Matthew's comments are not inconsistent, since he noted that David Cole
has said he never denied the Holocaust, whereas Matthew believes that this recent statement is not sincere. Whether or not that belief is correct wouldn't necessarily make Matthew's remarks inconsistent.
The issue of sincerity is the crucial point both to Matthew's remarks and to the 'truth' of the matter. This is because in the early 1990s David Cole gave the impression that he was a card-carrying revisionist, appearing on TV shows with Bradley Smith, and making videos plus little essays which took a revisionist line. The small print is that Cole's 'questions' were posed as questions rather than as definitive statements, leaving him the very small 'out' that he may in fact never have actually come out and said 'there were no gas chambers', even though this was the common-sense inference of Cole's JAQ-off routine.
The gap between public statements and private beliefs, which is what Matthew noted, is precisely the problem here for revisionists, since Cole disassociated himself from the revisionist movement in 1998 before he disappeared and reinvented himself, and made various comments about gas chambers and the Holocaust which distanced himself from his apparent positions five years earlier. See
here for his statement.
Ever since then, revisionists have been consoling themselves with the idea that Cole recanted only due to pressure and threats from the Jewish Defense League and was 'really' still one of them; in practice Cole was evidently busy being a Republican Party activist under a new name and also made videos about the Holocaust without any revisionist spin.
After David Stein was outed last year as David Cole, he was interviewed by
The Guardian and said things which can be read in several ways, especially this quote: "The best guess is yes, there were gas chambers... But there is still a lot of murkiness about the camps. I haven't changed my views. But I regret I didn't have the facility with language that I have now. I was just a kid."
Thus in 2013 he confirmed what he said in 1998, which contradicts somewhat his apparent position in 1993, but in reality was probably consistent with the JAQ-off position he originally took.
At least some of his questions were actually answered, and this evidently led him to state in 1998 and 2013 that yes, gas chambers were used to kill Jews. It's worth noting that already by 1995, Cole was reacting badly to the dogmatism of hardcore Holocaust deniers like Robert Faurisson, who refused to accept that there was good evidence of the use of a gas chamber at Natzweiler-Struthof and conducted himself somewhat dishonestly when revisionists including Cole went on a 'field trip' there. See
here for the details. (The irony with this is that it was Faurisson's attitude to Natzweiler that gave Jean-Claude Pressac, who at the time was leaning in a revisionist direction, the first warning signs that Faurisson was not operating in an honest fashion. So the 'movement' lost two activists in part because of the same issue.)
Therefore, quite what Cole believes has been obfuscated from both sides - revisionists want to reclaim him as 'one of them' whereas many commentators will focus on recent remarks like 'I haven't changed my views' and believe that Cole remains 'a denier', with both sides ignoring the fact that Cole said in 2013 the same thing he said in 1998, namely that he thought gas chambers were used in the Holocaust.
As for the ending of his career as a political activist, politics is largely about perception, rightly or wrongly. In other professions it wouldn't necessarily be an issue or would not get traction. Imagine if Stein/Cole had retrained as a teacher and it came out in the same way, a vengeful girlfriend. Obviously, that would be an act of spite, as it was in reality, but the vengeful girlfriend would find it difficult to persuade a school board to get Stein/Cole fired when this would conflict with First Amendment rights and likely involve complicated disciplinary hearings that Cole could easily have survived. In the event that the girlfriend tried to go to the local or national media and say 'hey, there's a schoolteacher here who used to pal around with deniers', then Stein/Cole could easily say forthrightly that his views had changed, and refer to the 1998 statement, meaning the fuss would be over. Because Stein/Cole was blogging and palling around with Hollywood stars, that made it
news. Compared to finding out that Ron Paul employed staffers who wrote racist articles, this wasn't much of a political scandal, but it did end whatever utility Stein might have had for Republicans in California.
