Imagine a profile like this for an antifa activist. For a street medic. For a BLM organizer. nytimes.com/2017/11/25/us/…
Aside from the existence of the article itself, let's go through and check out all the times the piece soft-pedals its subject matter.
1. The title: "The Nazi Sympathizer Next Door." "The Nazi Next Door" is equally accurate, and way punchier.
2. "the bigot he surely is." Strike the "surely."
3. The Traditionalist Worker Party is avowedly racist and antisemitic, not merely "extreme right-wing."
4. The TWP didn't just "march" in Charlottesville. They beat people up.
5. "Its leaders claim to oppose racism." Oh, come the fuck on. Stop it.
6. "Matthew Heimbach, the leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party" (who physically attacked a black woman at a Trump rally last year).
7. "fascist activist." Good. But maybe use the word before the seventeenth graf?
8. "He experienced no scarring racial episodes." Scarring racial episodes? Really? Really?
9. "He insists he is not racist." As my kid would say, "Is he, though?" (He is.)
10. "White nationalism." This phrase, or "white nationalist," is used five times in the article. Not once is its subject described as a Nazi, a racist, an antisemite, or a white supremacist.
11. "4chan, the online message board and alt-right breeding ground." Get your thesaurus out. You can do better.
12. "The widely accepted estimate that six million Jews died in the Holocaust." How about "historical consensus"? Let's go with "historical consensus."
13. Lots of discussion of Hovater's views. No indication that the writer ever asked him explicitly about white supremacist ideology.
14. More discussion of Heimbach, who has publicly defended slavery, without a mention of that fact.
15. "Books about Mussolini and Hitler." Which books? A photo published with the article makes clear that several are pro-Nazi. Say so.
16. "The pasta was ready." You know what? I give up. Lemon out.
Okay, so here's the thing. These guys are racists. To be a Nazi, as the article demonstrates that they are, is to be a racist.
Their denial that they're racists is an inch deep. Hovater is a Daily Stormer contributor, for Christ's sake.
As I wrote a few years ago—in a blogpost about one of Heimbach's heroes—it's not just okay to call racists racist. It's obligatory. studentactivism.net/2012/09/08/its…
They're racist and they're violent. If you're not prepared to say so, don't write about them, because you're not prepared to tell the truth.
Something else on that last tweet: The author of the Times piece says he never really figured out what made his subject tick. nytimes.com/2017/11/25/ins…
"What makes a man start fires?" he asks. But to figure out why a man starts fires, you have to first acknowledge that he's an arsonist.
There's no reckoning with the violence of the movement in which Hovater is embedded in the piece. It's entirely absent.
If the author asked Hovater specific probing questions about his racial views, he never says so in either piece.
It's as if he's embarrassed to ask Hovater whether he thinks black people are inferior to white people, or whether Kristallnacht was wrong.
To even ask such a question is a violation of social decorum, so the reporter never explicates Hovater's views.
If you ask the question, he may lie. But if you never ask the question, you erase the possibility of answering it.
