Comedian unwraps Holocaust denial with apparel line

When comedian Nathan Fielder found out that his favorite jacket company paid postmortem tribute to a known anti-Semite and Holocaust revisionist in one of their catalogs over a decade ago, he did what any nice Jewish comedian would do: he opened up a competing jacket company.

“Although many disagreed with his views, he has to be admired, however grudgingly, for his lions [sic] courage in asserting and defending the rights of free opinion and free speech in these wimpy, politically correct times,” read the obituary for the late columnist Doug Collins.

The homage was a disappointing find for Fielder, who can been seen wearing his Taiga jacket in many episodes of his Comedy Central series “Nathan for You.”

“Not only could I not trust Taiga anymore, I couldn’t trust any outdoor apparel company to know their beliefs so I thought it would be safest, if I could be wearing a jacket on TV, to start my own company,” Fielder told Canada’s Global News.

According to the Summit Ice website, “Mr. Fielder immediately recognized a need in the marketplace for an outdoor apparel company that openly promoted the true story of the Holocaust.”

All Summit Ice profits go to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Center, “to further its mission to promote human rights, social justice and genocide awareness through education and remembrance of the Holocaust,” says the website.

This past Sunday marked the first brick and mortar pop-up of Fielder’s line. The one-day-only sale took place in the comedian’s hometown of Vancouver, a “world-class city,” as Fielder described it to the Global News.

“I don’t know if you know, but Vancouver hosted the Olympics in 2010, so it’s a very popular city,” he said.

The pop-up was appropriately located next door to a Taiga outlet, a fact made all the more awkward due to the special promotion the company ran, which entailed trading in any Taiga jacket for a free Summit Ice one along with a pin reading “Deny Nothing.”

‘Any Taiga jackets collected will be disposed of in a manner deemed appropriate by Mr. Fielder’

“We’re trying to take all the Taiga jackets off the market in Vancouver,” Fielder told CBCNews.

A press release on the Summit Ice website said that “any Taiga jackets collected will be disposed of in a manner deemed appropriate by Mr. Fielder.”

Fielder, who holds a business degree from University of Victoria, famously presents a variety of half-baked ideas in the hopes of “helping” struggling local businesses on his show “Nathan for You.”

But with celebrities increasingly seen sporting his Summit Ice gear, including fellow Vancouver native Seth Rogen, this venture is anything but a joke for Fielder. CBCNews reported Summit Ice as having half a million dollars in sales to date.

In addition to all of the pop-up’s proceeds going to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Center as usual, on Sunday Fielder pledged an additional $150,000 to the organization.