Conservative Maine News Site Fires White Nationalist Writer
When the conservative Maine Heritage Policy Center launched its political blog last month, newly hired chief executive Lance Dutson predicted in an editorial that “we’ll no doubt have kinks to work out along the way.”
Well, a big kink developed this week when other Maine bloggers pointed out that one of the center’s newly hired writers, Leif Parsell, has a long history of espousing white superiority and may even have ties to neo-Nazi organizations.
Those revelations led to Parsell’s firing on Tuesday, Dutson confirmed today to Hatewatch. “Though these comments were made prior to his employment with our organization, the rift between our value system and those expressed in this pattern of online behavior is significant enough to require an end to our employment of this individual,” Dutson said in a statement.