The next year, Norton defended her friend Weev, née Andrew Auernheimer, as “just an asshole” after he revealed his new swastika tattoo in a blog post for The Daily Stormer, a prominent white-supremacist website. In addition to showing off his new ink, that post, written following Auernheimer’s release from prison, enumerated some of his racist ideas:
I’ve been a long-time critic of Judaism, black culture, immigration to Western nations, and the media’s constant stream of anti-white propaganda. Judge Wigenton was as black as they come. The prosecutor, Zach Intrater, was a Brooklyn Jew from an old money New York family.
[…]
The whole time a yarmulke-covered audience of Jewry stared at me from the pews of the courtroom. My prosecutor invited his whole synagogue to spectate.
[…]
They took control of our systems of finance and law. They hyperinflated our currency. They corrupted our daughters and demanded they subject themselves to sex work to feed their families. These are a people that have made themselves a problem in every nation they occupy, including ours. What’s saddest is that we are the enablers of this problem. The Jews abused our compassion to build an empire of wickedness the likes the world has never seen.
(You get the idea.)
People were upset, understandably enough, especially given that Auernheimer’s public persona up that point had largely been that of the puckish Internet troll, thanks in no small part thanks to pieces like one Norton had written a few months earlier. (“He is a witch for this century, a perfect reprobate bearer of our sins and our ignorance.”)
In defending his Daily Stormer post, Norton was dismissive of her friend’s critics, even arguing, somewhat bafflingly, that people who eat meat are more destructive than white pride.
(Auernheimer currently works as systems administrator for The Daily Stormer, handling contributions donated to the site and its founder, Andrew Anglin, largely via Bitcoin.)
For her own part, Norton’s views on white supremacist and fascist ideologies are somewhat muddled. She has conceded, for example, that she has been friends with “various neo-Nazis in my time,” but also made clear that “I have never agreed with them.” Spending so much time with her neo-Nazi friends appears, one way or the other, to have rubbed off:
Norton appears to have been in contact with Auernheimer at least as recently as November 2017. Every time she talks to her friend, she wrote, she reminds him that his commitment to Nazism is “dumb.”
To be fair, Norton’s new (or would-be new?) colleagues are not much more sophisticated in their analysis of social phenomena like white supremacy, fascism, and capitalism, much less the material connections between them; the function of institutions like the New York Times editorial board and the Opinion section being not so much to interrogate the status quo as to bolster it, there’s probably even something to be said for it representing the true diversity of elite American political opinion by hiring an outright Nazi sympathizer, even if one who feels compelled to lightly chastise them when they express their outré opinions.
In any case, we applaud the New York Times for its (temporary?) commitment to exploring the rich ideological diversity of the American right and look forward to a column gently disapproving of both neo-Nazis killing people and disruptive student protests against such killings, whether or not it’s written by the person who tweeted this:
Update, 10:25 p.m.: In a statement, editorial page editor James Bennet confirmed that Norton would not be working at the Times: “Despite our review of Quinn Norton’s work and our conversations with her previous employers, this was new information to us. Based on it, we’ve decided to go our separate ways.”
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