When Scott Greer was writing stories for the conservative Daily Caller web site, he was also writing virulently racist articles under a pseudonym for Radix Journal, a web site founded by white supremacist Richard Spencer.

Daily Caller editor-in-chief Geoffrey Ingersoll told us in an email that he didn’t know about Greer’s racist moonlighting gig and that if he had, he would have fired Greer. But this instance wasn’t the first time the Daily Caller seemingly cut ties with a writer only after another publication had highlighted their white supremacist views.

On 5 September 2018 The Atlantic reported that chat logs revealed Greer wrote under the name Michael McGregor on Spencer’s web site. His posts disparaged African-Americans, Jewish people, and women. In 2015 he responded to the police custody-related death of Freddie Gray, a black Baltimore man, by writing on Radix that:

Cops are now the preferred scapegoats for the sole reason that they are the symbols of a justice system Blacks hate, a justice system Blacks want undermined for their benefit. However, this justice system has to be harsh on Blacks in order to preserve stability and a measure of safety in a multiracial state. The current campaign against tough policing, if successful, would effectively turn any city with a large percentage of Blacks into a third world hellhole.

The Atlantic also reported that:

[Greer’s] posts sometimes showcased anti-Semitic views as well. In a post about a 2015 cover story in The Atlantic about European Jews written by the magazine’s current editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, Greer sneeringly (and with incorrect grammar) used Hebrew words and wrote that Jews were responsible for the anti-Semitism they face in Europe due to “the Jewish role in promoting the root causes of this problem through their support of mass immigration, multiculturalism, and hate speech laws that only go after Whites” … Greer also wrote about sexual politics, the religious right, and abortion; in a September 2014 post about a sexual-consent law in California, he wrote that “while sex laws become more draconian for White men and they are further assaulted for trying to be men, the more virile Arabs, Blacks, and Hispanics that are swarming into our countries will continue to victimize our people.” In June 2014 he wrote that Christian Zionists’ “worship of Jews borders on fetishization and naturally incites hatred for the root cultures of European peoples.” In March 2014, he wrote that pro-life movements “are not pro-life in any way, shape or form. They have a sick obsession with seeing any type of ‘human being’ that is capable of shitting being preserved — no matter what the cost.” In another September 2014 post, he wrote that gender equality “will make women more determined to pursue ambitions that will make them miserable, turn men into eunuchs, and allow for the continuing growth of non-White hordes in formerly White countries.”

We asked Ingersoll when he was made aware of Greer’s Radix affiliation and what he would do to prevent further publishing of content authored by white supremacists on the Daily Caller. Ingersoll responded by saying he was “insulted” by our questions and that he would have “fired Scott Greer instantly if I ever knew about his posting to that website.” He also maintained that he has “rebuilt the process for vetting opinion contributors and for vetting news contributors,” but he did not provide specifics nor did he explain how Greer slipped through the cracks in the first place.

Ingersoll expressed concern that this reporter “might have suffered a series of severe blows to the head and are in need of immediate medical attention. Please, stop what you are doing right now and get a CAT scan.“ Emails sent to the Daily Caller’s executive editor Paul Conner, public affairs director Margaret Crilley and chief operating officer Brian Danza were not returned.

Although Ingersoll claimed ignorance to Greer’s views, Greer didn’t make a secret of them. In August 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported that Greer associated with hardcore white nationalists including Devin Saucier and Marcus Epstein, posing for photographs with them that were posted to Facebook. In one photograph, Greer can be seen wearing a t-shirt from the Youth for Western Civilization (YWC), a now-defunct white nationalist student group.

In a statement to The Atlantic, co-founder and publisher Neil Patel admitted he was aware of the allegations in the SPLC report but didn’t take action at the time because he believed the organization to have a history of “unfair attacks” and Greer had denied the accusations. “We had two choices,” Patel told the The Atlantic. “Fire a young man because of some photos taken of him at metal shows in college, or take his word. We chose to trust him.”

The day after President Donald Trump was elected in November 2016, Greer declared that “As a white man, I finally now feel safe in America” on his verified Twitter account:

As a white man, I finally now feel safe in America — Scott Greer (@ScottMGreer) November 9, 2016

In May of that year, Greer wrote a post for the Daily Caller likening calls by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to remove a Confederate monument with Islamic State tactics.

Ingersoll’s response to us reflected that of Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson’s belligerent tirade directed at Washington Post reporter Erik Wemple, who also asked about whether Carlson, now a Fox News prime time host, knew of Greer’s background when he was hired:

I asked Tucker Carlson if he knew about Scott Greer’s racist tracts exposed by @RosieGray. His response below. https://t.co/e4maQKDDmo pic.twitter.com/FlV1GsF4iL — ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) September 5, 2018

This is not the first time a white supremacist has been exposed while writing for the Daily Caller. In May 2017, ProPublica revealed that Jason Kessler had authored a piece about a white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, but neither Kessler nor the Daily Caller disclosed that Kessler was in fact involved with organizing that very protest, and that he had given a speech “in which he praised fascist and racist organizations, thanked a prominent Holocaust denier, and declared the beginnings of a cultural ‘civil war.'” Kessler went on to organize the deadly “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in August 2017 during which a counter-protester was murdered.

Ingersoll acknowledged in a series of Twitter posts in July 2018 that Kessler was paid per click for the stories he wrote. Ingersoll also acknowledged that he personally scrubbed Kessler’s bylines from the Daily Caller’s site but offered no explanation for that action to readers.

In March 2017, a former editor for the site posted a tweet in which she joked about running over Native American demonstrators who were protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. In September 2017, the Daily Caller posted, then deleted, a video of Jewish New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush saying the word “chutzpah” with the well-known folk song “Hava Nagila” playing in the background. That same month, Wemple reported that another Daily Caller writer, Chuck Ross, had maintained a now-defunct blog until 2010 in which he wrote at length about his belief that black people were inferior.

Here is a list of Daily Caller writers who have so far been revealed to have expressed racist views:

Scott Greer

Greer spent his time at the Daily Caller writing about immigration and the alt right, along with pieces that painted Native Americans as violent cannibals, blaming black people for the racial disparity in police shootings (referring to slain 12-year-old Tamir Rice as a “large male”) and providing a sympathetic platform to a man fired from his job for turning up at Confederate monument rally in New Orleans decked out in a helmet and shield. According to The Atlantic, Greer started working at the Daily Caller in 2014, while his pseudonym “Michael McGregor” was listed as the managing editor of Radix.

Jason Kessler

The “Unite the Right” organizer wrote three articles for the Daily Caller, including one published on 14 May 2017 that promoted a rally lead by white supremacist Richard Spencer. He penned at least two other stories for the web site, in one of which he interviewed Kyle Chapman, a 41-year-old man known online as “Based Stickman” for swinging a stick at opponents during demonstrations. A third story outlined the gruesome murder of a 17-year-old boy by MS-13 gang members. After a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd at Kessler’s “Unite the Right” rally on 12 August 2017 and killed a woman, the Daily Caller deleted Kessler’s articles.

Peter Brimelow

Brimelow runs the white supremacist web site VDare.com. In March 2017, he wrote a column for the Daily Caller in which he argued that the United States “was to be a nation-state, the political expression of a particular (white, British) people, as in Europe.” As RationalWiki noted, “[VDare.com] appears to be mainly a platform for Peter Brimelow’s anti-immigration views, which veer frequently into playing footsie with overt white nationalism; the other topics are window dressing. Brimelow has admitted that VDARE does publish people who are white nationalists.” In August 2018, White House speechwriter Darren Beattie was fired for appearing alongside Brimelow at a conference.

Moses Apostaticus

Moses Apostaticus is the rather august-sounding pen name of David Hilton, an anti-Semitic writer who has posted memes expressing the belief that Israel was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. In September 2016 the Daily Caller published an op-ed by Hilton promoting the “cultural marxism” conspiracy theory which posits that any criticism of institutional oppression is a Marxist ruse meant to attack the “straight, white male.” In a January 2017 Daily Caller piece, Hilton promoted another anti-Semitic conspiracy theory and accused billionaire philanthropist George Soros of deploying “foot soldiers” in his scheme to implement a “globalist oligarchy.”