That's a distortion. He took down is blog because the NYT journalist planned to use his real name, which is their typical practice. They didn't even have to break confidence to find it out, because he had publicly made the link in published work. This was also before he (or anyone else) saw the article. He and his fans seem to be under the false impression that their extremely-online internet-forum mores apply to all of society, and were outraged.
It's also an exaggeration to call the article a "hit piece." It wasn't glowing fluff, and that's all. I don't think he and his fans would have been satisfied with anything except an uncritical report of how they see and understand themselves.
No reporter is forced to out someone by “typical practice”, it’s a deliberate action. Revealing Scott’s identity only added heat to the story, not light.
That's a list of seven things, over a time period spanning 50 years. More than half appear to be cases where the person or their family were in legitimate physical danger. In all listed cases, it's the author's identity that was kept secret, not the subject of an article.
> No reporter is forced to out someone by “typical practice”, it’s a deliberate action.
In cases like Scott Alexander's, they're not compelled to hide anyone's identity either.
> Revealing Scott’s identity only added heat to the story, not light.
Maybe in the mind of his fans, but obviously not in the reporter's view. And frankly, all the "heat" came from Alexander's reaction and that of his fans.
You're claiming they faked that? That's silly. Scott's main purpose in life is being extremely nice to various weird irrelevant species of right-wingers in his comment sections; when he writes a post about politics the main thesis is that you too should also calm down and be extremely nice to them, which is why he makes the posts so long you'll forget what you were upset about by the time you finish reading them.
When it comes to say, Berkeley feminists, who are occasionally mean to him in real life, he's never nice to them and calls them practically Voldemort (direct quote).
He also likes to occasionally quote his irrelevant right-wing friends like Moldbug (or Charles Murray), ostensibly to write responses taking them down, but of course if we all just ignored them they'd go away and the main reason to write any kind of response to them is to let people know they exist.
As previously stated I think you should ignore everyone from Berkeley or else they'll make you join their polycule and discuss AGI alignment all day.
What I imagine you've heard is people who have seen the way he treats his comments section and his approach to discourse as a commitment to hearing all sides. Before he went to Substack, he took down his blog because of a NY Times hit piece alleging he supported Charles Murray, which wasn't really true, but he was critical of universities not allowing Charles Murray to speak. He is also fairly known for his "tend his garden" thing on his own blog, which means he favors people who are polite in the way they comment over people who don't hold abhorrent points of view. For instance, his blog is about the only non-explicitly racist place you'll still see Steve Sailer on a regular basis, who is definitely a eugenicist. But to Scott, he doesn't really mind if you spend 90% of your commenting effort over several decades committed to the real problem with America being that our worst cities are overrun with genetically inferior black people, just so long as you're polite about it and don't start fights in his comments.
The unfortunate side effect of this that I don't think Scott has ever grappled with and maybe never will now that he's making money from it is that his blog has gradually fallen prey to the Gab/8chan effect that being the last person to tolerate bad people means your blog is going to become overrun with bad people. His comments sections have tremendously deteriorated over the years because of that. Everybody is very polite and friendly with each other while discussing incel theory and the problems of low IQ in the global south.
That said, Scott himself still overwhelmingly writes about nerd topics, like his absolute obsession with prediction markets. It's practically every other post. Just avoid the open thread posts that where the comment direction is entirely driven by the audience rather than by him selecting a topic.
And, I guess for completeness, I believe someone on Twitter once posted "evidence" of Scott admitting in private that he believed blacks were genetically predisposed to low IQ. He has never publicly said anything like that, so I guess take the word of some random person on the Internet that produced a collection of pixels with whatever size grain of salt you think that warrants.