COMMENT: If you’re going to post online propaganda for the Alt-right, label it that way

The Irish Times let themselves and their readers down on Thursday.

The Irish Times' publication of an Alt-right 'glossary' piece by Nicholas Pell on Thursday morning was a dangerous thing, and a careless thing that needs to be called out for what it was: fascist propaganda. The publisher's failure to name Pell as a card-carrying member of the Alt-right movement was perhaps its greatest error; by failing to label the author's affiliation with the movement, they gave him and the piece a neutrality that presented those malevolent, racist and sexist terms ('Dindu Nuffin,' 'Snowflake,' 'Cuck') as fact rather than opinion. John McManus, The Irish Times' Opinion Editor, subsequently wrote the words...

'Fundamentally we don’t subscribe to the notion of denying a platform to people we don’t agree with or that will provoke strong debate, as the Nicholas Pell piece has done.'

The point that McManus misses is that the only debate raised by Pell's piece was how far The Irish Times had strayed from its values by carrying those words. The Irish people have not been living on Mars for the last year, and are surely savvy enough - given the election of its poster boy to the office of the world's most powerful man - to know the Alt-right's agenda and their key terminology. To claim that the piece provokes debate as well as informs the clueless Irish masses is, quite frankly, not only insulting but patronising to the people who read Pell's article and got a little bit sick in their mouths. Before we're accused of being a bunch of left-leaning liberals who supported the capitalist pigmonsters of the Democratic Party from afar - and shut our eyes to the anger of the American ultra-conservative movement - and ignored the other side, we do think all sides deserve their platform and real debate should be welcomed. But those sides can not hide behind a cloak of neutrality. Pell's articles have appeared elsewhere, and he is as entitled to publication as anyone else, but the editorial controls that stop the spread of hate speech and fascist terminology do not and should not stop with freelance contributors. When you allow a glossary to contain racist terms such as 'dindu', you aren't providing a broad range of views, you're surrendering your own platform - hard won over many years and at one time a critical bastion of liberalism when Ireland was a more oppressive place - to the grossly offensive. The Irish Times will come back from this, and their many fine writers should not feel like their work is diminished by the careless publication of Pell's words, but lessons must be learned.