Comment by arduanika

Fair enough. But the reason that "the right" is not letting go of the story is:

1. The fraud was not in fact being investigated seriously enough until this kid, even while lacking the basics of journalism as Patrick describes here, forced the issue.

2. This is just another example of the decades long trend where more and more bad patterns and outcomes can persist for far too long because the normal checks are fended off with spurious accusations of racism.

There's some variation on how "the right" would handle (2). The center-right wants to shore up our culture of color-blindness to patch these vulnerabilities. The far-right wants to do away with egalitarianism altogether, and just go back to plain old racism. If we can't figure out the former, we might well end up with the latter.

(My reading is that Patrick falls squarely in the "center-right" here, fwiw. Then again, it can be hard to decode his exact subtext from under all the polite circumlocutions. Reading his stuff is something of an acquired skill and/or taste.)