[jonahx]

Your POV reflects your status as an intelligent, educated person capable of, and presumably accustomed to, doing free and open research. It's wildly inaccurate to assume that even a small fraction of the population is in the same boat. Indeed, if you think I'm being unfair or elitist, I recommend a few semesters teaching at a state university in the US -- your doubts will surely be erased after that.

What most people will infer from such laws is the simplest conclusion: that they reflect reality, and that denying the Holocaust is what stupid people do. Most people absorb the majority of their views from what they commonly hear and see as being acceptable. If they see enough people discussing something, no matter how objectively wrong or stupid, they will put it into the category of "subjective things that might be true," and be done with it.

Ironically, many intelligent people are blind to this, because it is so far from how they operate themselves.

[braythwayt]

See also: Fox News.