NYT Covers Racism From the Point of View of the Racist

December 5, 2025

Julie Hollar

In the latest installment of sympathetic media profiles in the “Nazi Sympathizer Next Door” genre, the New York Times (11/3/25) offers a more than 3,000-word article on William Hendrix, one of the 12 Young Republican state leaders whose bigoted and violent group chat messages were leaked and reported on in October (Politico, 10/14/25), resulting in a nationwide uproar.

Under the headline “How a Kansas Republican Became Part of a Racist, Antisemitic Group Chat,” the Times‘ Sabrina Tavernise and Georgia Gee profile Hendrix, 24, who lost his job at the Kansas State Capitol as a result of the scandal. Readers are treated first to a photo of a thoughtful-looking Hendrix, wearing a navy suit with an American flag pin on the lapel, with the caption, “William Hendrix, who has not spoken publicly about the group chat until now, said that he was stunned by the intensity of the uproar and the fallout on his life.”

A later photo shows Hendrix gazing out his car window at the state capitol building, “where he once worked.”

Described at various points as “ambitious,” “young” and “bullied for his weight” in school, Hendrix is given ample opportunity to explain himself, with only mild pushback from the Times. Meanwhile, the rest of his party is largely exonerated from any role in its own radicalization. As I pointed out for FAIR (11/16/20) when covering a previous iteration of this phenomenon from the Times, the problem journalists must confront isn’t that they haven’t probed deeply enough into the far-right psyche; it’s that they refuse to stop normalizing it.

https://fair.org/home/nyt-covers-racism-from-the-point-of-view-of-the-racist/