Why Do All These Neo-Nazis Keep Writing For Our Publications?

Funny how that happens:

Trump has emboldened the “alt-right” to seize upon once ostensibly staid conservative institutions for its own purposes. (The term, which came to the attention of the mainstream around the 2016 presidential election, served as a means for internet-savvy white nationalists and white supremacists to downplay—or whitewash, you could say—their racist and antisemitic beliefs. It is used throughout this piece to refer largely to a specific clique with ties to the Washington, D.C. media and think tank scene.)

Campus conservative groups like Turning Point USA have been a target both of external coups and their own racist representatives who used them as a means to legitimize their beliefs. Figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos, the once-beloved conservative commentator and far-right troll, found refuge in havens such as Breitbart. Despite their prevailing view that much of the GOP constituted “cuckservatives,” numerous white nationalists have sought to use the party to propel them out of obscurity.

And then there’s the Daily Caller, the conservative publication co-founded by Tucker Carlson, who stepped down from his role as editor-in-chief in 2016. Even since the “alt-right” rose to prominence during the 2016 election, the site has been sucked into its own game of “Who goes Nazi?” Since Trump’s election, numerous Calleremployees have come under fire for their semi-secret white nationalist affiliations. For instance, Andrew Kerr, an investigative reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation, was outed as having appeared on a number of programs with far-right conspiracy theorist Brittany Pettibone. (Pettibone—wife of European white nationalist leader Martin Sellner, a man who recently sparked outrage for corresponding and accepting thousands of dollars in donations from the perpetrator of the Christchurch massacre—has branded herself as one of the most prominent “experts” of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.)

Remember when Tucker was still the guy MSNBC was trying to make a thing rather than the white nationalist bingo caller he openly is today and tried to portray the Daily Storm..er, Caller as the site For Conservatives Who Want Real Hard News? As Parene said back when the Daily Caller had reached its current level of quality but not quite its current level of fascism:

The Daily Caller, the site he launched with a promise to offer a new model for conservative journalism, is primarily a catalog of sleazy traffic-baiting aggregated Web garbage (“Top 10: Most beautiful ‘most beautiful’ women [SLIDESHOW]”), ancient relics of online commentary with nowhere else left to publish (Ann Coulter, Mickey Kaus), and overblown scandal-mongering headlines that promise much more than they can deliver. In other words it is like a mean-spirited parody of a conservative version of the pre-AOL Huffington Post, with a healthy dose, recently, of attention-grabbing race baiting. This is not the sort of thing Carlson used to be known for.

[…]

Carlson’s Daily Caller was supposed to be a home for edgy, independent voices and serious, well-reported journalism from a conservative perspective. No one actually wants that — if they did, it would exist, right? — because the online right-wing audience simply wants to be told reassuring and outrageous lies. Carlson ran up against that reality early on. The Caller’s traffic was abysmal. So they went hard on sensationalism and stunts. Some of the stunts were fun (trolling Keith Olbermann by buying KeithOlbermann.com). The sensationalism was ridiculous. It began when someone leaked the Caller a trove of emails from JournoList, the private listserv that various liberal and centrist reporters had belonged to, and the Caller chose to very clearly and purposefully misrepresent those emails in an attempt to gin up outrage about the vast liberal media bias conspiracy. The stories proclaimed that liberals were engaged in a vast and secret conspiracy. Carlson himself acknowledged that the emails were “banal” in his attempt to deflect the criticism his publication’s “reporting” was receiving. Screaming headlines were outright distortions, completely unsupported by the contents of the story, in what would quickly become a Daily Caller tradition. The stories were full of obvious and malicious omissions and misrepresentations. Carlson didn’t give a shit. Traffic grew.