Meet The Dapper Young Morons Who Should Stop Calling Themselves Reporters

The day the lunatics took over the asylum.

Soviet poster I found on Reddit that allegedly says “The unity of the working people and the Communist Party is unbreakable!"

On the most recent episode of Blocked & Reported, Jesse Singal chatted with Dave Weigel, a wonderful political reporter who has worked basically everywhere but is now at Semafor. They talked about the state of political journalism, twitter bullshit, and the election. You should listen to it!

I particularly enjoyed their discussion of a somewhat infamous Mother Jones headline from 2016. You might remember this because it was an internet drama for a few days, but if you don’t, in the run-up to the 2016 election, Mother Jones ran a profile about white nationalist Richard Spencer.

The profile by Josh Harkinson is about this racist alt-right bastard who, at the time, was an influential figure in the then-nascent alt-right movement that was very excited about Donald Trump’s candidacy. The headline was “Meet the dapper white nationalist who wins even if Trump loses.”

The very long and not-at-all glowing piece is about how he and his were intentionally trying to smuggle in these evil ideas by swapping Klan robes for Brooks Brothers.

This story came out about a week before the election. It did well, but it also didn’t get enough attention because, as you may remember, the last week of that election was pretty packed with news. Then, as you also may recall, Trump won the election. Surprise!

A few weeks later, Spencer and some other racist pricks had a little celebration in DC where they actual Nazi salutes. Coverage of this event went viral. And it led to people going back and finding the Mother Jones story from a few weeks before. This time, they were very mad!

“Mother Jones roasted for ‘dapper white nationalist’ description of racists,” said the Daily Dot.

"Dapper" and dangerous: The ugly history of glamorizing white nationalism,” warned Salon.

“Let’s Just Stop Writing Long-Form Profiles Of Nazis,” suggested Current Affairs.

“Please don’t make Nazis the new fashion darlings of D.C.” begged the New Republic.

“Give the piece a read if knowing your enemy by way of a spread in Tiger Beat is important,” advised the Daily Dot’s idiot writer..

This is basically demonstrative of the retroactive reaction to the profile. We had glamorized him! We had made him look sexy and cool! This is how Trump won because stupid Nazi-normalizing magazines wrote nice stories about Nazis!

I hadn’t written the original headline because I was actually in a mental institution for October 2016 (lol), but I was back in the saddle for the outrage. There was a lot of anger. Social media anger, yes, but it got worse than that, and people were complaining through other channels.

It's Somehow Been 6 Years Since I Cracked Up And Went To A Mental Institution

I was very against changing the headline. I do not believe in letting the outraged mobs win. It’s a moral hazard. But I was overruled and so on November 25^th, the headline was changed, and “dapper” was removed.

Dapper-gate became such a meme in the aftermath of the election that the following year it even ended up in a video game.

We never should have changed the headline. There was nothing wrong with it! “Dapper” was a key important part of what Spencer was trying to do.

As someone from the Southern Poverty Law Center put it to the LA Times after the Nazi salute rally:

“This is how you sneak these ideas into the mainstream,” she said. “The guys in the suits are the ones we have to worry about.”

On Blocked & Reported, Jesse and Dave discuss this event as a canary in the coal mine for a lot of the idiotic media criticism we’ve seen in the years since—people who want every headline about Trump to end with “and that is bad.”

But let me tell you a story from inside Mother Jones.