A few days ago, George Mason Koch-supported economist Robin Hanson wrote an insane misogynistic screed on his blog. Today, in the New York Times, Ross Douthat chose to take up the challenge of trying to legitimize Hanson. Hanson said that women owe sex to unattractive men, claiming that’s a natural consequence of society wanting poor people to have more opportunities to succeed. Hanson’s argument is tortured and transparently flawed, but worse than that, it is a terrible denigration of women. In Hanson’s view, women are property that can be traded to make unattractive men happier. You might wish to draw your own conclusions on how many women might be interested in getting involved with Hanson, who has a history of misogyny, typified by his 2010 post “Gentle Silent Rape”.

But what Douthat did in his article today is nearly as bad as Hanson’s denigration of women. Douthat’s article is an excellent example of how the right-wing propaganda machine normalizes Republican hate and whitewashes it for mass consumption. Douthat is sometimes interesting — he is one of the best, if one can be so positive, of the sad group of right-wing public intellectuals, a group of weak-thinking ideologues who have been selected and propped up by right-wing billionaires. But Douthat’s column today comes nowhere near any sort of quality. Beyond the hate-laundering Douthat does today, he also falls into his frequent pattern of salting his article with false right-wing talking points.