The Other McCain

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Politico ‘Journalist’ Resigns After Doxing Trump Supporter Richard Spencer

Posted on | November 23, 2016 | 1 Comment

Our Neutral Objective Media:

National editor at Politico Michael Hirsh resigned after publishing the home addresses of alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer Tuesday morning and advocating for serious violence.
Politico confirmed his resignation following requests for comment from The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Stop whining about Richard B. Spencer, Nazi, and exercise your rights as decent Americans,” Hirsh wrote in a public Facebook post. “Here are his two addresses.” . . .
“These posts were clearly outside the bounds of acceptable discourse, and POLITICO editors regard them as a serious lapse of newsroom standards,” Politico Editor-In-Chief John Harris and Editor Carrie Budoff Brown told TheDCNF. “They crossed a line in ways that the publication will not defend, and editors are taking steps to ensure that such a lapse does not occur again.”
While Hirsh’s initial post could have been charitably interpreted to imply advocacy of a non-violent protest outside of Spencer’s home or other similar non-violent actions, a subsequent question and answer clarified Hirsh’s intentions.
“Completely agree we should mobilize against his hateful ideas, but what does knowing his home addresses do?” one Facebook user asked Hirsh. “Send a letter? Confront him in person? . . .”
Hirsh responded in an unhinged manner: “I wasn’t thinking of a fucking letter, Doug. He lives part of the time next door to me in Arlington. Our grandfathers brought baseball bats to Bund meetings. Want to join me?”

(Via Memeorandum.) Full disclosure: I’ve known Richard Spencer since 2007, when he and I participated in a panel discussion about the Duke lacrosse case, and he published some of my columns in 2009 when he was editor at Taki’s Magazine. Richard enjoyed some of my gonzo stuff, and I was hate-listed by the SPLC before being hate-listed by the SPLC was cool, so we had that in common.

Any conservative who is willing to think outside the box — to speculate about root causes of our cultural decay — is apt to attract this kind of controversy, and I sometimes have to remind myself that I’m neither an activist nor an “intellectual,” but merely a journalist. The difference between me and most conservative journalists is that I was a journalist before I was a conservative. Earning my living as a reporter and editor covering local news for small-town Georgia newspapers wasn’t about ideology or partisan politics, it was about facts, and that experience gave me a point of view that is different from most others.

By “different,” I don’t mean better, just . . . different. And so when other journalists start freaking out over someone like Richard Spencer, it amuses me. People have freaked out over me, after all, and knowing that I’m basically harmless, I always figure that whoever is this week’s Scary Right-Wing Personality is less scary than his reputation would suggest. This is doubly true when I actually know the person who is at the center of the firestorm of controversy. As I have often said, Richard Spencer is a young guy who has read too much Nietzsche. He is highly intelligent and, because he was a graduate student at Duke during the carnival of hate and lies surround the false accusation of rape against members of the university’s lacrosse team, Richard saw the academic Left at its absolute worst. He reacted harshly against this, which hardened his commitment to a sort of mirror-reverse of the “By Any Means Necessary” mentality that prevails on the Left. Is Richard Spencer wrong to think this way?

That’s not really a question I’d care to examine. Instead, I think we ought to ask what facts — what objective reality — Richard Spencer has perceived that led him to adopt his controversial opinions. He is highly intelligent, as I say, and it is therefore a mistake to dismiss him as an ignorant bigot, or to react to him as a neo-Nazi cartoon stereotype.

For years, I have covered the “extremist fringe” of politics, both Left and Right. This was what attracted my attention to radical feminism, after all, and when you have gay Marxists protesting Donald Trump, it is wrong to suppose the Right has a monopoly on “extremist fringe” politics.

We need more balance in journalism — more honesty, more facts, more truth. We are not going to get that from the liberal media, and so we must roll up our sleeves and continue doing it ourselves. Selah.



 

Category: Media Bias, Racism

Comments

One Response to “Politico ‘Journalist’ Resigns After Doxing Trump Supporter Richard Spencer”

  1. YUGE Mistakes? | Regular Right Guy
    November 23rd, 2016 @ 2:25 pm

    […] Politico ‘Journalist’ Resigns After Doxing Trump Supporter Richard Spencer […]