All because of a foul-mouthed live streamer, the Zionist Organization of America issued a drastic and self-defeating ultimatum to the President of Heritage Foundation. It told Kevin Roberts that ties with it would be severed unless he made a public apology for defending Tucker Carlson, as well as dump him for platforming Nick Fuentes.

Supposedly the affiliation and interview were red flags. Roberts duly caved. To believe the ZOA, flirt with Carlson and you can’t begin to combat antisemitism. We shall see how much of a difference blackballing him makes. But to put it bluntly, the ZOA was prepared to cut off its nose to spite its face.

The demand was not rooted in the symbiotic relationship between ZOA and Heritage, a think tank to reckon with. The Zionist body was guided by an obdurate mindset, not by common sense. So what if Carlson let Fuentes go through his shtick of denying the Holocaust and poking fun at it. Is it worth making a bunfight that’s bound to be counterproductive?

On the one hand it will drive clicks for the manipulative bigot, an attention-seeker bar none. On the other hand it will upend the Heritage National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. Such a breakup makes no tactical sense. After all is said and done, the playacting Nazi inflicts minimal harm with Holocaust insults meant to provoke and make a spectacle that elevates him to a holy cow celebrity.

The fact is, Fuentes is not an authentic Holocaust denier. He lauds Hitler’s aura, compares the crematoria to cookie baking, fusses over the accuracy of 6 million, and generally goes for ridiculous but riveting theatre on podcasts. This works too well - the Tucker Carlson interview racked up 16 million views. As regards the blockbuster star punting Nazi dogma or Holocaust denial, that’s an altogether different kettle of fish.

For, contrary to popular belief, there is Holocaust denial and then there is Holocaust denial.

For one thing, there’s hard core and soft core denial, and the latter is the one posing a high order threat.

Fuentes’s denial is not hard or soft, it’s clownish, and the less attention paid to him the better.

(Spotted here. For examples of Fuentes’s Shoah denial, see here.)