Draft:Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias is an American centrist blogger and journalist who writes about economics and politics. Yglesias has written columns and articles for publications such as The American Prospect, The Atlantic, and Slate. In November 2020, he left his position as an editor and columnist for the news website Vox, which he co-founded in 2014, to publish the Substack newsletter Slow Boring.

Views
Like many centrists, Yglesias has no core principles and has often embraced whatever is trendy at the moment. He supported the 2003 Iraq War when that was fashionable and then later turned against it once the public mood changed. He supported Clintonite neoliberal policies when that seemed like the "smart" thing to do until Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, after which he became a Bernie Sanders supporter when it looked like all the cool kids were doing that. Once the Bernie movement lost steam in 2020, Yglesias quickly pivoted to "anti-woke" talking points along with his old interest in racist pseudoscience. He has particularly taken to promoting the work of eugenicist and racist crank Richard Hanania and giving Steve Sailer a platform to spew his racist garbage. It is unclear why Yglesias doesn't simply block Sailer so that his followers are not constantly subjected to Sailer's racist rants whenever they look at Yglesias's replies, thus allowing Sailer to gain more readers and followers. It is also unclear why he is so blasé about Hanania's continued promotion of racist pseudoscience.

Controversy
In 2013, Yglesias garnered controversy for his statements about the 2013 Dhaka garment factory collapse, with Yglesias arguing that the lower building standards that partially led to the factory's collapse make "economic sense" in developing countries, later tweeting that "foreign factories should be more dangerous than American factories" and "the current system of letting different countries have different rules is working fine." His comments were widely criticized in The Daily Beast, Time and other outlets, with The Guardian commenting that Yglesias is "confusing a person's human worth with their socio-economic status. That's wrong." Yglesias later clarified some of his comments, but stood by his original position.