What should be immediately clear about Mehdi Hasan, then, is that he lacks journalistic scruples. He evinces a blinding deficiency in personal integrity which, far from being an embarrassment to him, he seems content to flaunt. And this anti-intellectual social positioning colors everything he writes, reports, Tweets, or says on air.

Of late, this has allowed him to gather attention to himself by, eg., attacking Bill Maher and Glenn Loury for their supposed racism — then causing a ruckus when his Tweet on the subject was rightly met with a Community Notes backlash on Twitter. Not only was Hasan’s thesis risible and his math incompetent, but his intent, rather than to provide any kind of journalistic gloss on the problem of black-on-black crime, was to deny that any such problem even exists — then to racialize the claim by pretending to stand in solidarity with Blacks against what he referred to as “racist tropes,” all while falsely claiming white-on-white homicide is commensurate with black-on-black homicide in any meaningful way.

[Don’t miss the fun McCartney riff at the top, and read all the way through to Jeff’s point. Adam and I talk about these same issues on Amiable Skeptics pretty regularly, and Jeff drills down to move back out to the larger point very well here. Which is: we both liked “Revenge of the Nerds” better as a movie. — Ed]