In general, I am fascinated with the psychology sociology of denialism and conspiratorial thinking, and was very active helping to combat anthropogenic global warming and climate change denialism about 10 years ago at Dr. Ricky Rood’s climate blog and its contentious discussions. (In 2017, IBM purchased Dr. Jeff Master’s Wunderground website, which was the host for Ricky’s blog, and shortly afterwards, they eliminated the non-revenue generating weather and climate blogs.)
I believe that the fit of anger by Dr. Scott Atlas in his threat to sue actual infectious disease experts who challenge his non-expert radiologist opinions will fade away relatively quickly. Dr. Atlas is not in the same category as the infamous British historian David Irving, a White-supremacist, Nazi-worshiping anti-Semite who has had a life-long pathological support of crazy false history and “alternative facts”. David Irving was mentioned in a Mark Sumner story of the front page, but I did not want to go far off-topic with a David Irving post.
In general, I am fascinated with the psychology sociology of denialism and conspiratorial thinking, and I was very active helping to combat anthropogenic global warming and climate change (AGW/CC)denialism about 10 years ago at University of Michigan professor Dr. Ricky Rood’s climate blog at the old Weather Underground, a weather and climate website. (IBM purchased Dr. Jeff Master’s Wunderground website for its commercial weather features about three years ago, and cancelled the blogs.) Many of the adamant, hard-core denialist participants at the Wunderground blog discussions were supported by U.S. TV meteorologists, who at the time were mostly still in the denialist camp. However, it appears that most of the TV “Mets” have now pretty much embraced the reality of AGW/CC, and that has transferred to many of their fans, although strong pockets of AGW/CC denialism still exist.
I was amazed at the fairly rapid “conversion” of the TV Mets to accepting AGW/CC, and now they have become very important in a new pattern of disseminating accurate science-based climate change information to their vast evening audiences in the U.S. via small bites of information that the non-science majority of Americans can handle and digest. I sometimes fantasize that Fox News anchors and reporters will go through a similar period of enlightenment, but there are some very BIGLY barriers to that happening. Alt-right misinformation outlets are much more “bad-to-the-bone” like anti-Semite Neo-nazi David Irving, and not as likely to change without the increase in threats from hurricanes, floods, droughts, melting glaciers and ice sheets, and creeping sea-level rise that slap one in the face like a Monty Python fish-slapping skit.
“Alternate facts” historian and holocaust denier and hard-core anti-Semite David Irving, still going string at age 82, has has a “financial revival” via donations and support from white supremacists around the world. Unlike Scott Atlas, he was dumb enough to agree to the judge only/no jury British libel trial format where he lost. There was a “recreation-style” NOVA TV special in 2000 about the trial (“Holocaust on Trial”), and a 2016 (Denial) movie with Rachel Weisz, which I have downloaded and will watch this evening.
David Irving has a currently active Facebook Official Fan Page with over 8,000 followers where he sells his books.
I have not researched Google’s current stand on holocaust denial and antisemitism.
The below excerpt is from a 2017 Guardian (UK) article.
Google, which owns YouTube, has come under pressure for disseminating hate speech about Jews and promoting Holocaust denial after the Observer revealed that its top results for searches around the Holocaust were directing people to denial sites. After weeks of pressure, Google agreed to make changes to its algorithm, but they are far from comprehensive. Google auto-complete still suggests the Holocaust is a “lie” and a “hoax” and still directs to neo-Nazi websites such as Stormfront, where Irving is considered an authority on the subject. He also has a presence on Facebook, where his page has gathered more than 7,000 likes.
Lipstadt said the idea that Irving had been vindicated by history was “preposterous”. “There was nothing, zilch, in the historical claims that he made. We proved that. But this is the world we are living in. Where facts don’t matter any more … and it’s absolutely terrifying.
“I’ve no idea of knowing if his claims about his newfound popularity are true or not but you’d have to be living under a rock not to see that this proliferation of racism and antisemitism is being disseminated by the internet.
“This has nothing to do with freedom of speech. It’s about truth and lies.”
Irving, however, says that he is speaking to people who have lost trust in mainstream sources of information. “It’s all to do with this phenomenon of people not trusting what they are told by their governments and newspapers. They seek around to find someone who provides some remedy to this. And they find me.
“I am part of the remedy. It’s not just that I’m selling huge amounts of books around the world. One of the big changes of the last two years is the amount I’m getting in donations.
“It used to be small amounts, and they still come in, but people are now giving me very large sums indeed – five-figure sums. I now drive a Rolls-Royce. A beautiful car. Though money is completely unimportant to me.”
His new fans, he says, are the same people who in the US are supporting Donald Trump, who he believes will make a good president and “has his heart in the right place”. Though, he says, he is also impressed by the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
“The Labour party is tearing itself apart with these allegations about antisemitism,” he says, “but Corbyn seems like a very fine man. Maybe it’s because he’s near my age, but I’m impressed by him.”