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“Meanwhile, parts of the right’s response to Ferguson and the rise of Black Lives Matter became intensely racialized, and outright racist.”

Rosie Gray, Buzzfeed

(How could anyone right-of-center possibly be guilty of “racism,” in relation to Ferguson and Black Lives Matter?)

I feel really bad for Katie McHugh. (We were the barest of acquaintances, but we met a couple of times, and I found her to be a very nice, cute young lady.)

McHugh is the subject of a 10,000-word, Buzzfeed thing, an unusual sort of hit piece, “Get Out While You Can: Once notorious for her racist and bigoted tweets, Katie McHugh saw the dark insides of the white nationalist movement.” It’s a classic “TL; dr.” But I read it through to the bitter end.

I’ve seen this rehabilitation ritual before, with Ian Jobling. Jobling was the brilliant right-hand man to Jared Taylor at American Renaissance for a few years. He broke with Jared in 2006, ostensibly over David Duke’s appearance at that year’s AmRen conference, but I suspect that it was more personal than that.

Jobling believed in civil rights ideology, which caused an impossible tension with his realistic approach to society.

Once Ian had broken with Jared, leftists stalked him online, exposing his attempts to support himself. He wrote a brilliant, serial e-book, The Inverted World, I believe he called it, only to pull it offline, and seek to eliminate his virtual paper trail.

After the racist Left destroyed Jobling, the SPLC gave him the option of recanting his former life, and denouncing his onetime compatriots. And since there is always enough internal bad blood in the wake of such relations, why not?

There’s very little work in journalism that will pay the rent, and most of that is on the pc Left, with some on the pc Right. Pick your hackery. The most talented journalists I know are lucky if they can get work as editors or publicists.

There’s a class war factor to all of this, as well. If you’re not well-to-do, even being talented and pc will rarely help you get hired. But going anywhere near the Alt-Right/Dissident Right/whatever is career suicide.

And people like Rosie Gray and outlets like Buzzfeed—which published the Steele dossier, one of the most notorious hoaxes in the history of journalism, and whose editors have never apologized for that—will make sure that it is. (Note that even after Katie decided to recant, the people who had destroyed her life would only use her to make money off of her, but refused to pay her a thin dime for her work.) Rosie Gray:

“The friend, with whom I’d previously interacted on Twitter, reached out to show me an essay McHugh wrote about her experiences. I showed the piece to my editors at The Atlantic, where I was then a staff writer but soon to leave to work on a book, but we discussed it and agreed that our role was to approach her as a journalistic subject, rather than publish a piece by her.”

Intermittently, during her thing, Rosie Gray plays concern troll, talking about McHugh’s health problems (she’s got Type 1 diabetes).

Meanwhile, people on the “wrong” side of the journalistic tracks do a lousy job of taking care of their own, especially those who are not well-to-do. (The class issue, as far as I can see, works the same on both sides.) So, when the Devil throws you an apparent lifesaver, what are you going to do?

Except that Gray and Buzzfeed threw Katie no lifesaver at all. So, Katie McHugh has been reduced to trying to make money betraying her old friends, and being exploited for paydays by people who were and remain her enemies.

Perhaps we need to revise Carl Schmitt’s infamous “friend-enemy relationship” (Freund-Feind-Verhältnis). In certain social milieus, and for certain people, there is only the enemy-enemy relationship.

Nicholas Stix
Nicholas Stix, Uncensored

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Biography - Nicholas Stix

Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.

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