Rise of Holocaust denial driven by pernicious, AI-driven social media
New York Post · RC · trust 35/100
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As the algorithmic age takes Holocaust denial mainstream, historians must admit a bitter defeat.
When the two of us met at Harvard 15 years ago, one was a professor teaching modern history, and the other was an undergraduate interested in the future of artificial intelligence.
The elder of us had published a succession of books concerned with one of the most important and intractable questions of the 19th and 20th centuries: Why did the successful economic and social integration of the Jews after their emancipation or westward emigration produce such a vitriolic backlash?
I (Ferguson) had written a history of the Rothschild banking dynasty and a biography of Siegmund Warburg. I had studied the German hyperinflation of 1923 and its corrosive impact on the Weimar Republic. I had written books about the two world wars, one of which — “The War of the World” — offered a novel interpretation of the Holocaust as one (the worst) of in a series of episodes of mass murder.
I not only lectured on these issues at Harvard and other universities, but I also sought to reach the widest possible audience by engaging in journalism and broadcasting, producing more than 30 hours of documentary television for PBS and Channel 4 or the BBC in Britain.
My animating goal was to ensure that citizens learned the lessons of history — including the vital lesson that antisemitic rhetoric can be translated into genocidal reality if it is adopted by a modern state.
Yet today I see this hatred normalized, the Holocaust trivialized. Popular and influential conservatives such as Tucker Carlson and the Conservative Political Action Conference crowd now tolerate traffickers in Nazi revisionism.
And the poison being peddled to young conservatives by radicalizers such as Nick Fuentes is even worse than traditional Holocaust denial. They don’t so much deny the Holocaust as mock it and celebrate it.
A 27-year-old Rumble streamer who first earned far-right fame by attending the Charlottesville, Virginia., white supremacist rally in 2017, Fuentes presents himself as a history-savvy truth-teller.
In contrast to competitors crouched over webcams in Red Bull–strewn bedrooms, he projects a retro talk-show vibe — suit and tie, tasteful set, warm lighting, high-end camera.
Five nights a week, his million-strong legion of followers gathers to see Fuentes spend two to three hours reacting to the news and opining on pop-culture drama before engaging directly with fans via “superchats” they pay him handsomely to read on-air.
But when you ask one of them to explain Fuentes’s ideas, the answer is usually hopelessly vague. “You’ve just gotta watch for yourself,” they reply, attaching a video longer than “Lawrence of Arabia.”
This is a tell — a sign that the true attraction isn’t evidence or arguments, but instead the emotions Fuentes arouses. If you watch a three-hour lecture about history or science, you can summarize the key points to a friend, even if you can’t recall every detail.
By contrast, there are no summarizable takeaways from performances like a Fuentes show. He gleefully spouts the N-word and unfurls slur-laced harangues against transsexuals, gays, Muslims, Indians, blacks, Jews and women — language his white male listeners know would get them fired.
Often, the offensiveness is unmoored from any ideology at all, like Fuentes’ recent declaration that child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was “cool as fuck.” The posture is that he’s freeing his audience — especially “involuntarily celibate” (incel) Zoomer men — from all the norms they resent.
With that pretext, Fuentes gives his viewers a fig leaf of cover to treat virulent hatred as a big joke they’re all in on. He praises Jim Crow segregation, admires Joseph Stalin, lauds the Taliban and calls for an American dictatorship. But it’s all wrapped in ironic 4chan memes and intermixed with chat about Star Wars, Taylor Swift and the “Barbie” movie.
So Fuentes is only breaking one more taboo when he says: “Hitler was awesome,” “Hitler was right,” and “the Holocaust didn’t happen.”
The main point isn’t to convince people of that factual claim. It’s to make them reject the topic as unworthy of moral concern altogether, and to paint those who care about Nazi atrocities as cringey, out-of-touch scolds.
Now add today’s AI into the mix. Since the original Facebook news feed, the AI used by the platforms has become vastly more sophisticated. It now systematically plucks such “rage bait” videos from obscurity and pushes them to precisely the users most likely to engage — on a scale, at a speed and with a precision inconceivable 10 years ago.
The app’s interface may look the same, but show interest in a Fuentes clip, and quite quickly every other video is someone ranting that Jews (or blacks, or slutty women, or Democrats) are ruining America.
Yet the platforms reward brevity, so gradually one sees the same message conveyed by short, abstract memes that make no argument at all.
In the deepest bilges of the algorithm are calls to violence, often evading the platform’s content-moderation software with a peaceful alpine landscape and spoonerized incitement: “Jill kews.”
Increasingly, the creators of such content use AI-generated images to heighten the emotional impact of the message — innocuous scenes that turn into giant swastikas if you unfocus your eyes, or imaginary scenarios of angelic blond girls surrounded by brown-skinned rapists.
Realistic deepfakes depict Jewish celebrities making inflammatory comments, or hordes of savages rampaging through a city. And, since 2024, AI has been used to resurrect the Führer himself. Viral videos now translate Hitler’s speeches into English using his own voice and delivery style — transforming what sounds to anglophone ears like cartoonish bombast into something far more compelling.
Recently, as an experiment,…
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