Suddenly, simultaneously, all White House doors burst open and uniformed officers rush out bearing either (a) submachine guns, with which they open fire, slaughtering the children of America’s leading families, or (b) bottles of mineral water, slices of the First Lady’s birthday cake and an invitation to join the President that evening on the White House lawn for a barbecue and serious discussion.

In 1989, fourteen million Americans, six percent of the population were in college. That year two million Chinese kids, 0.2% of the population—the first postwar generation whose education was uninterrupted—an entire generation of its future leaders. The idea that any elite—let alone the child-worshipping Chinese—would murder its own children for demonstrating peacefully over legitimate grievances is even sillier than the notion that they were demonstrating about democracy. They were demonstrating about money and sex. The only ‘democracy’ they wanted was the big character democracy they had learned under Mao: hence the re-appearance of big character posters—not seen since the government de-revolutionized the Cultural Revolution twenty years earlier. Mao had told them what to do when an incompetent government would force them to bear the burdens of its incompetence and corruption: bring out the Big Character Posters. He’d even tried to get big postering constitutionally guaranteed.

Apparently, the libertarians grouped around Reason had successfully been making political inroads into Silicon Valley’s enormously wealthy technology industry, and had now organized a major conference in San Francisco to gather together their supporters. Their left-leaning rivals decided to nip that project in the bud by highlighting some of the more unsavory ideological positions that mainstream libertarian leaders had once regularly espoused. Perhaps Ron Paul and other libertarians might oppose overseas wars and drug laws, and support cutting taxes and regulations, but they and their Republican Party allies were unspeakably vile on all sorts of other issues, and all “good thinkers” should therefore stay very far away.

The debate began in rather mundane fashion with an article by Ames entitled “Homophobia, Racism, and the Kochs” denouncing Reason for sharing a platform with a high-ranking Republican Congresswoman of Christian conservative views, as well as the magazine’s reliance upon Koch funding and its alleged support for Apartheid South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s. The response by the Reason editor seemed quite persuasive, and he rightfully dismissed the guilt-by-association attacks. He also outlined the gross errors and omissions in the charges regarding South Africa, and ridiculed Ames as a notoriously error-prone “conspiracy theorist.” Surely few outsiders would have paid any attention to such a typical exchange of mudslinging between rival ideological camps.

But then things took a very different turn, and a week later Ames returned with a 5,000 word article bearing a title sure to grab attention: “Holocaust Denial.” He claimed that in 1976 Reason had published an entire special issue devoted to that explosive topic.

Surely everyone on the Internet has encountered numerous instances of Holocaust Denial over the years, but for a respectable magazine to have allotted a full issue to promoting that doctrine was something else entirely. For decades, Hollywood has sanctified the Holocaust, and in our deeply secular society accusations of Holocaust Denial are a bit like shouting “Witch!” in Old Salem or leveling accusations of Trotskyism in the Court of the Red Czar. Progressive Sam Seder’s Majority Report radio show devoted a full half-hour segment to the charges against Reason, and Googling “Reason Magazine”+”Holocaust Denial” today yields thousands of hits. This substantial explosion of Internet controversy was what caught my own attention at the time.