Michael Hirsch Politico editor resigns. How the political and idealogical landscape has begun to change in America (for the worse).
In what is increasingly becoming to betray the frays of society and ideologies for a long time coming, Micheal Hirsch Politico Magazine’s national editor found himself on Tuesday out of a job after calling for violence against Richard B Spenser, head of the white nationalist think tank National Policy Institute.
Hirsch’s ouster comes after he was effectively forced to resign when during the course of the day the Politico editor wrote a Facebook post where effectively he called for physical action against Spencer.
In a Facebook post first picked up by the the dailycaller, Hirsch wrote in part: ‘Stop whining about Richard B. Spencer, Nazi, and exercise your rights as decent Americans. Here are his two addresses.: …,’
Rather than intimating the leaking of the alternative right’s leaders address was so as to send letters (which in and of itself was a questionable crossing of transgression) Hirsch went one further.
Responding to a commentator, the Politico editor wrote: ‘He lives part of the time next door to me in Arlington. Our grandfathers brought baseball bats to Bund meetings. Want to join me?’
It wasn’t too long before wind of Hirsch’s position became public (do you suppose?) leading to general disconcert with Politico editor-in-chief John Harris and editor Carrie Budoff Brown calling Michael Hirsh’s post indefensible. Shortly there after Hirsch tended his resignation.
Told Harris and Brown in a joint statement: “These posts were clearly outside the bounds of acceptable discourse, and POLITICO editors regard them as a serious lapse of newsroom standards,’
Adding: ‘They crossed a line in ways that the publication will not defend, and editors are taking steps to ensure that such a lapse does not occur again.’
By the end of Tuesday Hirsch was out of Politico.
Not coincidentally, Hirsh’s post comes just days after Spencer’s alt-right organization, the National Policy Institute, held a conference to celebrate GOP President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral victory as a step towards identity politics with the notion that ‘The alt-right is here, the alt-right is not going anywhere, the alt-right is going to change the world.’ Nazi salutes aside.
How it intends to change the world has in turn caused some degree of chaffing at the bit with a portion of what some describe as the liberal media (the anti-media might be a better description?) stymied and fearing for what it believes are the civic virtues of a tolerant society. Tolerance which if history and action are a guide have increasingly gone by the wayside way before Donald Trump won Presidential office.
The doxing of Spencer’s address and the suggestion of violence has become the latest act of hubris in the political and cultural landscape which struggles to find countenance and some measure of rational discourse as one set of idealogues seeks to debunk and demerit the other, with one side calling the other nazi’s, sissy’s etc- which is to say emotional and vitriolic responses to the issues of the day have become more endemic as opposed to nuanced critical provocative discussions which one would suppose ought to be the veneer of a national editor of the elk of Politico.
Unless of course one is to suggest the real animus of a journal is to drop the pretense of democratic discussions and constructive facilitation of ideas and the outright bullying arm of one’s preferred dogma and cultural plurism, even if that means behaving in a way that one claims to find offensive and oppressive in the first place….
