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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29133 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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Richard Hanania is a man whom I do not always agree with but do appreciate for successfully pissing off people both on the left and the right. The ability to piss off people from both of those groups is, in my opinion, generally correlated with being right about things.

Well, Hanania has allegedly been linked to a pseudonym. The allegation is that about 10 years ago, he was routinely saying taboo things about race and gender issues under the name "Richard Hoste".

Some quotes:

It has been suggested that Sarah Palin is a sort of Rorschach test for Americans [...] The attractive, religious and fertile White woman drove the ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite absolutely mad well before there were any questions about her qualifications.

If they had decency, blacks would thank the white race for everything that they have.

Women simply didn’t evolve to be the decision makers in society [...] women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.

It's nothing very shocking for those of us who read dissident right stuff, and it's not even really that far away from Hanania's typical under-his-birth-name writing. But it may be a bridge too far for much of the more mainstream audience.

What I wonder is, which way shall Hanania go?

  1. Own it, say "yes I am Richard Hoste and I did write those things"? He would gain praise from some people for honesty, but he would also stand probably a pretty good chance of losing book deals, interviews with some mainstream figures, and so on.

  2. Deny deny deny?

  3. Ignore it?

I think that it is an interesting case study, the attempted take down of one of the more famous examples of what is now a pretty common sort of political writer: the Substacker whose views are just controversial and taboo enough to have a lot of appeal for non-mainstream audiences but are not so far into tabooness, in content and/or tone, to get the author branded a full-on thought-criminal.

It has been suggested that Sarah Palin is a sort of Rorschach test for Americans [...] The attractive, religious and fertile White woman drove the ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite absolutely mad well before there were any questions about her qualifications.

Hmm. Minus the shot on the "Jewish elite", this or something close to this might be right. It's not at all charitable, but it might be accurate.

this or something close to this might be right

Seriously? Sarah Palin was 49 years old 10 years ago so definitely not fertile. She was also not attractive in any conventional sense of the term.

She was 44 in 2008 when she burst onto the national scene, so still potentially fertile. I recall the phrase "VPILF" being tossed around quite a bit.

IIRC there was an actual porno called "Who's Nailin' Palin?" -- and a funny joke from the brief period of funny Stephen Colbert jokes about how Equal Time law required the development of one called "Who's Ridin' Biden?".

She has five kids. Accusing "barren" libs of seething at her fertile life is the point. Not that she is is fertile right this minute.

She was DC attractive

No, the Jewish part is accurate. See this.

Jennifer Rubin

Jennifer Rubin writes reported opinion for The Washington Post. She covers politics and policy, foreign and domestic, and provides insight into the conservative movement, the Republican and Democratic parties, and threats to Western democracies. Rubin, who is also an MSNBC contributor, came to The Post after three years with Commentary magazine. Prior to her career in journalism, Rubin practiced labor law for two decades, an experience that informs and enriches her work. She is a mother of two sons and lives with her husband in D.C. She is the author of “Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump” and is host of the podcast Jen Rubin's "Green Room."

So a conservative Jewish political commentator wrote a punchy article dunking on self hating liberal whites and the Jewish elite. This guy references her statement about such people and Palin. And that's the "gotcha" being used to demonstrate his vile racism.

So it's the sort of gotcha that falls apart with a bit of digging. Not that would-be cancellers will care and not that it helps him any.

Rubin is now a full bore progressive. That’s why it’s funny.

Quite funny to go back fifteen years and find Jennifer Rubin defending Sarah Palin in Commentary. How times change.

Oh, he's literally just paraphrasing an article by a neoconservative Jew. That puts it in a much different perspective.

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