Editor's Notes: Reactionaries Are Not Fun Weirdos

Two days ago, Gilad Edelman wrote a profile of Richard Hanania for The Atlantic. The thrust of it is clear enough from the jump:

"Former white supremacist."

"Once the toast of MAGA-tech barons and reactionary intellectuals."

There is nothing "former" about Hanania's white supremacy, whatever these nominally liberal media figures want to tell themselves.

I took a look and found no less than six Atlantic articles featuring or focusing on Hanania over the years. Worse than that, they published an article written by Hanania in 2012, when he was either still writing for the white supremacist site VDARE or had only recently stopped. The topic was relatively banal, but the writing and thinking were equally unremarkable. Furthermore, that banal topic was, somehow, professional basketball—and not the business or political sides of pro hoops, but coaching strategy! The number of capable authors with greater credibility on that topic had to have numbered in the millions. 

So one wonders why this guy has gotten so much attention. 

One might argue that it is important to criticize or draw attention to dangerous, influential writers or political figures. The problem is that it is very obviously coverage like The Atlantic's that has made Hanania influential in the first place, to the extent that he even is influential.

Some of the coverage of Hanania was done in good faith but a lot of it is more along the lines of the John Ganz post about this kind of thing: 

Edelman's profile of Hanania this week comes off every bit as a scrapbook memorial to an encounter with a fun weirdo.

What do we make of a media system where the liberal side behaves this way? Do we have any hope of winning, given this reality?

Let's turn this topic over from a couple of angles.