Thread by @studentactivism

One more quick thing about that NYT profile of Hovater. Remember the podcast the author mentions? Well, I listened to a couple of episodes.

Here's the sole quote from the podcast that appears in the piece. It's ... not representative of the show's content.

Heimbach does most of the talking on the podcast. Hovater is mostly his sidekick and foil. I never heard them disagree. Here's what I did hear…

Heimbach is obsessed with Jews, and with supposed Jewish domination of society. He uses the phrase "the Jew" a lot.

He's a big fan of Hitler. He drops quotes multiple times into both episodes, usually banal ones. "As Adolf Hitler says..."

Both of them are aggressively hostile toward gays and feminists, aspects of their bigotry that are never mentioned in the Times piece.

It's clear that they're hoping for and working toward a Nazi takeover of the US. Heimbach uses the term "Weimerica" to describe the US today.

The themes of the podcast (mostly) aren't absent from the piece. They are, however, muted in the story. Alluded to rather than illustrated.

What emerges in the podcast, and what IS absent from the story, is a clear sense of Heimbach and Hovater's organizing project, and their political vision.

As I said in my previous thread, these guys aren't "Nazi sympathizers," as the article put it. They're Nazis. They're Nazis. Nazis organizing other Nazis.

Let's look at what the NYT says about the Traditionalist Worker Party, which Heimbach and Hovater co-founded.

1. It's "one of the extreme right-wing groups that marched in Charlottesville, Va., in August, and again at a 'White Lives Matter' rally last month in Tennessee."

2. Its "stated mission is to 'fight for the interests of White Americans.'"

3. Though the ADL considers it a white supremacist group, "its leaders claim to oppose racism."

4. It sells swastika armbands on its website, with a vaguely jokey description.

5. According to Hovater, "it has held food and school-supply drives in Appalachia."

That's it. That's all we learn about the TWP in the Times.

You know what would have been good? "Its leaders repudiate Jews, feminists, gays, and immigrants, and are plotting to bring a Nazi regime to power in the United States."

I'd encourage you again to read this thread, which covers the TWP angle in a way that resonates with what I've written here:

And again, isn't about "pushing back" against Hovater, or saying "racists are bad." It's about ACCURATELY DESCRIBING THE SUBJECT OF YOUR PROFILE.

These people are engaging in, and fomenting, violence in service of Nazism. You'd never know that from reading the Times.

I learned ten times as much about Hovater and Heimbach from listening to two episodes of their stupid podcast than I did from reading the Times profile. That's a scandal.

Yes, it's important to show the ways that neo-Nazi activist leaders are like regular white folks. It's also important to show how they're different.

If you're going to write about these people, you have to do both. Either on its own is flat, two-dimensional.

And the more I think about it, the more I think that the "just like us" impulse was WHY the Times writer couldn't accurately depict his subject.

"He's a white nationalist, but he's just like us" works, narratively. "He's obsessively committed to building a Nazi America, but he's just like us" doesn't.

Most folks aren't ranting on podcasts about The Jew. Most folks don't read Goebbels. Most folks don't publicly self-identify as Nazis.

That stuff is WEIRD. But that sense of weirdness, of commitment to subculture, to intentional social alienation, is absent from the piece.

You wouldn't write a piece about a furry, a Scrabble pro, or a bottlecap collector without a luxuriant narrative dive into The Scene. Why do it with a Nazi?