Food Network superstar Paula Deen is the latest celebrity to embark on an "apology tour," spending the past ten days releasing apology videos and making weepy teary appearances on TV shows begging for mercy for having used racial epithets in the presence of her employees, one of whom is currently suing her. I don't know the details of the case, and I don't want to know. The lawsuit will be decided by a court, not by me (and not by you). But I do want to say that I'm sick to death of people being forced to publicly apologize.
Perhaps it's because I was one of those people.
Two months ago, I was "outed" as having spent five years, from 1990 through 1995, making various claims, on shows like
60 Minutes,
The Phil Donahue Show,
48 Hours, and M
ontel Williams, regarding the Auschwitz camp and its role and function during the Holocaust. What I said was controversial, but my views were based on what I perceived to be the facts. I never uttered a single word that was in any way hateful or pro-Nazi, because I am the exact opposite of those things.
After a large monetary bounty was put on my head by a violent extremist group, I changed my name, and spent the last eighteen years as David Stein. I built a very successful GOP event-organizing operation, and my political writing was carried by every major conservative site on the 'net, from
FrontPageMag to
Commentary and
The Weekly Standard, from the Breitbart sites to
The Daily Caller and
HotAir, from
The Blaze to
The Washington Times and OReilly.com, and on shows including Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the Larry Elder Show (where I had become an occasional guest...he and I were even working on a documentary film together).