William Otis, a former special counsel to President George H.W. Bush and a current professor at Georgetown University Law Center, was nominated by President Donald Trump this week to sit on a federal commission that sets policy on how to punish criminals.

It’s easy to dismiss “fringe” media like Alex Jones or Breitbart News or other decidedly racist, anti-Semitic or “alt-right” blogs as the rantings of kooks and those outside the mainstream, except we now have a man in the White House who exploited and stoked the fires of these outlets all the way there.