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Some months ago, someone on Twitter said the following:
That's the kind of middle-of-the-road statement that, two or three years ago, I would have associated with Right-wing rationalists. People called out the media and the establishment when it was wrong while also being open and honest about the Right's flaws. While that tendency still exists in places like DSL and here, I've found it's becoming rarer and rarer, with those espousing it increasingly likely to be told they aren't welcome. This parallels a wider tendency in American politics: the rise of the so-called "Tech Right." People like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Shaun Maguire. Richard Hanania initially hoped they would infuse the Right with needed level-headedness, after all, such people were urban, socially moderate, and didn't have chips on their shoulders about class. This has largely not happened. You could hardly imagine Musk, Andreessen, or Maguire saying anything like the above statement. Their attitude parallels that of the Right as a whole - "misinformation" is just a left-wing smear and there's no downside at all to every random person with a two-digit IQ having a social media megaphone. Musk did push back on the tariffs, (perhaps because his business interests were being harmed) but you could never imagine him saying "libs are right" about anything. Even when he's broken with Trump, he hasn't reflected on the barren epistemological environment that led to Liberation Day, instead doubling down on conspiratorial Epstein stuff. To get a reasonable, moderate perspective, you have to follow the kind of people who march around with tiki torches and scream "Jews will not replace us!" That's not much of an exaggeration; the statement that libs were right about misinformation came from Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Charlottesville goon march.
This is the last straw, Alex.
Barely a day ago, @Amadan gave you some rather clear operational advice, with his mod hat on:
He said it well, I can't say it any better. Our (very weak, if it even exists at all) Affirmative Action policy for left-wing trolling is, shall we say, not up to the task of tolerating this any longer.
Quoting a tweet that "someone made on Twitter" without attribution or source is a... choice.
If it was made with the intent of rules-lawyering our BLR guidelines, by not submitting a link at all, it was made poorly.That's a minor quibble at the end of the day. You have been repeatedly warned to behave yourself, and you've clearly annoyed both the commentariat and us mods well past the point of being justifiable on merit. You are being egregiously obnoxious, and show no signs of stopping. We tolerate more from those who give the forum more. You're not there, quite the opposite.
Banned for a month. Consider this provisional, since the other mods are asleep and I've asked them for their opinions regarding a duration. Me? I'm open to the idea of a permaban.
Edit: I've elected to cut down the ban to 2 weeks since two respected commenters are willing to speak up on Turok's behalf. Hopefully he gets the message.
To be clear Turok is not a left winger. Hes a hananianite libertarian who is butthurt that they couldn’t co-opt the right from the conservatives.
I don't have a Twitter account, and I don't go out of my way to follow twitter e-celbrities.
Maybe you can help me out here. What's this "Hanania" guy's deal?
Everything I see about him here on the motte seems to suggest that his entire schtick can be reduced to "poor people are gross moral failures and I'm clearly not poor. Are you poor? Are you a gross moral failure?"
Am I missing something here?
Imagine someone who not only unironically uses the term human capital, and unambiguously considers themselves as higher human capital, but who also conspicuously talks about how the Republican Party has really gone downhill since it started catering to the tastes of those lower human capital against the advice of better human capital.
iprayiam3's characterization of Turok can apply to Hanania in general- someone who is generally upset that their intelligence and self-evident superiority aren't met with the deference and leadership they feel is their due. You can talk about Hanania, the social critic, but what that misses is Hanania, the would-be luminary / public intellectual / movement leader. Critics are common, but it takes a special sort of Influencer who is Intelligent enough to deserve to be listened to.
In mechanical terms, Hanania is/was a journalist who gained noticed in the 2000s by writing for far-right publications (that he has since disavowed). But from those publications he made connections with the sort of people who read them and more mainstream right-leaning media to sometimes write for those, and in turn use those as a further spring board. Hanania is a sharp enough wit that he can stand out by poking midwits, and enjoys it for both its own sake and the adulation it brings from those happy to see the victims pricked.
IIRC, part of what made Hanania stand out / get excommunicated from the respectable media (besides his not-quite-secret further right entry point) was that his schitk of being an angry libertarian also made him one of the earlier public critics/opponents to what we now call DEI. Hanania was always something of a shock-jock writer, picking arguments to provoke, and mocking woke / social justice / DEI efforts was something where he was ahead of the crowd. That boosted his credentials in some circles, especially those more interested in racial-IQ science, in the 'only Diogenes is wise enough to tell it like it is' sense. However, intellectual humility is not exactly something Hanania gets accused of having too much of, and he (or at least his support group) would probably tend to fixate more on Diogenes' acerbic wit and less on the joke.
This comes to the political pretensions... not really ever, but the closest in the the early-mid-2010s, pre-Trump. Trump rose because there was a power vacuum of voter base trust in the Republican establishment. That vacuume was because the Republican base disagreed with the Democrats on a lot and wanted someone who would fight. Hanania was also someone who disagreed with the Democrats on the lot and wanted to fight. This is a now decade-old vibe, but there was a vibe that Republicans were looking for something different than the stale old Bush-era republicans. (Memorably, the Republican Party elite had been taking the lesson via post-Romney autopsy that the change they needed was to become more like the Democrats. This, uh, didn't work out for that wing of the party.)
The fact that the Republican base went with someone like Trump, rather than someone like more Hanania-adjacent, is somewhere between 'something that will never be forgiven' and 'It's not like I wanted to be popular with you' and 'I knew you were all idiots anyway.'
I don't know / recall if Hanania ever made an overt play for Republican Party influence, but he's been bitter about it in ways that are more akin to a spurned would-be-lover than an outsider. Hananaia has written about how conservative republicans are worse (in some ways) than democrats, about how Trump has a stranglehold on the party, about how the party has become the low human capital party (since Trump), etc. etc. The sort of thing that gives the impression that Hanania sure would think it was a good thing if the Republican party was replaced with people who met Hanania's standards, which of course includes agreeing with Hanania, and would naturally elevating Hanania-like people like Hanania into policy power. (But, of course, he'd never be so low-brow as to directly appeal to his own greatness.)
Despite that, Hananaians occasionally make scratches, or at least associations, with political relevance. Hanania was allegedly / accused of contributing to the Project 2025 republican wishlist / template that the Trump administration cribbed from for early policy priorities. At the same time (loosely / more recently), Hanania did a media tour publicly professing regret for ever voting for Trump (which, of course, was due to Hanania being insufficiently Hanania and taking his reasoning further). Hanania thus tries to shape Trumpian politics, while also keeping as far distance as he can. If Trump zigs, he will zag, and comment at length at how bad zigging is.
Hananaia acts, in other words, loosely like a would-be government-in-exile hoping that, should the hated regime fall, people will naturally look to them for guidance. However, this is undercut a bit by how the would-be government is led by a hated aristocrat who openly loathes the peasants, and hardly loved in return. Still, he's useful enough to enough people that he continues to exist.
The way you write Hanania reminds me of Sailer’s law of female journalists (https://www.unz.com/isteve/sailers-law-of-female-journalism/) - very low value human capital of him to succumb to the same pressures.
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