The New York Times Can't Figure Out Where Nazis Come From In 2017. Pepe Has An Answer.

My Thanksgiving weekend ended on a strange note: with me sitting on the couch next to my family and a crackling fire, interviewing a white nationalist over Facebook Messenger.

I reached out after the New York Times published its controversial profile of Tony Hovater — a twenty-something Ohio Nazi sympathizer/White Nationalist/Alt-Righter. The piece was roundly criticized as a soft-focus profile but my issue with it is that it largely ignored the driving force behind the energized far-right movement: the internet. I wanted to know more about how the internet influenced Hovater's politics (a subject that wasn't really addressed in the piece). 

In a follow-up to the piece, Times National Editor Marc Lacey attempted to defend the good-faith reporting and framing behind the profile. "The point of the story," he writes, "was not to normalize anything but to describe the degree to which hate and extremism have become far more normal in American life than many of us want to think." It's a totally valid argument and — if we're being honest — more people need to come to terms with the fact that those with extreme politics need to be covered and not sensationalized. 

But nothing quite explains "the degree to which hate and extremism have become far more normal in American life than many of us want to think" than the rise of an online ecosystem that allows for the most abhorrent views to find not just an audience but a supportive community. As one person put it perfectly on Twitter today: "the internet is the vascular system that makes it go."

This has been reinforced for me in my reporting on the pro-Trump media and online political extremism over the past 18 months. During a Trump meet-up this spring one 4channer who's been a devotee of the message boards for a decade recounted his radicalization experience to me with an eerie sense of perspective. That years of shitposting for fun slowly crystallized into an ideology. Which is not to say he was "red-pilled" by dumb memes, but that 4chan's /pol/ message board filled a sort of professorial role for him. It provided him with a number of convincing arguments and a sort of syllabus to explore the ideas more. After a while, he said told me that the /pol/ rhetoric was just "the way I started to see the world. I couldn't unlearn it," he told me. He described the whole process as "kind of tragic, when you think about it."

There are lots of ways to cover the far-right (and the far left, too!). My colleague Joe Bernstein's tactic has been to expose the communications and connections — financial and otherwise — that the movement would like to keep secret (arguably the best way). And there are ways to interrogate Nazis and extremists of all kinds to share their views in ways that expose holes in their logic and inform readers of all the insidious ways hate is manifest and spread. But no matter the tactic, there's nothing more vital than the context. And in 2017, there's no way to talk adequately about hate without interrogating the role that the web and its myriad multi-billion dollar platforms play.

OK, so that's a lot of wind-up. Here's the piece, which I hope you'll read and share. It's got some looks at Hovater's internet presence and his thoughts on what I've written above. As always, thanks for reading and feel free to send me your comments, etc. And if you know anyone who'd like to read this, forward them or — hell — sign them up! Hope your Thanksgiving was restful and didn't involve any fireside interviews with political extremists.

The piece: The New York Times Can't Figure Out Where Nazis Come From In 2017. Pepe Has An Answer.