Last month, The New York Times published a profile of white nationalist Tony Hovater that set big swaths of the internet on fire. The piece, which lingered on Hovater’s Twin Peaks tattoo, his good manners, and his pasta-cooking techniques, struck many as whitewashing Hovater’s views and his role in far-right organizing, criticism the Times’ national editor Marc Lacey rejected in a published response. We “need to shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life and the people who inhabit them,” Lacy said.

Though I was one of this particular piece’s harshest critics, I agree with Lacy on this point. It’s clear that white nationalists and other fringe groups are becoming more visible, not less. And we cannot (and should not) ignore them. Instead, we need to have a serious discussion about what shedding “more light” on these types looks like in practice — and what we are hoping to accomplish when we make the attempt.

The first thing to recognize is that an individual is rarely newsworthy in isolation. What makes any of us deserving of public attention is the impact we have on others. Political extremists, in particular, are interesting because of their role in activist movements — groups of people, sharing a common ideology, joined in common cause.

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To effectively write about such individuals, we need to do four things: identify their ideology, describe their work, explain their goals and call them by their name. Let’s take those one at a time.