AI is Activating Antisemites Left and Right - with Niall Ferguson

**Dan Senor** (0:02)
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**Niall Ferguson** (0:50)
You are listening to an Ark Media podcast.
All my efforts to help people understand why the Holocaust happened, so that we wouldn't make the mistakes again of the 1930s and 1940s as a species appear to have come to nothing. To me, there's no longer a polarization problem. We have a horseshoe problem now, which is that the far right and the far left are converging on the political spectrum, which is bending into a horseshoe. They're converging on a number of key issues of which antisemitism turns out to be the most, as it were, viral. The thing that gets the most engagement on social media is anti-Israel, anti-Zionism, anti-Jews, and that seems to be working both for the far left and the far right.

**Dan Senor** (1:48)
It's 1:30 p.m. on Monday, July 20th in New York City. It's 8:30 p.m. on Monday, July 20th in Israel, as Israelis monitor the war with Iran as it escalates.
Five months ago, historian Niall Ferguson joined us on this podcast to talk about the return of anti-Semitism, primarily on the American right. He described, for example, Tucker Carlson's role in reviving what he called, quote, all that lunacy, but predicted that with luck, the people pushing it would sink back into irrelevance. That has not happened. Now, Niall and AI researcher John-Clark Levin have published a new essay in the free press with an arresting title, The Death of History.
Its central argument is that the methods historians once used to defeat lies about the past no longer work. For example, in 2000, historians Christopher Browning and Richard Evans could enter a courtroom in the UK, meticulously dismantle David Irving's distortions of the Holocaust and outright Holocaust denial and help historian Deborah Lipstadt in her libel case. The lie made factual claims. Those claims could be investigated, exposed and disproven. Today, Holocaust denial can arrive as an eight second video, an AI generated deep fake, a teenager silently signaling an anti-Semitic conspiracy or a clip of Hitler speaking English in his own voice. Algorithms distribute that content to the people most likely to engage with it, while bots create the impression that everyone else agrees. By the time a historian reaches for the archive, the viewer has moved on to the next video. And the numbers they cite are alarming, which we'll get into. Today, we're gonna work through three questions. First, what exactly broke between the David Irving trial and the TikTok era? Was it the format, the audience, or our basic assumption that facts can defeat spectacle? Second, how much of this apparent movement is genuine belief? And how much is an illusion of consensus manufactured by bots, troll farms, and recommendation algorithms? And third, if digital identification is dangerous, biometric authentication remains flawed, and moral persuasion is only a hope, is there actually a remedy? Niall Ferguson is a Free Press columnist. He's the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, a Senior Faculty Fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center, and the author of 16 books, a couple of which we'll talk about today, which are very relevant. He also runs Greenmantle, which is an advisory firm.
John-Clark Levin is an AI researcher whose work has examined the risks, governance and geopolitical consequences of advanced artificial intelligence. John-Clark co-authored the piece in the Free Press with Niall that we will be discussing today. Together, they end their essay with four words. What fools we were. Well, if the fair fight over historical truth is over, what does the fight become now?
Niall Ferguson will join me right after this quick message.

**Daniel Hartman** (4:53)
Hi, I'm Daniel Hartman, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

**Yossi Klein Halevi** (4:57)
I'm Yossi Klein Halevi, senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute.

**Daniel Hartman** (5:01)
What's more important, to be feared by your enemies or morally true to yourself?

**Yossi Klein Halevi** (5:06)
Should Israel strive to be a nation among nations, or should it accept the fact that it is now a fortress apart?