Michael A Hoffman II

Biography

Hoffman was born to a Catholic family in 1957 in Geneva, New York. His father, the chief of physical therapy at Clifton Springs Hospital, was German-American. His mother was Italian-American. According to biographical information on the back cover of his book Judaism Discovered, Hoffman studied at the State University of New York at Oswego under Dr. Richard Funk and Dr. Faiz Abu-Jaber, father of Diana Abu-Jaber.

Hoffman was reportedly taught at an early age about William Morgan, whose disappearance in 1826 resulted in the formation of the Anti-Masonic Party. He said that he learned from his maternal grandfather that elections in the United States were rigged by organized crime. From this, Hoffman was said to have deduced that "[n]othing is as it seems to be," which in turn led to a "life long vocation, researching the subterranean workings of the occult cryptocracy's orchestration of American history". He has worked on the projects of neo-Nazi Tom Metzger and of the Holocaust deniers Willis Carto, David Irving, Ernst Zündel, and Herman Otten. He has served as Assistant Director of the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust denial organization. He has also edited the work of alternative publisher Adam Parfrey.

Hoffman claims to have operated an organic farm and to have lived among the Amish for several years. In 1995, Hoffman moved with his family to Idaho. There, he hoped to establish a museum that would detail the "Communist holocaust against Christians" (i.e., the persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union), "the holocaust against the Germans", (i.e., the bombing of Dresden and other major German cities in World War II), and the "Holocaust against Japan" (i.e., the incineration of Tokyo and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

Economics

Hoffman is the author of Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not (2013). He argues that Jewish money-lenders have been scapegoated by gentile and Christian usurers in order to deflect attention from Renaissance Roman Catholic and late Protestant usury banking.

Holocaust

Hoffman has been called a Holocaust denier by some sources such as Michael Barkun of Syracuse University. Hoffman's one full-length work on the topic is The Great Holocaust Trial: The Landmark Battle for the Right to Doubt the West's Most Sacred Relic. This book, published in 1985, rather than elaborating a Holocaust denial thesis itself, provides a sympathetic account of the 1980s Canadian trials of Ernst Zündel. At the time, Zündel was required to appear before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal for "spreading false news", by distributing the Holocaust-denying pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die? in Canada. Hoffman's book argues that Holocaust denial material should be completely legal to publish.

For a time Hoffman was the assistant director of the Institute for Historical Review; although this organisation publishes an array of different books, it is best known for its Holocaust denial works. Hoffman has been criticised by Stephen A. Atkins, an academic from Texas A&M University Libraries who specialised in extremism and terrorism. In his 2009 book, Holocaust Denial as an International Movement, Atkins claimed that Hoffman's newsletter Revisionist History promotes Holocaust denial. Atkins also claimed in this work that Hoffman has denied the existence of the gas chambers, advanced antisemitic conspiracy theories, and contended that "the real Holocaust of World War II was deaths caused by the Allies." In the 1990s, Hoffman propagated his views online, via newsgroups.

Cryptocracy

Hoffman is the author of Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare which outlines his conspiracy theory of a shadow government or "cryptocracy" that gains power through manipulation of symbols and twilight language. Examples of such "psychodramas," in Hoffman's view, include Route 66 (which connects various centers of occult significance), and the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in which Hoffman sees ritualistic elements. The theory of masonic symbolism in the assassination of President Kennedy was first articulated by James Shelby Downard, with whom Hoffman co-authored King/Kill-33 which became the inspiration for a song by Marilyn Manson.

Hoffman also states that the gnosis of this ruling cabal is slowly being revealed through movies such as They Live and The Matrix and other forms of symbolic and subliminal communication. Hoffman has appeared on the Alex Jones radio show to discuss his theories. In a 2002 lecture in Sandpoint, Idaho, Hoffman analyzed the 9/11 terror attack in terms of human alchemy and psychological warfare

More important is his understanding of the tenets of mind control, and the fallacy that exposure of the methods of a criminal undertaking represents an important step "toward overthrowing the power of the cryptocracy." The perpetrators typically let the truth emerge—The Revelation of the Method—strengthening their hold on the subject population.

Criticism of Judaism

Following on from the work of earlier Christian polemicists, such as Johann Andreas Eisenmenger and Alexander McCaul, Hoffman is a critic of the religion of Orthodox Judaism and has learned to read Hebrew as part of his research. In particular, Hoffman's works have taken aim at the Babylonian Talmud, arguing that the Judaism of today is not the religion of the Old Testament but that the Talmud is instead its basis. He has argued that Orthodox Judaism is a racist, supremacist creed. His two works about Judaism are Judaism's Strange Gods and Judaism Discovered: A Study of the Anti-Biblical Religion of Racism, Self-Worship, Superstition and Deceit.

Hoffman claims that the Talmud itself is anti-semitic in its oppressive micro-management of Jewish lives. In writing intended for Jewish readers he stated, "Our mission is your salvation and freedom from the shackles of Talmudic evil and oppression. With regard to you, our attitude is one of pidyon shevuyim.

Hoffman believes that most Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from the Biblical patriarchs, but from the Khazars. Although today, Hoffman avoids using the term Jewish or Jews, preferring instead the term "Judaics", he has previously wrote hyperbolically of Jews; for instance Hoffman described the bringing of the libel charges in the case of Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt as "another revisionist weed pushing itself up through hairline cracks in the Jewish concrete that covers our planet." According to Mattias Gardell: "Antisemitism is prominent... in the worldview of Michael Hoffman II".

Slavery

Hoffman is also the author of They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold Story of Enslavement of Whites in Early America. According to Derrick Jensen, Hoffman is "overtly racist" and "attempts to make the case that the enslavement of whites by commercial interests in Britain and the Americas was worse than the enslavement and genocide of Africans... perpetrated by those same interests." Jensen said "Hoffman's analysis is seriously flawed" but that "his scholarship is impressive, and the story he tells is both interesting and horrifying". In 2015, Liam Hogan writing in the British publication openDemocracy criticized Hoffman's scholarship in his essay "Irish Slaves - The Convenient Myth".

Publications

Hoffman is the author of these books:

Hoffman has also written the introductions for modern reprints, which he also published, of:

Hoffman has written articles for the UK-based magazine Fortean Times, as well as the Lutheran newspaper Christian News of New Haven, MO, which is published by Otten. He has claimed to have worked as a reporter for the Albany, New York, bureau of the Associated Press. His principal research interests are historical revisionism, the alleged occult roots of Freemasonry, the command ideology of the Cryptocracy, Fortean phenomena, and the sacred texts of Orthodox Judaism.

He also wrote the script for the 1989 publication, Tales of the Holohoax which landed Simon Sheppard in jail.