Study Hall Digest 10/9/2017

Hi

Okay let’s get this Milo thing out of the way: people who think that brown and black people are lesser than white people are white supremacists. People who think that trans people are not real are transphobic trash. Collaborating with those people makes you a collaborator. Sympathizing with them makes you a sympathizer, or maybe a “mitlaüfer”—a fellow-traveller. You can say you’re not a Nazi sympathizer, but then why do you keep sympathizing with Nazis??? Let’s call shit what it is. These people do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. You can say you just like the white supremacists because they’re troll-y and mean. But you can really only ever take that position if you’re privileged enough for a person’s trolling to be just trolling, not suicidal-thought-inducing, dehumanizing language that can lead to actual consequences. I’m glad Mitchell Sunderland got fired. He sucks. He should have been fired a long time ago. But there’s no way Broadly and Vice didn’t know about his close relationship with Milo and the alt-right for years (I mean he tweeted about it frequently). They fired him for the same reason Milo lost his book deal a few months ago: not because these media mega-companies have morals, but because the optics got bad enough. In a just world Olivia Nuzzi would have been fired, or never hired, at NY Mag for her truly strange obsession with Ann Coulter (and they should fire Jesse Singal while they’re at it as both of them are known transphobes). But in a just world 75 percent of the New York Times and Washington Post Op-Ed pages, which are equally if not more responsible for normalizing fascism, would be gone too. The media is a dumpster fire and if its owners can reap profit from fascism, they will promote it gleefully. This is not a theoretical scenario. It’s happening right now. It’s a common mistake to assume that the media has morals (maybe thanks to journalists’ self-aggrandizing nature and movies like Spotlight?). People who work in the media (you?) might have morals, but those people do not have the power to do much, except publish some good work occasionally that somehow, against the odds, makes it out of this dumpster fire to the public, and hopefully provides a small (though, as we’re seeing right now, inadequate) bulwark against an industry committed to fanning fascism’s flames as long as it’s profitable to do so (and because of the nature of fascism and capitalism, it will always be profitable to do so).

Anyway…

Speaking of good journalism making it through, I really enjoyed this article on Seattle neo-Nazis, many of whom work in the tech industry. There’s been a lot of discussion about whether this kind of reporting—infiltrating groups, talking with Nazis, etc.—is okay, and I think this article proves that it is, as long as it’s done right. The problem isn’t talking to the Nazis, the problem is humanizing them or making them seem normal. This article does a good job at showing just how stupid they are.

And speaking of terrible media companies: Tronc (lol) has been distributing some old-school anti-union fliers to its employees. I was really hoping that the fliers would be written in the same insane language as the company’s launch materials, but oh well.

Condé Nast, seeing the success of Teen Vogue’s pivot to social justice, is launching an LGBTQ publication called them. Will it be good? Who knows. Will it underpay writers? Probably!

I’m glad that media companies are finding business models that are profitable, I just wish it was happening to better media companies and not the place that produces Pod Save America.

Are you one of the people who wants to pay hundreds of dollars to directly connect with Atlantic writers? If so, please explain yourself.

CNN, you ok sweetie?

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Final Thoughts

Srsly guyyysssss, can we pool some money to buy Gawker????