Here's the cover for Mark Hecht's self-published book (the author of the white-supremacist article in The Vancouver Sun). His work is on invasive species and that that makes him qualified to write about immigration is fundamentally dehumanizing and racist. 1/ 
Note the title, _The Rules of Invasion: Why Europeans Naturally Invaded the New World_. Some invasions are just "natural," it seems! And, hilariously and without citation, the cover proclaims "An emulous rival to Guns, Germs, and Steel." 🤣 2/
But you really must check out the back of the book. It includes a blurb from Kirkus Books, where you can get a review for a starting fee of $425! 3/
The back is terribly written and, of course, racist, but it also misspells "scientsts" and "reserach," a bit ironic considering this species of racism loves to mobilize science and research as "neutral" in order to legitimize and "rationalize" their racism. 4/
To promote white supremacy doesn’t require rigorous analysis or knowledge of history and structures, and certainly doesn't require critical thinking or communications skills. But this Vancouver Sun article shows just how low the a bar is for getting a platform for WS ideas. 5/
Mark Hecht has a MSc specializing in, from his bio page, "the spatial and temporal distribution of flora and fauna." The only way to think that specialization is relevant to writing an op-ed on human diversity and immigration is approaching it from a racist POV to begin with. 6/
Expertise matters! I would never dream of writing an op-ed on, say, epigenetics--even though of course my work could potentially intersect with that in some ways. But the intersection in Hecht's case is fundamentally racist. 7/
The Sun mistakenly listed him as a professor, further evidence of carelessness & a low bar, but I bristle at foregrounding this distinction bc academic hierarchies aren't meritocracies. Some profs don't have PhDs, many PhDs aren't profs, & profs with PhDs can also be racist. 8/
I'm precarious non-TT faculty who also has a public platform. I know it can be hard to put yourself out there & it's not easy to build a profile. But this tells me that maybe it CAN be easy as long as you promote racism--editors won't read your work or even verify your title. 9/
This incident should make us all think seriously about the state of the media and the academy together. Both institutions have historically spoken truth to power, and both are under attack now, from within and without. 10/10
