reputation as tough guys can be a bit inflated sometimes.

The next day I asked Fisher Price Chris if I had anything to fear about Romano outing me after his outburst. Chris, who’s known John most of his life, said that John would never do that, no matter how angry he was. And Chris was right. The Romano incident was in early 2011, and he never tried anything after that. In fact, we’d end up becoming friends again after Breitbart died in March 2012.

With Friends of Abe in slowdown mode after losing Gary Sinise and his money, Stacia suggested that the Republican Party Animals begin holding monthly events—smaller ones to supplement the bigger ones. Our numbers kept growing, as did my influence as a conservative writer. My political articles (and the viral videos I often edited to accompany them) were featured on Fox News, The Rush Limbaugh Show, O’Reilly.com, MSNBC, the Hollywood Reporter, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, New York Daily News, HotAir.com, the Daily Caller, the Washington Times, Breitbart.com, Human Events, Ace of Spades HQ, Gawker, the Weekly Standard, the L.A. Jewish Journal, Pat Dollard, the Daily Telegraph (UK), The Blaze, FrontPage Magazine, the Washington Examiner, Commentary, American Thinker, Pajamas Media, RightNetwork.com, MichelleMalkin.com, Newsbusters, the History News Network, WND, Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism, Moonbattery, Eyeblast, the Orange County Register, the Orange County Weekly, Creeping Sharia, Jerusalem Pulse Radio, AllahPundit, the Media Research Center, NewsReal Blog, Right Pundits, SodaHead, Islamist Watch, Politifi, The Hope for America, Jihad Watch, Atlas Shrugs, Right Wing News, and even The Huffington Post.

A long list, but I don’t mind bragging. My stuff was rather good. Soon enough, I had mainstream conservative authors (like Janet Tassel of Harvard Magazine and the Jewish Advocate) writing for my site. It’s that thing about doing good work and everything else will fall into place.

My political writing was aided by friends like Larry Elder, who read my exposés on air. I felt a rush that I hadn’t experienced since my revisionist days. Those middle years between revisionism and politics, in which I churned out uninspired crap purely for the money, had made me forget the exhilaration of making and reporting new discoveries. Just as with revisionism, money didn’t matter anymore. My site never turned anything even remotely resembling a profit, even as my readership grew. Romano had tried to teach me how to “monetize” a site, but I was as uninterested in that as I had been in “monetizing” being a revisionist. I was making just enough (through mailing list rentals and residuals from old projects) to support Rosie, and that was my only real expense, beyond fast food and the $9.99 bottles of vodka I’d purchase at CVS.

Among the casualties of my political pieces: I got the Department of Defense to drop not one but two leftist programs (one was a course in “class warfare” and social justice, the other was an instructional program telling service members to use “humor” and “body language,” rather than violence, if they are bystanders witnessing a rape or murder in progress). I exposed a Venezuelan diplomat conspiring to funnel money and support from the Chavez regime to violent U.S. extremist groups. I revealed that money from the Obama “stimulus” had gone to the University of South Florida to set up a permanent exhibit honoring a “black revolutionary” who provoked the murder of police officers and Asian storeowners, and who advocated the murder of Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

I exposed an official policy launched by the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security instructing law enforcement to follow Islamic gender apartheid rules when questioning Muslim witnesses or suspects (Muslim women can’t be spoken to without “their man” present). I released the audio, never before heard, of a conference held at Hofstra University sponsored by the NAACP and the ADL in which a “model legal statute” was chosen that could remove the free speech rights of “racists.”

I got a senior NAACP official removed after revealing a conference he co-organized at which Jews were slammed as “parasites” and Obama was repeatedly called “nigger,” “coon,” and “half-nigger.” I exposed the fact that the new in-house legal counsel for Southern California Edison used to edit a site that advocated suicide bombing attacks against Jewish civilians. I revealed that the L.A. teachers union was funneling money and support to a racist, anti-Semitic city council candidate. And, in the weeks before the Wisconsin recall election, I uncovered video of progressive “pro-woman” Democrat Tom Barrett lauding a “gangsta rapper” at one of his campaign stops, as the rapper hollered about “bitches who ride me, make a nigga comfortable,” because “cash make the women shake they asses, so get on the tour bus, bitch.”

In the days after the Newtown mass shooting, I was the first to report that Connecticut is one of only six states in the U.S. without an “assisted outpatient treatment” law (court-ordered treatment, including medication, for mentally ill people who have a history of medication noncompliance, as a condition of remaining in the community). I showed that the liberal groups pushing for gun control in the wake of Newtown were the same ones that torpedoed a proposed assisted outpatient treatment law in Connecticut a year earlier. Limbaugh read that story on air. Larry Elder would sometimes have me come on air to discuss my newest find. And occasionally, I’d get noticed not so much for my own exclusive stories, but for debunking another writer’s “scoop.” I was roundly attacked by anti-Muslim nutjob Pam Geller for daring to point out her sloppy (nonexistent) reporting when she claimed that Texas Governor Rick Perry was advocating a “pro-Sharia” curriculum in Texas schools.

Of course, Geller had neither read nor published the curriculum in question. Once again displaying my awesome powers as the “one-eyed king,” I published the curriculum and interviewed the author (a conservative Christian, pro-Zionist retired teacher). Not only was it not “pro-Sharia,” it was in fact highly critical of Islam.

Geller, displaying the wit and wisdom that made her a conservative darling, responded on her site by calling me an “asshat.”

My writing allowed me to engage in some of the “double teaming” that I so very much enjoy doing. In one instance, revisionist Bradley Smith, who lives in Baja, talked his buddy, a university professor down there, into getting the film I produced (anonymously) about Ernst Zündel and Germar Rudolf booked to play Baja’s largest film festival. As the festival prepared to screen my film, “Stein” was on the phone with every sponsor and celebrity guest at the festival, warning them of the “denial” film that was about to screen.

As a result of my efforts, the festival’s biggest co-sponsor withdrew, and by the time the film screened, it was standing room only, because everyone wanted to see the film that caused all the fuss. Plus, I forged a long-term email relationship with actress Maria Conchita Alonso, who was one of the celebrities at the festival. I had instructed Bradley to try to ambush her for an interview, and at the same time I called her manager (who, wouldn’t ya know, was Israeli) and warned her that Alonso was going to be ambushed by denier Bradley Smith. The manager was so grateful, she passed along my personal info to Alonso, who kept in touch and often sent me exclusive statements about Hugo Chavez (Alonso, raised in Venezuela, was a die-hard anti-Chavez activist).

My greatest coup was releasing a series of letters from the 1980s between a Holocaust revisionist and Noam Chomsky. Those letters came straight from the old McCalden files, and they got me on the home page of David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine and the History News Network. The letters proved that Chomsky had been lying for years about the actual nature of his relationship with deniers/revisionists.

Of course, I was taking a risk. The Chomsky letters received so much exposure, I was petrified that someone—anyone—would ask me how in the fucking hell I ever got them in the first place.

But no, no such questions. No curiosity. That’s the blogosphere for you—no curiosity about sources. That’s why fake stories and memes get so much play. No one gives a shit about provenance.

The one time I couldn’t exploit my revisionist past to further my conservative present was in 2010, when the Ohio incumbent, Democrat Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (in office since 1983), was being challenged by GOP go-getter Rich Iott. 2010 was the year we slaughtered the Dems, and Iott’s chances looked decent, until it surfaced that he was a member of a war reenactment group, and during a reenactment performance had donned an SS uniform.

Naturally, Jewish groups demanded the standard apology, even though Iott showed proof that he had portrayed soldiers in the Civil War and World War I. It was theater, which is what these war reenacters are all about. Kaptur—totally not a Jew-friendly congresswoman (she takes money from Arabs, not Israelis)—played up the “uniform” thing for all it was worth. But I had the fan letter she wrote to me as Cole in the 1990s, praising my revisionist work.

That really could have made a difference, had I released it. Here was a congresswoman slamming a rival for his war reenactment hobby, while she had praised the work of “evil Holocaust denier” David Cole.

But I couldn’t release the letter. There would have been no way I could have done it without my photo as Cole, and my videos, resurfacing. I could have influenced the election, but at my own expense. So I held back.

Iott lost by only 35,800 votes. It was Kaptur’s worst showing ever.

19.

OTHER LOSSES

By 2012, things were going so well, I could almost describe them as being on auto-pilot, that beautiful mirage of a life that I always dreamed of, in which I don’t have to keep inventing and reinventing, and in which I’m not constantly putting out fires. January 2012 put me very close to that goal. My events were now so well-known that I didn’t have to work my ass off to get people to attend. I’d announce an event, and folks would come. It was that easy. Stacia did the cooking/catering if needed. Mike Thompson the guitar god (STILL not yet deserving of a derisive nickname) provided the music. I had a rotating set of conservative-friendly venues around town. Young Jeremy at Friends of Abe was working with me on doing joint projects, especially as FOA was less and less able to do events on its own, and I’d become known across the conservative blogosphere for my investigative reports, which made people more tolerant of my growing alcohol problem (a talentless man who drinks too much is dismissed as worthless; a talented man who drinks too much is excused as a tortured soul or a brilliant eccentric).

And speaking of tortured souls, enter Michael Walsh, the New York Post’s most right-wingiest of weekly columnists. He’s also a National Review columnist who used to write under the pseudonym “David Kahane” before outing himself in 2010. I had only known Walsh as the morose, lisping old fat man who’d show up at my events. It wasn’t until 2011 that I realized he was the “David Kahane” who’d helped Andrew Breitbart launch BigJournalism.com. In the second half of 2011, he started showing up at my events with greater frequency, and we became friends. Although his Post and National Review columns kept him busy, his main source of income was writing Disney fluff like the 2002 Hilary Duff vehicle Cadet Kelly. He’d often tell tales of having been a Cold War spy in East Germany, but his bread and butter these days was catering to mindless tweens. Checkpoint Charlie? More like “Checkpoint Miley.”

Walsh is the only person I’ve ever known to be the subject of a derisive Cracked.com piece. “5 Little-Known Sequels That Ruined Iconic Stories” spotlighted his massive bungling of the much-anticipated sequel to Casablanca. The article detailed how many ways Walsh had “raped the venerable corpse” of Casablanca, concluding with a link to an interview in which Walsh was asked about the viability of the book he’d just been paid a great deal to write. Walsh’s response? “That’s not my problem.”

That was the man’s nihilism and “I don’t give a fuck” attitude before he lost his daughter and his marriage. It got much worse in 2012.

No one knows why Walsh’s twenty-two-year-old daughter Clare died. She just never woke up on Christmas morning, 2011. Even the private pathologist hired by the family couldn’t come up with answers. After returning from New York following her death, Walsh told me he needed my help. He’d became severely depressed. The fact that just over a year earlier he himself had nearly died on the operating table during open heart surgery made it worse.

“Why would God save me just so I could see my little girl die?” Walsh was not just depressed, he was having a crisis of faith. He felt cheated by God. His marriage fell apart, and soon, I couldn’t get rid of the guy.

Walsh wanted company. Not just the occasional company from Abes, or from my RPA events, but more “up-close and personal” company from my female friends: Rosie, Stacia, and several others not worth mentioning in this book. I have a desire at this point to begin referring to Walsh by my derisive nickname for him, “Cadet Walshy,” a reference to his Disney Channel masterwork. When Cadet Walshy first approached me at an Abe event in January 2012 to ask for my help in arranging “company” to take his mind off his daughter’s death, I didn’t read anything ominous into it.

He was hurt. He was lonely. And why wouldn’t I help him?

I’d later learn that what he wanted, specifically, was the “company” of young women. And he looked at me as some sort of pimp. I don’t want to judge a man who suffered the type of tragedy that befell Cadet Walshy. But the guy’s a perv. And that perviness would end up contributing to my “outing” in 2013.

Cadet Walshy and I would talk a lot throughout 2012. He would speak of giving everything up. Moving to Ireland (his ancestral home). Becoming a hermit. One day it would be, “I’m chucking politics for screenwriting,” and the next day it would be “I’m chucking screenwriting too. I just want to be done with this life.”

Rosie was particularly soothing to Walsh, perhaps because she looks like an “Irish rose,” even if her mentality is closer to the goose-stepping Huns from which she came.

Apparently, Rosie was also growing more “soothing” to the other Mike—Mike Thompson, the Wolverine-sideburned guitar hero.

And me? Five years of Rosie was finally taking a toll on my finances. The writing and events were keeping me constantly busy, but they didn’t pay. Because of my success as a political writer, I’d been offered two very nice jobs. One was a position writing for Middle East Forum, the anti-Islamist think-tank founded by former State Department and Defense Department official Daniel Pipes (one of the genuine intellects of the anti-Islamist movement), and the other was a job writing for the Independent Journal Review, a top-200 news website.

I turned them both down. It’s not fun for me if I get paid. Just like with revisionism, I wasn’t doing it for the money. I wanted full partnership with Goombah Romano because I don’t like having a boss. But even in his case, I rejected an offer to get paid per article.

I had a chat with the redhead. I told her we had to cut back. Since 2011, our deal had been her daily $200 meals, gas for her car, bi-weekly grocery trips (about $200 to $400), and her parking tickets. I told her I couldn’t do that anymore. Meals and gas only. No more groceries, no more tickets.

Rosie knew that politics was the “other woman” in all of this. I was getting so much pleasure from it, and although it wasn’t contributing any money, it wasn’t taking any either (the days when I had to worry about not breaking even at events were long gone). Rosie and I weren’t really enjoying each other’s company that much, either. At her daily feedings, I’d do nothing but drink cheap booze (I couldn’t afford to feed the both of us). Things were definitely ready to end. But neither of us would allow that natural course of action. I still wanted my six-foot-tall redhead at my events, and she, now thirty-one years old (in the modeling world, that makes you Grandma Moses), had seen her acting aspirations implode as her modeling gigs dried up. She wasn’t about to give up those daily meals and a gassed-up car.

An unhealthy thing had gotten much unhealthier. But whereas I, a master plotter in every other matter, was simply allowing my limp body to drift through a daily routine I was unsatisfied with, Rosie, another master plotter, was plotting. She was looking at the long-term. You don’t quit your job without tucking away office supplies and other valuables in the months leading up to when you give notice.

Another change in 2012 was that I was finally free of Scott “Scatty” Edwards. Scatty had thrown a petulant fit at the end of 2011, declaring that he didn’t want to be in the Republican Party Animals anymore. He was pissed that I never paid for his hotel room, and that I had become the face of the group (and the wallet, and the talent, etc.).

Sometimes people truly puzzle me. When Scatty announced that from now on he wanted to be “Party on the Right,” a new conservative party group that would remain centered in Oregon, I honestly don’t know what he expected me to do. Did he expect me to say, “well, then, I’ll be Party on the Right too, because where you go, oh worthless fat man in the sleep apnea mask, I follow!”

Of course, months later, he’d come to regret his decision to leave. But no matter. I was relieved to be free of the fat ginger. I joked to Rosie that I felt as though a three-hundred-pound boil had just been removed from my ass.

It was only after Scatty cut ties with me that about a half-dozen of my people decided to finally tell me about all the blow he’d do at my events. Oh great, friends, thanks for finally enlightening me. Assholes. Talk about having dodged a bullet. Jesus. I mean, I would always reserve our venues as private, but I couldn’t control the kitchen and wait staff. All I’d need is one person taking a quick iPhone shot of a guy doing blow at an event with Republican politicians, and I’d be exiled, disgraced, and abandoned.

I mean sure, that happened anyway. But it might have happened sooner.

When Andrew Breitbart died unexpectedly on March 1, 2012, we gathered at our favorite Barney’s Beanery hangout for an impromptu night of communal mourning. Although it was very last minute, David Houston, the owner of Barney’s, arranged for us to have the upstairs level and roped it off as private. It was very appropriate that we gathered there. Andrew was the reason the Abes used that venue for our monthly beer and pizza nights. Initially, we’d used the “historical” Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood, but Andrew wasn’t fond of it because it was too far from where he lived.

And there we were the day he died, gathering at the place he loved so much. Rosie was down in San Diego with her folks, so I took Stacia. The mood was beyond somber. Dave Houston had decided that all of our drinks would be on the house, the entire night. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone had earlier that day posted a piece titled “Andrew Breitbart: Death of a Douche.” Conservative “comedian” Stephen Kruiser had obtained Taibbi’s cell number, and he was busy tweeting it to his 160,000 followers (and passing the number around for other Abes to make crank calls).

Stacia had heard of Goombah Romano, but she’d never met him. He left the Abes after the “fucking Holocaust denier” incident a year earlier. But in he walked, he and I not having seen each other since that previous Barney’s encounter. I’m not sure why he came…maybe he needed to erase the memory of the last time he interacted with Breitbart (the girls’ bathroom episode). But for whatever reason, he showed up. Time had healed whatever animosity I had for him. My website was doing well, and my events had grown past the days when I needed his little garage band to play. I walked up to him and we hugged. No hard feelings all around. We chatted like old times.

I’ll speak a bit of blasphemy now: I never cared for Breitbart. To the people in my former circles, I might as well have just said “Reagan sucks” or “I’m embracing Islam.” But again, I have to say, I never cared for the man.

One of the things that made Breitbart likeable was how absolutely detestable his foes were. All the left can do is scream “racist! racist! racist!” Leftists are magicians with only one trick, and it can amaze and astound only if you don’t actually think about it. Breitbart was as far from a racist as it’s possible to be, and every time he’d stand nose-to-nose with a leftist who was shrieking “racist!” at him, he was a genuine hero.

Also, the left has no concept of the extent to which Breitbart’s expansion of the power of “new media” has benefited them, too. Breitbart was a very early innovator in new media, and everyone—even the leftists who despise him—has reaped the rewards. But regarding Breitbart’s overall effect on conservatism, especially since his death, I’d rate it more of a net loss than a gain.

Chris Loesch, husband of Dana Loesch, the conservative talk radio host and then-editor of Breitbart’s BigJournalism.com, started a very small private Facebook group for conservative artists (S.C.A.R.S.—the “Secret Conservative Artists Rant Society”), mainly to ridicule the likes of Breitbart acolytes James O’Keefe and Christian Hartsock, who shot the infamous (and factually questionable) “pimp and ho” exposé of ACORN. (Christian is a really decent kid who was a friend of mine, but he needs to mature a bit as a filmmaker.) There were never more than about forty people in the group, including myself, and it was very funny to see the mix of legitimate artistic criticism (“the O’Keefe/Hartsock videos suck”) and the inevitable jealousy that all artistic types feel whenever someone they consider a lesser talent gets major recognition and they don’t (“why do the O’Keefe/Hartsock videos get such play?”).

Artists are still artists, liberal or conservative. An artist without jealousy and secret feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt is like a fat man without gas.

The private resentment that some conservatives had regarding the way Breitbart would fawn over someone like O’Keefe, a man who few of us respected, was not as bad as the refusal of most conservatives to admit the extent to which Breitbart fumbled the Shirley Sherrod story.

When the Sherrod story first broke, I knew something seemed fishy. The video cut-off mid-sentence. She was obviously in the middle of an anecdote. It was plain as day to anyone who was willing to see. The problem was, most people in my circle weren’t willing to see. Breitbart had created a cult of sycophants, and an outer circle of wannabes who desired nothing more than to be an inner-circle brownnoser.

I emailed a couple of the inner-circle sycophants, asking if they had a transcript of the full speech. True to form, they refused to help. Within a day or so, the full tape came to light. Breitbart had really fucked this one up. For those who don’t recall, the short version is that while USDA official Sherrod, who is black, was speaking to an NAACP audience, she told a story that can be paraphrased like this:

“A white farmer came to me for help. I thought he was racist, so I was debating whether or not to help him. Finally, I decided to at least do a little something for the guy, so I took him to see a lawyer who was ‘one of his own,’ a white man, because that’s where he belonged, with his own kind.”

(Here’s where Breitbart cut the video. But the story continued.)

“But then I found out that the white lawyer wasn’t helping this man at all, only taking his money and putting the man at risk of losing his farm. It was at that point I realized that it isn’t about race at all. I had been wrong, and I jumped back in and represented the white farmer with all of my abilities.”

It’s a typical “epiphany moment” story. Anyone with any sense could see that she was going somewhere with the tale. She was working toward a point. Breitbart deceitfully presented the video to look like the story ended when Sherrod took the farmer to see “one of his own kind.”

After several days of Breitbart stubbornly refusing to admit he’d made an error, and with conservatives circling the wagons around him, I wrote a piece out of frustration and called it “Breitbart was Wrong” (excerpted below). I asked Goombah Romano (this is back when I was editing his site) if he thought we should run it. Remember—our site was on par with Breitbart’s at that time. Romano, still smarting from the Barney’s Beanery altercation, told me to run it.

Breitbart’s attempt at save-ass was to claim that the story was never supposed to be about Sherrod, but about the NAACP audience. Sherrod wasn’t the focus of Breitbart’s Monday morning post. No, not at all. The point was that the NAACP audience was clapping and applauding and whoopin’ it up as she described withholding aid from a white farmer.

It was a great rationalization. But there’s just one problem—it was a lie.

Here are his actual words, from his initial Monday morning post:

“Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups’ racial tolerance.”

The target of the post was Sherrod. The audience was mentioned only peripherally. And note that Breitbart didn’t mention the audience applauding or clapping. Not ONCE. He only mentioned “murmurs of recognition and agreement.”

Remember that little detail.

Because HERE’S what Breitbart said about the NAACP audience on Good Morning America Wednesday morning, as he attempted to do damage control:

“It (the Sherrod video excerpt) shows people in the audience there applauding her when she discriminates against a white farmer. That was the point that I was trying to make.”

And a few minutes later:

“If you want to talk about people clapping (and here Andrew claps his hands for effect) racist behavior, that’s exactly what you see in this video.”

And here was Breitbart in an interview on Politico:

“I believe that I’m held to a higher standard. If this video showed a picture of a Caucasian talking in the exact same way but talking about a black person with an audience affirming and clapping that behavior, the reporter would be getting a Pulitzer Prize right now.”

Clapping? Applauding? I’ve listened to the video with the volume turned up high enough to scare my neighbors. There’s no clapping, and there’s no applauding.

So am I just supposed to check my intelligence at the door? Am I supposed to pretend that something exists when it doesn’t, and then criticize ideological opposites when they do the same?

Breitbart would never speak to me again, and neither would his sycophant-in-chief Larry O’Connor (editor of Breitbart.com). I’d see them every few weeks, and I’d always go up to say hi. They’d avoid eye contact and flee like children. It made me laugh.

The Breitbart sites still occasionally carried my work; Breitbart was petulant and childish, but he was still a businessman. Yet he never backed down on the Sherrod story. At a September 2010 Abe event with GOP representatives Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy, Breitbart stood up during Q&A time and announced that he should be recognized for unearthing the most important story in the nation by bringing the Sherrod video to light (for those of you paying attention, “Q&A” typically means that you ask a question, rather than make a proclamation).

What Breitbart taught conservatives was to always double down if the left accuses you of being wrong. But conservatives can be wrong. The knee-jerk instinct that Breitbart preached, to meet any leftist criticism with a twice-as-strong affirmation of the thing you’re being criticized for, is disastrous. Admitting a mistake is seen as “kowtowing” to the opposing side. It doesn’t matter if you actually were wrong. Double down! Defy!

During the controversy over remarks made in 2012 by moronic Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock (Akin had stated that a woman can’t get pregnant from rape, and Mourdock had claimed that when a rape occurs, it’s because God wants it to), I found myself in many heated exchanges with conservatives. My position was that Akin had to go. Mourdock’s Zippy the Pinhead moment came too late in the race for him to be replaced, but Akin’s didn’t.

The response I got laid bare the Curse of Breitbart: “Even if Akin was wrong, we need to double-down on our support for him, because the important thing is to defy the left. That’s what Breitbart taught us. Never give an inch, always grow more defiant the more they attack you. Always double-down!”

Breitbart, now dead, had created a monster, one that I’m not sure even he would have approved of. Time and again, GOPs and Tea Partiers would tell me, “Akin might be wrong, but it would be worse if we conceded that. I’ll support Akin even more strongly now.”

Chris Loesch even launched a tirade in his private group about how, medically, Akin was right! He bent over backwards trying to prove the claim that women can’t get pregnant from rape. Bobo Zelkin and I could barely believe what we were reading. And it was all being done in Breitbart’s name. Akin and Mourdock not only (justifiably) lost their races, but their dim-wittedness (and the Breitbart “double down” strategy) had, by the last month of the election, made the abortion issue the number-one concern of female voters in swing states, above the economy, jobs, healthcare, foreign policy, the debt, Obama’s scandals, and all the other things we should have been concentrating on (according to Gallup’s October 17, 2012, poll, female voters in twelve swing states ranked abortion as their number one issue).

The Breitbart Curse goes beyond doubling-down on defective candidates. It also extends to doubling-down on defective issues. In an irony that Andrew would have found infuriating, as he was never much of an advocate for “social conservative” issues, the double-down strategy is often invoked by those who push the issue that’s killing the GOP: the rape/abortion issue. “Oh, so them liberals don’t like the ‘no rape exception?’ Well then, we’ll push it even HARDER ’cause it pisses ’em off. We’ll DOUBLE DOWN on it!”

The left’s “war on women” meme is probably one of the best strategies I’ve ever seen, because it’s based on the assurance that during each election cycle, the GOP “base” will demand that its candidates push the “no rape exception,” and, as a result, several GOP candidates will say something idiotic. Because if you grill a “no rape exception” guy long enough, he’ll say something offensive. And the media will go national with those comments and other races will be affected. And as long as the media knows that the best strategy for GOP defeat is to grill “rape guys” about the no rape exception, it guarantees that the media will concentrate on that issue exclusively.

I did my best to fight against the GOP “rape guys,” and I made absolutely no impact. Just like when I tried to convince the gay Nazi chef to use the word “Holocaust” when defending imprisoned revisionists.

You can’t reason with most ideologues. Left or right, Nazi cuisinier or GOP rape guy, strategy is seen as weakness, compromise as surrender. Breitbart didn’t invent this curse, but the idol worship that followed his untimely end has assured that the curse becomes a nail in the coffin of many, many GOP candidates.

Breitbart’s curse helped lose us the election.

In the end, the left will benefit more from Breitbart’s legacy than conservatives will. And most leftists will probably never have the simple intelligence to realize it, or to finally stop calling Breitbart a “racist” and actually thank the man.

20.

DEVIL DOES YOUR DOG BITE?

The Republican Party Animals on “auto-pilot” was destined not to last. Rosie had grown dissatisfied with the decreased level of financial support I was providing. And, more than that, we were both growing very tired of each other. As often as not, I’d arrive at an event with Rosie after having paid for her daily feeding, and I’d leave with Stacia, as she lived so close to me, and, frankly, I preferred her company.

Rosie would often end the night hanging out with guitar god Mike (still not worthy of a derisive nickname), and Cadet Walshy, whose creepy fixation with Rosie, over thirty years his junior, would have been alarming had I noticed it at the time. Others did, but it never registered with me. I think it was because I genuinely liked the poor bastard. And I respected him, as a skilled writer of the type of worthless opinion journalism I usually hate.

The same with guitar god Mike. I really liked the guy, and I respected his music skills. Nothing that was happening those early months in 2012 raised any red flags. I saw no flags when Mike absconded with Scatty’s model/date at the summer event, and I saw no flags when Mike attempted to unethically undercut the front man of his band, Gary Graham, by offering me his services at much cheaper prices.

The fact was, Graham was a mediocre musician. Mike, on the other hand, was not only truly skilled—gifted, I’d say—but he was used to playing for tips and free food. $50 to him was a windfall, a bounty. I would later give him the derisive nickname Tipjar Mike Thompson in honor of the fact that he never went anywhere without his trusty Tipjar.

Independently of my political endeavors, I’d help Tipjar Mike promote events on his own, at local pubs, clubs, and even a pizzeria where he played for free pizza slices every Friday night.

The problem with where Rosie and I had drifted was that not only was the veneer gone (in that we’d both come to realize that what we had was a business relationship, plain and simple), but the fun was gone. In the early years, there was a feeling of “adventure” because we were working together on the goal of her acting career. By 2012 that goal was dead. We were in a rut that, though bothersome for me, was worse for her. I had my political passion. She had…nothing. No career, no goals, nothing but her food fetish. She even bought two kittens in early 2012 to give her life something meaningful.

Her behavior was becoming erratic. Rosie rarely showed her ugly side to strangers, and I was taken aback the first time she did. A week before one of my events, out of pure vanity I decided to get my hair—which had grayed rapidly since 2007—colored. It was the first time in my life I’d ever done something like that. Rosie was used to coming by for her daily feeding around 3 p.m. I made the appointment for 2, but I didn’t realize it would take at least ninety minutes. Rosie came into the salon at 3, and the stylist told her it’d still be another half-hour. She burst out crying in front of the stylist and her staff, and stormed out to the parking lot, where she began sending me angry texts.

I excused myself and walked out into the lot, hair half-finished. I went up to Rosie’s car. She was in tears. There was a Trader Joe’s across the street, so I gave her my credit card and told her to go shopping (food shopping to Rosie is like clothes or shoe shopping to other women). She perked right up, grabbed the card, and put a good hundred bucks on it before I finished up and we went for her feeding.

That type of public display was not like her. She was deteriorating.

My own attitude wasn’t helping things. My growing dissatisfaction with our “arrangement” led me to speak much more frankly about it than I used to. I began to get very blunt. And I was too wrapped up in my own endeavors to see that this giant redheaded monster was hurting. She was hurting from her career aspirations lying in ashes. She was hurting from being over thirty (not old by normal standards, but it’s a big deal for former “ingénues”). She was hurting from seeing her sister’s once-promising music career end in a hailstorm of rented dicks. She was hurting because her father, in his mid-80s, was in decreasing health, and she had never known death before. “Princess Rosie” was no longer charmed. That food I bought her daily was the only thing she had. That, and the social circle I’d introduced her to in the Abes and the RPA.

I wasn’t grasping the effect my words were having. By continually forcing the issue of our “cold business arrangement” to the forefront, I was robbing her of the ability to believe it was anything else. I was shoving in her face the implication that she was barely better than her sister. I can see now how that would have taken its toll. And if I didn’t care about her mental state, I should have cared about the damage she could eventually do to me.

By March (as I would later learn), Rosie began planning. She started hitting me up for more and more “emergency expenses,” while secretly fooling around with Tipjar Mike, who was thankful that my money was relieving him of the need to pay for Rosie himself (which he wouldn’t have been able to do).

The monthly Republican Party Animals nights were hugely successful. In April, I took Stacia and Rosie to a private dinner with Michael Reagan and some clod who was running for Ccongress (handsome guy, though…all Native Americany). At our next event, we got a new addition to our circle—Daniel Knauf, the creator, producer, and writer of the HBO series Carnivale, and the co-producer and writer of the Starz series Spartacus. Daniel had recently “outed” himself as a conservative, and he was looking for fellowship. He found it with us, in no small measure. He was a good guy, a good friend, and, for Rosie, a new link to “the business.” Except that after his “outing,” the work had dried up.

I rented out Barney’s Beanery for the Abes and the RPA in early June for a party to celebrate the victory we all knew was coming in the Wisconsin recall election (a.k.a. the day the union entitlement mentality got kicked in the nuts). It was our last good night. Everybody was happy. We were all together—the Abes, the RPAs, me, Rosie, Stacia, Jennifer “pig nose” Warren, and all of our VIPs. Bloggers “live blogging” from the event, Abe A-listers getting free drinks, and Cadet Walshy holding court from the bleachers of the indoor big-screen “stadium” area. There was a sense of exhilaration in the room. Because we won. And we won by a bigger landslide than anticipated. We ended the night singing karaoke. Barney’s had the worst karaoke list in the history of mankind. Not a single song I could handle.

I sang BTO’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.”

And, indeed, I hadn’t. Rosie and Tipjar had fallen in love. Whereas with The Beast I saw the red flags but chose to ignore them, in this case, I was completely oblivious. I should have been tipped off when one night, after an Abe event, a drunken Tipjar Mike picked a fight with a homeless guy just for the fun of it. Rosie was the most physical conflict-avoidant person I ever knew. Any signs of male aggression were always a deal killer with her (even to the extent that she’d get pissed at me if I complained about bad service in a restaurant). So the fact that she witnessed Tipjar Mike’s aggression against a homeless guy, and that she was okay with it, should have set off an alarm or two. No other guy had ever gotten that kind of slack from her.

Rosie’s next move was to siphon away as much money from me as possible, and to make sure that Stacia—the first girlfriend she’d had since her college girlfriends dumped her—would remain loyal.

As a historian, these kinds of things fascinate me, because in every massive conflict between nations you see the exact same things that occur in conflicts between individuals—the same jockeying and maneuvering, the same collecting and testing of loyalties, the same measuring of risk against gain. The difference is only the scale. I used to make that point when I lectured. Never elevate or excoriate historical figures to the extent that they stop being flesh-and-blood humans. Don’t make Hitler the devil, and don’t make the Founding Fathers gods. They were still human, no matter their impact on history.

Keeping Stacia was of the utmost importance for Rosie. Stacia was the perfect girlfriend for her—overweight but facially attractive (in other words, not a threat, as her USC girlfriends had been, but not an embarrassment either). And for Stacia? Well, now she could get into any club, no waiting. I didn’t blame Stacia for taking the deal.

In his personal life, Fisher Price Chris Noll was hitting rock-bottom. The man I once described as the steadiest of rock-steady corporate white guys was spiraling into a rather dark place. Chris had become obsessed with this sadly stereotypical Chinese girl. You name the stereotype, she embodied it—advanced degree, high-paying math/science job, traditional “tiger mom” family always pushing her to achieve more, and a generally cold, businesslike attitude toward relationships. You show weakness in front of a girl like that and you’re dead in the water. Sadly, when the girl dropped Chris for a guy with a PhD, Chris became unhinged. He damn-near started stalking her, waiting outside her downtown L.A. apartment, skulking around in the lobby, and generally making an ass of himself.

I’d have never done that, not even with Sarah. When they’re done with me, I’m done with them. Why debase yourself? (Or, at the very least, if you’re going to debase yourself, do it in book form like this. At least you’ll get paid.)

Being dumped by his living stereotype, combined with the constant pressure of having to fire jolly toymakers, his failed writing and acting career, and the fact that Stacia alerted him in advance to Rosie’s machinations against me, finally made the guy snap. That summer, he decided it was no longer enough to merely kill woodland creatures with a gun. He wanted something a bit more bloody. He entered the woods and put a fucking arrow through a giant bear’s heart. As the bear lay dying, Chris jumped down to feel its heart stop. He then cooked and ate the carcass. That bear represented all of Chris’ stresses and woes, no less than every bottle of vodka I’ve killed in my life represents mine.

But I always sober up. And Chris had to return to his job. Heavy drinking and bear killing are just band-aids. When Chris got back, he decided to throw in with Rosie. Stacia had promised to mend his relationship with the Chinese girl. It was his weak spot, so he agreed—he’d leave my circle. I lost a good friend. Rosie had rubbed off well on Stacia, who had identified Fisher Price Man’s weakness and used it to her advantage.

I also felt bad about losing Stacia. So many times, when the two of us were drunk together, I came close to telling her the horrifying reality of my situation with Rosie. But I held back, because I knew that her friendship was one of the few good things in Rosie’s life. Because of my remaining shreds of sentimentality, I didn’t do a preemptive strike, and I got fucked. Preemptive strikes rule. I’ll never miss another chance to do one.

At the next RPA event in the Valley, Rosie, Chris, Stacia, and Mike left me stranded there at the end of the night. It was funny (in retrospect). It was 2 a.m., and I was saying goodbye to several GOP bigwigs who had come into town specifically for the event. I saw the typical crew of “last remainders” standing outside the venue; one of them always took me back. When I returned from saying my farewells to the out-of-town guests, I saw that everyone had ditched me. At my own event. And in the fucking Valley of all places.

I’d lost my two most reliable assistants (Stacia and Chris), my music guy (Tipjar Mike), and, of course, the six foot tall redheaded face of the RPA. So much for auto-pilot.

It didn’t entirely end that abruptly. Chris’ conscience got the better of him, and he told me he’d known for months about what Rosie was up to. And I was faced with the cold realization that the thousands of dollars Rosie had taken off me the previous few months had been squirrel-style nut-storing…something to tide her over for her summer with Tipjar.

The really unpleasant part of the story is that had Rosie simply come to me early on and admitted she had feelings for Tipjar, I would have welcomed it. She was tired of me, I was tired of her. It was time. But she couldn’t leave in an honest way, not while I was still a daily source of financial support. It wasn’t saying goodbye to her that smarted; it was the theft, the deceit, and the realization that several people I considered to be my best friends knew about it in advance.

It had become routine for Friends of Abe VIPs to ask me to arrange events for their birthdays. My next event was a birthday soiree for our resident Fox News cameraman, Rodger Howard. It was a great turnout. Rosie and Stacia crashed it (that was the moment I realized I had to begin creating “if your name’s not on the list, you’re not getting in” security, which we’d never had to do before, as the privacy surrounding our events kept them totally off the left’s radar).

Stacia came up to me to say that we were through as friends, and how dare I ever claim that Rosie took so much as one cent off me. I felt a great deal of anger boiling up inside me, and I was about to tell Stacia that her claiming that the reality I’ve lived with for the past five years was an invention is like me telling her that everything she went through with her mother’s long, painful death from cancer was an invention. “Doesn’t feel nice, does it, being told that you didn’t live through something you did.”

But I held my tongue.

Never one to be oblivious to irony, I realized that the anger I was feeling must be like what Holocaust survivors felt when they thought I was denying their reality. (I’m not trying to compare my trivial problems to the unthinkable horror they endured. I’m just making the point that it’s painful to think that the reality of something you lived through is being denied).

My birthday that year was bittersweet. The first one in six years without Rosie. No question, she’d become a fixture in my life, albeit a horrible and costly one. Worse still was the loss of Chris and Stacia. To cheer me up, the RPAs and Abes threw me a huge bash. Much like the legendary bash thrown by Marty Farty, everyone was there. Earlier in the day, our Fox News cameraman Rodger had been walking through the studio and ran into Larry Elder. “You going to Stein’s party?” he asked. “What party?” Larry replied. Indeed, I hadn’t invited Larry, as I assumed he had no interest in attending anything except my professional functions.

Well, I was wrong about that. At the party, I was having my ear bent by a beak-nosed cougar named Lee Morris, who very badly wanted to go to an Abe event. Knowing that we could never have enough cougars in FOA, I told her I’d put her on the list. I was saved from conversing with this molting parrot when my new second-in-command, Tracy, rushed over to tell me that Larry had walked in. I vanished from the Beaky Buzzard with such speed that she probably lurched forward from the suction. Out of all the VIPs I’d dealt with, Larry was my favorite. And he had a surprised for me that night.

As always, Larry was the hit of the party. He even went behind the bar to pour beers for my guests from the kegs the venue owners had provided gratis for my party as a way of thanking me for all the business my group brings them. The fact that Larry himself doesn’t drink made it even funnier to see him playing bartender.

Later in the evening, Larry took me aside. He’d been closely watching everything I’d been doing with the RPA and the Abes, and he was impressed. He wanted to do a film with me. The two of us, collaborating. I asked him if he’d ever seen any of my (“safe”) Holocaust films. He said it didn’t matter. “You get things done, David. Plus, every time I see you you’re having a ball. You really seem to love life. You have a great spirit.”

I hadn’t the heart to tell him that it was as much the “spirits” as it was the “spirit.”

“Here’s my private number. Call me, and come by the house in a few days.” Over the next week, at KABC and at Larry’s beautiful home in the hills, we talked about the film he wanted to do. Several years earlier, he had self-produced a film called Michael and Me, a satirical take on Michael Moore and the gun rights issue. It never went anywhere. Now, Larry wanted to do a larger-scale film about guns, the Second Amendment, and self-defense (especially as it applies to women).

With a handshake deal, we agreed to work on it together. I’d spend the next few months on pre-production. I was really enjoying it. Guns were never my issue, but I learned a great deal as I laid the groundwork for the film. Even some of the biggest supporters of gun control concede that more innocent lives are saved each year by using guns in self-defense than are taken as the innocent victims of gun violence. I believed that the film was needed, as it was a side of the gun issue people rarely hear about except through the clumsy propaganda of the NRA.

And that was one thing Larry and I agreed on—no NRA. “We don’t want to be connected to, funded by, or seen as tools of the NRA or other professional gun lobbyists,” Larry told me. We’d fund the film ourselves, and we’d interview people on both sides of the issue, none of whom would be professional lobbyists. We wouldn’t even quote the NRA in the film. We wouldn’t have to. The movie would be made compelling by the real stories of people who found themselves in situations in which firearms, or the lack thereof, had impacted their lives. Rape survivors who fought off their attackers; inner-city families who defended their homes from violent intruders; and people who were following the law, not carrying a concealed weapon in areas in which it was forbidden, who found themselves unable to stop a mass shooting. Larry also wanted to go into the history of how the KKK had fought to keep guns out of the hands of black people during the post-Civil War days through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era.

Larry had already obtained a great piece of footage. He had “ambush interviewed” Michael Moore, who likes to portray himself as a walking encyclopedia of “gun crime” statistics. Elder forced Moore to admit that he had no clue how many Americans lives are saved each year by using guns in self defense.

As I said, guns were never my pet issue, so I enjoyed working on the project, because I was learning new stuff.

I could keep Rosie out of my events, but not Abe events. I had brought her into FOA, and the only grounds for expulsion were either being exposed as a secret leftist, or attempting to record meetings (obviously, I’d later find out that there was a third unforgivable violation—being a Jew who expressed an unpopular opinion about Auschwitz in 1992). Just as when I stopped working with Goombah Romano, I decided that the best avenue was not to make my beef with Rosie an issue with the Abes. But whereas Goombah had shown the good sense to tuck his little Sicilian tail between his legs and vamoose from my playground, Rosie decided to dig in her heels, showing up at every Abe event, Tipjar Mike in tow.

I was angrier at Tipjar than I was with Rosie. I have no respect for a guy who can only make money by having his girlfriend scam for him. I mean, be a man. If you want to scam, do it your fucking self.

When I put that horrid beak-nosed cougar, Lee Morris, on the list for an Abe event, Rosie and Tipjar sought her out and told her what a monster I was. I couldn’t have given a shit about what Toucan Sam thought about me. The bigger issue was, Rosie was making it clear that she was “campaigning.” She hadn’t pulled her trump card yet, her “nuclear option” (my revisionist past), but I knew it would only be a matter of time before she did.

I weighed the pleasure of staying in my life as Stein against the damage that would be done to a whole bunch of innocent people if Rosie outed me, and I decided I had to take off.

In September 2012, I alerted the Abes and the RPAs that I was saying goodbye. I sent an open letter to all of my colleagues:

I am stepping away from the RPA and Friends of Abe (and all similar enterprises). Circumstances have dictated that it has to be this way. There is a time to batten down the hatches and fight; Tuesday’s anniversary of 9/11, and the subsequent events in the Muslim world this week, remind us of the kind of fight that cannot be abandoned. But, conversely, there are times when a particular fight, specifically one that is personal and not political, isn’t worth getting beaten up over. Sometimes, simply walking away is the best course of action.

The past four years have been among the best of my life, and I have all of you to thank for it. I mean this, as sincerely as I’ve meant anything I’ve ever said or written. Thank you! To everyone who has worked with me, exchanged ideas with me, had a few beers with me, joked around with me, commiserated with me, supported my work, or contributed to this group in any way, if only by your presence, thank you.

What a dignified goodbye. And, had it stuck, a lot of people would have been saved a lot of aggravation.

And it wasn’t like I’d have been left with nothing to do. My film with Larry Elder was secret at the time. No one knew about it, and no one had to. So I could still work on that, while giving the appearance of having left with my honor and dignity intact.

But my farewell didn’t stick. You probably already guessed that.

No one wanted me to go. Abes and RPAs bombarded me with emails and calls, imploring me to stay. I knew that would happen. I was the joining factor between the Abes and the Republican Party Animals, and there wasn’t anyone else who could do what I did. But I saw the potential for disaster down the road, because I knew Rosie’s nature all too well.

At this point, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to ask why I didn’t quietly “out” myself among the group to deprive her of the power. Well, two reasons. First, I didn’t want to feel “maneuvered” by Rosie into outing myself. I kept asking, “what if I’m wrong? What if I’m just being unnecessarily paranoid? What if she’ll never out me?” If I outed myself, I’d never know if I could have just kept going without ever being exposed by her.

And second, even if I’d outed myself, the results would’ve been the same. Rosie may have outed me, but it was one of my own RPAs who went to the press. So even if I’d outed myself, that still would’ve happened, except I’d look like a publicity-hungry dick for having outed myself. The same people who hate me for keeping the secret would’ve hated me for being the one to divulge it. I was fucked either way. But at least by staying quiet, there remained the possibility that Rosie might have a conscience and let my past remain in the past.

After staying away from the circle for several weeks, and dealing with a nonstop barrage of complaints about the actions of the admins I’d put in charge to replace me, one guy finally changed my mind about leaving: Michael “Cadet Walshy” Walsh.

When I cut off contact with Rosie, her private life became none of my concern. I had no idea how close she had become with Cadet Walshy; it was none of my business. I reached out to Walshy to say goodbye and thank him for his friendship. He replied that it was stupid for me to walk away. He knew that “the troubles” had to do with Rosie, and he assured me he’d never get involved. In an email on October 7, he wrote: “David—I learned long ago never to involve myself in other people’s personal lives. I’m sorry when any of my friends fall out, and I hope you all can somehow reconcile. If not, please know that whatever happens that changes nothing as far as you and I are concerned and I hope to see you soon at an RPA or FOA event. Call me if you want to talk.”

We did talk, the next day. I expressed my concern over the possibility that Rosie might use him in an attempt to take revenge against me for cutting her off. Again, Cadet Walshy put my mind to rest; he would not get involved. I abandoned my plans to leave, and I came back.

I had no idea that the sixty-seven-year-old Walsh was about to move in with Rosie. And just as I had no idea of the growing level of Lolita-fetishism between Walsh and Rosie, it also hadn’t occurred to me to think that there might be a connection between Walshy’s steadfast assurances, and the fact that he needed me to stick around for reasons of his own.

Cadet Walshy had enlisted me to do an event at a museum where he serves on the board. The Wende Museum in Culver City is the nation’s largest Cold War museum and archive; they have hundreds of thousands of documents, testimonies, photographs, films, books, and artifacts. Walshy wanted me to use my GOP organizing skills to help the museum hold a private fundraiser.

At the time, I was doing one event per month, but I made the Wende event a priority. I arranged for a great lineup of speakers—Larry Elder, retired Navy Commander and Naval Intelligence officer Jennifer “J.E.” Dyer, and Michael Reagan. I would provide the open beer and wine bar at my expense (if the point of an event is to raise money, you gotta liquor ’em up).

The museum’s director, Justinian Jampol, was a good kid (we’d gone to the same high school, though many years apart). Justinian and Walshy had one very important point to stress—there could be no mention that the fundraiser was being organized and the event hosted by a partisan GOP group. The museum is a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit public charity, so there could be no partisan politics that night.

No problem.

We planned the event for early December. But first, there was a much larger matter on the horizon. The election was drawing near. The big election. The one where we were going to totally kick Obama’s ass out of the White House. It had been a fun and exciting election season. Every primary candidate but Romney and Huntsman pandered to the Abes. “Crazy Eyes” Bachmann only got a luncheon, not a banquet. Hell, even Santorum got a banquet. Sorry, Crazy Eyes. Newt got the Reagan Library, our finest venue. And Herman Cain? Poor Herman…his Abe dinner just so happened to come the day after he was hit with those sexual harassment charges. Abes dropped out of that event by the dozens, leaving Searcy—an uncompromisingly strong Cain supporter—to condemn the Abes as “pussies.”

Searcy and I mixed it up quite a bit over Cain. I was not a fan, and Nick and I had a few heated but respectful exchanges. Generally speaking, Abes didn’t ever go up against Searcy. Like Cadet Walshy, his clout came from the fact that he was actually doing stuff. That’s why, at the Paul Ryan event, Searcy got the “captain’s table” (as he always did) while poor Danny Knauf, every bit Nick’s equal resume-wise, got shoved in the back. Two hit series for cable, but what have you done for us lately? When Nick and I sparred over Cain, I didn’t back down, and, to Nick’s credit, he admired that. We became close friends. Plus, I was a “captain’s table” guy now, too.

From that point on, Nick never missed one of my Republican Party Animals events. He ever began bringing his wife and young son.

Now, I ought to mention Clint.

There’s a section in Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart” in which the old man who is about to be murdered utters a tragic wail upon finally realizing that the noises he’s hearing in the dark bedroom can’t be explained away. He has no choice but to admit to himself that a person is in the room, creeping toward his bed. It’s a chilling passage because we’ve all been there, though usually in less dire circumstances. We’ve all had a moment of terrible realization.

Such was the case after Clint Eastwood’s GOP convention speech in August 2012. Oh, how we all wanted to like it. As Abes, some of us knew it was coming. And we had been looking forward to seeing one of the most respected and iconic actors and filmmakers in the world use his estimable talents to deliver a rebuke of Obama that would resonate throughout the nation.

And instead, we got that empty chair thing.

In the RPA think-tank room, we tried so hard to convince ourselves that we hadn’t just seen a colossal fuck-up. “If you really break it down, if you really think about it,” one member wrote, “it was actually genius.” But the thing about a speech is, if you can only detect the “genius” by examining it under a microscope, it wasn’t an effective speech. It’s reminiscent of the old Jackie Mason routine about how pretentious people will tell you that you have to “develop a taste” for health food, but no one has ever had to “develop a taste” for hamburgers or fries or fried chicken. And we tried, damn did we try, to “develop a taste” for that Eastwood speech. He was an Abe, he was one of us. We tried, all night. And then, about 2 a.m., one of us just threw in the towel and said, “I’m sorry, but I just can’t defend it. It sucked.” That was the “Tell Tale Heart” moment. The acceptance of a terrible truth. And from that point on, everyone else felt free to admit the same thing. The old guy let us down.

Not that he had any responsibility to say anything other than what he wanted to say. He’s earned the right to do things on his own terms. But the disappointment among the Abes and RPAs was massive. There was a feeling of a missed opportunity, and, by the next day, as the leftist press began making fun of the speech, the sense of an opportunity blown grew larger and larger.

I’d see Clint again in October. Condi Rice spoke to us less than two weeks before the election. It would be our last big bash before the expected thrashing of the Kenyan Indonesian Manchurian Muslim usurper. Larry Elder and I planned to meet there. We wanted to talk to Condi about our documentary. In her autobiography, she told a story about how her father and the other men in her town used (gasp) guns to ward off the Klan and keep the townspeople safe from lynchings and church burnings (leftists will argue that the presence of firearms in the town was a mere coincidence in relation to the Klan backing down).

I got to the Luxe Hotel and called Larry. “I’m inside, David, at our table. Come on in.” Now, this was out of the ordinary. Typically, all Abes entered the banquet hall together, at the same time. VIP Abes (i.e., people like Eastwood, Mamet, and Grammer who didn’t want to mill with the ordinary Abes) waited in a kind of holding cell until the filthy dirty commoner Abes were seated, so that they could make a grand entrance (these are the things I love about Hollywood pecking order bullshit…A-listers preferring to be cramped in a small room rather than having to mix with their inferiors).

Voight was never like that. That loopy bastard loved mixing with the commoners. Sinise too, but he was gone by this point.

I asked Larry, “Young Jeremy isn’t letting anyone in yet. We’re all at the bar. How did you get in?”

“I got in. I’m in. Come join me.”

You see, the benefit of being a “captain’s table” guy, like Larry and I were, was that you could mill around at the bar before the doors opened, because you were one of the few people with assigned seating. Every other lowlife had to fight for seats like rabid lemurs. So I’d never minded hanging out at the bar. But that night, there was Rosie tonguing Tipjar, and yes, all of a sudden, Larry’s idea to be inside the empty banquet hall seemed like a good one.

I went up to the door. Young Jeremy took me aside.

“Please don’t go in there, David.”

“But Larry’s in there, waiting for me.”

“I know. He…he kind of forced his way in there. I couldn’t stop him. He got here early; no one knows he’s inside. Please, if you go in there too, everyone else will want to go. We’re not ready to open the doors yet, and all I need is for the people without assigned seats to start rushing in. Please, please…help me out here.”

The poor slobs without captain’s table privileges were an unruly lot. Yes, if they thought that folks were being allowed in, they’d rush the doors to get the best of the non-assigned tables. But, on the other hand, staying outside meant more wonderful opportunities for Rosie to taunt me. I saw genuine panic in Jeremy’s eyes. No need for me to make things more stressful for the poor guy. “Okay, buddy, I’ll hang out here.”

I called Larry and told him I’d come in when the doors were opened. Still and all, these were the kinds of things I loved about Larry. He didn’t want to mill around with a horde of slobbering admirers, but he also didn’t want to be penned up with Eastwood, Mamet, and the other A-listers in the holding cell. He just wanted to be sitting comfortably with his girlfriend inside the banquet hall. And poor Jeremy was no match for him.

Over the past few months, I’d become Larry’s unpaid editor. The unpaid part was at my insistence; I don’t charge friends for editing. I only learned how to use Final Cut in the first place because I got tired of paying someone else to update Rosie’s acting reel. Larry’s radio show was back on in drive-time, and Larry was desperate to get back on national TV (he used to have a popular nationally syndicated daytime TV show). So I’d been editing reels for him, using his twice-weekly appearance on a Fox morning show, to help him attract another TV gig.

At one point during the Condi Rice event, when Larry got up to use the restroom, his girlfriend Nina leaned over to me and said, “He likes you so much. He’s always saying, ‘David just gets things done. You ask him to edit something, he makes it happen, he doesn’t ask for anything, he just does it.’” That comment jolted me to a realization that I had truly conquered the Sarah demons. I was back doing something I loved and not caring about money.

Nina added, “When Larry takes a liking to someone, he’s loyal ’til end. Friends for life.”

Nina was sorely mistaken. Soon enough, neither she nor I would still be in Larry’s life. By early April, Larry would be coming to my events with a brand new blonde (a seriously uptight and annoying Austrian who I really didn’t care for), and by the end of April, he’d have walked away from me entirely after my outing.

At the Rice event, Larry told me he needed my help with his latest book. It was a memoir, a deeply personal recollection of the night he reconciled with his estranged father. Larry’s usual publisher, HarperCollins, for whom he had written several New York Times bestsellers, had refused to publish this one, because it wasn’t political. Black conservatives can’t win; either they’re ostracized for being too political, or, in this case, for not being political enough.

Larry had been forced to slum it at World Net Daily (WND) Books. WND Books was mainly known for publishing Obama birth certificate conspiracy crap. Online, the WND site occupied the middle ground between respectable conservative sites (National Review, Weekly Standard) and the batshit crazy ones (Alex Jones, Ulsterman Report, and any site in which the word “Paul” is preceded by the word “Ron”).

It was beneath Larry. Way beneath him. Yet, sensing their first opportunity to hook a respected, bestselling author, WND made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Ironically, right after Larry signed with WND, HarperCollins reversed itself and said they wanted the book after all. But it was too late; Larry was stuck with WND.

And he was only now realizing the importance of the “full author support” that a mega-publisher like HarperCollins would provide. Larry was having to do a lot of stuff himself. WND needed a commercial for the book. It was up to Larry to make it happen, so Larry came to me. He called WND from the banquet table and negotiated my price. God bless Larry. He was always very, very good to me.

As the evening progressed, Condi Rice agreed to be interviewed for our documentary. During a break in the program, I was taken aside by Derek Broes. Broes was a senior VP at Paramount, and senior director at Microsoft. By 2012, he ran his own consulting firm, and he was a contributor to Forbes.

“It’s a lock, David,” he told me. “It’s going to be a Romney landslide.” He painstakingly explained the polling numbers and the context and meaning. “We can’t lose.”

Well, shit, if Derek Broes says so…

The Abes planned a massive election night party at the Beanery.

“You coming?” I asked Nick Searcy.

“Well, I shoot Justified ’til about 9 p.m. that night. If we’re winning, I’ll have the network send a car to bring me, so I can drink and celebrate. If not, I’ll just go home.”

Wanna guess if I saw Nick on November 6?

21.

BIG FUCKING BABIES

You should have seen all the weepy-willows on election night. A hundred crying Abes. Jesus Christ, it’s only politics. If you’re gonna cry, cry over something that matters.

At the start of the night, pollster whiz Derek Broes once again reassured everyone what a sure thing our victory was. Within an hour, he was gone. None of us saw him leave, so my assumption is that his massive embarrassment gave him the ability to liquefy like the T-1000, allowing him to slip through the floorboards unnoticed.

I’d reserved an area upstairs, so that I wouldn’t have to mix with Rosie and Tipjar. I’d brought two fashion models with me to keep me pacified. I was happy as a clam. Fuck the election results; we brought that disaster on ourselves. Romney was weak, and our “rape guys” had managed to impact swing states they weren’t even from.

Smoking a cigar outside the Beanery, Cadet Walshy was keeping his cool too. He was a kindred spirit in the “fashion models ease the pain” school of thought. For our own separate reasons, we really couldn’t be bothered with the election results. And we both agreed entirely about the damage caused by the “rape guys.” If I was bothered by anything that night, it was that I’d have to rally the demoralized Abes and RPAs to come to the Cold War museum event in three weeks. Since it was a fundraiser for the museum, I couldn’t give out comps. Folks would have to pay. That would be a challenge following such a massive, momentum-killing electoral pantsing.

Only two years earlier, at the same location, we’d had a standing room-only crowd celebrating the midterms. And only five months earlier, my Wisconsin recall party didn’t break up until 2 a.m. But November 6? The crowd thinned quickly. By 10 p.m., there were only three Abes left. The Beanery began letting in regular folks, as a three-person private party was not going to be terribly profitable.

After walking my models to their car, I returned to join the other two remaining Abes: my buddy Sean (an artistic director at the largest advertising and marketing firm in Hollywood), and Stephen Kruiser. Kruiser bills himself as “the conservative stand-up comedian,” which is the same as saying “the guy who’s not funny.” Anyone who feels a need to stick an adjective before “stand-up comedian” will inevitably suck. Whether it’s “Johnny Night Owl the Native American stand-up comedian” or “Sister Freewoman the feminist stand-up comedian,” you can be assured that they’ll be as funny as ball-cancer. Less funny, in fact. “Adjective comedians” cater to true believers, people who want to hear their beliefs robotically re-stated in joke form, as opposed to people who actually want to laugh. And, like all adjective comedians, Kruiser had his audience. He was a regular on the Fox late-night program Red Eye, and he was the star comedian on the Tea Party circuit.

And Kruiser wasn’t funny. But he’d done one of my events in 2011. I liked him because he only wanted to get paid in alcohol. That’s what I would have done in his shoes. But it’s not just that he sucks, it’s that he trumpets his pious Catholicism publicly, while acting like a total douchebag privately. At my event, he arrived with a sweet little Jewish girl from our circle named Jennie. Frail, small, and easily rattled (she’d bawled her eyes out during her Abe induction ceremony), timid little Jennie was Stephen’s date. Until he saw the buxomy young thing who was my (platonic) houseguest for the week. Kruiser abandoned Jennie and spent the night doing shots off buxomy’s boobs. Kruiser had arrived in a car I’d sent for him. Once he decided to ditch Jennie, he came to me with a problem.

“I want that bitch out of here.”

“Jennie?”

“Yeah. I don’t want to leave with her. I want to leave with Mandy and her tits. So get that little stringbean out of here.”

Jennie, having come with Kruiser in the car I sent, was not terribly happy to learn she was being sent home. But, you know, he’s a pious Catholic and all, so I’m sure everything he does is grounded in morals of some type.

I asked one of my non-drinking friends to keep Jennie company for as long as she wanted to stay, and to get her home safely whenever she was ready to go.

Stacia, when we were still friends, had bent over backwards for Kruiser. Stacia was a property manager, and Kruiser took an interest in one of her West L.A. units. But, being a dick, he refused to make up his mind about whether to put down the money. And Stacia, trying to be helpful to an RPA, risked her job by de-listing the unit for four months without telling the owner, basically “saving” it for Kruiser. She could have lost her job. And Kruiser couldn’t have cared, being such a pious, moral guy and all.

Of course, now that Stacia and I weren’t speaking, I realized that Kruiser’s loyalties sat firmly with the woman who risked her job for him. So I’d kept out of his way. No biggie—the guy disgusted me anyway. But here we were, the three of us—me, Sean, and Kruze—the last Abes standing on the night we got our asses handed to us. So I sat down with them, as Sean and I were very close friends (he always enjoyed fondling me, in a way that’s like “I’m so secure in my heterosexuality that I can pinch another man’s ass except maybe I’m going just far enough for you to wonder if I’m not that secure in my heterosexuality but then again maybe I’m just the kind of guy who really commits to a bit”).

As I sat down and began making small talk with Sean, Kruiser exploded at me. He was drunk and pissed off at the election results. And he was pissed off at me. He stood up and came at me. “Don’t fuck with my friends. Do you hear me, David? DON’T FUCK WITH MY FRIENDS. I’m warning you…DON’T FUCK WITH MY FRIENDS!”

“Stephen, I’m not ‘fucking’ with your friends. In fact, I’ve been totally quiet about the whole Rosie and Stacia thing.”

“You calling me a liar? YOU CALLING ME A LIAR? Stop fucking with my friends.”

There are two phrases that, when employed by someone who is drunk and angry, strongly suggest that a fight is about to occur. One such phrase is “YOU THINK YOU’RE BETTER ’N ME?” And the other is “YOU CALLIN’ ME A LIAR?” Kruze used the latter, and I had no desire to get into a fight. So I turned to leave. Sean grabbed me around the ass to keep me from leaving (you know, in an “I’m so secure in my heterosexuality” kind of way), but I told him I was done for the night.

As I walked to find a cab, I realized that Rosie was still making people choose sides. I’d actually thought the night had gone well, with me staying upstairs and her staying downstairs with Tipjar. I thought it showed that we could coexist at the same events. But Kruiser’s outburst proved otherwise. Rosie was trying the “proxy war” thing.

The “problem” of having to coexist with Rosie at events never came up again. After the October Condi Rice event, and the November electoral ass-reaming, Jeremy stopped having Abe dinners. The evening events would now come down entirely to my Republican Party Animals. Which meant I could control the guest lists. And Rosie’s proxy war ended as quickly as it began. My buddy Daniel Knauf, he whose credits with Carnivale and Spartacus had not been enough to earn him anything but a corner seat near the kitchen entrance at Abe events, had finally struck it big again. NBC had entrusted him with its massive-budget period piece Dracula series starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers. This was going to be NBC’s attempt to revive the outlandishly expensive prime-time costume drama genre.

Well, now, all of a sudden, Knauf was “worth” something to the likes of Rosie. She and Stacia planned a party—at one of my regular venues, no less—to “celebrate” his new good fortune. The night before the “event,” Knauf emailed me. It was about 1 a.m. He wanted to know if I was up, and, if so, could we talk. I called him.

He told me that Rosie was as transparent as cellophane. He explained that ever since the news about Dracula was announced, she’d been sticking her nose up his ass like a bloodhound. He didn’t want to go to this “party,” but he wasn’t sure if it would offend me if he didn’t. Because I’d kept mum about the Rosie situation, Knauf didn’t know the backstory. So I told him. He was relieved that he could skip the “party.” He expressed gratitude that I’d always treated him as a VIP even when he was unemployed. I don’t do that “captain’s table” shit. Not at my events. That was an Abe thing.

The Cold War museum event went perfectly; a packed house. The museum staff told me it was the largest turnout they’d ever experienced in the venue’s history. Cadet Walshy’s museum made some good cash, and everyone was looking to me to pick up the slack as FOA continued to sputter.

I edited the commercial for Larry Elder’s book, although I was creeped-out by the fact that the WND guy was named Michael Thompson (Tipjar Mike’s name).

Following the Cold War museum event, I began planning for 2013. But not everything was Peaches and Herb. I had something under my skin, and, for once, it wasn’t scabies.

The 2012 election had made an alarming percentage of GOPs go Charlie Manson poo-flinging tin-foil-hat crazy. The people in our circle like Derek Broes had so convinced the bulk of us that victory was inevitable, many of us became hopelessly detached from reality. I saw a steady, progressive mental deterioration within my ranks.

In the 1950s, the right was hobbled by a conspiracy mindset. This is a factor in how the GOP, the party of Lincoln, lost the black vote, and how the Democrats, the party of the KKK, won it. The far right simply couldn’t accept that the civil rights movement was organic and popular. No, it was all a commie plot. A plot to “destabilize” the U.S. By the 1960s, the Democrats were harnessing the power of the movement, while the far right-wing of the GOP was still dismissing it. It was a horrible miscalculation. The LBJ Democrats were saying, “this is a popular movement, so let’s exploit it to pass the legislation we want.” The right wing was still trying to convince itself that everything, from civil rights to the counterculture, was neither inevitable, popular, nor organic, but a commie plot orchestrated by “subversives.”

As always, the side that ignored reality lost. Reality is a roided-out female weightlifter from hell, and she’ll fuck you up good if you take her on.

During the George W. Bush years, the roles were reversed. Now, it was the left that claimed everything was a conspiracy. No one really likes Bush. No one was really in favor of the Iraq war. No reasonable person has any fears about Islam. It’s all a product of the Rupert Murdoch/Koch Brothers/Fox News/neocon conspiracy machine. The 2004 election? RIGGED VOTING MACHINES!

The left’s rejection of reality hobbled it. The left lost itself in conspiracy fantasies, to its own disadvantage.

Following the 2012 election, the right reverted to its conspiracy days with the speed of a mentally shattered adult who starts sucking his thumb like a baby. I liken it to the scene from Albert Brooks’ Lost in America in which Brooks’ character, a hundred percent certain that he will get a promotion, learns from his boss that he’s been passed over. And he goes apeshit. He has a meltdown. He burns every bridge and decides to withdraw from society.

Welcome to my world, post-November 2012. First, we had the deniers: “Obama didn’t win; the voting machines were rigged.” Then we had the impeachers: “Now we’ll just have to impeach him (because that worked so well for the GOP in Clinton’s second term).” And lastly, we had the bunker boys: “I’ma goin’ down into my bunker with mah guns and mah supplies ’cuz Obammer’s ’bout to suspend the Constitution and put us all in FEMUR death camps.”

Cadet Walshy and I did our best to slam the nutcases. And we took every opportunity to rub the noses of the “double down on the rape guys” morons into the defeat they helped engender. Walshy was about to eviscerate the “rape guy” supporters in his New York Post column. He and I had it out with them in a private thread.

Cadet Walshy: “Last call to the Todd Akin defenders—writing my NY Post column right now and am STILL waiting to hear from the Missouri crew about why he shouldn’t have stepped aside after his rape comments and let somebody who could win take a shot.”

Soopermexican Hidetora (a popular Mexican-American conservative blogger): “Well, for one, twenty-twenty hindsight. I’m not sure what point you’re trying to prove aside from that—it’s very easy to look back at a race that lost and say we should have done something else. It’s much harder to say at the moment which races we should abandon and which ones we shouldn’t.”

Walshy: “Oh no, it’s not. Every sentient being knew that Akin was toast the minute he made that remark and I—among other national Op-Ed writers—called for him to step aside. But the Missouri contingent kept telling me I was wrong, that Akin would win, that God was on his side, etc.”

Me: “The Akin travesty has more to do with the ‘double down’ mentality some on the right have started to cling to these days. Any time we feel ‘challenged,’ we double-down, because to do less would violate the ‘Breitbart principle’ of never giving an inch, right or wrong.”

[Name redacted]: “The ‘double-down’ mentality is not very Conservative, as it’s totally irrational! And it is a bad move. We can’t let the other side remove our ability to think, just because we’re sad, or want to win.”

Me: “Soopermexican, I can only speak from personal experience. I was in many debates with fellow conservatives last August regarding Akin, and in each instance the defense was, ‘maybe Akin is a moron, maybe there were better GOPs in the primary, maybe he’s a liability, but DAMMIT I ain’t gonna let the left tell ME who my candidate is, so I’m gonna support Akin MORE, just outta spite.’”

Soopermexican: “David, you’re not gonna address at all the culpability the Romney campaign has in making us all ignore the polls?”

Me: “But in what instance did the Romney campaign ever say to ignore the polls regarding Akin? When did the Romney campaign ever say to ignore the polls that showed that ‘post rape comment’ Akin was doomed?”

Soopermexican: “It doesn’t strike you that perhaps the Obama-loving media would have continued in their tactic to tie us to rape issues? Paul Ryan was implicated in the matter because he had pushed legislation to distinguish between one rape and another. Should we have dropped him too?”

Me: “Well, as long as we push for the ‘no rape exception’ issue, the media has every right to exploit it. You know I love you Soop, but we’ve been round and round on this issue before. The ‘no rape exception’ is, statistically, the least popular GOP issue in the party’s history, maybe in the history of any major U.S. party. It polls at best 6 or 7% support.”

Chris Loesch: “The damage our side did to the campaign was monumental too. My point was stop throwing people with years of exemplary service under the bus for one blunder. Our side did that…Our side forced the loss we still could have won and Romney lost anyway Big Time that had nothing to do with Akin. I know Rove & Palin think we should have put the 3rd place loser in instead (of Akin) which was 1 illegal & 2 she would have lost anyway. I seriously don’t get the 2nd guessing on this here. I ask that you leave my name out of the piece but MO voters aren’t stupid, not just anyone was going to beat ClairBear [McCaskill] and despite all the negative press, constant national focus and universal condemnation what he said was less offensive than many things others have said in the left including Clair or her voting track record. This topic doesn’t happen on the left because they defend their own and move on. Clinton, AN ACTUAL MULTIPLE ACCOUNT ACCUSED RAPIST gets more love from Republicans than Akin who stupidly bumbled a line. Why? Because the left rallied the troops around Clinton. He still won, he still has respect from both sides which makes me sick. Us? We have a good man, with a very conservative long time voting record who misspoke once sitting at home while Clair helped maintain Dem control of the senate.”

Chris Loesch: “David, We HAD NO FUCKING CHOICE BUT TO DOUBLE FUCKING DOWN! So FUCKING FINE CONDEMN HIS STATEMENT BUT IT WENT OVER THE LINE WHEN WE CONDEMNED THE MAN. what the fuck? It’s like the whole world is on crazy pills. He was urged, I even personally arranged a golden parachute but he wouldn’t go. Until he made the comment it was a cake walk for him, why? He was the best candidate in that race by leaps and bounds. I don’t know how it helped to treat him worse than we treat actual rapists like Clinton. PS, again, nobody had doubled down until it was clear he would not leave. In the meantime the added destruction of the man by those on our side (science be damned or whatever) made it impossible to win. For fuck’s sake the guy apologized. I had Priebus tell me to my face that even if we closed the gap they would not support Akin. They literally wanted to lose that seat. Romney had no chance of winning. Rove and the rest constantly lied to us. I knew Romney wouldn’t win before the primary so why as Soopermexican pointed out didn’t we urge him to step down? Paul Ryan who has the exact same beliefs as Akin? Is he dead to us now too? Rand Paul?”

Dana Loesch: “There is more to this race than the national headlines. Let me state some things: I was involved in this race from the beginning. In fact, before the beginning. A year before the primary I met with the candidates, most of whom I already knew. I had party insiders confiding in me about the state of party leadership: various factions battling it out over a candidate. Akin seemed one of a few obvious contenders. There were other, better candidates, but the party couldn’t get over themselves enough to field them. It was a well-known disaster. John Danforth was one of the shit disturbers with whom I had a public feud. No one wanted to let the people decide. Cue horribly nasty primary in which the party sat on its hands publicly and fueled it privately. They were angry at Akin on TARP, him bad-mouthing NCLB, etc etc. not the Danforth and crew way. No wonder Akin stubbornly refused their assistance in the general after the jackassed way they behaved in the primary. I would too. Unfortunately, both the party and Akin contributed to the loss. A friendly primary meant Akin would have used their help and simple media training would have helped him avoid talking to Jaco, a pigheaded man whose station had to apologize to me and other grassroots on air after he said that we were Klansmen. Akin would have replaced his kid campaign manager with a real one.

Personally, I go where the fight is, having learned the Breitbart way from the man himself, and wanted to fight. So did David [Limbaugh]. So did Phyllis [Schlafly]. We were fucked either way here folks, and even more so being grassroots because somehow the blame would be tossed on us. I knew this which is another reason I fought so hard.”

Walshy: “My larger point is that a party with proper party discipline should have had Akin out by any means necessary the instant he uttered his rape comment. That the GOP did not speaks poorly both of Romney and the Stupid Party. Also, the notion that those on the right have to ‘defend our own’ is just nuts.”

Chris Loesch: “I disagree that he needed to be out. He apologized, we already at that point had held him up to a higher standard than ANY Democrat ever had to be held to.”

Walshy: “Akin lost and he lost bad and that should have been prevented, even if the national party pulled a Torricelli maneuver. I certainly understand your grass roots point of view, but in this case I think the defense of Akin was misplaced.”

Chris Loesch: “You are wrong. 100% wrong. I think the strategy of some phony ‘we are better than you, look how we turn on our own’ is suicidal.”

Walshy: “One last thought before I have to run to a studio meeting: the Democrats don’t care whether something is legal and feasible. They just do it. And until we learn how to play like they do—for keeps—we’re going to keep losing.”

Chris Loesch: “‘Learn how to play like they do…’ Got it. Break the law is a good strategy but forgiving & backing a great candidate who said sorry is bad. You know part of ‘play like they do’ is not eating their own. Ahem, Clinton—the actual rapist.”

And just when we were done fighting over the “rape guys,” along came the Newtown mass shooting. And a good one-third of the folks in my circle went full-retard. “Obama committed the Newtown massacre himself in a plot to take away our guns!” “No, there was no Newtown massacre at all—the ‘grieving parents’ are actors. Have we actually SEEN any children’s bodies?” And it wasn’t just Alex Jones conspiracy nuts who were saying that. It was Breitbart.com writers like Star Trek actor Gary Graham (who by December had given up his musical aspirations, in part because Tipjar Mike would undercut him at every point. I think in four years I was the only one who actually paid poor Gary to play).

If the election had (in the words of Cartman) “warped our fragile little minds,” Newtown made us “TIMMY!” “Trutherism” became the norm after any shooting that made the news. It was either an “Obama plot” to “grab our guns,” or a “false flag” to distract from other Obama plots. Amazingly, after 2012 Americans apparently lost the ability to commit murder of their own accord. Now they only killed because Obama forced them to.

I was in my element, though, because I could finally explode with full force against the nuttiness within my own ranks. With the Abes on hiatus, with my RPA in full force, and with my writing being carried by every major conservative site, I could do exactly what I did when I achieved a similar level of respect and influence within the Holocaust revisionist community in 1994—I could start berating my own.

Now, here’s where a Gilbert Grape’s Brother like my old nemesis Michael Shermer doesn’t “get” me. I know that sounds like a cocky thing to say, like some pretentious artiste telling his girlfriend “no one gets me, babe,” but Shermer has made a cottage industry out of claiming to “get” me, so it’s fair for me to point out where he’s wrong. When I was able to get to a point in the revisionist community where I could turn my critical eye inward, pointing out the fallacies and lazy historiography of other revisionists (and of straight-out deniers like Faurisson), Shermer decided that the “key” to understanding me was to realize that I “like to stir things up just for the hell of it, to be a contrarian for contrarian’s sake.” Shermer repeated that claim in 2013 when interviewed by the Guardian regarding my “outing.”

To an intellectual lightweight like Shermer, that’s the only way to interpret the actions of someone who criticizes his own, whether it’s a Jew criticizing the reluctance of Jews to objectively revisit the history of Auschwitz, a revisionist criticizing fellow revisionists for their unquestioning acceptance of pseudo-history from Jew-haters, or a Republican criticizing his fellow GOPs for losing their fucking minds after November 2012.

To a guy like Shermer, life is very simple. You find your “group,” you go with the flow, you never make waves, slow and steady wins the race, and you “die a good old man,” the butt-end of a butt-head’s life: no muss, no fuss.

I see things differently. I believe that change, in any party, movement, or loosely affiliated group of advocates can only come from within. And I believe that it’s the duty of anyone with an active intellect to challenge the falsehoods and fallacies that crop up in the circle(s) in which they have influence.

It’s two different ways of looking at life. To Shermer and his fellow “Simple Jacks,” people who make waves that might disrupt a gravy train are “pot stirrers.” To me, I can take or leave the gravy train. I don’t suffer fools, period.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I had neither the readership nor the mesmerizing “Mothra as a caterpillar” eyebrows of Cadet Walshy. But, by December 2012, I drew my fair share of water in the Hollywood conservative community. So my words had, at the very least, some impact. I published pieces about our self-defeating position regarding abortion and rape, our suicidal adherence to the Breitbart “double down” principle, and our bungling of the gun rights issue (which I was more familiar with after having put in five months on the documentary with Larry Elder).

What held the RPA together for so long was the same thing that had slowed the Abes to a halt. The RPAs had a central, well-liked figure who knew how to mediate, how to herd a bunch of cats, and who could keep the momentum going so that there was too much activity for infighting to set in. That’s what Sinise had done for the Abes, and young Jeremy had proven to be a pale replacement.

One of the keys to keeping the RPA together was holding as many events as possible, with small ones in between the bigger ones. That had been Stacia’s idea, and one of the benefits was that forcing these folks to see each other every few weeks helped kill a lot of the squabbles that used to take place in the private Facebook “think tank” group. One-on-one, person-to-person, it’s harder to be hostile or insulting.

2013 started off like motherfucking cherry pie vodka cotton candy gettin’ a blowjob from a woman who knows how to do it right kind of year. Abe inertia put a lot in ol’ Dave’s lap. Academy Award-winning screenwriter, novelist, and PJ Media CEO Roger Simon (a.k.a. “Mr. Conservative Moneybags”) and I were going to do an event to promote his newest book, which had a Cold War theme. I told him the Cold War museum would be the best venue, but since I had just done an event there, it would have to wait a few months.

Jittery music Jew Boris Zelkin also had Simon’s ear, and, when Simon left PJ Media, Zelkin had the idea to use Simon’s apparently limitless reserves of money (and, I can only assume, gold, diamonds, and ruby-studded crowns and scepters) to start a new website, one that could counter the growing nuttiness emanating from conservative sites like Breitbart and WND. So, of course, Zelkin came to me, to see if I’d go in on it with him. We agreed to move forward on the new website idea. I didn’t think it would cost Roger Simon more than, say, three Fabergé eggs, and a Monet or two to fund what we needed. In other words, no biggie for him.

I’d been talking with author, screenwriter, and PJ Media columnist/contributor Andrew Klavan about appearing at one of my events, as well as syndicated columnist and National Review honcho Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg and I were in the process of working out East Coast/West Coast scheduling issues.

Dennis Miller’s literary correspondent (and “book lady”) Lisa Dabbs (“Dabbsie” in Miller-speak) was helping me procure Dennis for an upcoming event.

Young Jeremy at FOA and I were discussing a series of smaller events for the Abes, things that could be done without the non-present Sinise money. Finally, the kid was trying to get FOA back on its feet.

The Abes couldn’t afford to do anything to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Breitbart’s death, so I put something together. Although the bad feelings between me and the Breitbart crowd had largely been forgotten, I had—once again—pissed them off by going public with the fact that, in the year since Andrew died, the people running his sites were ripping off conservative writers with reckless abandon. Ben Shapiro, who became editor-at-large of the Breitbart sites after Andrew’s passing, is the most shifty and dishonest man I’ve ever known. Unlike my friend Carlos, Ben wears his orthodox Jewishness like a fucking badge, quite literally pushing it in your face any time you try to criticize him. “You calling me a plagiarist? LOOK AT MY HEAD. LOOK AT THAT YARMULKE. Now never speak ill of me again.”

Shapiro had flaked out on events I’d scheduled for him three times in a row, even though, in all three cases, I had painstakingly arranged the event so that he would appear after dark on a Saturday (because don’t forget that yarmulke!). After I mentioned a few instances in which Breitbart.com had plagiarized my work, I heard from a dozen conservative bloggers and writers with the same story, so I went public with it. We were all sick and tired of feeling intimidated by a 28-year-old unibrow in a kippah.

So well-liked was I at the time that some of the conservative money people turned on Shapiro, demanding answers as to why his site stole my work. One woman, who I can only describe as the Margaret Dumont of conservative society, strong-armed the Breitbart people into finally crediting my work (in one case, too late—CBS had already picked up the story and credited it to Shapiro). Shapiro’s assistant told “Dumont” that they normally don’t credit stories, because it’s “too bloggy.” “Dumont’s” anger forced an apology from the site.

To pull off the Breitbart memorial night, I needed someone a bit less contentious as my partner, so I brought in Derek Broes, the Paramount/Microsoft Abe whose disastrous pre-election polling had, on election night, caused more right-wing hard-ons to go limp than a naked Helen Thomas recreating “two girls one cup” with Candy Crowley.

Broes and I partnered up. It was a very successful evening. Conservative radio host and blogger Tony Katz (a graduate of the Kevin Smith School for How Goateed Fat Guys Should Dress) said a few words, as did conservative superstar Bill Whittle (a veteran of several of my past events). After speaking, Bill took me aside. “I just want to say, I know things about you, David. Things that you don’t know I know.” Oh shit, where’s he going with that? The seven-foot-tall monster put his hand on my shoulder (I don’t actually think he’s that tall, but, from my perspective, most men look seven feet tall). “You’ve saved people’s lives, David. You’ve saved lives. I know you never like mentioning that, but I just want you to know that I know. You’re amazing. Thank you for everything you do.”

To this day, I don’t have a clue what he was talking about. But to paraphrase a line from Ghostbusters, “When someone tells you that you save lives, you say ‘yes.’”

I once saved Rosie from getting crushed by a giant falling dolly loaded with boxes at Trader Joe’s, as she was ducking underneath it to rummage for more food to buy, but I consider that merely a momentary lapse in judgment on my part.

Things were progressing well on the Larry Elder film. Larry’s a great man, but he can be a little ADD—a common problem among those with very active minds. No sooner had we begun working on the Second Amendment film when he started pitching me other movie ideas, including one about the time he was the target of a national sponsor boycott (you know, by leftist advocates of “tolerance”). By 2013 I’d learned that what Larry needed me to do was just work on our film, and bring him in as needed. He told me that he trusted my judgment enough that he didn’t really need to know the details; he just wanted me to get it done.

So, typically, I’d plan stuff, and send him a quick email for his okay. Sometimes I’d drop by KABC (which was barely five minutes from my home) to show him something. I gave the film a title, which Larry loved: A Necessary Good. Because generally speaking we weren’t looking to convert the anti-gun crowd; they’re too deep into their ideology. Rather, we were hoping to target those people who at least agree that the Second Amendment gives Americans an inalienable right to gun ownership, but who believe that that right is a “necessary evil” (it might be part of the Constitution, but it does no good). The theme of our film was that the Second Amendment, far from being a “necessary evil,” was a necessary good.

Kickstarter had been kicking up a lot of attention in 2012, and by 2013 the crowd-funding site was on fire. Over lunch one day I told Larry that I thought our film was tailor-made for it. Larry reached millions of people a week. My fellow Abes who made the pro-fracking film Fracknation had raised $212,000 through Kickstarter, and they didn’t have Larry’s name or reach. I told him we could go that route and totally avoid dealing with private investors who’d own part of the project (which was something I had no desire to return to after Nuremberg). Newtown had the gun rights issue squarely on the front pages. And as much as I hated the “bunker people,” their dollars were as good as anyone else’s.

“Do it,” Larry told me. “Set up a Kickstarter. I’ll get the word out.”

In the meantime, Larry had another task for me. He was trying to revive his highly rated Warner Bros. syndicated daytime TV show Moral Court, which had been produced by Stu Billett Productions (The People’s Court). Moral Court was described as the only court show that dealt with ethics and morality rather than legality. Larry, who is a lawyer, would judge cases and award cash settlements based on which party he felt was morally and ethically in the right. The show was so successful that even though its first-run broadcasts ended in 2001, the reruns continued through 2007 in syndication.

Larry’s personal assistant and I combed through Larry’s garage for the VHS tapes of all the episodes (we found about eighty). Larry wanted me to watch them all and edit a reel. Eighty one-hour VHS tapes, which would have to be digitized, of course. I was genuinely happy to do it.

As I was planning the Kickstarter for the Elder project, I was approached by Nick Searcy. He wanted to do a feature with me. He told me that it had always been his dream to play Whittaker Chambers in a movie adaptation of Chambers’ autobiography Witness. I generally don’t like to slow down to explain cultural references to the uninformed, but for the uneducated fetuses out there, I’ll spell out the Chambers story in broad strokes: Fat, balding, dumpy dude, ex-communist-turned-America-loving-patriot, exposes young, handsome, perfect-haired State Department official as Soviet spy (during the “Red Scare,” you know—the thing that George Clooney tells you was nothing but a “paranoid right-wing slander-fest”). Young handsome guy denies the allegation, and is vigorously defended by all of the George Clooneys of his day. Fat guy dies from alcoholism and fatness, scorned by the elites for “slandering” young handsome guy. Young handsome guy lives to be ninety-two. The Soviet Union falls, and fuck if the KGB archives don’t show that fat dumpy dude was right all along about young handsome guy being a spy. Amazingly, fat dumpy guy doesn’t return from the grave to give everyone the finger.

I’d done some work for Searcy—editing a trailer for his very funny self-parody web series “Acting School with Nick Searcy” (look it up on YouTube; even liberals think it’s hilarious). And I’d done a small amount of consulting on his scripts. He decided I was the one he wanted to spearhead the film.

For Searcy, playing Chambers was a dream project. And he was already totally rocking the balding and dumpy look.

Searcy’s Justified shooting schedule kept him busy, so he tasked me with finding a screenwriter and negotiating the rights to Chambers’ autobiography from his elderly children.

I contacted Chambers’ son, and initiated a series of calls aimed primarily at figuring out why the Chambers children hadn’t sold the movie rights in over sixty years. I determined that Searcy and I would either have to fly the son out to LA, or go to Maryland ourselves. The key would be convincing the son that Nick would do right by his dad’s life story.

I contacted Abe screenwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh (La Femme Nikita, The Day Reagan Was Shot, 10,000 Black Men Named George, and The Stoning of Soraya M.). He confided in me that he wouldn’t take the project because he didn’t feel that Nick had the weight to play Chambers (emotional weight, as in “gravitas”). I didn’t pass that along to Nick; I just told him that Cyrus was already committed to other projects (which was not a total lie).

Finally, Nick and I decided to approach Cadet Walshy, because who better than a Hilary Duff writer to pen a screenplay about one of the most important events of the Cold War? I’m being facetious; Walshy was exceptionally well-versed in the topic.

At our first informal meeting to discuss the screenplay, I began to worry that Walshy was coming unglued. A year after his daughter’s death, he was carrying photos of his guns in his phone, as one would normally do with pictures of family members. He proudly showed off the photos to me and Searcy.

My good buddy Mark Tapson, screenwriter, Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and a writer for FrontPage Magazine and Townhall, was yet another Abe/RPA who wanted me to organize his birthday bash. But Mark, one of the most humble guys I’ve ever known, didn’t want the night to be solely about him. “It’s more that I want to celebrate the night with the RPA, which is pretty much all of the people I’d ever want at my birthday party anyway,” he told me. Since Mark didn’t want to be the sole focus, I asked Larry if he needed help moving his new book. WND hadn’t paid me yet for the commercial, so it occurred to me that they might be dropping the ball on Larry’s author support as well.

Larry loved the idea. I had WND send me cases of books (that they followed through on, since I had to pay in advance. Funny, how do I end up paying the assholes who owe me?), and I began promoting the event.

Separately, Jamie Glazov, managing editor of David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine and host of “The Glazov Gang,” asked me about partnering up with him and the Horowitz Foundation for an event in May. As much of a prick as Horowitz is, Jamie is a truly nice guy. The son of Soviet dissidents from the Brezhnev era whose family fled the USSR when he was nine, Jamie has a perspective about freedom a bit more nuanced than the “Occupy Wall Street” brats who scream “oppression” because the government doesn’t pay for taxpayer-funded ass-wipes after every shit they take.

I told Jamie I’d be honored to work with him and Horowitz on the event.

Another thing on the calendar was a book signing I’d promised Eric Gollum, the Washington Times mole-man. As much as the very sight of him made me queasy, it was a simple truth that the more events we had, the stronger the cohesion among the members. So mole-man would get his book signing.

Lastly, but of perhaps the greatest importance, I was approached to handle an event to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of the 1st Battalion, 227th Aviation Regiment. A new film had been produced about the regiment, which has served with distinction in every conflict since Vietnam. The filmmakers had reserved a movie theater in Burbank, and one of the Abes involved in the project told them that I was the only guy who could fill the seats and get some VIP attendees. Dozens of members of the 227th and their families would be flying out from Texas for the event. The filmmakers didn’t have a trailer for their film, so I started out by cutting one, and then mapping out how I would fill the house to standing room only.

On a final note, the people at Independent Journal Review finally got me to consider that paying position as a staff writer. It wasn’t the money that convinced me, but rather, after dealing with the Breitbart.com plagiarism, I felt that having an exclusive deal with a recognized news site to run my work would serve as insurance against future instances of theft.

So, to recap, my film with Larry Elder was about to go all Kickstarter after six months of diligent pre-production work on my part, I had another feature in the works with Nick Searcy, an event being planned with Roger Simon, possible events with Dennis Miller, Jonah Goldberg, and Andrew Klavan, an event with Jamie Glazov and the David Horowitz Freedom Foundation, the Andrew Breitbart memorial, more joint RPA/Abe events in the works, the Larry Elder book signing and Mark Tapson birthday shindig, and the new staff position at Independent Journal Review. Plus, I had a personal assurance from Cadet Walshy that he would never get involved in any of Rosie’s high schoolish chicanery, and Rosie, for her part, was nowhere to be seen.

Everything was comin’ up Milhouse! I was on top of the world with no problems in sight.

The thing I hate about writing a book instead of editing videos (which is what I’m used to doing), is that I can’t add a soundtrack. So I’ll ask you to supply your own. If you know Creedence’s “Bad Moon Rising,” please start humming it now. Much appreciated.

22.

MY THIRD DEATH

Let us to’t pell-mell;

If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.

—Richard III

If things were going swimmingly for me, they were going drowningly for Rosie. This was, of course, unbeknownst to me. She was completely off my radar, and I couldn’t have been happier. But we had hundreds of mutual Facebook friends, several of whom never seemed to get the memo from common sense central that I had no desire to hear about her. Some very well-meaning Abes and RPAs, all eager to bring news to the Bwana, informed me that she had bitched online about not having a fancy birthday dinner (January 11). And I heard from the same folks again on Valentine’s Day. “Rosie posted that she had to spend Valentine’s Day at Souplantation.” For those of you who don’t know, Souplantation is not a restaurant where black folks make soup for no wages. Rather, it’s an all-you-can-eat salad and soup bar where only the soup part is actually all-you-can-eat, as you get only one pass by the salad section. Every Sunday in the L.A. Times, Souplantation runs ads with $6.99 coupons. Rosie steadfastly refused to go there during my time with her (there are no meat dishes, and you can’t take anything home). The one time we were forced to go there, while on the road during one of our trips, I was given the job of distracting security while she stuffed cheese pizza and brownies into her bag.

And this is where Tipjar Mike took her on Valentines Day. To put that in perspective, this was the first birthday and Valentines Day in six years in which her magic Jew didn’t spend upwards of six hundred dollars. And Tipjar Mike spent $6.99. I have no idea how good he is in bed, but no amount of guitar prowess, nor the finest, most savory, guitar god dick in existence, could possibly be enough to compensate Rosie Tisch for a $6.99 Valentines Day dinner.

My friends told me she left Tipjar after that.

One other thing that grabbed my attention was that, in the weeks before the Breitbart memorial event, Broes told me that Rosie kept trying to get on the guest list (something I wouldn’t have been able to see, as we were blocked from seeing each other on Facebook). Twice Broes had to remove her, only for her to come back again. This puzzled me. Why was she trying so hard to get into an event that I was organizing?

A few nights after the Breitbart bash, I got my answer. Her mom was in town from San Diego, and Rosie was obviously anxious to show off to her mom by doing the prom queen thing in front of several hundred conservative big-shots. Barred from the event, she, Fisher Price Chris, Tipjar, and her mom were forced to slum it at some dive bar across town. For the past six years, every time her mom had come into town, it had meant a steak dinner at places like Morton’s and Mastro’s.

Rosie was unhappy with her new reality. No more $600 birthday dinners, no more $600 Valentines Day dinners, no more $800 “taking mom to the steak-house” nights. Rosie was pissed, and she was dangerous. And I received concrete proof almost immediately after arriving at that conclusion. I got a 1 a.m. phone call from a drunk Nick Searcy. The drunk part was no surprise—after his wife and kids were in bed, Nick always started drinking, and that’s usually when he’d call me, to discuss our film project, or his web series, or to tell me the same damn Jon Voight anecdote for the tenth time (something to do with how much Voight loved Searcy’s “Acting School” web series).

But this night, he had something else on his mind.

“I got a call from some dude named John Romano…I don’t know the guy, but he says he used to be with Friends of Abe. He tells me, like some fucking doom prophet, ‘don’t work with Stein! Don’t work with Stein! You’ll regret it.’ What the fuck is this guy’s problem?”

If Searcy had been with me in my living room, he’d have seen, not panic on my face, but a smile. Fuckin’ Rosie. I knew this was coming.

“Oh, Romano, yeah. He and I had a nasty split when I used to edit his website, just like he had when he left Breitbart. He’s just got it in for me, that’s all.”

“I kept asking him, why shouldn’t I work with David? He’s my friend. He’s been a big help to me. But he wouldn’t give me any specifics. It’s like he was just trying to use scare tactics.”

“Yep, that’s Romano for ya. He’s kind of a dick.”

“That’s what I thought. If he calls back again, I’ll tell him to fuck off. I don’t even know how he got my number.”

And then Searcy told me the Voight anecdote again and we said goodnight.

I sat at my computer and took another swig of vodka. Romano had to have heard I was working with Searcy from someone, and the only people who knew were me, Searcy, and Cadet Walshy. I emailed Cadet Walshy. He claimed he had never heard of any “John Romano.” I assumed that Cadet Walshy had inadvertently mentioned the project to Rosie, who then tried to enlist Goombah Romano to out me. But Romano was as cowardly as always. He wouldn’t go all the way. His non-specific “prophet of doom” ranting was met with justifiable derision by Searcy. If you’re going to out me, out me, you fat fucking wop.

Rosie had made the typical mistake that people make when they try to hire a hit man. She’d gone with a street thug. Because that’s all Goombah Romano was—a slicked-back-hair New York street thug. Thugs wet themselves the moment they’re braced. You want to get an ugly chore done, you need someone with ice water in his veins, someone who just doesn’t give a shit. Someone like me, or Cadet Walshy.

But once again, Cadet Walshy assured me that he’d never be party to any Rosie-centered ugliness. From a February 21, 2013, email exchange:

Me: “Hi Michael. I’d like to ask if you’ve been contacted by a gentleman named John Romano regarding me.”

Cadet Walshy: “I don’t know anybody named John Romano.”

Me: “Thank you Michael, much appreciated.”

Walshy: “What’s the rumpus? If it’s about personal stuff, as I told you, I left high school 46 years ago and have zero interest in revisiting it. If it’s about (the Whittaker Chambers) movie stuff, someone’s going to have to be ready to put some $$ on the table before I move the discussion along about the Chambers project, as I’ve told Nick, for the option money.”

Me: “No, the Romano thing is about personal crap. I’m sorry to have even bothered you with it.”

Walshy: “Include me out, pls.”

Me: “Of course, Michael. I would never bother you with that. But this fellow has bothered Nick, so I just wanted to make sure he hadn’t bothered you, that’s all. Nothing more.”

Walshy: “ok.”

If I’d known Cadet Walshy was living with Rosie, I wouldn’t have believed him. But even if I foolishly took Cadet Walshy at his word that he would stay out of things, I nevertheless knew that Rosie would not stop looking for a partner to out me. She’d never do it alone. It’s not just that she’s the type to never get her hands dirty; it’s also that too many of my people were like Daniel Knauf—industry folks with a knee-jerk adverse reaction to opportunistic actresses. Rosie needed a partner. It wouldn’t be Goombah Romano (I sent him an email telling him to back off, and he basically responded with “I’m done, I’m out”). It wouldn’t be Tipjar Mike; that coward couldn’t even look me in the eye. And it wouldn’t be Fisher Price Chris Noll; he only goes up against animals.

I emailed Rosie one last time, imploring her not to continue her course of action. I tried to reason with her by bringing up an incident about which she was already familiar. When I did Nuremberg, I hired, as the film’s director, a man who’d served as an archivist and filmmaker for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. After witnessing the large amount of money being poured into Nuremberg by my investors, this fellow tried to squeeze me out of my own film so that he could get a direct line to that money himself. The reason for the director’s duplicity was obvious. He was a “kept man,” married to the most successful casting director in the business, and this poor gent’s paltry income was totally dwarfed by the millions his wife earned every year. He was well-off, but it wasn’t “his” money. He was literally on an allowance.

Little did this poor bastard know that back in 2004 I had been a secret guest at a house in the San Fernando Valley that he used for his weekly rendezvous with his mistress. When I returned from my El Segundo exile, I needed a place to hole up for a few months before going back to the Westside. Fat Frank gave me the keys to a house in the valley where he was house-sitting, but he told me to stay out of sight every Thursday night when the house became the Shoah dude’s love-nest.

When the philanderer tried to squeeze me out of my film four years later, I let him know that I was aware of the secret that could destroy his marriage. And he exited gracefully, as gracefully as he could with his tail between his legs, taking his ill-planned mutiny with him.

I explained to Rosie that the whole point of having a “nuclear option” is to hold on to it in case of emergency. I used mine against the Shoah guy in self-defense. Rosie was trying to use hers to nihilistically scorch the earth. That’s just not practical.

But, deep down, I knew it was fruitless to try to talk her out of it. At that point, the only power she had was to destroy everything I’d built up.

April 6 was the book-signing event for Larry Elder and the birthday party for the David Horowitz Foundation’s Mark Tapson. Several hundred people, shoulder-to-shoulder. I couldn’t act as though I knew the Rosie hammer might drop; I had too many responsibilities that night. I managed to move every book that WND sent me, and I made a public announcement about the Kickstarter campaign that Larry and I were going to launch for the gun rights film. I gave a shout-out to the crew who helped me torpedo the latest Obama Administration Department of Defense program, and Larry said a few words.

It was a great night. NBC show-runner Daniel Knauf regaled us with top-secret dailies from the upcoming Dracula TV series. Folks had a blast.

My regulars had demanded name tags, because each event was getting bigger and bigger, and a lot of the people who only knew each other from the Facebook group were having trouble recognizing each other in person. But they all knew me, so I thought I’d have a little tragic foreshadowing fun with my name tag. I dubbed myself “Harold Shand,” the character Bob Hoskins played in the classic British mob film The Long Good Friday, one of my favorite films. Harold Shand is a mobster with a shady past who desperately yearns to go legit. But in the end, his earnest attempts are thwarted by betrayal from those closest to him.

Cadet Walshy was at the event with a girl so young, it was startling. He didn’t tell me who she was, and I didn’t ask. Walshy asked me what my name tag meant. “You’re the screenwriter, Michael. You ought to know,” I replied. “In fact,” I said, “I’ll give a free drink to the first person who can tell me what film the name’s from.” Walshy’s child-date grabbed her iPhone. “Well, now I have to find out! I’m Googling it.”

“I doubt you’re old enough to drink,” I told her. I wasn’t joking. She looked nineteen.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Rosie and Walshy had already outed me to “Tudors” Zaslow, with the condition that she only tell Larry Elder. Walshy was totally able to look me in the eye and joke with me all night, knowing what he was doing, and what he was about to do. If only this master screenwriter of Hilary Duff films, this ruiner of Casablanca, this proud Irishman, had any concept of The Long Good Friday, he may have appreciated the irony. In the film, Harold Shand is taken down by the Irish.

I don’t know why I believed Cadet Walshy when he promised he’d never be part of Rosie’s machinations. Realistically, he was her best choice. As I said, if I knew he was living with Rosie, I’d have known what was coming.

And it came.

April 19 (the day before Hitler’s birthday; also, my last day of normalcy).

I’d arranged with one of my regular venues to have a karaoke night to benefit the Second Amendment Foundation. As it was that organization’s event, not mine, I had no desire to control the guest list. So, of course, Rosie signed up to attend. I allowed the organizer, an RPA, to promote the event in the Facebook “think tank” group. Throughout that Friday afternoon, several of my people asked why I wasn’t going. I told them that I didn’t want to be in the same room as Rosie.

I had a bad feeling about that night. Rosie would be with a hundred of my RPAs, and I wouldn’t be there.

An RPA friend emailed me privately. “Why not just go there and stand up to her?”

I was blunt. “She’s holding something over me.” I knew that would prompt a follow-up question.

“What could she possibly have over you?”

My reply: “It isn’t criminal (no accusations, charges, convictions, etc.), it isn’t sexual (no pics of me with midgets, donkeys, etc.), and it isn’t political (I’m not a closet liberal spying on FOA for Media Matters). Other than that, I just don’t want to speak about it. Suffice to say that Rosie has a ‘nuclear option’ against me.”

My friend told me that I didn’t have to go into any more detail if I didn’t want to. If Rosie was in fact holding something over my head, he’d never want to be in the same room with her again, either.

These would be the last few hours in which folks liked me.

I wasn’t used to being home on a Friday night, but as the Second Amendment Foundation benefit raged in the Valley, I was wiling away the night on the phone with an Abe/RPA who’d just wrapped vocal work on Star Trek Into Darkness. We were discussing the best way for her to make use of the credit.

While I was on the phone, I noticed the membership in the private Facebook “think tank” group dropping rapidly. Minus five. Minus ten. Within fifteen minutes, we’d lost twenty people. That was irregular. We never lost anyone before. It was hard enough to get in. People only left if I kicked them out. Before I had time to process the exodus, I started getting the emails. Conservative blogger Kira Davis, one of our most active members, sent me the Phil Donahue link. “David, what is this? I was shown this tonight. I don’t understand. Is this you? What is going on and am I or is my career in jeopardy by my association with you? There are all kinds of rumors flying around about you right now and people are nervous and I want to know for myself, as someone who considers you a friend. I don’t want to talk about you. I want to talk *to* you. Can you explain? Please?”

About ten similar emails came in at the same time. By now it was after midnight. It was April 20. Happy birthday, Hitler. You’d be glad to know that a Jew’s being destroyed on your special day.

Rosie had gone nuclear. The emails all told the same story. It was her and Cadet Walshy. The same Cadet Walshy who had given me his word that he’d stay out of the personal stuff. He walked through the Second Amendment Foundation event showing everyone my Donahue and Montel appearances. I could not have been outed more publicly, or in a way more calculatedly geared toward causing mass damage. Of the hundred or so people at the event, each one of them alerted their friends, who alerted their friends, and so on.

Cadet Walshy knew back in September that I’d been willing to leave quietly. He’d been the one who told me it wouldn’t be necessary. And now, our hundreds of mutual friends were about to have a terrible, terrible weekend.

Me? All I could do that night was sit back and play Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day” over and over again. I love that song; it always makes me happy.

The next day I got visits from three RPAs who were concerned that I might be suicidal. Suicidal? Sheeeeeeit. Suicide is something I fake, not something I do. Getting all self-killy over politics is a hundred times more pathetic than crying over it. But the well-wishers brought booze, so I welcomed their misplaced concern.

There was tremendous panic in “the circles.” My lot was intertwined with that of so many others. I must have received ninety calls that weekend. Everyone had advice, and that advice was almost unanimously “recant. Just say you were a stupid kid. You didn’t know what you were saying.” Almost all of the advice-mavens used the same term—“Get in front of it.” (In political crisis-speak, “getting in front of it” means aggressively addressing the charges before your foes can circulate them).

On the surface, this was not bad advice, at least from the point of view of the Abes and RPAs. Cadet Walshy had issued an edict—literally—that the Cole/Stein matter was not to be written about publicly. The goal was simply to banish me from the circles. And now that I’d been outed, no one was to speak of it to outsiders. And the local GOP heads backed him up. No squealing.

So, in theory, I could have tried to “get in front of it” by going public. But it would have been futile. I’d have been playing a game of “save ass” that I couldn’t have won. My reputation was toast. No one would ever again attend one of my events. No GOP VIP would ever again speak at anything I organized. In part, it’s because of the ingrained idea that nothing about the Holocaust can ever be revised. You can deny the Armenian mass murders, you can revise the Ukrainian forced famine, you can revise the history of slavery, the war against Native Americans, World War I, Franco’s Spain, junta Argentina, and everything else. But revise the history of Auschwitz? MONSTER!

Also, GOPs don’t get a pass on anything that makes them look “racist.” If I’d been an anti-Zionist lefty, I could have survived. But a pro-Zionist rightist? Forget about it. I was a liability to end all liabilities. The media would use me as a club against anyone who’d work with me. The only way my former colleagues could survive would be to denounce me and distance themselves.

And boy, did they ever. The reactions ranged from “I’ll kill you” (the extreme reaction) to “I’ll beat the shit out of you” (the moderate reaction) to “I’m going to pretend I never knew you” (the kind and gentle reaction). I can count the people who stood by me on the fingers of my hands.

Abes got so spooked, they even pulled things from the Internet that I’d anonymously edited for them. Nick Searcy shat his drawers with such sphincter-muscle-defying speed that he pulled the fucking trailer I cut for his web series.

Andrew Klavan of PJ Media claimed that my IMDb page was full of phony credits, while Sharon Waxman of The Wrap (described by the always-dependable Wikipedia as “one of the entertainment industry’s most influential and reliable news sources”) claimed that I had no IMDb page at all. This, by the way, is one of the most entertaining parts about being a media “bad guy”—no one can ever quite agree on the manner in which you’re bad. “Stein/Cole is a fraud! He has no credits!” “Stein/Cole is a fraud! He has many credits but he faked ’em!”

The truth is, whereas someone like Waxman was not going to be bothered doing the simple Google search that all the trolls who have since graffitied my IMDb page message board were perfectly capable of doing, Klavan was just frightened, as he’d been planning to do one of my events. Meanwhile, the editors at Independent Journal Review, scared to death of fact that I’d been writing for them, scrubbed the site clean of my work, a fairly Stalinist response from supposedly conservative journalists.

I recanted in 1998 to the JDL for three reasons. One, it may have saved my life. Two, Sarah was moving in with me and I didn’t want that threat hanging over her. And three, I had already left revisionism two years earlier. I had no attachment to it, and the recantation was a great way to finally burn that bridge.

But recant now? There’d be no good that could come of it. The media would still pummel me, GOPs would still distance themselves, I’d still be hated and no longer trusted by my former allies, and I could never again be the guy I was, the guy who could draw five hundred people to an event, the guy whose likeability kept the peace, the guy who could act as the in-house scold against conservative excesses and wacky conspiracy theories.

In other words, I could never be the person I’d been for the past five years. That incarnation of me was dead. The best I could hope for would have been to limp along as a shambling, barely-recognizable shadow of David Stein, falling all over myself to apologize on demand over and over again. That was not going to happen. I could have raped a woman, doodled a kid’s wiener, or shot a guy in the face. There can be redemption for those things. But my beliefs about Auschwitz? No redemption, no forgiveness. Maybe at most fifteen percent of my former colleagues might have “accepted” me if I’d groveled. So I’d have groveled for what? I still could never go back to the way things were.

I was done. Period. If I was going to lie about my historical views, as I did in my JDL recantation, something good would have to come of it. If I’m going to shit all over my historical research, I need a reason beyond “maybe Larry Elder might talk to you again.”

No, it was time to move on.

My decision to not “recant” was validated when, only a few days after my outing, and while it was still an in-house secret, young Jeremy at the Abes’ front office banned me from all future Abe events. No attempt at discussion; I was persona non grata. He didn’t even ask if I wanted to recant.

David,

Over the last week, several people have exposed me to the Phil Donahue/David Cole-Holocaust Revisionist piece on YouTube.

I do not agree with the views of David Cole as expressed on the Phil Donahue show two decades ago, but at the same time, this isn’t France where people go to jail for saying things people don’t like about the Holocaust—or any other topic for that matter.

Still, the secrecy surrounding your identity change has created a situation that could be very harmful to FOA and the people associated with FOA. Members have attended or even spoken at your events who had no idea who David Cole is or was, but who could be very badly damaged in the media as a result. Similarly, FOA itself had no idea who David Cole is or was, but could itself be badly damaged in the media as a result. As a result, many of our members feel mislead, angry, and exposed.

For those reasons, I must now remove you from the FOA roster and ask that you not attend any future events. We just can’t invite this kind of conflict or negative exposure on our other members.

You know as well as anyone how delicate FOA is. We are a private community of conservative entertainment professionals who want to get together, have lunch or a beer, maybe hear a speaker or two, and enjoy fellowship with likeminded people. We cannot be associated with this kind of controversy and the media exposure it will invite.

Please consider this email a formal notification that you are no longer a part of the FOA community.

David, you have always been very kind to me, and I am sorry for what is happening. I appreciate the energy and enthusiasm that you have always shown, and the festive attitude you have always brought to our events.

Please know that neither myself, nor the organization I represent, wishes you any personal ill, but my foremost responsibility is to protect the group.

Best regards,

Jeremy Boreing

Executive Director—Friends Of Abe

Exactly. There was nothing I could have said or done to have made things better. Rosie knew that, Cadet Walshy knew that. I was finished.

The Abes were fine with Mykelti Williamson (Bubba from Forrest Gump), who’d been accused of stalking his ex-wife, and criminally charged with stabbing her boyfriend in a jealous rage. And the Abes had absolutely no problem with batshit crazy Victoria Jackson (the SNL alumna) penning (on her website) an outrageously racist and factually incorrect article in January 2013, basically regurgitating the white supremacist battle cry “white men built this country, white men ARE this country:”

Just for the record, white men invented rockets, space travel, airplanes, the automobile, the English language, the U.S.A., most medical advances, electricity, television, telescope, microscope, Ivy League Universities, the computer, the Internet, and on and on. I think white men should be praised and respected. White Christian Conservative Men especially, should be loved and adored. They were the backbone and originators of the greatest nation on earth. We need more of them now. In November, 2012 The Blaze reported that Alec Baldwin tweeted, “Obama’s re-election signaled the end of white, middle-aged Christian male dominance.”

Maybe that’s why our country is going to pot; our huge deficit, foreign attacks, crashing economy, racial and class warfare, immigration problems, bigger government, disappearing freedom, growing poverty, sky-rocketing unemployment, rancid immorality, more pregnant teens, etc. etc.—“the end of white, middle-aged Christian male dominance.” I’m just saying. Find a white, middle-aged Christian man today and hug him. And then, encourage him and your white Christian sons to stand up, be leaders again, and save our country from the God-hating communists like Alec Baldwin and Obama.

But she’s fine; no banning.

I lost 1,500 Facebook friends in the space of a weekend. I wonder if that’s a record.

After my departure, the Abe/RPA Facebook “think tank” group I so lovingly created and ran split and fractured. I couldn’t have cared. One thing that I did care about was the Larry Elder situation. After Walshy told “Tudors” Zaslow about my past, she stalked Larry for an entire day, calling repeatedly and hanging out near his home on a Sunday. Larry doesn’t like to take calls on Sunday, and, with anything regarding my work with him, he didn’t like to take calls from anyone but me.

But “Tudors” was persistent. Having heard about the documentary I was doing with Larry, she figured that pushing me out might mean she could take my place; another unearned credit. After a full day of persistence, she finally got him on the phone.

I was oddly relieved, because I hadn’t yet decided how to broach the subject with him. At least now I knew that he was aware of it, and the next move would be his. My guess was that he’d want his “stuff” back (all the raw materials I’d been using to do unpaid editing for the guy for seven months).

The next day I got an email from Larry’s personal assistant Dana: “David, hate to do this—but I need to get the tapes back from you for a couple weeks. Someone at the station is putting together a sizzle reel for Larry. I can send a messenger to pick them up, but I’ll need your address and a time frame when they can be picked up.”

See, this is how guys “break up.” This is how “bromances” end. No yelling, no screaming, no demanding an explanation for every offence, no tearful insistence that one party apologize. It just ends. I knew what that email meant—I’d never hear from Larry again. The very idea that Larry would send a messenger was a dead giveaway. Even when Larry’s career hinged on a piece of editing, it was always my job to deliver or pick up. For Larry to pay for a messenger service was huge. You have to know the guy to know how major that was.

There was no need to make this any more difficult. I played along.

The next day, a uniformed messenger showed up. Larry got his stuff back. And that was that. I haven’t even tried to inquire if the documentary I’d been doing research, scheduling, and pre-production for is still going to continue without me. Larry deserved a clean exit. I owed him that, at the very least.

But Larry felt that neither he nor World Net Daily owed me one cent for the work I’d contracted to do. Remember how early on in the book I mused about the acceptable level of dickishness in a tell-all book? Well, there’s also the equally valid question of an acceptable level of dickishness among the people who were shocked and surprised at my “outing” as Cole. What goes too far? What crosses the line? I allowed my former colleagues to mourn and curse me all they wanted. I owed them that. But Larry Elder crossed the line by supporting WND’s decision to default on the payment I was owed for the commercial I edited for his book.

That work had been done anonymously. It would not have associated my name in any way with Larry or WND. And the work had already been done, and approved by Larry. So, I thought to myself, sure Larry’s pissed at me, but certainly his sense of ethics, and, you know, that whole “free market honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work” thing, coupled with the fact that I had done eight months of free editing for his personal career aspirations, coupled with the fact that I wouldn’t have taken the WND job if Larry hadn’t insisted I do it for a fee, coupled with the fact that Larry pleaded with me to take the job, saying I was the only one he trusted to edit the spot…all of those things, taken together, led me to assume that when WND asked Larry what to do about the outstanding balance, he would just say “pay the man.”

But no. Somehow, what I said about Auschwitz twenty-two years ago means that I shouldn’t get paid for a commercial spot I did in the present day.

The truth is, I really could have used the money I was owed. Fucking Rosie…still costing me money, even a year later.

Amazingly, the Abes, the RPAs, and the GOP honchos managed to keep my outing under the rug, out of the public eye, for two weeks. Mole-man Eric Gollum called and texted me several times asking if he could “break” the story on his blog. He might as well have been asking if I could make him less ugly. But while I just ignored him, the Abes were piling on. Cadet Walshy warned Gollum not to publish the story, and Gollum obeyed.

For Cadet Walshy to attempt to strong-arm Gollum into keeping quiet, even though Walshy, as a professional journalist, surely understood the value of a good story, made me realize that fat perverted Walshy was scared. My destruction was supposed to be a controlled burn. A targeted hit, with no blowback. But only an idiot could’ve thought the story wouldn’t blow up. Beating up Gollum was akin to berating your retarded nephew for spilling a glass of water on the carpet while a tsunami is heading toward your house.

I did some strong-arming myself. Goombah Romano’s website was long dead. So, brilliant paisan that he is, he figured he could revive it by breaking the story of my outing. I decided to brace him, because I knew I could, and because it’s always fun to fuck with a coward.

As soon as I saw that Romano posted a story about me, I emailed him (April 24): “You were too much of a coward to come after me yourself, but after someone else takes me out, you try to exploit it to help your dying (dead) site. You should know that you’re not hurting me by doing [it]—I’m gone, vanished, a vapor. You’re only hurting the FOAs who have been, understandably, praying that this story stays contained. You appear to be the first one to have taken it beyond Facebook. You won’t win any friends that way, you sack of shit. But, worse than that, you’re harming people who don’t deserve it. But what do you care, right?”

He pulled the story immediately. Dear God, I hate a coward. If, for once in his miserable life, he’d stood up to me, stood up for something, I’d have at least developed a small modicum of respect for the guy. People like Romano are worthless. At least in my life, I’ve stood for something.

But if the story was still under wraps, the anger was boiling over. Bobo Zelkin declared me an enemy of the Jewish people. “There is no revising any part of the Holocaust. Revising and denying are the same thing. Stein/Cole is a NAZI.”

One of my former members named Leah stated, “Call me racist if you want, but nothing matters other than what’s good for the Jews. Stein betrayed us.” Dennis Miller’s co-host Lisa Dabbs expressed relief that I was outed before Miller could do one of my events (which she was helping to arrange).

Nick Searcy was initially a bit sad and melancholic that I was gone (he posted “David was a smart and funny guy, with lots of good ideas. I’ll miss him.”) But he soon saw how the tide had shifted to severe, unsympathetic anger toward me (and far be it for an actor to ever shift a stance because of public opinion). Now, he compared me to the Grand Kleagle of the KKK. Because, of course, taking an unpopular position about a historical subject is exactly the same thing as murdering black people.

Nick was a great guy. I’ll miss him, too. Behind the guy’s arrogant, “fuck you” veneer was a typically insecure actor, as vulnerable and loveable as any of the twenty-something actresses I’ve helped over the course of my life. I’ll miss our late-night drunk-talks.

Make sure to YouTube-search “Acting School with Nick Searcy.”

My conservative “pals” couldn’t have been more despicable in the way they attacked my remaining friends. One of my oldest friends—from high school—was vilified because she’s black. In the remnants of the Facebook “think tank” group, they went racial on this young lady with an abhorrent spitefulness. They called her a “race traitor” and an “Uncle Tom” for “remaining friends with a KKK guy” (yeah, that’s me, apparently). This young woman had put herself on the line for years as a black conservative, hearing exactly those kinds of taunts from the left. And now, she was hearing it from her own supposed friends on the right. They even brought up slavery. “How would you feel if David denied slavery, huh?”

The fact that many of the people who refused to abandon me were women didn’t sit well with my former friends, either.

Stephen Pavelski, the lead artist behind James Cameron’s Avatar (he was also an artist on the Twilight films, Iron Man 3, The Avengers, and the recent Planet of the Apes reboots), claimed in an email to me that the women who were remaining friends with me (I’ve redacted their names) were doing so not because they had any intellectual ability to assess a situation and make their own judgments, but because they’re “just female.”

He wrote, “Your own direct claims on the subject (the Holocaust) are a serious barrier to any fellow human being with a lick of common sense ever trusting you again. Not sure why [redacted], [redacted], [redacted], and [redacted] seem so willing to overlook that fact. Maybe they are too sentimental to realize that your unjustified contempt for and sense of superiority over your fellow human beings applies to them, as well. Maybe they are just female.”

You have to travel a bit with conservatives to really grasp the import of the attacks against my black and female friends. Conservatives spend an inordinate amount of time defending themselves against (usually baseless) claims that they’re racist or misogynistic. But, in my case, the minute the shit hit the fan, they went racial and misogynist. They became the very stereotypes that the left portrays.

However, they did (inadvertently) bring up an interesting point by invoking slavery. Of course, no one denies slavery (just as I didn’t deny the Holocaust), but in fact there has been a great deal of slavery revisionism. That’s simply par for the course with any major historical event. In fact, there was an entire book written about slavery revisionism: Peter Novick’s 1988 masterwork That Noble Dream—required reading for any student of history.

Novick pointed out that certain “truths” about slavery changed over time for political reasons. All major historical topics contain grey areas and room for interpretation. Novick even documents one white (leftist) historian who was bullied into suicide by black leftists who claimed he had no right to “revise” their history (or even write about it).

I guess I got off easy, then.

After I read how my former compatriots were bullying my black and female friends, I pulled a little trick on the small number among the bullies who’d still answer my emails. I sent them a quote, from a Palestinian professor, about how Jewish scholars too often put their ethnic/racial/religious identity before a detached examination of the Holocaust:

“When scholar-advocates put advocacy first, exempting “their” group, however defined, from detached, critical examination, they deprive that group and the larger society of the one authentic contribution scholars can make in public affairs.”

My former buddies responded to that quote with vitriol and hostility. “Stupid fucking Palestinian terrorist,” one former pal wrote, “what a load of crap.”

Of course, I was just fucking with these dimwits. I wrote back, “Oh, shit—sorry! That’s actually a quote from a conservative white professor regarding how black nationalists and leftist feminists have harmed the field of history by putting “group identity” before objective detachment (the quote is from Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream, by Rice University Professor Emeritus of History Thomas L. Haskell).

Well, NOW my conservative friends loved the quote! Now, it’s brilliance personified.

Fucking imbeciles.

23.

“GET HIM!”

On May 1, I heard from the Guardian. One of my RPAs had a connection to the paper, and she leaked the story. And that’s when I knew Walshy and Rosie’s “controlled burn” was about to go full-blown wildfire. And it did. The Guardian piece, a fair and balanced profile which—startlingly and accurately—referred to me as a revisionist and not a “denier,” opened the flood gates. Within days, the story was everywhere: The Huffington Post, MSN, AOL News, Yahoo News, The Wrap, Gawker, Raw Story, The Daily Kos, the American Spectator, the Washington Times…left, right, or center, the hounds had been released (the Kraken too, I’m assuming).

The L.A. County GOP and the Westside Republicans sent out a special email to their mailing lists, with the subject line “The Holocaust Denier You’ve Met.” After the usual “enemy of the Jews” boilerplate, the GOP leaders, who had profited greatly by always being allowed to use my RPA gatherings for recruitment, rather pitifully stated: “David Stein is actually the holocaust denier David Cole, [but the] Republican Party Animals concept is good and we and other Republican leaders will work with the RPA to rebuild.”

So stupid. I was the RPA. Rebuild what, idiots? Naturally, there never was any “rebuilding.”

Eric “Gollum” Golub was so pissed that he didn’t get the “exclusive” on my story (thanks to Walshy’s strong-arming and my refusal to talk), he could barely dig his runs and digest his earthworms. He wrote a piece for the Washington Times calling me an “infiltrator” and “a nasally-voiced Jew” (for the record, my voice is gravelly. Big difference). He added the usual stuff about me being “evil” and a “sickness.” Humorously, several liberal sites held up Gollum’s article as an example of GOP intolerance toward Jews (generally speaking, referring to “the evil Jew” in a piece supposedly about fighting anti-Semitism isn’t good strategy).

I don’t blame mole-man Gollum; the surface world above his native burrows is strange and unfamiliar to him. He’s doing his best.

The American Spectator came after me, as did PJ Media (no doubt browning its collective pants over my ties to its founder and several of its “star” personalities). Along with the attacks in the press, there was the expected grave-dancing. Scott “Scatty” Edwards was having a field day reveling in my demise. Conspiracy loon Pam Geller, so thoroughly humiliated when I exposed her fabricated “Rick Perry Sharia curriculum” story, was jumping for joy.

Doug Giles, radio host and father of Hannah Giles (the “ho” in the ACORN “pimp and ho” sting videos) was also doing a soft shoe on my grave. I had become a huge pain in the ass to him, humiliating him for his lunatic conspiracy theories.

The right-wing blogger known as “Warchick” was ecstatic about my demise. She called me a “fagatronic craphole” (“Fagatronic” sounds like a late-’80s electro-dance band), and she said that her only advice to everyone on the right regarding what to do about me could be summed up in two words: “get him.”

I remained sympathetic to the responses from the conservative community until Boris Zelkin decided to up the craziness to a new level. I’ve described jittery, neurotic Boris in this book as an Emmy-winning music composer and Gary Sinise’s arranger. But, just for the record, I should point out that his Emmy is for ESPN sports music. In other words, this is no Rachmaninoff. Small duchy, large douchebag. When these kinds of people get a chance to lord power over others, they usually take it. Zelkin decided to threaten anyone who remained my friend with being blacklisted in conservative circles. Of my remaining friends who are parents, he even threatened to “blacklist” their children.

Yes, he actually sank that low.

Indeed, that was a major motivating factor for several of my former friends—the parents in our group had gotten used to scheduling “play dates” for their kids. Bobo Zelkin’s targeting of the children rattled a couple of people who had otherwise promised to stand by me.

It didn’t surprise me. Boris is a zealot, like Pavelski. There’s no middle ground, no weapon they won’t use. To them, it has to be a vernichtungskrieg—a war of extermination.

Elin Carlson, another Abe and the actual singer on Glee (she’s the one who does the real vocals while the pretty-boy and pretty-girl actors act all singy-like on camera) is another one who floated the “blacklist” threat. The funny thing is, her leftist Glee co-stars would have probably applauded such tactics.

The blacklist threats were showing the true colors of the Abes.

For her part, Beverly “Tudors” Zaslow, rather than threatening a blacklist (you can’t threaten what you can’t do), kept pestering every RPA and Abe who was still connected to me online, offering to help rescue them from “Nazi Dave,” in return for involving her in their next project. She had this email exchange with one of my most well-connected industry friends, whose name I’m leaving out because he’s like family to me, and because we have a friendship that transcends politics.

Zaslow: “You need to know you’re still Facebook friends with David Stein. He’s a Nazi, and you shouldn’t be seen with him. If you didn’t already know about his past, I’ll be happy to tell you!”

[Redacted]: “David is one of my best friends. I don’t believe what people are saying about him. He’s not a Nazi, and we’ve discussed his views, and the uproar, and we’re fine.”

Zaslow: “You’re right. I don’t believe those things either. I need to give David a call and talk to him. I’ve stayed at his place, and he’s always been a great guy to me. Let me know if I can help on your next project!”

To use a Dennis Miller line, to call Beverly Zaslow a scumbucket is an insult to buckets filled with scum.

Yet while there were the zealots (like Zelkin and Pavelski), the frightened (Searcy, the FOA leadership, and probably Larry Elder), the bitter (Eric Gollum), and the unscrupulously rancid (Zaslow, whose opinions were dictated solely by the industry pull of the person to whom she was speaking), there were also the non-industry people in the RPA, those I’d let in because the Abes don’t allow any non-Hollywood folks. To those workaday stiffs, the RPA was as close as they’d ever get to “the business.”

One example was Michael Hausam, an Orange County home insulation guy. I’d brought him into the RPA about a year earlier, and we were good friends. After my outing, he sent me seven supportive texts in a row, such as this one: “You’ve got some serious fans in your corner! I LIKE you and, if welcomed, would like to help.”

And then Rosie told him she’d go target shooting with him and be his buddy—he’d have a real-life fashion model on his arm. And all of a sudden, he starts posting that I’m a “Nazi.”

This is the caliber of people I used to work with. The zealots, the opportunists, and the weak can go fuck themselves. But I have genuine sympathy for the frightened. They did what they had to do.

The writer who profiled me in the Guardian confirmed that Cadet Walshy had refused every attempt to be interviewed for the piece. I think, once he saw that the supposed “controlled burn” had gotten out of hand, Walshy decided to scurry away. But he did begin posting all over Facebook that I was lying about having hosted the event at the Wende Museum (the event that about 150 people saw me host). I’m not sure why Walshy felt the need to do that—perhaps fear was compelling him to distance the museum from me as much as possible. Or maybe he was just taking his own advice, from a July 2009 column he wrote for National Review, in which he stated that beating an opponent isn’t good enough. You have to “eviscerate” him, “put him in the morgue.”

The only way I could defend myself would be to release the emails between me, Walshy, and the museum staff, in which all parties agreed that this event, run by me, represented an official partnership between the Wende and a partisan political organization. Those emails could lose the museum its nonprofit charity status.

To Walshy, outing me was more important than the museum he claims to love. The man who convinced me to come back from my voluntary exit got what he wanted—the most well-attended event in his museum’s history. Time now to “eviscerate” me. He’s a sick man, a stark reminder of how superficial and empty most of my “friendships” during my Republican Party Animals days were. With perhaps a dozen exceptions, I have no problem saying “fuck ‘em all.”

The RPA is finished, and Friends of Abe was a good idea that never quite realized its potential. The fact is, Jeremy’s words in my “letter of banishment” were very accurate: “We are a private community of conservative entertainment professionals who want to get together, have lunch or a beer, maybe hear a speaker or two, and enjoy fellowship with likeminded people.” Essentially, Friends of Abe was the Stonecutters from The Simpsons. Haughty ideals, in theory, but in practice, just a bunch of assholes having beer blasts.

At the end of the episode, the Stonecutters change their name to the “No Homers Club” to keep Homer out. And now Friends of Abe is the “No Davids Club.”

Sinise had envisioned great things for FOA. He wanted an underground networking powerhouse of conservative talent. He wanted it to be about more than just grabbing a beer. But Gary ignored a rather large problem—the talented people in the group (Eastwood, Bruckheimer, Searcy, Mamet, Knauf, and Sinise himself) weren’t interested in doing “political” projects, whereas the untalented (or no-longer-talented) ones (David Zucker, Victoria Jackson, Stephen Kruiser, and all of the “pitchers”) could only churn out unbearable crap.

One night in early 2010, pollster Frank Luntz, in an after-hours session with key FOAs, challenged us to use our “talents” to come up with some issue-oriented TV commercials for the midterms. He gave us his word that he would personally show any decent spots on Fox News. After Luntz left, I walked through the room hearing all the ideas being pitched. Jesus Christ, what abominable garbage! I couldn’t believe the lack of talent.

Rosie’s victory was, if not pyrrhic, at least without benefit to her beyond the pleasure of seeing me twist at the end of a rope. A full year after we stopped talking, her only new credit was a foot fetish website. If she thought ingratiating herself to the Abes would lead to work, it didn’t.

And now, $200,000 later, all she has to show for everything is a foot fetish page. I’d be sad, about my wasted money and her wasted potential, but I’m not. I actually think it’s a nice ending. Out of five rankings bestowed by the freaks who visit that page (ugly feet/bad feet/OK feet/nice feet/beautiful feet), Rosie Tisch merits three stars out of five—“OK feet.” That’s unfair. I’d have given her at least four. But then again, feet aren’t my thing.

One last point: Rosie and Walshy timed my outing specifically to sabotage the event I was organizing for the 227th Aviation Regiment’s fiftieth anniversary. By taking me out when they did, people fled the 227th event in droves, even though I immediately excused myself from the event and turned over the organizing duties to others. The heroes of the 227th who took the time to fly out here were met with a near-empty house. Even Searcy, who narrated the film that was screening that night, fled. The people who’ve put their lives on the line to protect this nation for a half-century had their special night destroyed because Rosie Tisch was petulant about having to eat at Souplatation, and because the writer of Cadet Kelly wanted to curry favor with a surrogate for his dead daughter.

It’s fucked up, any way you look at it.

A few weeks after my outing, I got a call from Paul Alessi, who had been one of the Abe’s best conduits to D.C. bigwigs. In the past, he’d helped me secure locations for events, but he’d never offered me the type of guests he’d offered the Abes. He was unaware of my outing. And he was calling out of frustration.

“That fucking FOA, Jeremy doesn’t want to do shit anymore. They don’t want to do banquets, speeches, anything. I’ve got a couple of high-profile guests I was trying to offer him, and he blew me off. And that’s when I realized that it’s you, Dave, you’re the only one who actually does things anymore. Let’s do an RPA night with my contacts.”

Painfully—and I mean as painfully as passing a stone—I had to tell him that I was no longer in any position to do events, high-profile or otherwise.

“Why, man? What happened?”

“I was outed for stuff I said in my youth. Stuff about history.”

“Fuck that. Who the fuck cares what you said about history when you were a kid?”

“Pretty much everyone, Paul. I’ll send you the links. If you still want to work with me after you read them, call me, and maybe we can put together an event where I’m behind-the-scenes but not publicly involved.”

“Hell yeah. Dude. Whatever it is, I’m still going to want to work with you. FOA is dying. It’s all you now.”

I sent him the link to the Guardian piece. I never heard from him again.

As late as September, I was contacted by the campaign manager for Erika Harold, the former Miss America (2003) running for congress in Illinois. The campaign was coming to me to organize a West Coast fundraiser.

Having to break the news to the campaign manager was painful. Harold is a stunning young woman, a black conservative, Miss America, a Harvard Law School graduate running in Obama’s beloved Illinois…mother FUCK, I could’ve put on one hell of an event with all the material I’d have had to work with.

I suggested to the campaign manager that she take my number out of her phone and never mention my name again.

It would be easy to mistake my grumbling over my friends’ reactions as an attempt to garner sympathy by whining, “oh woe is me.” I can see how that can come across, but it’s not the point I’m trying to make. I’m trying to show the absolute insanity that otherwise sane and intelligent people display at the mere mention of Holocaust revisionism. People who went to bed one night with absolutely no knowledge of how many extermination camps are said to exist became blinded with rage when they woke up the next day to learn that their trusted friend had once stated there were two fewer than traditionally claimed.

In the case of ninety percent of these people, had I told them, before my outing, that there were four organized killing camps for Jews during World War Two, there would have been no anger, no fury, because they’d never bothered to learn the standard story by which to measure the revisionist version. I could have told them there were three extermination camps, or thirteen. They wouldn’t have balked; they trusted my judgment.

But after they were told by the media that I had violated a sacred tenet, no one could hold back the fury.

It’s a religious zealotry similar to when a bunch of imams decided to stoke anger in the Muslim world over drawings of Mohammed. Years before the creators of South Park were banned by Comedy Central from depicting Mohammed amid threats of violence, the show had already done so, in an earlier episode, and no Muslim anger resulted. Because the followers needed to be told to be angry.

I hate to say it, but I have an even greater disdain for the blind followers of “thou shalt not revise Auschwitz” than I do for the “thou shalt not draw Mohammed” zealots, because at least the Islamists believe they are acting in the name of their god and prophet. It’s religious fanaticism in the name of religion.

But to apply such fanaticism to something that is secular and man-made is grotesque. To approach a real-world discipline like history or science with religious zeal and blind, unquestioning obedience is obscene.

And if you think I’m overreaching with my Auschwitz/Mohammed analogy, I’d simply point to the people who say “it doesn’t matter if you’re right about Auschwitz; you still shouldn’t be saying that.” That’s not rational. It’s something the guardians of a faith would say.

Larry Elder is in most aspects a rational man. Yet during our partnership he would tell me of his fondness for Irv Rubin, not realizing that he was speaking to someone who’d been assaulted and threatened by Rubin. Rubin was a man who torched the houses of opponents and burned down the revisionist library of the Institute for Historical Review. Rubin wasn’t a figurative book burner; he did it for real.

Elder, who himself has been the target of “censorship” in the form of advertiser boycotts, was fine with Rubin’s history of using force and intimidation to silence people like me. He told me he had considered Rubin a friend.

The irrationality agitates me, and that agitation is what lies behind much of the anger in this book. If you’ve read this chapter with the assumption that I’m asking for sympathy, you read it wrong. I’m trying to paint a portrait of intelligent people mimicking the zealots they claim to oppose, whipped up by a media they purport to distrust.

It’s the lack of reason that angers me, not the loss of friendship. These folks were good drinking buddies and the constant ego-stroking was pleasing. But I knew neither the people nor the stroking until 2009, and I can be quite happy again without either.

Apologies

It’s easy to apologize to a dead man. I’ve received several apologies since I was figuratively assassinated. Shermer finally apologized for defaming me, the Detroit Jewish News editor finally apologized for saying I was as bad as “Hitler, Hussein, and Arafat,” even Sarah sort of apologized, blaming her “issues” when she lived with me on her “struggle with mental illness.”

Kyle Becker, the associate editor of Independent Journal Review, which by the end of 2013 had grown to become the number two-ranked conservative website in the U.S., emailed me to let me know it wasn’t his choice to scrub my work from the site. He also offered this frank and somewhat surprising admission: “I don’t think you necessarily get a fair shake from people. I read your comments that are supposedly insanely controversial in a more academic light, and I’m not into disrespecting you or what you were investigating. They are legitimate questions and should be taken seriously, not taken out of context and blown up to be something they’re not.”

And finally, young Jeremy at Friends of Abe, who had finally managed to pull off another dinner (courtesy of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who wanted to use the Abes as a testing ground for potential support should he decide to run for president in 2016), apologized in an email for banning me without hearing my side of the story:

You rebuke me for not speaking to you personally and giving you a chance to provide your side of the story, and I accept that rebuke. To be honest, it seems not only disrespectful but cowardly not to have called you personally.

I should have called you. I should have given you an opportunity to add clarity or even just your own point-of-view. I did not. I sincerely apologize for that. I’m sure it’s cold comfort now, but whatever comes of all of this, I am truly sorry that I did not call.

So that you know, I all but begged people not to write or speak publicly about you either. I’m sorry that someone did.

Yes, it’s easy to apologize to a dead guy. Because the dead are always the losers, and the living can afford to be gracious in victory. So fuck apologies, and fuck the cowards who waited until I was beaten and powerless before apologizing. As far as I’m concerned, if I’m figuratively dead, which I am, let this book be my middle finger from beyond the grave.

EPILOGUE

My favorite part of The Big Lebowski is the closing scene, in which Sam Elliott’s character, the grizzled old cowboy who’s been narrating the film, practically dares the audience to accept the fact that there was no point to the film they just spent two hours watching. There’d be no resolution, no climax. It was the getting there that was the fun.

The Coens did a slight retread of that theme in Burn After Reading over a decade later. At the end of Burn, the CIA chief and his subordinate spend the last scene of the film pondering the meaning of everything we’ve just spent two hours watching.

CIA Superior: “Jesus, what a clusterfuck…Jesus fucking Christ.”

CIA Officer: “Yeah.”

CIA Superior: “What did we learn, Palmer?”

CIA Officer: “I don’t know, sir.”

CIA Superior: “I don’t fuckin’ know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.”

CIA Officer: “Yes, sir.”

CIA Superior: “I’m fucked if I know what we did.”

CIA Officer: “Yes, sir, it’s, uh, hard to say.”

CIA Superior: “Jesus fucking Christ.”

They’ve learned nothing, we’ve learned nothing. There was no point, no grand lesson, no meaningful climax. The arrogant, self-important analyst (played by John Malkovich) who quit the agency to write his “mem-wahz” is ruined and comatose, and the woman (played by Frances McDormand) whose greed and vanity put the entire plot in motion is getting everything she wanted.

And the two CIA guys, as surrogates for the audience, are left to wonder what the hell the point of it all was.

You might think I’m trying to relate this to the experience of reaching the end of my book. And you’d be correct. But I’m not a Coen Brother, and if you’ve come this far, if you’ve actually read this far, you deserve some type of resolution.

I’m just not sure what type of resolution I can give you. I’m still a revisionist, I’m still a conservative, and I still like redheads. I can honestly say that I’ve learned nothing new.

My time in politics was fun, but ephemeral. And, in the long run, insignificant. Political events, viral videos, and “blockbuster” blog pieces vanish from memory the moment new ones come around. That’s just the nature of the game. What was a big deal a week ago now has all the resonance of what you had for lunch last Tuesday.

My history work is another matter. I certainly did make an impact there. I’ve been shocked by the overwhelming number of positive emails I’ve received from people who claim that my work changed their lives, and I’m astounded by how much of my work is still in use. My old revisionist colleagues are inundated with requests for me to appear at events, and I’m deluged with new Facebook friend requests from people who say they’ve waited years to have the chance to meet me.

Still, that’s not exactly great news for ol’ Dave. I’m being pursued by a fan base I consciously walked away from eighteen years ago. As if transported back to 1995 by time machine, I’m once again dealing with “fans” who don’t get that my historical work has nothing to do with my politics. I’m still as staunchly pro-Zionist as I ever was. My friends of the past five years won’t talk to me because they think I’m trying to destabilize Israel, and many of my new friends want to talk to me because they think I’m trying to destabilize Israel.

The people who think that revising the history of the Holocaust will somehow topple Israel are idiots. Israel’s existence is not based on whether or not there were gas chambers at Auschwitz in 1944. If, tomorrow, Yad Vashem declared that Auschwitz had no killing program, it would not make one damn bit of difference. Israel would be fine, because Israel’s Muslim foes don’t give a good fuck about historical subtleties. No one in the Muslim world is studying forensic reports, thinking “if I can’t find traces of cyanide residue in the Auschwitz kremas, I’ll hate Israel and try to destroy her. But if I can find the traces, by gosh I’ll love and support her.”

Israel came into existence because the entire Jewish community of Europe was issued an eviction notice. Period. One million deaths? Three million? Six million? That isn’t the point. The point is, the Jews were evicted, and they decided it would be rather valuable to have a place of their own. A reasonable reaction.

Those looking to destabilize Israel by questioning what happened in four rooms in occupied Poland in the summer of 1944 are on the wrong track. But that makes the other side wrong-headed, too. Those who attack, imprison, smear, ostracize, and defame anyone who makes reasoned inquiries into the actual goings-on at the Auschwitz camp in the ’40s are just as bad. They think that by attacking the natural process of historical revision, they are somehow “saving” Israel and the Jews. They hold the ridiculous belief that the entire fate of the Jewish people, and the state of Israel, is predicated on keeping revisionists down—down by law, down by public pressure, down by attacks and smears, down by violence, and down by public ostracism. All of Israel is hanging in the balance, and only waging a vernichtungskrieg against revisionists can save a nation that has done rather well kicking the asses of people way more dangerous than historians who study gas chambers.

Pro-revisionists fool themselves into thinking their work will topple a nation, and anti-revisionists fool themselves into thinking that their work will save a nation.

Both sides are wrong. The Jews have survived way worse than a cyanide residue analysis on a crumbling wall in Poland, and Israel has survived greater existential threats than David Cole walking around with a video camera in a Krakow swamp. And hallelujah for that.

I was merely trying to solve a historical mystery that fascinated me. And I thought it beneficial if the work was done by a non-ideological researcher with no ulterior motives. Say what you will, but it goes no deeper than that. That’s not to say I didn’t appreciate having certain experiences at such a young age—traveling throughout Europe and Asia, being on national TV, going on lecturing tours. But that’s cart/horse-horse/cart stuff. Before it ever occurred to me that I’d be on TV, I was already knee-deep in the research. The “perks” (and the punishments) followed the research, not the other way around.

And here I am, like the CIA guy at the end of Burn After Reading, wondering “what was the point?” Where the fuck do I go now? I’m banned from the politically conservative and pro-Zionist circles I had embraced (and by whom I had been embraced). But I’m not about to embrace a new (old) fan base and become something I’m not—a “political” revisionist in pursuit of a goal beyond following a simple curiosity that has pretty much been sated.

Worse still, I’ve come to realize that my old work, and the news of my outing, is being hailed by the new breed of conspiracy morons, the mouth-breathers who claim that the Newtown shooting was a hoax, that Congresswoman Gabby Giffords faked her own shooting in order to “grab our guns,” that schizophrenia isn’t a disease but rather the result of Obama implanting microchips in our heads, and that the government uses “crisis actors” to simulate everything from 9/11 to the Aurora movie theater shooting. These are the buffoons I set out to study like lab rats back in the 1980s. That any of them would imagine a kinship with me or my work sickens me. Historical revisionism is a natural and expected process. Cleaning up flaws in the historical record after a major event like a world war is not the same as claiming that all 27,000 residents of Newtown decided to fake a mass shooting. I’d rather gouge out my testicles than accept the accolades of the lunatic fringe.

The funniest aspect of the contemporary conspiracy fringe’s embrace of my work is that, back in the days, the ideological ancestors of these nuts were saying the same thing about me that the new generation says about the grieving Newtown parents or the witnesses to the Boston Marathon bombing. I was called a “plant” and a “psy-op soldier” and a “Mossad or CIA agent” long before Facebook gave every feeble-minded Alex Jones fan a forum through which to spew their ideological jizz. I detest these guys. Some days, I hate my fan mail as much as I hate the death threats.

The simple truth is, I’d prefer not to be hated or embraced, because I’m not terribly happy with the reasons that someone would do either.

In the ’90s, when I was “taken out” by the JDL’s $25,000 bounty offer, they flattered me. I was not worth the money or the effort. My most recent “death” was more appropriate—taken out, for the most trivial of reasons, by a woman whose physical appearance does not reflect the smallness of her character. A literally small man taken out by a figuratively small woman for literally small reasons.

There’s symmetry there. It’s an appropriate way for me to exit. It’s an ending that makes sense. And considering how many things in life make no sense at all, that’s good enough closure for me.

APPENDIX A

I’m used to being put in double-binds—those situations where no matter which choice you make, you’re criticized. When I was working in revisionism, I was in a double-bind regarding my Jewishness. If I didn’t mention it, I’d be accused of hiding it. If I did mention it, I’d be accused of exploiting it.

My general rule of thumb, in such a situation, is to err on the side of honesty.

Regarding this book, I know I’ll be in a similar double-bind. If I mention my beliefs regarding Holocaust history, I’ll be attacked for using this book to spread “revisionism.” If I don’t mention my beliefs, I’ll be attacked for being too cowardly to present my opinions on the very subject that made me well-known in the first place. So I’m gonna talk about ’em. I’d rather be hated for an opinion than derided as a coward.

Before I can properly explain my views, I need to address the state of the Holocaust history field as it was in the late 1980s. There was a popular myth that the Holocaust was “the most well-documented event in the history of mankind.” That just isn’t true. The myth of “total documentation” was accepted because people confused “well-documented” with “well-known.”

The Zündel trials had exposed the myth of “total documentation” to the entire world. And the world—or the percentage of it that pays attention to Holocaust history—was wondering, “what will the ‘experts’ do to fix the evidentiary gaps?”

Enter Jean-Claude Pressac.

In 1989, the Klarsfeld Foundation (the Nazi-hunting organization responsible for bringing Klaus Barbie to justice) decided to shell out the bucks for a first-of-its-kind, “definitive” response to revisionist claims about Auschwitz. The book would be written by French chemist and former Holocaust revisionist Jean-Claude Pressac. As the New York Times reported:

A 563-page study of the Nazi gas chambers [Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers] has been published in a limited edition in the United States by Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, the French Holocaust researchers and Nazi hunters. They say the volume provides a new kind of definitive scholarly documentation of the murder of millions of Jews and others during World War II.…“Pressac is the first to try to assemble all the written information, the technical plans and specifications and to base his proof on that, so it’s complementary to the other proof,” said Mr. Klarsfeld. (“A New Book Is Said to Refute Revisionist View of Holocaust,” The New York Times, December 18, 1989)

I would meet Pressac in Paris in 1994, and his views are discussed later in this section. For now, it’s important to see how he summed up the field of Holocaust history in 1989. Pressac referred to “traditional” Holocaust history as “a history based for the most part on testimonies, assembled according to the mood of the moment, truncated to fit an arbitrary truth and sprinkled with a few German documents of uneven value and without any connection with one another.” (Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, page 264)

This was not an uncommon assessment at the time. The following quotes are not from revisionists.

Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable. There is no denying the many contradictions, ambiguities, and errors in existing sources. No written orders for gassing have turned up thus far…many questions remain open. All in all, how many bodies were cremated in Auschwitz? How many died there all told? What was the national, religious, and ethnic breakdown in this commonwealth of victims? How many of them were condemned to die a ‘natural’ death and how many were deliberately slaughtered? And what was the proportion of Jews among those murdered in cold blood among the gassed? We have simply no answers to these questions at this time. From 1942 to 1945, certainly at Auschwitz, but probably overall, more Jews were killed by so-called ‘natural causes’ than by ‘unnatural’ ones. (Arno Mayer, Holocaust refuge, Professor Emeritus of European History, Princeton University, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? Pantheon Books, 1988)

According to the historian Raul Hilberg, the United States alone captured 40,000 linear feet of documents on the murder of European Jews. Add to this other captured documents, police and court records, memoirs, oral histories, film documentaries, interviews, two thousand books in many languages (there are over ten thousand publications of varying size on Auschwitz alone), and we can say that the Holocaust is a uniquely well-documented historical event. Yet a host of unanswered questions remain, and we have not even agreed on a name for the terrible thing that happened. The term ‘The Final Solution’ has passed into common usage, but, fortunately, this obscene Nazi euphemism does not correspond to fact because nearly half of the European Jews survived. (New York Review of Books, September 28, 1989)

History is always liable to revision and there are indeed some unresolved problems of the ‘Final Solution’…There are some genuine uncertainties about the exact structure and working of the gas chambers and the number of their victims. However, these reasons for questioning the evidence where it is weak are not reasons for rejecting it where it is firm: they are reasons for looking it in the face. (Lord Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Good Old Days, The Free Press, 1991)

A very disturbing thing has happened to journalism, to the writing of history, and even to justice. In anything to do with the Nazis…any attempt at detachment is considered suspect, any degree of objectivity reprehensible. (Gitta Sereny, London Review of Books, April 2l, 1988)

There were never four million victims in Auschwitz.…By definition, a myth is an untruthful interpretation of reality. The fact that Israeli politicians and the media accept the four million figure with all its disastrous ramifications can perhaps be explained by the conscious or unconscious effort made in this country to create a Holocaust myth that is totally different from the reality it supposedly relates to. If two-and-a-half million Jews were gassed at Auschwitz, that is “better” for propaganda than the truth, as though the truth were not horrible enough. (Professor Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry, “Fighting the Distortions,” The Jerusalem Post, September 22, 1989)

The two most impressive testimonies came from [French filmmaker] Claude Lanzmann [Shoah] and Simone Veil. Among the many moving things Mme. Veil, an Auschwitz survivor, recalled was the fact that even as minister, with access to all sorts of archives, she was unable to discover when and where her father and brother were deported. There are no official records. This is what Lanzmann meant when he chided the historians for assuming that the facts are known. The facts have disappeared. Absence is at the heart of the problem. Who, he asked, could write a meaningful history of Treblinka? (Patterns of Prejudice, volume 22, issue 1, 1988, published by the Institute of Jewish Affairs in association with the World Jewish Congress)

The archives of the Third Reich and the depositions and accounts of its leaders make possible a reconstruction, down to the last detail, of the origin and development of the plans for aggression, the military campaigns, and the whole array of procedures by which the Nazis intended to reshape the world to their liking. Only the campaign to exterminate the Jews, as regards its conception as well as many other essential aspects, remains shrouded in darkness. (Leon Poliakov, professor of history at the Sorbonne, Harvest of Hate, l979)

Why can such diversity of interpretation over the nature and timing of the decision for the Final Solution flourish? I would suggest two reasons. The first is one of definition. What is meant by a decision for the Final Solution? …A second reason for such diversity of interpretation is the lack of documentation. There are no written records of what took place among Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich concerning the Final Solution, and none of them survived to testify after the war. Therefore, the decision-making process at the center must be reconstructed by the historian, who extrapolates from events, documents, and testimony originating outside the inner circle. Like the man in Plato’s cave, he sees only the reflection and shadows, but not reality. This hazardous process of extrapolation and reconstruction inevitably invites a wide variety of conclusions. (Professor Christopher Browning, Fateful Months, Holmes & Meier, 1985)

Ernst Zündel’s lawyer: “It appears, then, that even today some of the relevant documents to give us a clear understanding of this massive situation are still missing. Would you agree?”

Raul Hilberg: “Oh yes.”

Lawyer: “And some of them might very clearly contradict some of our firmly fixed views.”

Hilberg: “I can never exclude the possibility of contradiction. After all, there are people who maintain [at the recent historians conference] at Stuttgart that Hitler did not give any orders [for the extermination of the Jews].”

Lawyer: “Yes, so in fact people questioning these types of situations can be of use to you and to others in stimulating further research.”

Hilberg: “Obviously. And if I could live another fifty years, I think I might invest another thirty-six of them in further research.”

Lawyer: “Because this is a very important question, isn’t it?”

Hilberg: “No doubt it is.” (Excerpt from the cross-examination of Raul Hilberg at the 1985 trial of Ernst Zündel)

Many writers on the Holocaust have failed to apply to Holocaust documents the required rigor of critical scholarship. German documents have all too often been accepted at face value, partly because their thoroughness and precision have been mistaken for truthfulness. Jewish documents, on the other hand, have been received in an attitude of reverence for the dead and respect for the survivors, with the result that critical judgment and analysis have been suspended lest they desecrate the memory of the Holocaust and its victims. But history demands a more astringent approach. There are, as a matter of fact, Holocaust documents that conceal rather than reveal, that are written in language intended to serve ulterior motives or a hidden agenda. There are also Holocaust documents that are outright falsifications and some that purvey myth rather than historical fact. Eyewitnesses to the same event do not give precisely the same account; neither do documents dealing with the same episode describe it the same way. …The survivor’s memory is often distorted by hate, sentimentality, and the passage of time. …Survivor accounts of critical events are typical of all testimony, that is, they are full of discrepancies. About matters both trivial and significant, the evidence is nearly always in dispute. In part the unreliability of these accounts derives from imperfect observation and flawed memory, but in larger part from the circumstance that they are not constructed exclusively on the basis of firsthand experience. In order to present a coherent narrative, the author has likely included a large measure of hearsay, gossip, rumor, assumption, speculation, and hypothesis.

…Contemporaneous records, too, though free from the distortion of forgetfulness, share the defect of survivor accounts—subjectivity, restricted experience, and feebleness of expression. …

Political bias in both contemporaneous and survivor documents is at once blatant and insidious. Without exception, every official or personal document written during the German occupation or after the war by an active member of a Jewish party or movement is flawed by partisanship. (Lucy Dawidowicz, Yeshiva University, A Holocaust Reader, Behrman House, l976)

Now to the numerical questions: how many victims [of the Holocaust]? One need only look at the voluminous literature about Soviet resistance, French resistance and German resistance, or the unsupported statistics of military and civilian losses in Russia, Poland and elsewhere, to see that such questions are enveloped in symbols with which nations laboriously construct their historical memories. Figures can become political footballs. Three million Poles died, the Russians lost 20 million soldiers and civilians. Everybody was a partisan. All these figures are taken from thin air.

Yet almost everybody has a figure for the total of Jewish dead. The well-established number of six million, however, was adopted very early. It was based mainly on the hearsay evidence of a Sturmbannfuehrer Hoettl, whose affidavit recording a conversation with Eichmann was made at Nuremberg in November 1945. More generally it is also based on the crude calculations of the Institute of Jewish Affairs and the World Jewish Congress, also going back to 1945 and 1946. Even so, the number of six million has been repeated in speeches, articles, and popular books for 40 years.…

The rounded toll of European Jewry is between five and six million. That there is still no accepted answer is largely due to the failure of historians to enlist the help of demographers. The greatest difficulty in computations is the number of Soviet Jewish dead.…Obviously, nothing pertaining to Soviet statistics is self-evident. Compounding the difficulty for the historian who would like to know how many Jews were alive in Russia in 1945 is the absence of a Soviet census between 1939 and 1959. Nevertheless, an attempt could be made to derive a 1945 figure from the Soviet Jewish population trend disclosed in the census data of 1959, 1970 and 1979.

The omission of such calculations raises the suspicion that even historians do not wish to risk a finding of an overall total that would fall below the 5,500,000 threshold. “Maybe we have to rethink the figure of six million,” notes Raul Hilberg. (“Recording the Holocaust,” Jerusalem Post Magazine, June 12, 1986)

For the discovery of the Holocaust, the Nuremberg Trials were both a boon and a bane. No mere historical research could have mustered the costly five year effort in staff and resources that were commanded by the proclaimed Allied policy of punishing war criminals. Documents were thus quickly uncovered that we might otherwise still be hunting 35 years later. But documents were also often irretrievably torn from their context, carelessly excerpted, poorly translated, duplicated under various unrelated designations, and incorrectly assembled in artificial folders in a manner that muddles their meaning and taints their authenticity. (Robert Wolfe, chief of the Modern Military Branch, U.S. National Archives, in “Discovering the Final Solution,” Brewster Chamberlin et al., ed., The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps, United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 1987, p. 183)

Much of personal testimony is unreliable about names, locations or dates…Many accounts of survivors, including court testimony and oral history, present similar problems. By and large, these recollections are a poor source for the identification of persecutors, or even of people who helped.

What survivors speak about most is their suffering. Samuel Gringauz, himself a survivor, had harsh words for these personal histories. In the January 1950 issue of Jewish Social Studies, he called them “Judeocentric, logocentric and egocentric.” For him, most of the memoirs were “full of preposterous verbosity, exaggeration, dramatic effects, dilettante philosophizing, would-be lyricism, unchecked rumors, bias and apologies.”

Of the many thousands of survivors’ statements in oral history collections, comparatively few have been used by historians.…Jan Karski, a messenger of the Polish government in exile, states in his memoires, Story of a Secret State (Boston, 1944), that he entered the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, that he visited Belzec disguised in an Estonian uniform, that Estonians as well as Ukrainians guarded the camp, that the inmates he saw were Warsaw Ghetto Jews, and that he witnessed the departure of a train filled with almost all of the camp prisoners.

The description of the Warsaw Ghetto is convincing enough, but there were no Estonian guards at Belzec. Warsaw Jews were not sent to the camp, and no train filled with people left from there. “I would not put him in a footnote in my book,” said Raul Hilberg. (“Recording the Holocaust,” Jerusalem Post Magazine, June 12, 1986)

The most valuable source of information is the testimony of the prisoners who were there, who have done their best to bear witness to what they experienced. This testimony is fallible, however, partly because most of the survivors saw only a small part of this huge institution [Auschwitz]; partly because they had no way of recording events as they happened, under conditions of great hardship; partly because memory itself is fallible, and half-stilted recollections are still emerging fifty years after the war; partly because many of these memoirs have been worked on by interviewers, ghost writers, and editors, whose contributions to the process are now inextricably intertwined with the raw material of raw memory. One ends by making very subjective judgments about the spirit and reliability of each witness. (Otto Friedrich, The Kingdom of Auschwitz, HarperCollins, 1982)

That’s a small sampling of how many non-revisionist experts viewed the state of Holocaust history by the time I entered the field.

The question I’ve been asked the most since being outed is, “Are you still a “Holocaust revisionist?” Thanks to my outing, my old material is being seen by a new generation of viewers. Old videos of mine that random people had uploaded to YouTube now have millions of hits. I can’t undo the outing, as much as I wish I could, so I might as well try to explain my views as best I can. I’ll try to explain what the standard story is, and my “deviations.”

The Standard Story: Until summer 1941, Hitler’s policy toward the German and Austrian Jews was to do whatever he could to drive them from Europe. It was a policy of forced emigration.

My Take: Correct.

The Standard Story: Before 1941, there was no official policy regarding what to do with Eastern European Jews, some of whom were already under Nazi control, others of whom would not find themselves in that position until after the invasion of Russia.

My Take: Correct. In November 1940, Himmler prepared a secret document for Hitler regarding the Nazi plan for dealing with the “alien races” in the East. Here are the relevant passages (emphasis mine): “I hope that the concept of Jews will be completely extinguished through the possibility of a large emigration of all Jews to Africa or some other colony. Within a somewhat longer period, it should also be possible to make the ethnic concepts of Ukrainians, Gorals and Lemcos disappear in our area. What has been said for those fragments of peoples is also meant on a correspondingly larger scale for the Poles.…Cruel and tragic as every individual case may be, this method is still the mildest and best one if, out of inner conviction, one rejects as un-German and impossible the Bolshevist method of physical extermination of a people.” (Yitzhak Arad, Israel Gutman, Abraham Margaliot, eds., Lea Ben Dor, trans., Documents on the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, 1981)

Hitler received the report and deemed it “good and correct.” So we know that at the end of 1940, emigration was still the plan for the Jews, and a slow, eventual dissolution was the plan for other “alien” ethnic groups. At this time, “physical destruction” was rejected as “un-German” and “Bolshevist.”

The Standard Story: Following the invasion of Russia, the first stage of organized physical destruction of Jews by the Nazis began. It was initially ordered that adult male Russian Jews be shot. Similar orders were given to the SS death squads (“Einsatzgruppen”) that went into the Baltic states.

My Take: Correct. During the “Russian front” phase, the killing of Jews, in an organized fashion, was seen as a military tactic. It was also ordered that all communist “functionaries” and “radical elements,” Jewish or not, be killed as well. The Nazis were killing Jews as part of a general program of liquidating all “unfriendly” elements on the Eastern Front.

Himmler seems to have given little thought regarding what to do with the women and children, because when one of his Einsatzgruppe commandoes inquired about it, Himmler’s response was, “drive the female Jews into the swamp.” This was not a euphemism—the SS actually tried to drive the women into a swamp (the Pripet Marshes in Belarus), and the idea was quickly abandoned. So there really wasn’t much of a “plan” beyond killing the adult male Russian Jews (at that point).

The Standard Story: In fall 1941, Jewish emigration from German territory was forbidden. Since 1932, it had been encouraged. But now, the Jews were trapped.

My Take: Correct.

The Standard Story: Even though there was no “plan” in fall 1941, there were already murders of Jews separate from the Eastern Front killings.

My Take: Correct. There were willy-nilly killings of Jews outside of the Russian campaign. In November, for example, a transport of Jews from Berlin was sent to Riga, and even though a direct order came from Hitler that those Jews should not be “liquidated,” they were anyway. According to Raul Hilberg, this was not part of any “plan,” but rather, the Nazis were clearing out Jews and sending them places with no thought given as to how the Nazis who received them were to house or provide for them. This is a horrible sentence to write, but some Jews were killed because it was “convenient” for the Nazis who’d been saddled with them.

The lack of a “plan” was not sitting well with the Nazis who oversaw the 3,500,000 or so Jews in occupied Poland. In September 1941, SS-Sturmbann-führer Rolf-Heinz Höppner, head of the Security Service in Poznan (occupied Poland), complained in a memorandum that plans to deport Jews to his territory were “patchwork,” and that there had been no “basic decisions” made, and no “total clarity” about what Hitler wanted done with the Jews.

The Standard Story: In January 1942, a top-secret meeting was convened in Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, for the purpose of drafting a plan for the “Final Solution.” It was decided that Europe’s Jews would be killed.

My Take: The standard story is incorrect. The Wannsee Conference’s top-secret “protocols” mention nothing of murder. The protocols are actually quite vague. They include a rundown of the number of Jews in Europe (approximately 11,000,000 according to the Nazis’ figures), and a discussion of what to do with “special classes” of Jews (Jews in mixed marriages, Jews in mixed marriages with children, and Jews over 65, all of whom would be to one degree or another exempted from the “final solution”).

But what was the “solution?” Well, the protocols are, as I said, vague. At one point, they state, “Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes.”

So, able-bodied Jews basically being worked to death. Nothing is said about the non-able bodied.

Of the able-bodied Jews: “The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, bei freilassung, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history).”

You’ll note that I kept two words in the original German. That’s because shifty translations are one way that bad historians fuck with you. Dishonest historians have, for decades, mistranslated “bei freilassung” as “if released.” In that context, the passage in the protocols could be summed up as “watch out for the surviving remnant if they are ever released.”

But actually, “bei freilassung” is best translated as “at release” or “when released” or “upon release.”

The Wannsee protocols clearly state that, at some point, the Jews will be released.

The protocols end with the representative from occupied Poland asking that immediate attention be given to the “problem” of the Jews in his sector.

The vagueness of the Wannsee protocols is neither proof of a genocide plan, nor proof of no plan. It just means that in January 1942 there was a lot still undecided.

By the way, this take on the Wannsee protocols is not mine alone. Professor Yehuda Bauer, arguably the second most important figure in Holocaust historiography after Raul Hilberg, agrees. From a January 23, 1992, JTA piece entitled “Nazi Scheme Not Born at Wannsee, Israeli Holocaust Scholar Claims:”

An Israeli Holocaust scholar has debunked the Wannsee Conference, at which top Nazi officials are said to have gathered at a villa in a Berlin suburb in 1942 to draw the blueprints of the “Final Solution.” According to Professor Yehuda Bauer of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Wannsee was a meeting “but hardly a conference,” and “little of what was said there was executed in detail…“The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story that at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at.”

The Standard Story: After Wannsee, there was a “master plan” for the murder of all European Jews.

My Take: Incorrect. Historians have been searching for a “plan” for seventy years. Respected historians like Hilberg have admitted they have no written proof of a plan. Revisionists have used the lack of written proof to claim that there was no plan.

The truth is, there were many “plans,” many trial balloons floated, many things attempted and abandoned based on the countries in question and the situation on the ground that particular year.

You know the only way to think about it? The only “plan” was that if a German goal required the death of Jews, those Jews would die. There’s your plan. But German goals were constantly shifting.

Some elements of the German war machine wanted Jews preserved for labor, others wanted ethnic cleansing, to hell with the consequences. All throughout the war, we see the people “in the know” not knowing anything. We see an Einsatzgruppe leader stating, “sure, we’re killing the Russian Jews, but we can’t kill the Polish Jews.” We see Wilhelm Kube, the Generalkommissar for Weissruthenien (Belarus) stating, “sure, we’re killing the Polish Jews, but we won’t kill the German and Austrian ones.” We have Goebbels writing in his private diary on March 7, 1942, that the Jews will be concentrated in the East, and then after the war they’ll be shipped out of Europe and never allowed to return. Then, on March 27, 1942, he writes of a plan in which, as the ghettos of occupied Poland are emptied, they will be refilled with Jews from the West, and the process of emptying and restocking will be repeated again and again until about “60 per cent” of Europe’s Jews have been “liquidated.”

But that never happened; the emptied Polish ghettoes were never refilled.

And then, on May 30, 1942, he reports that it’s Hitler’s plan to resettle the Jews in Central Africa, anywhere as long as Europe would no longer be their “homeland.”

On December 12, 1942, Goebbels hints that some bad shit’s been going down in Poland regarding the Jews: “The atrocity propaganda concerning Poland and the Jewish Question is taking on abnormal forms on the other side. We will not, I fear, be finished with this thing in the long run by remaining silent. We already have to answer to some things, if we do not want to run the risk of becoming gradually discovered.”

On May 8, 1943, Goebbels writes that the Jews must be “thrown out” (“aus heraus”—thrown out, sent out) of Europe.

October 7, 1943, Goebbels reports that Himmler stated that the “Jewish question” can be “solved” by the end of the year (the end of 1943).

Beginning in February 1944, Goebbels begins to speak of the “Jewish question” in the past tense, stating that it’s something that the Jews in Germany have “behind them.” And the Nazis, says Goebbels, have “put it behind us” (February 25).

There never was a plan. There was never a decision about what to do with European Jewry as a whole. The Holocaust was a patchwork. Some things were “planned” but never carried out. Some things happened that weren’t planned. The “Final Solution” as murder was applied in certain places, to certain groups of Jews, while, at the same time, there was an understanding that a “final” Final Solution for all European Jews had not been decided on.

I always compared the futile attempt to see a “master plan” to the old tale of blind men describing an elephant. Each man thinks the totality of the elephant is the part he’s touching. “An elephant is sharp and pointy,” says the blind man touching the tusk. “An elephant is round and flat,” says the one touching the ear. “An elephant is thick and stocky,” says the one touching the leg. “An elephant is thin and snake-like,” says the one touching the tail.

The elephant is all of those things. The Holocaust was the totality of its various parts.

The Standard Story: Following the Wannsee Conference, and the decision to focus on Poland, extermination camps with gas chambers were set up in Poland: Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno (which had come into operation slightly earlier). These camps would mainly serve to eliminate massive segments of Polish Jewry.

My Take: Correct. From 1942 through 1943, Polish Jewry was subjected to one of the most brutal campaigns of mass murder in human history. Because of the secrecy surrounding those four extermination camps, and the fact that they were ploughed under and erased from existence in 1943, it’s difficult to be precise about certain details. And we do know that some Jews were sent to those camps as a throughway to other destinations (as recounted multiple times in Gerald Reitlinger’s 1953 masterwork The Final Solution). But, more than enough circumstantial evidence exists to show that for most Jews, the train ride to those camps was one-way, and final.

What fascinated me was how Hitler and Himmler went from their 1940 pledge to not kill Jews to the death camps that were created in Poland in 1942. What changed? The first thing that changed was that the plan to permanently expel the Jews into the “Asian” part of Russia was thwarted when the German front stalled that winter. But that was a practical setback. More important, I believe, was a theoretical concept expressed by Sturmbannführer Höppner several months earlier. In a memo to Adolf Eichmann, Höppner floated this idea:

“A danger persists this winter that not all of the Jews (of the Warthegau district in Poland) can be fed. It should be seriously considered if the most humane solution is not to finish off those Jews incapable of work by some quick working means. In any case, this would be more pleasant than letting them starve to death.”

Never underestimate the power of an idea. Here’s where I believe we find the reason for the change in attitude from “we can’t kill them—that would be Bolshevist” to “it’s okay to kill them.” Höppner provided a perfect rationalization. When the “Bolshevists” liquidated entire peoples, they did so in the cruelest possible way—sending them to Siberia to slowly freeze and starve to death. Höppner’s take was, if you don’t want to be Bolshevist, don’t let those poor wretches freeze and starve. Rather, do the “humane” thing—euthanize them quickly and “pleasantly.”

See what he did there? He took Hitler and Himmler’s desire to do the opposite of what the Bolshevists do, and he turned it around, allowing them to now define “not being Bolshevist” in a way that would be most practical for his needs.

A new rationalization was born. Now, the “anti-Bolshevist” thing to do was “humane” euthanasia. And that pretty much sealed the fate of the Polish Jews.

The Standard Story: The gas chambers were technological marvels. The Nazis had created automated, assembly-line mass murder. High-tech crematorium ovens were used to quickly and effectively burn the bodies.

My Take. Pure bullshit. There were no “automated” gas chambers. They were simple creations—rooms with the exhaust of a car or truck piped in. There were never any gas chambers that required levers or machinery. The gas chambers were simply rooms with no windows, a locked door, and car exhaust piped in. Big outdoor pits, not crematoriums, were used for burning bodies. If cavemen had cars and an accelerant, this is how they’d commit genocide.

The Standard Story: At the same time that the four extermination camps were operating in occupied Poland in 1942, Jews were also being gassed at Auschwitz, which was a combination labor and extermination camp. As Auschwitz had not been built to be an extermination camp, makeshift gas chambers were used in ’42—first, a semi-underground building at the Main Camp, and then a small building (called “the farmhouse” or “the cottage” or “the bunker”) outside the perimeter of Birkenau.

My Take: Yes and no. Everyone agrees that the primary focus of Auschwitz was labor, but, did killings take place there in 1942 (at the same time as the mass killings in the extermination camps in Eastern Poland)? There’s certainly evidence for that, the most damning being the factually unassailable diary of camp doctor Johann Kremer in summer/fall 1942 (he describes brutal “special actions” against inmates and new arrivals). However, there is no evidence that any killings took place in the semi-underground building in the Main Camp (that’s the building that, until my work was publicized, was routinely shown off to tourists as the “gas chamber”).

The question, though, is, were the 1942 killings at Auschwitz authorized? For that, it’s important to understand the bizarro world of the Nazis. If you ran an extermination camp, your job was to kill Jews. If you ran a labor camp, your job was to preserve the labor force at all costs. For the Nazis, it was all about following orders. If you’re ordered to kill Jews, you do it. If you’re ordered to keep them healthy, you do it.

In 1942, Auschwitz-Birkenau was a mess. There was a massively high death rate from disease. During the summer, typhus and similar diseases ravaged the inmate population. When Himmler learned of the high death rate at the labor camps, this secret directive was sent out by the central WVHA office in Berlin-Oranienburg, which was responsible for the SS concentration camp system. It was sent to every concentration camp, including Auschwitz and Majdanek (December 28, 1942):

In the enclosed a compilation of the current arrivals and departures in all the concentration camps is sent to you for your information. It discloses that out of 136,000 arrivals about 70,000 died. With such a high rate of death the number of the prisoners can never be brought up to the figure as has been ordered by the Reichsfuehrer of the SS [Himmler]. The 1. camp doctors must use all means at their disposal to reduce essentially this death rate in the various camps. The best doctor in a concentration camp is not the one, who believes that he must stand out for uncalled severity, but the one who by his supervision and exchange keeps the working capacity at the various labor commands at the highest possible level. The camp doctors must supervise more often than in the past the food of the prisoners and, with the approval of the administration, submit improvement proposals to the camp commandants. These, however, must not only appear on paper, but must be controlled regularly by the camp doctors. Furthermore, the camp doctors are to see to it that the working conditions at the various labor places are improved as much as possible.…The SS Reichsfuehrer has ordered that the death rate absolutely must be reduced. (Available online as “Copy of a letter from the SS Main Office of Economic Administration to all concentration camps,” Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression Volume IV, The Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/2171-ps.asp)

By February 1943, Auschwitz camp physician Dr. Wirths informed the SS: “As already reported, after the typhus epidemic in the Auschwitz camp had practically been suppressed in November and December, there followed a new rise in typhus cases among the Auschwitz inmates as well as among troops, brought by the newly arriving transports from the East. In spite of the counter-measures that were immediately taken, a complete suppression of typhus cases has still not been achieved.”

It’s an open question whether Auschwitz’s corrupt commandant, Rudolf Hoess, began killing new arrivals (especially sickly ones) to reduce overcrowding and lessen the chances of epidemics. The SS certainly suspected Hoess of “extralegal” killings. The SS began investigating Hoess and camp Gestapo chief Maximilian Grabner for “unauthorized” killings and plundering of inmates’ possessions.

In ’43, Auschwitz Gestapo chief Grabner was arrested by the SS. SS judge Konrad Morgen claimed that the killings at Auschwitz were done by the officers at the camp to “make it easy on themselves.” But he points out that the murders were by bullets, not gas: “The officers in the KZ [Auschwitz] made it easy for themselves. When new inmates arrived and he had no room, they took out the last batch, put them up against the wall and shot them, and made room for the new batch.” (Interview with Konrad Morgen, Roosevelt Library, John Toland papers, box 53)

As Heinz Hoehne wrote in his seminal study of the SS, The Order of the Death’s Head, this was part of the “schizophrenic” nature of the camp system. “Unauthorized” murders of Jews were “investigated by a whole squad of SS legal experts.”

It’s also important to point out that in 1942, the British were intercepting top-secret coded messages from Auschwitz to Berlin (the Germans did not know that the Brits had cracked the German code). None of the messages mentioned gassings or mass-murder. Rather, “illness” was the main cause of death in the camp (British Intelligence in the Second World War, Cambridge University Press, 1979).

So, yes, Jews were killed in Auschwitz in 1942. The open question is, was it part of the extermination program going on at the same time in the Eastern Poland camps, or was it a separate matter, carried out in contradiction to orders?

And now we come to the major fork in the road, the “deviation” that nearly cost me my life.

There are two versions of what happened in 1943.

The Standard Story: The four extermination camps in Poland, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec (which had already been shuttered), and Chelmno, were closed. They were closed because Auschwitz was renovated in order to become the largest, most efficient murder factory in history. The renovations at Auschwitz, including brand new crematorium ovens and two massive underground gas chambers equipped to use cyanide gas instead of “old fashioned” carbon monoxide, made the previous four camps obsolete. Auschwitz would take over as the main killing camp.

My Take: In 1943 the four extermination camps were indeed closed. But did that mark the end of the extermination program, or a shifting of the program to Auschwitz? Therein lies the crux of the controversy. My position is that in 1943, after having lost the battle at Stalingrad, and with their situation on the Eastern Front looking dire, the Nazis ended exterminations of Jews in favor of using the remaining Jews for labor. Due to circumstances at the front, the “use them for labor” voices had prevailed over the “ethnic cleansing” voices. Auschwitz-Birkenau was revamped in order to become a functional, “modern” labor camp without the massive death toll from disease that Himmler had been bitching about since 1942. The renovation of Auschwitz was undertaken with labor output in mind, not mass murder.

On what evidence do I make that claim?

To start with, the extermination camps were not closed because they were obsolete or in need of “improving.” They had functioned quite well. Flawlessly, really.

Four important things happened in 1943 regarding the Final Solution. The four extermination camps were closed, Himmler and Goebbels began speaking of the Final Solution in the past tense, Hitler ordered the term never to be mentioned again, and Himmler received the statistical report he commissioned from SS master statistician Dr. Richard Korherr. Korherr referred to this as a “final extended report.” Final. Himmler had wanted the report at the beginning of 1943, and Korherr presented him with the “first provisional report” on March 23, asking for a few more months—until July—to present the “final extended report.” Korherr’s figure of murdered Jews is 2,419,656 (1,786,356 killed in the extermination camps, and 633,300 on the Eastern Front). Korherr’s figure jibes with a coded message sent in January 1943 by Hermann Hoefle, a staff member of the SS and police leader in Lublin, to SS Lt. Col. Heim, deputy commander of the SS and SD in Krakow.

Himmler received the report and signed off on it, instructing Korherr to make one small change—remove the term “special treatment” (the euphemism for murder) next to the figure of dead Jews, for “camouflage purposes.”

The report also included a breakdown of how many Jews were left for labor, and which countries still had “large populations” of Jews: Romania—a German ally (302,000 Jews); Hungary, a German ally (750,000 Jews); and “possibly France” (for which Korherr gave no figures, but there were indeed several hundred thousand Jews still living there).

And here we have another blow to historians who claim that the four extermination camps were closed in order to make way for a “bigger and better” Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination complex. Who was going to be sent there? The Nazis never made a claim on the Romanian Jews, and they barely made a claim on the French Jews (the Nazis had mainly deported foreign Jews living in France, but not the massive population of French-citizen Jews). And Hungary? Hitler had acquiesced to his ally Admiral Horthy’s demand that Hungary’s Jews not be deported. So, in ’42 and ’43, who were they building this “extermination mega-complex” for?

In summer 1944, the Nazis would begin deporting Jews from Hungary. But, there was no way in late 1942/early 1943 they could have foreseen that circumstances would present themselves in March 1944 that would allow for a military invasion of Hungary by the Germans. Plus, Hitler made it quite clear, at a meeting with Horthy in April 1943, that he wanted the Hungarian Jews “accommodated” in camps in Hungary. Hitler was enraged that Jews were running around “scot free” in Hungary, even to the extent that two Jews had just been elected to the Hungarian upper house. Hitler wanted Horthy to pacify his Jews in Hungary, as the Romanians did (Romanian Jews were not deported abroad, but imprisoned in Romanian territory).

The Auschwitz renovations had been ordered in 1942 during the typhus outbreak mentioned earlier. The underground rooms, which are portrayed as “gas chambers,” were morgues—cold rooms for body storage. Auschwitz was getting a makeover to become more “hygienic.”

The camp also got a bunch of new crematorium ovens. The matter of the ovens is one in which reality has been turned upside down by poor historiography. When Jews had been exterminated, their bodies were either burned en masse in pits, or buried en masse in graves. They were not placed, one at a time, in “civilized” crematorium ovens.

Pressac points out that the planned expansion of Auschwitz included more than just hygienic cold rooms and kremas (crematoriums). There was going to be a massive health camp as well:

The drawing…[blueprint] is a real godsend for the revisionists. Concerning the initial arrangement for the third construction stage at Birkenau, it formally states that this was to serve only as a mixed quarantine and hospital camp. There is INCOMPATIBILITY in the creation of a health camp a few hundred yards from four Krematorien where, according to official history, people were exterminated on a large scale. …The two drawings date from June 1943, when the Bauleitung was completing the construction of the four new Krematorien, and it is obvious that KGL Birkenau cannot have had at one and the same time two opposing functions: health care and extermination. The plan for building a very large hospital section in BA.III thus shows that the Krematorien were built purely for incineration, without any homicidal gassings, because the SS wanted to “maintain” its concentration camp labor force.

This argument seems logical and is not easy to counter. The drawings exist, and what is more they come from the SS Economic Administration Head Office in Berlin, so it was no local humanitarian initiative. (Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, p. 512)

Pressac points out that much of the expansion was never completed. He suggests, and he’s not alone in doing so, that the expansion/renovation might have been for a new phase of the camp—dealing with non-Jewish Poles, who would have to be “pacified” by the millions (interned and used for labor) as part of Hitler and Himmler’s plan to make the “ethnic concept of Poles” disappear. In ’42 and ’43, this still appeared attainable to the Nazis.

But the full expansion was never realized.

Pressac also solves the problem of intent regarding the two underground buildings that were supposedly the new, massive “gas chambers” built during the renovation. He states, unequivocally, that they were planned as regular morgues, with no homicidal or gassing intent.

The fresh air came in near the ceiling and the air extraction vents were near the floor, which means that the system was designed for a cool morgue, not for a warm gas chamber where the fresh air should come in from below and the foul air be extracted from above. …Many other details now prove that the room known as Leichenkeller 1, which in the past has been presented as having been specifically designed as a gas chamber, could not have originally been anything other than an underground morgue. (Ibid., p. 184–189)

Raul Hilberg’s response (“Holocaust ‘Debate’ Is Forum for Revisionists,” L.A. Times, February 23, 1989): “A report that an Auschwitz building could not have been designed as a gas chamber is correct but irrelevant.”

Both Pressac and Hilberg agree that the intent, when the renovations were planned, was not to create two giant underground gas chambers. The buildings were designed as “normal” (if that word can be used in the Nazis’ hellish universe) morgues.

But Hilberg is wrong about the intent being “irrelevant.” It’s only by studying intent that we can gauge whether the renovations were planned specifically to “take over” from the four extermination camps that were closed, or whether the renovations were intended to battle the poor hygienic conditions that were robbing the Nazis of their labor force.

Pressac makes another important point. With the air extraction vents at floor-level, the bodies would block any chance of clearing out the poison gas. And, as these rooms were in underground buildings with no windows, opening the doors would flood the entire complex with cyanide gas. Although he doesn’t claim that this is a “definitive obstacle,” he concedes on page 337 that the ventilation system problems pointed out by revisionists are “arguments that appear to me valid.”

If it’s true that the Auschwitz renovations were not done with the intention of supplanting and surpassing the four extermination camps that were closed, then we can view 1943 as the end of one phase of the Holocaust—the gas chamber killing phase. If you examine the evidence objectively, it all fits. The four camps were closed, Himmler ordered a “final” report on the murders and how many Jews were left for labor, the Nazis’ declining fortunes on the Eastern Front created an urgent need for labor, Himmler and Goebbels began speaking of the “Final Solution” in the past tense, and Hitler ordered that the term never again be publicly uttered, as all traces of the four extermination camps were erased forever.

Honestly, it does make sense. That doesn’t mean I’m right. It just means that this is not tin-foil-hat crazy talk. The evidence supports this conclusion.

But, we have to examine the summer of 1944. Germany’s “allies” in the Hungarian government had been caught trying to make a separate peace, hoping to unyoke themselves from the Nazis’ plummeting fortunes. The Germans invaded Hungary. And now, there was no need to get permission regarding what to do with the nearly 800,000 Hungarian Jews.

That summer, deportations to Auschwitz began. None of this could have been foreseen in ’42/’43. But now it was happening. The Hungarian Jews were in the Nazis’ hands.

What were the Nazis’ intentions? Because, post-renovation, the Hungarian Jews are the Auschwitz death toll. There were Czech and Dutch Jews sent there in ’44, but the Hungarian Jews supposedly made up the overwhelming majority of the victims.

Figures are conflicting regarding how many Jews were deported from Hungary (400,000 to 500,000), and, of that figure, how many went to, or through, Auschwitz (estimates vary wildly). I can’t turn this chapter into a detailed statistical survey, so instead I’d like to study intent. What do the contemporaneous documents, from the people “in the know,” tell us about the Nazis’ intent regarding the Hungarian Jews, whatever the number deported?

They tell us the only thing that makes sense. The labor-starved Nazis, rapidly losing the war, were taking the Hungarian Jews for labor.

Goebbels’ private diary, April 18, 1944: The Führer had so many forces to apply to this campaign that Horthy offered no serious resistance. In particular, the Führer expected contributions from Hungary of food, oil, manganese, and people. In particular, he wants the 700,000 Jews in Hungary involved in beneficial activities for our war effort.

April 27: 300,000 Hungarian Jews have been detained and imprisoned in the concentration camps. They should come, in large part, to Germany as a workforce. Himmler will take care of this; above all, they are to be used for our difficult war production programs. (Both of these quotes are from private translations of Elke Fröhlich, ed., Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, 29 vols., K. G. Saur Verlag, 1993–2008.)

Remember—Goebbels had previously had no problem writing in his diary about the killing of Jews. He has no reason to lie here.

The Hungarian deportations put Himmler in a real bind. He had ordered his men to commit the most horrific atrocities against Jewish women and children in 1941 (on the Eastern Front), and in ’42 and ’43 (at the extermination camps). And the only thing he had to show for it was a Reich that was, in ’44, by and large “Jew free.” And now, the Führer had ordered Hungarian Jews to be brought into the Reich by the hundreds of thousands for labor. In other words, “we killed all those people for nothing; we’re shipping Jews back in.”

Himmler had to go on an “apology tour.” He had some ’splainin’ to do about why Jews were now being brought back to where they’d been so violently cleaned out. Himmler’s secret speech to the generals at Sonthofen on May 24, 1944, is instructive. I’ll comment in brackets.

I believe, gentlemen, that you know me well enough to realize that I am not a bloodthirsty man nor a man who takes pleasure or finds sport in the harsher things he must do [bullshit, of course]. On the other hand, I have strong nerves and a great sense of duty—if I do say so myself—and when I recognize the necessity of something, I will do it unflinchingly. As to the Jewish women and children, I did not believe I had a right to let these children grow up to become avengers who would kill our fathers and grandchildren. That, I thought, would be cowardly. Thus the problem was solved without half-measures. [The “Jewish question” is solved, past-tense.] (Cited in Jonathan C. Friedman, Routledge History of the Holocaust, Routledge, 2012, p. 398)

Now, the hard part. He’s just admitted the horrific atrocities that occurred in the name of getting Jews out. So, why bring them back in? If it was to kill them, he’d admit it. He just copped to killing all the Jews up ’til this point.

At this time—it is one of those things peculiar to this war—we are taking 100,000 male Jews from Hungary to the concentration camps to build underground factories, and will later take another 100,000. Not one of them will ever come within the field of vision of the German people. [He wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true. As you’ve read, the first part of this speech was all about admitting murder.] I am convinced that things would look bleak for the front that has been built up to the east of the Government General [occupied Poland] if we had not resolved the Jewish problem there, if, for example, the ghetto in Lublin, or the massive ghetto in Warsaw, with its 500,000 inhabitants, were still in existence. [Another justification of the ’42/’43 killing program] (Cited in Stephen G. Fritz, Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East, University Press of Kentucky, 2011, p. 364)

With the shit-ton of karmic baggage that Himmler copped to in that speech, if the Hungarian Jews were being brought in to be killed, he’d have admitted it. And he would have spared himself the embarrassment of having to explain why the Reich was being repopulated with Jews after all of that “brave” Jew-killing.

Himmler’s speech mentions the male Hungarian Jews. What of the women?

On May 4, 1944, SS Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl sent the following telegram to Himmler: “The first transportation of Jews from Hungary show that about fifty percent of the Jews who are fit to work are women. Since there is not sufficient adequate purely female work available for this large number of women, we must put them to work for OT [Todt Organization] construction projects. Your approval is requested. The OT agrees.” (Available online in “USA v. Pohl et. al—Opening Statements of the Prosecution and Defense,” The Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/open4.asp)

Himmler’s reply: “Of course Jewish women are to be used for labor. In this case one has merely to provide a healthy diet. Here a diet with raw vegetables is important. Be sure to import garlic from Hungary in sufficient quantity.” (Ibid.)

Even though I prefer to rely on contemporaneous documents like the ones above, I should also point out that Adolf Eichmann, in his post-war memoirs, agreed that most of the Hungarian Jews were used for labor: “All told, we succeeded in processing about half a million Jews in Hungary. I once knew the exact number that we shipped to Auschwitz, but today I can only estimate that it was around 350,000 in a period of about four months. But, contrary to legend, the majority of the deportees were not gassed at all but put to work in munitions plants.” (“Adolf Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story,” Life magazine, November 28, 1960)

It needs to be mentioned that Anne Frank and her entire family were sent to Auschwitz in summer 1944, and not gassed. The Frank sisters were even treated in the camp infirmary (the girls would die from typhus at Bergen Belsen in 1945, in the weeks before the camp’s liberation).

Of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who passed through Auschwitz in 1944, were some killed? Possibly, yes. Hoess was a corrupt and brutal commandant. But the preponderance of evidence suggests that the 1942/1943 renovations at Auschwitz were not intended to “take over” for the four extermination camps that were shuttered, and the overwhelming majority of Hungarian Jews who were deported were used for labor.

Still, I could be wrong. There’s no way to prove a negative—you can’t prove that Jews weren’t killed at Auschwitz in 1944. All you can do is attempt to address the anomalous evidence that permeates the current (to use Michael Shermer’s term) “paradigm.” I put my thesis out there, for feedback and peer review, and I was denounced as being worse than Hitler, just as I’ve been denounced since my “outing.”

In a piece I wrote after my outing titled “Apologize My Ass,” I made this point:

What I said 20 years ago is either right or wrong. If I erred, I’ll cop to it. But admitting an error and apologizing for it are two completely different things. If a mathematician gets an equation wrong, he’s not expected to fall all over himself apologizing. He’s only expected to recognize the error and learn from it. You don’t write history books by yelling names at people. Trying to convince a historian he’s erred by yelling “racist” is like trying to bake a cake by screaming “YOU STUPID CAKE.” It’s just not how these things work.

My situation involves matters that I believed to be historically factual. If people think I erred, they can show me my mistakes, and I will admit any error. But apologize? Cave in because someone calls me “racist,” or because my conservative friends apparently believe that recantation at the point of a sword is how historical debates are settled? Hell no. Never.

So there you go. I’ve outlined what got my ass kicked twenty years ago, and why my valiant conservative “allies” have banned me today. Whether I’m a monster or not, you make your own call. I’ve already made mine, and I have nothing to apologize for.

A small end-note: some readers might be tempted to say something like, “okay, maybe you were correct regarding your thesis, or maybe you weren’t correct, but you certainly weren’t a Nazi monster for pursuing that line of inquiry, but…why even bring it up? What good can come from talking about it?”

In response, I can only respectfully point out that I did stop talking about it. I’ve been silent for eighteen years. If you’re unhappy that I’m talking about it again, tell it to the folks who outed me. Take your complaints to them.

As long as the “outing” has renewed interest in my old work, I might as well try to explain myself, as I don’t want anyone—friend or foe—to think that I ever “denied the Holocaust.”