Writing
Messengers of the Right
Back before Rush Limbaugh or Fox News, conservatives built their own media outlets — radio, television, magazines, publishing houses — as a way to secure political power in the U.S. Messengers of the Right tells the story of how conservative media pioneers were already transforming American politics in the 1950s and 1960s.
“Superb.” — The National Interest
“Well-researched and well-argued.” — New York Review of Books
“This is political history—and American history—at its finest.” — Margaret O’Mara, University of Washington
Columns and Commentary
I’ve written for a number of major newspapers, magazines, and websites, as both a columnist and as a contributor. My beat is conservatism, the GOP, media, and white nationalism. I also write broadly about American politics and culture.
For five years I was a weekly columnist at U.S. News & World Report. I followed that with a regular column at Vox and a biweekly column for The Age in Melbourne, syndicated across Australia. I’m currently a weekly columnist at CNN Opinion.
You can also find my byline at the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News, The Atlantic, New Republic, Los Angeles Times, Politico, Christian Science Monitor, New York Times Book Review, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, and Washington Examiner.
Want to read a few pieces?
Check out the clips below.
Don’t Expect Polls to Change Republican Minds
By Nicole Hemmer, Nov. 10, 2019
As support for both the impeachment inquiry and President Trump’s removal rises, opponents of Mr. Trump’s presidency are experiencing a long-dormant emotion: hope.
With each new poll, social media ripples with excitement. A majority supports impeachment. A plurality supports removal from office. And almost every day brings new details from the transcripts of the impeachment hearings, each with damning testimony of corruption and obstruction that promises to build even more support for removal — enough, even, to move Republicans on the issue.
But that hope springs from a false premise — that as the polls go, so goes the Republican Party. That’s no longer the case, and it hasn’t been for a generation…. Read on
Tweedy Racists and “Ironic” Anti-Semites
By Nicole Hemmer, Dec. 2, 2016
Collect all the portraits lining the many profile pieces of white supremacist Richard Spencer, and you might think you were holding the proofs for a slightly down-market GQ. A soft-faced white man in a too-tight peacoat, posing in a DC park. In a tweed sports jacket, standing in a brass-and-glass elevator. In dark-wash jeans, propping his leather ankle boots on a hotel room desk.
A recent Mother Jones profile is an exemplar of this beneath-the-hood reporting on white supremacy. It lingers over the details: the private school pedigree, the “slivers of togarashi-crusted ahi” that Spencer orders at the upscale hotel lounge, his “‘fashy’ (as in fascism) haircut.” The left-wing magazine does not truck in Spencer’s white nationalist politics — quite the opposite. But like many profiles of the alt-right leader, it contains an air of surprise. He’s a racist, but he wears some swank cufflinks.
Such coverage isn’t new to the alt-right. Operating from the flawed assumption that white supremacy is the provenance of poor whites and troglodytes, journalists have long had a tendency to get enamored of repackaged racism. Since the 1970s, the national press has fallen, again and again, into the trap of missing the substance of racism for its style…Read on
How Breitbart Became Just Another Right-Wing Trump Cheerleader
By Nicole Hemmer, Jan. 12, 2018
Steve Bannon, once depicted as the power behind President Trump's rise, has seen his fortunes fade fast, ousted first from the White House and now from Breitbart, the right-wing website that he turned into the hub of Trumpism and the alt-right during his four-plus years as its executive chairman.
It was a steep fall for the erstwhile kingmaker. Featured as "The Great Manipulator" on the cover of Time magazine and depicted as the Grim Reaper on "Saturday Night Live," Bannon leaned into the image of himself as a dark, all-powerful Svengali. "Darkness is good," he told the Hollywood Reporter shortly after Trump's election. "Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power." Yet if Bannon was, for a moment, the face of the brutalist turn in American politics, that moment is over. Bannon may not have lost his mind, as Trump claimed in recent weeks , but he has decisively lost.
It's not just Bannon on the decline, however. Breitbart itself has slipped from its place as left-wing bogeyman and right-wing powerbroker. The loss of Bannon once would have been seen as cataclysmic, a crippling blow to a site, and a movement, that drove so much of the tumult in American politics. But now it seems like the inevitable closing act. These days, Breitbart feels a lot like run-of-the-mill conservative media, not so different from Fox News or talk radio. That's partly an unintended consequence of its triumph: Breitbart's influence seeped into right-wing media on all platforms over the past two years. But if every conservative outlet sounds like Breitbart, is Breitbart still essential to Trumpism?…Read on
Only One Kind of Anger Counts in the 2020 Race
By Nicole Hemmer, Mar. 7, 2020
Now that the Democratic primary has been functionally narrowed to former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, with Donald Trump waiting in the wings to contend with one of them, there is one prediction about the coming election we can make with a great deal of confidence: There will be a lot of yelling.
The election will be an angry one. But its anger will be a certain kind: cramped, masculine, muddled with fear. Perhaps that's the only kind of anger the electorate is comfortable with. But it keeps our political options narrow, and ensures that our rage is always stoked, and never soothed.
The coming debates and rallies are likely to be high-volume affairs, orgies of Democrats' anger at Donald Trump and at corporations, and of Trump's vitriol against Democrats, immigrants and the media. That on-stage raging — echoed offstage in our discourse and even in comments like those made by Sen. Chuck Schumer (who later said "I shouldn't have used the words I did") about Trump's nominees to the Supreme Court — doubtless matches and amplifies an anger roiling the electorate.
But anger also helps explain how we ended up, after winnowing the most diverse primary field in American history, with three white men grasping for the presidency. They're the only demographic whose rage is considered legitimate… Read on