David Neiwert was a 21-year-old newspaper editor in the Idaho Panhandle in 1978 when the Aryan Nation hate group showed up in town. He and his publisher arrived at a fateful decision.
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David Neiwert was a 21-year-old newspaper editor in the Idaho Panhandle in 1978 when the Aryan Nation hate group showed up in town. He and his publisher arrived at a fateful decision.
“We decided, ‘Oh, these guys just want publicity and we’re not going to give it to them,’” he said.
“Well, within about three years that policy was completely discarded, because what followed was an endless litany of criminality, culminating in ’84 with the rampage of the Order, including bank robberies and assassination.”It taught him a lesson that has informed his work for almost five decades as a writer and thinker on far-right violent extremism and its incursions into the conservative “mainstream”:
There is no acceptable choice but to shine a light on forces like these.“You have to provide readers with the context into what they’re doing and what their beliefs are,
and make sure you’re not just doing ‘he said, she said’ journalism,
but actively exposing them for the people to see,”
“Yes, certainly there are going to be people recruited because of your journalism. But many, many people will be repelled. And more importantly, officials and law enforcement will be prepared, informationally, for dealing with these guyshttps://prospect.org/politics/2024-08-28-election-story-nobody-talks-about-neiwert-qa/