The New York Times's "Week in Hate" column has been singularly unimpressive, and is symbolic of the very ideological development of what was once a journalistic operation. It manages to suggest, without directly asserting, a classic post hoc: 'hate crimes since the election of Donald Trump.' In general, it is little more than 'The Week in Right-Wing Graffiti,' and I'm sorry but I am just not that impressed with graffiti as a hate crime, nor am I clear that there's been a big increase even in that, rather than an increase in reporting and coverage. It's supposed to make you think that America is falling apart because of insane Trump supporters, and it also tendentiously associates Trump with white supremacism, anti-semitism, and so on, wherever they may be found. Every swastika on the wall is something the New York Times can use.
Anyway, to my mind it backfires, just because it seems very sporadic and not that bad, etc: someone spray-painted a swastika on a high school; alright, that has never not happened. Maybe spray-painters have been 'emboldened' or 'authorized' by Trump's rhetoric, and so on. That is yet another very squirrely and vague set of associations. If you just think nothing could be more obvious, there's going to be no way to work you out of your ideology, so I'll give up on that. There is real bad shit going on: black sites, torture, walls. And yes, there are high school kids with spray paint.
Say that the Columbine mass shooting happened today rather than in 1999, and they did it on Hitler's birthday, and you found that they were playing around with white supremacism etc in their journals or online. If you were the New York Times, you'd manage to point out over and over that this was happening in the Trump era; your op-ed columnists would ask: "is it connected to Trump's hateful rhetoric?" Only an evil fool could doubt that for a second. Charles Blow's columns would go like this: 'I'm not saying he has the blood of those children on his hands, but he does.' You need better reporting, clearer connections, much much more honesty. Time for the editorial staff to take JOURN 101 again.
