Tweedy racists and "ironic" anti-Semites

[Tanuki]

http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/2/13814728/alt-right-spencer-irony-racism-punks-skinheads

..."A recent Mother Jones profile is an exemplar of this beneath-the-hood reporting on white supremacy. It lingers over the details: the private school pedigree, the “slivers of togarashi-crusted ahi” that Spencer orders at the upscale hotel lounge, his “‘fashy’ (as in fascism) haircut.” The left-wing magazine does not truck in Spencer’s white nationalist politics — quite the opposite. But like many profiles of the alt-right leader, it contains an air of surprise. He’s a racist, but he wears some swank cufflinks.

Such coverage isn’t new to the alt-right. Operating from the flawed assumption that white supremacy is the provenance of poor whites and troglodytes, journalists have long had a tendency to get enamored of repackaged racism. Since the 1970s, the national press has fallen, again and again, into the trap of missing the substance of racism for its style.

The alt-right exploits these weaknesses in journalistic coverage of racism. In their primer on the alt-right, which appeared on Breitbart, two of its leading figures, Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos, framed the phenomenon not as one of de-sheeted Klansman but creative free-speech radicals “eager to commit secular heresies.”
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But the coverage of Vice and McInnes, like that of punks and skinheads in an earlier era, also points to the problem of journalistic wonder at racism that comes in unexpected packages. To fix their coverage of racism, journalists must first confront the false assumption at the core of current coverage: that attitudes like white supremacy are artifacts of a distant past, that they reflect a lack of education, style, and sophistication. Attitudes like white supremacy are about power, and they dress up in whatever way they need to in order to protect that power. Only when that truth is fully understood can journalists set aside their awe at dapper Klansmen and hip racists — and begin to offer clear-eyed accounts of the dangerous ideology still in our midst."