How the Most Popular Girl in School Became a Popular Holocaust Denier
- bosnie2
- Nov 17, 2023
- 5 min read
Updated: Dec 13, 2023
I went to high school in the early to mid-seventies in a small town outside of Fresno, California called Clovis. At that time, the population was just under 20,000. Now the population is over 100,000.
We had one high school and a middle school. During my time there, the school district named our football stadium, Darryl Lamonica Stadium because he was an alumni. Our school had about two thousand students in four grades.
On Friday nights in the Fall, nearly every student attended football games. I didn’t even care about football, but I went because it was a social event that brought out the town and there were cute boys.
We had rodeos and destruction derbies; a lot of my classmates lived on farms. In those days at least 80% of the students were white with the rest being mostly Hispanic and then some black kids. The “Soul Club” as it was called, had about twenty members in it.
In my freshman year I took part in my first protest.
All the girls walked out of class to the administration building to protest not being able to wear pants to school, we could only wear dresses or skirts. Our young principal, Mr. Peter Mehas, met the crowd and sent us back to our classrooms after a few speeches had been given.
On Saturday nights there might be a Kegger in a farm field. I went to only one during all of high school, in my junior year I believe. I had just taken a sip of whiskey when several police cars and a paddy wagon showed up. When I saw the lights I thought “My mother is going to kill me.” We all scrambled to get in our cars as the police parked along the exit from the farm road and we dutifully drove out of the field and on our way. I don’t know if anyone was arrested, I wasn’t interested in looking in the rear view mirror, I just wanted to get to the A&W and wash the whiskey off my breath with some cold root beer.
Looking back now, I realize I grew up in a fairly bucolic time. At least for me, high school was fun and mostly light hearted. I don’t remember being jealous of other girls or crazy in love with any boy in my high school (my sweetheart went to school in a different district).
There was one girl I really admired. She always seemed so perky and put together. I could tell she came from money by the way she dressed. It was conservative but classy. She was a “Pep Girl” and belonged to other various clubs. She seemed utterly confident in who she was and always well mannered. Her name was Audrey Pinque.
At high school reunions someone always puts up the class pictures of those who have passed away. As you can imagine, nearly fifty years later, the wall of pictures has grown substantially. About ten years ago, someone posted pictures on Facebook of the commemorative wall and I was shocked to see Audrey Pinque in that group. So I began to research her and what I found was more than I expected.
Audrey Pinque (later Jones) had taken on the pseudonym “MacKenzie Paine.” Audrey had become somewhat of a star in the subculture of Holocaust Deniers. She was incredibly well known and popular in that crowd. She even had a radio show at one point and had plans to marry a Palestinian man whom she’d met at one of their denial conferences.
Audrey was so deep into the movement that in 2001, the Anti-Defamation League included her in a report called Holocaust Denial in the Middle East: The Latest Anti-Israel Propaganda Theme. In the report, Audrey is described as working for a man named Bradley Smith.
“Nor has Smith reported on any further connections between his own Committee for Open Debate of the Holocaust (CODOH) and Arab organizations. Audrey Jones, however, has since struck out on her own. Using the pseudonym, MacKenzie Paine, she mixes Holocaust denial and anti-Israel rhetoric in essays that she sends out to her “Bully Buster” listserv, which she claims has several hundred subscribers. She frequently includes reports from a Jordanian man, Ibrahim Alloush, on his efforts to spread Holocaust denial in his native country”.
In other accounts, she mentions that while in college she had been to Dachau and she was angry that the preserved concentration camp had made her cry and she called what she had witnessed when she was younger a complete and total fabrication.
In trying to figure out why my classmate Audrey Pinque, (lower left in cheer squad), an undisputed sweetheart of Clovis High Class of 1975, had fully embraced a persona no one in my class could have ever imagined, I came across information about her miserable life living in Baja California.
It seemed she moved to Baja with her father, a disabled brother and two sons. And while she had come from a fairly wealthy and influential family, Audrey was living hand to mouth trying to support the family.
That was when she got a job working for Bradley Smith, an established Holocaust Denier. At first she was just doing clerical work, but of course Smith began to school her in Holocaust Denial and obviously she was pliable. Under Smith’s tutelage, she began to turn and eventually became popular enough she went on her own, building an internet following for her writing and became somewhat of a celebrity in that crowd. She moved back to the states and took a job as a talk host with a questionable radio station in Huntsville, Alabama.
She became so popular via the internet listening audience she was invited to speak on the subject at a conference in Palestine. She even found a Palestinian love interest and mentioned to Smith they had plans for meeting in Italy and perhaps getting married.
In 2005, Audrey was driving in a rainstorm outside of Huntsville Alabama with her father, brother and two sons. She was broadsided by another car and died. Her father, brother and two sons survived.
In latter conversations with former classmates, I discovered that Audrey had struggled with mental illness for quite some time. At the very least, she was easily influenced. Smith recounts when he met her she was fervently a Republican supporting George Bush for President. Within months she began expressing that Bush was a murderer and blood thirsty tyrant eager to kill as many Palestinian children as possible.
Her life in Mexico wasn’t easy. At one point she was living in a house with a dirt floor and no running water, taking care of her elderly father, her disabled brother and two sons. I have no clue what happened in her own family growing up, I do know her mother died fairly young.
I can only think she had a void in her life and she liked her new found attention, after all she was one of the most popular girls in our school. Everyone loved her. And that might be the key. What do you do when everything you knew that pointed to a very successful life just disintegrates? Maybe you believe someone who tells you all your troubles are caused by a certain class of people, namely the Jews. And in doing so, you find friends and a community and people who praise you and want you to be a speaker at an international conference.
All of this makes me very sad as I knew the Audrey at Clovis High with the bright smile and a huge future. The one that I loved. The one that was going to live her life as an example rather than a cautionary tale.
***Post Note: I have had some criticism that I was trying to glorify a Holocaust Denier. I am not. I believe that if Audrey had first been influenced by Scientologist's, she would have become a Scientologist. Audrey was mentally weak and pliable. It's just the "Holocaust Denier" got to her first.
Holocaust Denial in the Middle East: The Latest Anti-Israel Propaganda Theme
Bradley Smith Audrey’s Death Announcement
Comments