Terminology

Looks like it was a lone nut (and a Chicago resident, at that), and not an organized group of nuts with a purpose, who was responsible for the brutal murder of Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow's mother and husband. In her NYT piece on Bart Ross's suicide note confession, Jodi Wilgoren writes: "Until Wednesday night, the search had largely concentrated on sympathizers of Matthew Hale, the Aryan leader convicted last year of soliciting his security chief to kill Judge Lefkow." So my question is: Can one be an "Aryan leader"? I mean, is "Aryan" a category recognized by the Times as something that could, even in theory, have a leadership? As in, African-American leaders, Jewish leaders, Catholic leaders, and Aryan leaders? I understand that, in journalism as well as in other writing, you're not supposed to repeat phrases (thus why "white-supremacist" might not have been used), and that in news pieces you're not supposed to give your own opinion (thus why "savage racist" might not have been used), but really, while Hale and his followers may consider themselves to be "Aryan," this does not mean that "Aryanness" is what unites their group as an entity with respect to the outside world. Hale & co. do not speak as leaders of all people whom Hitler would have deemed racially acceptable. Hardly--if most Americans of German or Nordic ancestry were white supremacists, that would be bad news indeed. But luckily, Hale speaks only for those who share his extreme, racist beliefs, which is why he ought to be called a "white-supremacist" or "racist" leader, and not an "Aryan" one.