We mere bloggers have seen this before, and are able to see through it fairly easily. It’s the phenomenon of Just Asking Questions, also known as JAQing off, in which an interlocutor dodges any effort to state what they really think by the game of only asking questions, questions that they already know the answer to, simply to troll for attention and stir up opposition. It’s an extremely common tactic, one that takes an act of will to cut short. The only way you can win is to not play the game.

So why aren’t experienced, professional journalists, like the gang at the prestigious publication The Atlantic, able to recognize the problem? Maybe it’s because they like JAQing off themselves, as they do in this dreadful article, What does Tucker Carlson believe?. Is that even an interesting or useful question? We know what Tucker Carlson does, does it matter what he thinks in his heart of hearts? So we get nonsense like this:

The subtext of these conversations is the question of whether Carlson is, as Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently claimed, a “white supremacist sympathizer.” For a time, the question could be written off as unserious, a voguish desire to ascribe racism to anyone who might not support increased immigration. But in recent years, Carlson and some of his guests have lent more and more plausibility to the label. On August 6, for example, days after a white gunman killed 22 people in El Paso, Texas, motivated by a fear of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” Carlson took to his program to argue that white supremacy was “not a real problem in America,” but rather a “hoax” drummed up by Democrats.

It is not a question whether he is a “white supremacist sympathizer.” We know that he is. Watch his show, and as shown above, it’s a parade of white nationalist talking points. Right there, the writer has answered the question…so why even pretend it’s an issue that we need to talk about? Because that’s Carlson stock in trade, the racist tirade, followed by the knitted brows and quizzical expression that just makes him look stupid, as if he’s JAQing off right there, “Why are you accusing me of being racist?”

At least The New Republic sees through the facade.

It all comes back to the lie of objectivity in journalism—the idea that reporters and editors are not themselves actual people with beliefs and bias. If an outlet takes a stand and dares to say, for instance, that President Donald Trump is a racist, it runs the risk of appearing “biased”—or worse still, alienating the faction of its wealthy conservative readership with sympathetic views of the administration. Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet exemplified this when he deflected a simple question about whether Trump is racist, responding in that special Timesian speak to say, “I’m not in [Trump’s] head enough to know whether he says [racist comments] because he wants to stoke his base.”

Then, to make a straightforward enough statement—that Tucker Carlson is a racist, say—is to issue a grave moral ruling, rather than to simply describe what is plain to see. And so for the purpose of self-preservation, and grinding against the core tenets of journalism, a facade must be crafted, one that requires a very specific kind of reporter and a very specific environment of praise and accolade in political journalism.

Reporters who carry out this grimy task are actively rewarded by the editors who hold the keys to power at major national publications. Shortly after the Carlson piece dropped, Yoni Appelbaum, a senior editor at The Atlantic, deemed it “fabulous” and doted on Plott [the author of the Atlantic piece] as one of the industry’s “great profile writers.” CNN’s media critic lauded it as “very good.” John Hendrickson, an Atlantic senior editor, wrote that the piece included “the greatest kicker I’ve read all year.” Bill Scher, contributing editor at Politico, called the piece “exceptional.”

Amazing. The metaphor of masturbation works on so many levels when looking at modern American journalism — it’s a circle jerk of JAQing off, where any effort to expose the reality of what’s happening in the media is deflected with a question and a pretense that one is thinking very hard and very deeply about a plain and simple fact.

Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump are racists.

But what does it mean to be a racist? How can we truly know what is in men’s hearts? Sure, they do and say racist things, but have you considered the possibility that it’s merely economic insecurity? Whether they are actually racists is a profound and important question worth writing at length about, but in the end, how can we really be sure? I wonder how many articles I can churn out asking questions?

Oh, shut the fuck up, wankers.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had a Confederate monument called “Silent Sam”. It needed to go. They needed a solution to allow “the University to focus on its core educational mission”. So they came up with an amazing plan.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans, one of those groups that idolizes past treachery, wanted the statue. It seems to me that the obvious solution would be to simply sell it to a private organization like that so that they would haul it away and take on the guilt and obligation. The UNC Board of Governors does not think that way, and had an alternative plan.

They would pay the SCV millions of dollars to take possession of the statue that they wanted.

The state’s monuments law prevents the removal of a public statue but there is an exemption for private ownership. The SCV arranged to acquire all property rights of the monument from the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). We reached an agreement with the SCV to settle the threatened litigation with the following terms:

• The SCV owns the monument;
• The monument will be transferred to the SCV;
• The UNC System and the Board of Governors will fund a separate charitable trust administered by a neutral, independent trustee in the amount of $2.5 million; the funds will come from interest on the university endowment fund, not tax dollars or tuition and fees.
• The separate charitable trust is to be used only for the preservation of the monument, as determined by the trustee; and
• The monument cannot be located in any of the 14 counties currently containing a UNC System constituent institution.

We also agreed that the SCV would sign a separate agreement limiting its ability to display flags and banners on university campuses, in exchange for a payment of $74,999. This agreement addressed the possibility that the consent order might not be approved, in which case the SCV agreed that it would not sponsor events on any of our campuses for five years.

Wow. That’s an interesting way to get rid of something. I have an alternative: pay me half that amount, $1.25 million, to take it on. Since I am in a Yankee state, we could call it spoils of war. I’d install it in my front yard and spit on it every day as I walked to and from work, which is all it deserves.

Or it could just be melted down and recast in a more appropriate form.

Or you could do as Greg Doucette has done, and sue the SCV for $2.5 million, to be turned into a scholarship fund for African-American students.

Man. I wish I was at a university that was so rich they could afford to pay off white nationalists to protect their “educational mission”, so we could jump down their throats and instead force them to pay for, you know, education instead. UNC just has funny priorities.

You know he’s not because he says he’s not.

That’s how racism works, you know: if you think a nation founded on black slavery, and another nation that carried out brutal ethnic cleansing, are just peachy, saying the magic words “I am not a racist” absolves you of all blame. You can support policies that promote white supremacy, you can put up Nazi flags like they’re Christmas decorations, you can intentionally put up pallets painted with Confederate symbols and point them at a minority-majority school, but as long as you deny that you’re a racist, you’re safe.

For bonus points, you can get really irate if someone accuses you of being a racist as long as you insist you’re not a racist, and then you can turn it around and accuse them of being racist against white people. What’s really neat-o is that if they then say “I am not racist!” you can smirk knowingly, because you know that everyone who says that is lying.

Words are magic!

Make no bones about it, Quillette is an outrageously racist site. Here’s an article that compiles numerous examples of its biases.

Lehmann has said she started Quillette to counter what she calls “blank slate fundamentalism,” or the proposition that educational outcomes, career success, capacity for ethics, and economic class are determined more by environmental factors than genetic ones. That is to say, she believes that social status, morality or immorality, and, yes, income itself are all genetically based.

Lehmann told Politico that Quillette’s goal is “to broaden the Overton window”—that is to say, expand the limits of acceptable discourse. She didn’t stipulate that she wants these limits broadened only to the right, but she didn’t have to. Writing in Quillette, Lehmann said the Overton window should be shifted so that people can more openly denounce “immigration,” for example by trumpeting the Muslim heritage of sex-crime suspects.

The real question, though, is why so-called liberals support the site, or even read it. The answer to that is that it exploits the same cracks that were exploited by the right wing to fracture the atheist movement: anti-feminism, anti-Islam, anti-trans bigotry. The people who are otherwise horrified by racism will cheerfully overlook the glaringly illiberal perspective of the site to join in #metoo-, Islam-, or trans-bashing.

Perhaps the most important weapon Quillette uses is applying pressure on a few specific fault lines that divide liberal audiences, such as the MeToo movement. Quillette has recruited liberal men accused of sexual harassment or assault, like Elliott, and empowered them as experts on feminism. In his first Quillette piece, Elliott blasted the desire to “believe women,” and blamed one accuser for his poor book sales and his television agent’s not returning his calls. Elliott has since written three more pieces for the magazine and become one of its strongest partisans on Twitter, joking about a “Quillette Hot American Summer” and frequently retweeting the magazine’s diatribes against feminism. “Wow, Quillette has been killing it recently,” he said in one tweet.

Despite his public defense of the magazine, Elliott told me, “People say, ‘Oh they published this or that,’ and I don’t know what they’re talking about. I don’t read most of the articles in Quillette.” Asked about the magazine’s repeated promotion of racist pseudoscience, Elliott said, “I don’t agree with that, obviously. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool liberal.… The articles you’re talking about, I haven’t read. Maybe if I read one, it would be so offensive that I would say I can’t write for them anymore.”

You can’t be a “dyed-in-the-wool liberal” if you’re willing to smear women, Muslims, and trans persons. You’re just another bigot who only likes white Christian cis men.

You should all take a little time to read David Neiwert’s century of lynching and rioting by white people in America, because we sure as hell didn’t get any of this in our public school history classes. This is the stuff that ought to be taught in fifth grade, except that a) a lot of white parents would scream at administrators about their kids being shown a picture of Grampaw smirking in a mob that’s dismembering and burning a black man, and b) I’d be afraid that there’d be some white parents smirking now and drilling the wrong lesson into their kids.

Even now I look at my fellow white people in that photo and wonder what the fuck is wrong with them. How do you participate in such horrors and ever again claim that you are on the side of what is right?

People would be concerned at teaching such graphic horrors in our classrooms now, but look at that — they were bringing their kids to a lynching, like it was a field trip to the local textile museum.