The article is actually rather vague about whether the op-ed was written by Hagar. It says: > To try to understand his viewpoint, Ars attempted to reach Hagar

The article is actually rather vague about whether the op-ed was written by Hagar. It says: > To try to understand his viewpoint, Ars attempted to reach Hagar by phone and email in September. In the course of this process, we learned that he did not actually submit many of these op-eds. Since the article claims to be about one op-ed piece submitted to many places, it seems reasonable to assume he wrote it, but that the mentioned PR firm then submitted it far and wide. It's also not clear from that wording if they actually spoke with Hagar (they "attempted to reach" him), or if this information comes from another source. In any case, it's still an obvious smear campaign.