NYT Hires and Fires Reporter on the Same Day Because He Wrote for Taki

Dylan Byer reports:

The New York Times has terminated its contract with one of its new online opinion writers after a Gawker article highlighted the writer's previous association with racist publications, according to that writer's Twitter account.

Razib Khan, a science blogger and a doctoral candidate in genomics and genetics at the University of California, Davis, was one of 20 writers who signed contracts with the Times to write for the paper's online opinion section.

The Times announced its new stable of contributors on Wednesday. Hours later, Gawker's J.K. Trotter reported that Khan had a "history with racist, far-right online publications." Khan wrote 68 posts for Taki's Magazine, a publication founded by a "flamboyantly racist Greek journalist," Trotter wrote. Khan also wrote a letter to VDARE, "a white nationalist website named after the first white child born in America, in which he discussed [an essay] concerning the threat of the United States becoming “more genetically and culturally Mexican.”

On Thursday night, Michael Eisen, a UC Berkeley professor, tweeted that Khan had been kicked off the opinion page. Khan later confirmed that news, telling one follower: "Yeah, told me today. [I] may contribute one-off op-eds in future. I'm chill about it. It wasn't a surprise that [people] went ballistic."an immediate request for comment late Thursday night.'...

UPDATE (Mar. 20, 10:35 a.m.): Murphy emails:

After reviewing the full body of Razib Khan's  work, we are no longer comfortable using him as a regular, periodic contributor.

We remain open to consideration of submissions from him to our op-Ed pages, both in print and online.

This is positively off the wall.  The man is a geneticist and seemed to be on occasion  discussing genetic backgrounds of different groups. If anything, it seems that Kahn went out of his way not to get into the black-white intelligence debate, Even  Gakwer writes:

Khan is careful with his actual words; he never says black people are less intelligent. 

For the record, I have personally met some very intelligent black people and some dumb ones, just like whites.

But, hey, if  this is the new extreme standard by which racism is measured, I hereby forbid any contributors to Target Liberty from linking to any NYT columnist or reporter, who may be hopped up on racist Starbucks coffee , since Starbucks offers for purchase Jewish in origin breakfast foods, such as bagels, but does not offer hoecakes in their stores in the ethnically diverse area around the NYT headquarters. You can quote and link to specific columnists and reporters only if they have publicly distanced themselves from the bagel only policy of Starbucks .

   -RW