I would imagine Quillette, being a conservative-leaning publication, routinely disagrees with this person’s socio-political beliefs, so ad hominem must necessarily be used.
Huh, is Quillette actually representative of the mainstream conservative movement? I think that would say a lot about the conservative movement if so....
It is hardly an alt-right publication. I got started on Quillette from the podcast Wrongspeak. They don't do regular episodes anymore, but they tackled a lot of really hard questions.
I don't agree with everything on Quillette, but their arguments are at least well thought out. There's a lot I don't agree with in this one (the author justifying Ferguson's non-deterministic models as even remotely acceptable is absolutely not-even-wrong from a data sciences perspective; not to mention we don't have the original code; not to mention the code had race conditions).
I'd suggest reading a few of their articles first. I don't see how you can see them as alt-right. They're a bit right of center, but they're pretty much centrists.
The point of alt-right is to act as a bridge between extremist views and modern conservative views. Most alt-right sites have a mix of reasonable articles, conspiracy theories, and somewhat extreme articles. The comment sections of these sites often lead to more extreme information, with the sites actively allowing it, and often encouraging it. The YouTube recommendation loop is a good example of how this works.
Sending traffic to any alt-right site helps recruit people to extremism.
Fine, but Quillette is still hardly the publication you think it is. I've never read anything hateful or right-wing on their site. Their articles always seem reasonable.
I think there's another side of this; the fear of ideas. Brenden O'neil does a great talk on this:
You're emphasizing what I'm saying. They have a mix of articles that range from slightly conservative leaning, to promoting eugenics. Since you find their posts to mostly be reasonable, the ones that are a little more right also seem reasonable, and with enough of that, the ones that are even more right become more reasonable too. It's meant to slide people further and further to the right, making them even more receptive to the extremely far right stuff that's in the comment sections. You're the target audience.