The story in question, which is the work of Mark Ames.
The previous article from 7/18 on the "Reboot 2014" conference.....Astonishingly, in February 1976, Reason dedicated an entire “special issue” to promoting Holocaust deniers, under the guise of so-called “historical revisionism.” How horrifying is it? You can judge for yourself — the whole thing is embedded below.
PandoDaily contacted noted Holocaust historian and Holocaust Museum expert Deborah Lipstadt to ask her opinion. In 2000, Lipstadt won a much-publicized libel trial in Britain against a leading Holocaust denier, David Irving. When we shared with her the list of Reason’s “special issue” contributors and authors positively cited in the issue, Lipstadt described it as “the Who’s Who of early American Holocaust deniers.”
Authors who contributed articles to Reason magazine’s “special issue” included one of the most notorious American pro-Nazi activists of the postwar era, Austin J. App, author of the 1973 tract, “The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks and Fabricated Corpses” and contributing editor to the rabidly anti-Semitic magazine, the American Mercury. Two more authors hired to write for Reason’s “special issue” included James J. Martin, a regular contributor to the same neo-Nazi American Mercury magazine; and Percy Greaves, a founding board member at the anti-Jewish hate group, the Liberty Lobby.
Both Martin and Greaves were deeply involved in leading anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denier outfits before, during and after Reason hired them as contributors; and shortly after they appeared in Reason’s “special issue,” both Martin and Greaves served as editorial directors in David Irving’s favorite neo-Nazi outfit, the Institute for Historical Review, described as “the world’s single most important outlet for Holocaust-denial propaganda” by the Anti-Defamation League.
Perhaps the most shocking article in Reason’s “special issue” was penned by Gary North, who was also Ron Paul’s congressional aide that same year, and has been one of the most influential figures in the Christian radical-right since the 1970s. North’s article in Reason mocked the Holocaust as “the Establishment’s favorite horror story” and questioned “the supposed execution of 6 million Jews by Hitler.” North also painted other rabidly anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers in a positive, “contrarian-cool” light, praising the works of David Hoggan, author of “The Myth of the Six Million,” French neo-fascist Paul Rassinier, and American historian Harry Elmer Barnes, considered the godfather of American Holocaust denial literature.
Some quotes from that:
So now we have the “Reboot Lab” conference taking place in the heart of San Francisco’s SOMA tech district. But if the purpose of the Reboot Lab conference is to merge Koch-brand libertarianism with Silicon Valley “libertarianism,” then the first thing you have to ask is: Why the Hell did they invite a mean homophobic hick like Cathy McMorris Rodgers to the show?
Rand Paul at least does a decent job showboating outrage against Big Brother snooping and drone attacks; at least there’s something there to grab onto before you get into the rest of Rand’s loonie-right politics. But the other keynote speaker, McMorris Rodgers?
In the, I suppose, quite likely event that Silicon Valley doesn’t know who she is, here’s a quick primer:
Rep. McMorris Rodgers was homeschooled by her father, and got her higher education degree at an unaccredited Christian fundamentalist institution, Pensacola Christian College (PCC), which bans homosexuality, open Internet (PCC until recently banned all Internet access), and mixed-gender stairwells (male and female students are required to use separate stairs and doors). Pensacola Christian College is the publisher of A Beka textbooks for K-12 pupils, which teach kids that Islam is a “false religion,” Hindus are “incapable of writing history,” Catholicism is “a monstrous distortion of Christianity,” African religions preach “false religious beliefs,” liberals and Democrats are crypto-Marxists, and the United Nations is a “collectivist juggernaut that would crush individual freedom and force the will of an elite few on all of humanity.”
The involvement in Reboot of Reason.com’s editor is both telling and entirely appropriate. For all of Silicon Valley’s self-celebration and pretensions to progressive values, you can find most of the Big Ideas spouted by Silicon Valley’s 21st century geniuses in Reason’s musty, nearly half-century old archives, many of which are only available in print or microfiche via public libraries.
Peter Thiel’s floating libertarian islands? The December 1972 “special issue” of Reason magazine proposed abandoning statist America for “new libertarian countries” built on floating ocean platforms. Travis Kalanick’s disrupted, deregulated taxi cab free-for-all? Half a decade before Kalanick was born, Reason’s February 1972 issue published “Taxis and Jitneys: The Case for Deregulation,” a proposal to disrupt taxi cab “monopolies” and licensing laws, published by a DARPA spinoff called General Research Corp (where former Reason editor Robert Poole also worked). Reed Hastings’ school reforms (i.e. privatization)? Reason published “The Case for School Vouchers” in April 1971. Elon Musk’s private space company? Reason devoted its April 1979 “special issue” to privatizing space. In fact, Reason’s Robert Poole and early contributor Mark Frazier are credited with organizing the first major space privatization conference in the mid-1970s.
And then there’s the uglier, darker side of the Kochs’ libertarianism on display in Reason’s archives: the fringe-right racism and fascism that the movement has tried to downplay in recent years to appeal to progressives and non-loonie techies. Throughout its first two decades, in the 1970s and 1980s, Reason supported apartheid South Africa, and attacked anti-apartheid protesters and sanctions right up to Nelson Mandela’s release, when they finally dropped it.