How Anti-Semitic And Holocaust-Denying Websites Are Using Google AdSense For Revenue
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Several websites that promote anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial are using the Google AdSense program to generate advertising revenue. These websites have celebrated Hitler for having “fought and died … for our race,” claimed that the Holocaust is “the world’s greatest hoax,” and started an online harassment campaign against Jewish people.
Google AdSense bills itself as a “free, simple way to make money online by placing ads on your website.” Media Matters has criticized Google AdSense for allowing hyperpartisan websites that post fake news to use its services. Outlets including The Washington Post and BuzzFeed have documented the financial incentive AdSense has created for those websites to publish sensationalist fake news stories to generate clicks and ad revenue.
AdSense’s program policy claims of prohibited content:
Google ads may not be placed on pages that contain harassing or bullying content, or on content that incites hatred or promotes violence against individuals or groups based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation/gender identity. Additionally, Google ads may not appear on content that incites or advocates for harm against an individual or group. However, pages containing educational, documentary, historical, scientific, or artistic content related to such subjects are permitted to participate in AdSense.
Some of the worst purveyors of anti-Semitism on the internet are using Google AdSense to generate revenue and are seemingly in direct violation of this policy, according to a Media Matters review. As of January 30, the websites listed below all host Google AdSense advertisements, which are marked with a blue triangle icon that reveals the words “AdChoices” when scrolled over and redirect to a Google ads page when clicked.
Here is a look at Counter-Currents Publishing, American Free Press, The Right Stuff, and Veterans Today:
Counter-Currents Publishing
Counter-Currents Publishing is a virulently anti-Semitic website and publisher that distributes material praising Hitler and advocating for Jewish people to be kicked out of America.
The Washington Post reported in March 2015 that Counter-Currents “exists to advance the books of noted neo-Nazis and the creation of an all-white nationalist state.” The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks hate groups, wrote that Counter-Currents is a “pseudo-intellectual white nationalist website and publishing house that caters to ‘academic racists.’”
Counter-Currents distributes the work of the late William Pierce, who, according to The New York Times, “built an organization of young supporters for George Wallace for president into the nation's largest neo-Nazi group.” It also distributes the work of Savitri Devi, who “devoted her life to Nazism” and Holocaust denialism.
Counter-Currents Editor-in-Chief Greg Johnson is a neo-Nazi. In an essay headlined “The Burden of Hitler, 2014,” he wrote that “Adolf Hitler, whatever his faults, was a loyal white man who fought and died not just for Germany, but for our race as a whole.” He added that “Jews are promoting conditions that are leading to the genocide of the white race. They are not doing this out of ‘self-defense’ against Hitler’s aggression, since they were doing it when Hitler was just a common soldier in the Great War. Indeed, the truth is that Hitler did whatever he did in self-defense against Jewish aggression — the same Jewish aggression that we are suffering today in a much intensified form.”
Counter-Currents managing editor and webmaster Michael Polignano is a neo-Nazi who wants to kick Jewish people out of America. He wrote an essay which was reposted on the Counter-Currents website that advocated for creating “a White People’s Party,” which “would have a single goal: to protect and advance the interests of Whites in today’s multicultural, anti-White America. … The White People’s Party would not accept the membership or support of Jews and non-Whites. We would not work for their interests, and we could not expect them to sincerely work for ours.” He added that “Jews have to leave America” because “they are a major cause” of America’s problems.
The site posted a 2016 essay headlined “100+ Reasons to Cease & Desist from Any Further Holocaust Commemoration,” which included the following reasons:
102. For falsifying the entire historical narrative of the 20th century, making ‘The Holocaust’ not only the centerpiece of World War II, but the pivot point around which all that came before or after must circle, surely the greatest feat of sheer propaganda ever foisted upon humanity.
103. For the relentless ratcheting back upward toward the six million mark of the estimated Jewish-Holocaust death toll by Holocaust ‘historians’. Everyone seems to have forgotten that ‘four-to-five’ million was the downwardly-revised most-common estimate in the decades immediately following the war. And Raul Hilberg, the so-called dean of Jewish Holocaust-historians, never changed his 5.1 million estimate over the course of his four decades of publishing on the subject. Nonetheless: the tantalizing six-million figure lures the estimates higher, and even when still several hundred thousand bodies short, ‘rounding’ up to six million is seen as legitimate despite the fact that Jews thereby ‘kill off’ far more of their own than did all the pogromists in all of pre-World-War II history. One is tempted to agree, though, that the six million figure is required to constitute a bona fide Holocaust, meaning that the enthusiastically very-much Jewish-assisted Terror Famine of 1932-33 with a death toll of 6.3 million was The Holocaust, and the Jewish Tragedy of 1941-45 with a death toll of 5-5.1 million was not.
American Free Press
American Free Press is an anti-Semitic publication that has repeatedly claimed the Holocaust is a “hoax.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) wrote that the American Free Press is “an anti-Semitic conspiracy-oriented newspaper” that attracts “the most vitriolic anti-Semites.” Willis Carto, who “used lobbying and publishing to denigrate Jews and other minorities and galvanize the movement to deny the Holocaust,” helped found the American Free Press.
The newspaper heavily promotes Holocaust denial. The site’s bookstore sells The Holocaust Never Happened & The CIA Killed JFK, which claims to destroy “the hoax of the 6 million Jewish victims of Nazi Germany.”
The website has promoted the book The Holocaust Hoax Exposed: Debunking the 20th Century’s Biggest Lie, which was written by late American Free Press reporter Victor Thorn. An article promoting the book claims that it “rips apart, in lay language, the veil-thin arguments used to prove the Jewish ‘Holocaust,’ which is then used by global Zionists to justify the creation and continued existence of the state of Israel and as a tool to silence all critics.” Another article promoting the book claimed it “exceeded” expectations because it “demolishes once and for all the Zionist-Jewish Holocaust fable.”
The publication also attacked Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, claiming he is a “mythomaniac who, in the 1970s, transformed the word ‘holocaust’ and made it the brand name of the world’s greatest hoax: the unfounded claim by an extremist segment of World Jewry to the effect that the German government’s wartime policy of territorial transfer of Europe’s Jews out of the Reich was in actuality an ‘extermination program.’”
The Right Stuff
The Right Stuff is an anti-Semitic blog that has contributed to online harassment campaigns against Jewish people.
The website started the anti-Semitic “parenthesis meme” in which Jewish names are surrounded by parentheses -- “(((name)))” -- often to target them for online abuse on social media. The ADL has said that The Right Stuff is “a virulently anti-Semitic site” and added the parenthesis meme to its online database of hate symbols, with CEO Jonathan Greenblatt stating: “The echo symbol is the online equivalent of tagging a building with anti-Semitic graffiti or taunting someone verbally.”
According to The Right Stuff’s editors, they started the parenthesis meme because “all Jewish surnames echo throughout history.” They wrote in an email to Mic that they undertook their campaign because the meme represents “the Jews' subversion of the home [and] destruction of the family through mass-media degeneracy. The next [parenthesis] represents the destruction of the nation through mass immigration, and the outer [parenthesis] represents international Jewry and world Zionism."
The website is filled with anti-Semitic posts. A 2016 post headlined “The Jews Are Getting Lazy” cast doubt on the number of people killed in the Holocaust:
Who knows though? According to (((Bryan Singer))), the Jew who’s had more to do with these heaps than anyone else, the linear progression of time isn’t really important to the X-Men films.
In an interview with Collider he said, “Time can always be fucked with, we’ve now learned that.” Sorta like how plaques at Auschwitz will read “4 million dead Jews here because of evil Nazis” then later say something like “1.5 million dead Chosen People killed in cold blood by heartless White Supremacists just cuz” then turn into a ballpoint-pen-written diary entry (before the ballpoint pen was invented, mind you) that says “6 billion Jews were hid under the floorboards here and beaten to death with complex hammer machines that were attached to the Nazi officers’ stationary workout bikes”. Sorta like that.
A 2015 The Right Stuff post mocked Holocaust survivors and celebrated trolling a Holocaust remembrance comments section on the internet. A 2016 post headlined “How to Spot a Jew in a World without the Coincidence Detector” gave “clues” on how to spot “those shifty bastards.”
Strife hit the white nationalist movement when information was published revealing site leader Mike Enoch’s real name is Mike Peinovich and he has a Jewish wife. Salon’s Matthew Sheffield reported that Peinovich vowed to continue the site’s work and “one of his partners, Jesse ‘Seventh Son’ Dunstan, claimed that Peinovich and his wife were ‘separating.’”
Veterans Today
The misleadingly named Veterans Today is an anti-Semitic website that has published pieces claiming the Holocaust is a “lie,” “racket,” and a “Jew-on-Jew False Flag Operation.”
Veterans Today (VT) claims that it is dedicated to “providing news for members of the military and veteran community.” In reality, as the SPLC notes, while many of the contributors are veterans and the site “offers some information about veterans' benefits (lifted from the Veterans' Administration) and links to home and other loans for vets,” VT also claims “that there was a conspiracy behind 9/11 (Israel orchestrated it, in cahoots with the American government), that the American government is a puppet (of Israel), that the Holocaust never happened or was greatly exaggerated (Jews made it up to manipulate non-Jews), and, most recently, that Julian Assange, the man behind Wikileaks, is a pawn (of Israel).” The ADL states that Veterans Today (VT) is a “website that presents anti-Semitic conspiracy theories as news.”
The site has published numerous articles casting doubt on the Holocaust. The following is just a sampling of that material:
- VT published a January 23 article claiming that “While the story of Anne Frank is tragedy, the basic facts of the Frank family history fly in the face of the belief that Auschwitz was an ‘extermination factory.’”
- VT published a January 2015 article -- headlined “Holocaust: A Jew-on-Jew False Flag Operation?” -- in which the author claimed that “After literally months and months of investigation on the genesis and history of the Holocaust I have come to the reluctant conclusion that the Holocaust was in fact a (Big Zionist) Jew on (Little non-Zionist) Jew False Flag operation. The evidence is so overwhelming on this matter that no other conclusion is as tenable. The facts supporting this thesis are irrefutable.”
- VT published a September 2016 article about the Holocaust headlined “The 'six-million killed' lie—the hoax of the twentieth century.”
- VT published a September 2016 article calling the Holocaust a “lie” and claiming that “many people are beginning to realize that they have been scammed and lied to by the Holocaust establishment for decades.”
- VT published an October 2015 article headlined “The Holocaust Is a Racket.”
Correction: This piece originally referred to William Carto rather than Willis Carto. We regret the error.