Niall Ferguson

One of the reasons I wrote so many history books, says Niall Ferguson in The Free Press, was to ensure people “learned the lessons of history” – like the vital lesson that anti-Semitic language can easily explode into genocidal violence. So it’s with profound dread that, today, I see this ancient hatred normalised and trivialised. Influential American conservatives like Tucker Carlson calmly tolerate revisionist “anti-historians” like Darryl Cooper, who deny the Holocaust and make mad claims such as “Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War”. Online, far-right trolls like Nick Fuentes don’t merely deny the Holocaust, they openly “mock it and celebrate it”. As AI permeates social networks, this kind of anti-history is spreading “like a cancer”. More than a generation after William F Buckley exorcised it from American conservatism, “anti-Semitism is back”.

Myron Gaines, a leading “men’s rights” influencer with more than a quarter of a billion views on YouTube pulls no punches: “Yeah, we like Hitler,” he posted on X last year. “No one gives a f*** what you woke Jews think any more.” A recent guest on his show, when asked how best to “take down” Jews, replied: “We gotta kill the motherf***ers.” In the past, such bile was confined to the filthy bedrooms of sad sacks, but today’s algorithms are primed to maximise user engagement, the angrier the better. And in the hellscape of social media, these clips – which can now be generated on a vast scale at no cost using AI – appear for a matter of seconds, with no opportunity for rebuttal, subtly polluting the minds of the young. “Real historians are powerless.” We naively believed that if we went to the right archives, read the right documents, and published scholarly books with the right footnotes, the Holocaust deniers would be driven from the field. “What fools we were.”