No, the New York Times isn't normalizing Nazis.

Yes, this story could be better — for it to have some meaning, we'd get some insight as to why Tony Hovater became a Holocaust-denying Nazi sympathizer. But the critics go further, saying that the story "normalizes" Nazis.

I dunno. Not sure how you can read this and think "gosh, that's normal":

Or this:

It's true, the story doesn't spend a lot of time screaming "this is bad!" But I suspect that's because the NYT editors know their audience probably doesn't include a lot of Nazi sympathizers, or even many folks who are Nazi agnostic.



I think, however, we're not really in a "show don't tell" era. People don't want the Nazi shown and allowed to hang himself by his own words. They want him castigated, publicly, as a warning to others. We fear that nothing is self-evidently bad anymore, and I guess that's kind of understandable. But I still think the reaction to this story has been an overreaction.

Like I say, the story could be better. And I understand the feelings of people who don't like to see evil people humanized. (This would've been really interesting, I suspect, if a writer of color been put on the job.) But ... evil people are human. I suspect a lot of us, under the right circumstances, could become the thing we hate the most.

But if you see a guy mocking "back, crippled dykes" and denying the Holocaust in the paper and think that the portrait is sympathetic, maybe the reporting isn't the problem.