Ahead of the one-year anniversary of Charlottesville, NPR decided to give an on-air lesson on the proper care and feeding of white nationalists and neo-Nazi ideology.
That is how Karen Attiah described the National Public Radio interview with Jason Kessler in the Washington Post on August 11. I have read the transcript, and I agree with her.
Kessler is an American white supremacist/white nationalist and is part of the so-called “alt-right,” or alternative right. The alt-right is a loose grouping of white supremacists/white nationalists, neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, neo-Confederates, Holocaust deniers, and other far-right fringe hate groups. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center which keeps track of such things, over 100 people have been killed and injured in 13 attacks by alt-right influenced perpetrators since 2014.
Kessler was the chief organizer of the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August of 2017, at which an alt-right member drove a car into a crowd of anti-racist protestors injuring many and killing Heather Heyer. Kessler was also the organizer of Sunday’s Unite the Right 2 rally in Washington, DC.
While I will not question too harshly NPR holding the interview, I agree with Attiah’s criticism of how they conducted the interview. It is inappropriate to provide Kessler a platform to spout his white supremacist ideology.
In this instance, NPR cannot be neutral. NPR should have challenged the racist lies and propaganda offered by Kessler. For example, Kessler said that white Americans are an underrepresented Caucasian demographic, an absurd and patently false statement. He said that his new rally had a goal of peace without the interviewer noting that Heather Hyer was killed last year by a white supremacist.
In a column in the Nation Magazine last fall, Gary Younge tells us “how to interview a Nazi.”
“White supremacists should be challenged—not indulged,” he argues. He suggests that the basic principles of journalism still apply: They should not be misrepresented or ridiculed. “We should not inflate their importance, ignore their brutality, or enable their self-aggrandizement.” Instead, they should be confronted, challenged, and exposed.
But NPR did none of that, and they committed another serious transgression. They followed the Kessler interview with one of a Black Lives Matter representative as if to suggest that Black Lives Matter is the Black opposite of white supremacists. And they compounded the situation by asking the BLM representative why he refused an invitation to the white supremacist rally. Unbelievable!
Inevitably, providing a platform for white supremacist ideologies lends credence to their views. Actions like that of NPR helps the white nationalists with their long-term goals. They seemed to have lost the battle in Charlottesville, but they may be winning the war. They have wanted to pull the Republican Party in its direction, and they have succeeded.
As former Republican Max Boot wrote recently in a Washington Post column, the GOP was once a conservative party with a white nationalist fringe. Now it’s a white-nationalist party with a conservative fringe.
The media should not assist white nationalist terrorists.
