Last updated on May 8th, 2013 at 06:56 am
If there’s one thing Republicans know how to do, it’s get out of hot water by getting in deeper.
Currently Republicans are trying to distance themselves from the revelation that “leading Hollywood Republican” David Stein is actually David Cole, a Jewish Holocaust denier. Yes, you read that right. The Guardian explains that in the 90s, gas chamber denying Cole was “a vilified guest on chat shows hosted by Phil Donahue, Montel Williams and Morton Downey, among others, and was depicted as a neo-Nazi on news shows such as 60 Minutes and 48 Hours.”
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Stein/Cole was the “head” of the “Republican Party Animal”, a Hollywood political/social group for conservatives. The Guardian reports that Stein/Cole, who maintains his Holocaust cynicism today, is friends with conservative media figures “with blogs, newspaper columns and syndicated radio shows.” Rory Carroll writing for the Guardian opined:
They put a lid on the story. Not a word has been published or broadcast. ‘When people found out it was, “Oh my God, get the fuck away from him.’
So peeved that Stein/Cole was ruining their already tattered reputation, Republicans say he smeared the name of “Republican Party Animals”.
How do you smear the Holocaust denier and prove that you, a Republican, are not a bigot? Oh, I don’t know. Probably by asking how they were supposed to know that the “Jewish guy with the nasally voice was a complete liar and a fraud”.
Neoconservative Eric Golub wrote that phrase for the very right wing Washington Times, after complaining that the media will now call conservatives names again, “The media now has another baseball bat with which to beat conservatives over the head. They presume that anything negative said about conservatives is true and silence is taken as acquiescence.”
“David Stein fooled everybody. In all the time he attended RPA functions, he never once spoke about anything other than Republican politics and getting drunk. There was no way any of us could have known that this Jewish guy with the nasally voice was a complete liar and a fraud.”
Thanks for clearing that up.
The Guardian says David Stein “was a cerebral, fun-loving gadfly who hosted boozy gatherings for Hollywood’s political conservatives” who brings together the big guns — “right-wing congressmen, celebrities, writers and entertainment industry figures …for shindigs, closed to outsiders, where they could scorn liberals and proclaim their true beliefs.”
If anything will lend a right wing group credence, it’s getting together just to scorn other people but we are not bigots — omg your nasally voice.
It’s truly amazing that this group of school yard bullies passing themselves off as “conservatives” can’t sort out why they are no longer a national party. But I digress. Back to the Republican Jewish Holocaust denier.
Republicans are trying to distance themselves, as Hollywood Republicans really can’t afford any further stigma of bigotry. Seriously, to be branded as attending social gatherings headed by a guy best known as a Holocaust denier in the 1990s in Hollywood is not the best career plan. Hollywood isn’t nearly as “liberal” as Republicans want you to believe.
Cole/Stein of course sees this as the real persecution, not the gas chambers, which may or may not have existed in his mind. He told the Guardian that conservatives in Hollywood are a “persecuted minority” attacked by “intolerant liberals”. Yes, Cole/Stein thinks that hippie liberals are running those big studios owned by even bigger corporations.
The artists are liberal, but it’s an industry town run by Big Corporate Money. Making good box office is the only thing that matters. And hating Jewish people is not good box office. Saying things like this in 2013 is not a good idea, “The best guess is yes, there were gas chambers. But there is still a lot of murkiness about the camps. I haven’t changed my views.”
Bigotry in general is not good box office. Hollywood doesn’t like this sort of thing, and it’s not for the reasons Republicans claim. It’s because bigotry isn’t all-American, it doesn’t sell the most movie franchises to the most people, and therefore it’s a liability. Would Bank of America hire a holocaust denier to represent it in TV commercials? No? Then it probably won’t fly in progressive, open-minded, open-hearted (so long as those values are generally appealing to the masses with the money to buy tickets) Hollywood.
It’s ironic to see the Republican Party done in by their own free market system in Hollywood. The market will not tolerate bigotry on this level, and there is no way to “southern strategy” movies made for a national audience. That’s the beauty of the free entertainment market. Yes, conservatives can corner a market on cable, but they can’t take a national audience and southern strategy it. They have to adapt, and by adapt, I mean they have to lose the bigotry.
Watch the head of the Republican Party Animals question whether gas chambers really happened:
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