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.

It’s painful, but he really is one of the worst of these right-wing monsters. Watch this smug, slimy scumbag execute standard old holocaust denial with a smile on his face.

Here's Nick Fuentes denying that the Holocaust happened.

Him and his followers are scum of the earth and their bad faith, anti-Semitic attacks should be shot down by the entire conservative movement. pic.twitter.com/7wJ9S7Q6zv

— Caleb Hull 🎅🏻🎁 (@CalebJHull) October 30, 2019

Ick.

The latest totally unsurprising scandal: emails from Stephen Miller to Breitbart reveal that he is a flaming racist. He loves confederate flags, Calvin Coolidge, eugenics, and racist novels. He was trying to shape the coverage at Breitbart, which was just fine with the editors there, who are just as racist as Miller.

McHugh told Hatewatch that Breitbart editors introduced her to Miller in 2015 with an understanding he would influence the direction of her reporting. For that reason, and because Miller would have regarded her as a fellow traveler of the anti-immigrant movement, McHugh sometimes starts conversations with Miller in the emails, seeking his opinion on news stories. Other times, Miller directly suggests story ideas to McHugh, or tells her how to shape Breitbart’s coverage. Periodically, Miller asks McHugh if he can speak to her by phone, taking conversations offline.

“What Stephen Miller sent to me in those emails has become policy at the Trump administration,” McHugh told Hatewatch.

Miller still has his job and the support of our president.

Oh, and did you know that Facebook still regards Breitbart as a high quality news source?

Facebook’s launch of a new section on its flagship app dedicated to “deeply-reported and well-sourced” journalism sparked immediate controversy on Friday over the inclusion of Breitbart News, a publication whose former executive chairman explicitly embraced the “alt-right”.

Basically, the KKK is now running the country and major media outlets. Are you OK with this?

Dietz is one of those well-groomed young white men with a brain full of slithery slimy worms. He’s a white nationalist with a podcast and a YouTube channel who’s been palsy-walsy with some of the nastiest Nazis in town.

…Dietz hosts the McSpencer Group alongside Spencer, perhaps the best known American neo-Nazi and a founding member of the so-called alt-right. For hours at a time, Dietz and a rotating selection of guests help plot the future of the white identity movement, touching on subjects from eugenics to Kurt Cobain (“a symbol of white displacement”) to the “negrofication” of American culture.

[Following publication of this article, videos posted to Spencer’s YouTube account featuring Dietz were pulled down. Several of Dietz’s podcast episodes can still be found on the streaming site BitChute.]

“They can’t speak eloquently. They can’t dress a particular way. They can’t show enthusiasm for education or career advancement or, I don’t know, monogamous healthy relationships without out of wedlock children,” said Dietz, during an episode with the author Colin Flaherty recorded earlier this year. (Flaherty, incidentally, was the voice behind the explicitly racist video that NYPD union boss Ed Mullins apologized for sharing this past summer).

Dietz frequently appears on other similar podcasts, and his own show, No Apologies, has featured guests such as Patrick Little, who believes Jews should be raised as livestock, and notorious neo-Nazi David Duke. In a conversation with Duke earlier this year, Dietz asks about the “issue” of right-wing figures maintaining relationships with Jewish people, and whether it “makes them emotionally blind to criticism.”

“You really can’t trust them,” says Duke. “The only Jews that I really have any respect for are those Jews that expose Jewish power and expose Jewish racism and expose Jewish efforts to destroy us.”

Following the lengthy monologue, Dietz replies: “That’s so well said.”

In addition, though, he has a Masters degree in clinical psychology and has been teaching at various small colleges in the New York area.

According to a since-deleted LinkedIn page, Dietz has also lectured at Brooklyn College, York College, Queensborough Community College, Medgar Evers College and New York City College of Technology. Inquires to those schools were not immediately returned.

A spokesperson for St. Francis College—where Dietz was listed in an employee directory until Friday morning—said that he last taught there in Fall 2018, and “will not return as an instructor in the future.” Further questions about Dietz’s time at St. Francis were not answered.

Wow. An openly racist man was teaching at Medgar Evers College…how did the poor fellow cope? Every day he walked through those doors he was rebuked by the name of a black civil rights activist, and in all of his classes he had to teach young black students. It must have been so hard for him. At least he could go home at night and vent his feelings on the internet, vomiting up all his hate and inadequacy for an adoring audience of fascists.

He’s losing that now. His allies are tearing down his videos, his website, TheDietzMethod, where he promoted his hypnosis and life-coaching business, is gone, and you can bet that no university is going to hire him, even for those awful little adjuncting positions, ever again. It turns out you can’t be trusted to teach if you think a lot of your students are inferior subhumans because of the color of their skin. Before you start bewailing the loss of free speech at modern universities, keep in mind that my dream of being a professor at Liberty University has also been crushed. Oh, woe.

One might wonder how he came to be this way, and sadly, he followed a common and predictable trajectory.

In conversations on his shows, Dietz occasionally refers to his own path toward white nationalism. He started as a traditional conservative, then became involved in Men’s Rights circles, writing for Return of the Kings, a pick-up artist website, and self-publishing a book billed as the “politically incorrect guide to dating.” He was once a fan of Gavin McInnes, the Proud Boys founder, but over time has come to regard that strand of the “alt-lite” as too moderate.

Once again, men’s rights misogyny was the gateway to a rat’s nest of toxic ideas.

Also, I’m curious: they mention that Dietz’s videos are being taken down (by who, it doesn’t say), yet I discover that Richard Spencer, the McSpencer Group, and the National Policy Institute still have active YouTube channels. Were the Nazis just overlooked?

HBO’s new blockbuster series is Watchmen, a sequel to the original comic book, and they’re doing something bold and educational: the opening sequence is a recreation of the Tulsa race riots, in which a white community rose up and murdered and burned an entire black community. Even today, the city of Tulsa is searching (reluctantly) for the mass graves that were dug in 1921. I’d read about this before, and it’s unbelievably horrific — it was such an awful act of blatant racism I had trouble believing it when I first heard about it. It happened, though.

One concern is placing it in a work of fiction, and specifically a show about alternate history. I hope no one comes away dismissing it as a comic book story, because you can find real-life, historical accounts of the event fairly easily.

What I didn’t know until this morning was the extent of the open race war that went on in this country after the Civil War. It’s shocking that this wasn’t taught in any school I attended! Check out this eye-opening thread on Twitter:

Thread:

A lot of white people were shocked to learn about the bombing of Tulsa from HBO's "Watchmen" while most black people are familiar with the bombing of Black Wall Street.

Even historians mention these events as isolated incidents.

— michaelharriot (@michaelharriot) October 22, 2019

I had never heard of the Kirk-Holden War before. This was a real war in North Carolina, in which the Ku Klux Klan declared war against the state, the army was called in, and the KKK won, dictating terms to the government…terms that included allowing no Northern intervention in how they “regulated” elections, where “regulation” included murdering black elected officials. One outcome of that kind of action was that the victors celebrated by erecting Confederate monuments all over the place. Our country supported the oppression of a democratic majority! It still is.

I’ve only seen the one episode of the series so far, and to be honest, I have mixed feelings about it as a story…but as a slap-in-the-face wakeup call to deplorable events in American history, it’s a five-star triumph. It promises to develop further as a story about American race relations, and all I can say there is that it’s about time we actually had a media confrontation over it.