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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'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?
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.
Deny deny deny?
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.
Let he who has never anonymously posted edgelord comments on the internet cast the first stone. I honestly can't imagine how dull and intellectually lazy one would have to be to never once let a single cancellation-worthy thought enter their mind. In the early 2010s there was even less of a barrier between thinking something and posting it anonymously on the internet. Not everyone was reading Moldbug back then. You didn't expect the thought police to be around every corner.
The idea of rationalism being an "off-ramp from extremism" has been around for some time. This article is not strong Bayesian evidence of anything, even assuming that it's true (It probably is. Hanania would have denied it immediately if it was false, and he's been radio silent on Twitter since the article dropped). Conservation of expected evidence; you should have assumed that anyone who says the things that Hanania says publicly under his real name also has stronger beliefs that he doesn't say. The quoted material sounds like exactly what you would get if you prompted a non-RLHFed LLM with the phrase "Richard Hanania under fire after the following controversial statements resurfaced:".
Ignoring it is the best option here. Anyone with a brain knew that there was a high probability that he believes (or believed) things like this. What the article does is make these things salient and give activists a pretext to attack Hanania and his associates. If he ignores it completely he can maintain plausible deniability.
I want him to acknowledge the article and say that his views changed, but not grovel.
"I want him to freely bleed in shark infested water, but not for sharks to feast on him."
Any sensible admission of past guilt is merely chuming the cancelation waters. I wish it wasn't so, but it is.
But he doesn't have moral guilt. Like I said, he just has to flatly state that he once believed one thing and now believes another. Hell, didn't Obama flirt with Marxism in college?
The kinds of people running cancellation campaigns do not see "flirting with Marxism" as a demerit.
Those are not the people who need to forgive Hanania. The people we need to forgive him are the Republicans in Conservatism Inc. Typically, they go along with left-wing cancellation campaigns, then brag about how much better than the left they are for ousting the "bigots" from their ranks, while still engaging with the bigots on the left. The smart people who do this like Ben Shapiro are acting in bad faith, but most Republicans are just too stupid to notice the contradiction on their own. If Hanania points it out, there's a chance some of them will get it. And we NEED conservatives to read his upcoming book. Mass awareness of Griggs v Duke is the key to getting it overturned, which is the key to defeating wokeness.
I have never seen or heard an intelligent comment come from Ben Shapiro. Why do you think he deserves to be listed as one of the "smart people"?
"He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2004, at age 20, with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, in political science and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Afterwards, he attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 2007 with a J.D., cum laude."
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Uh, Ben Shapiro has personal reasons for being very concerned about the right embracing old school racial doctrines.
Yeah, the reason is that the people paying him (the Kochs) tell him to care.
I know that you're implying it's because he's Jewish, but no smart person will believe that embodying all of the negative stereotypes about Jews is less likely to encourage anti-Semitism than allowing white people to have the same level of racial consciousness as Jews. I don't think most progressive Jews or cuckservative Jews no better, but Ben Shapiro and Jonathan Greenblatt do. That they behave in this manner anyway makes them a bigger threat to the Jewish people than to the white race, not that they're friendly to either. They care about their own career and nothing more.
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The problem with Griggs is that disparate impact can be discrimination as not permitted. For example, assume UNC wanted to continue to practice AA. They could pick a random attribute (eg single parenthood) that correlates with being black and provide a bonus for that. The goal is to find a facially neutral category but one you know isn’t in fact evenly distributed.
The problem with Griggs v. Duke is that idea that any disparate outcome against minorities shifts the burden of proof to “there is discrimination.”
Under current law, the right question is “does this policy have a truly reasonable relation to the X it is measuring.” So an IQ test for an intellectually challenging job? It has a reasonable relation and therefore the disparate impact is irrelevant. If on the other hand some firm institutes some policy about giving preferences in difficult jobs to people whose parents received SNAP benefits then that would be discrimination.
This of course assumes the government should even give one iota about discrimination by non government companies. But my suggestion deals with the statute as-is.
The idea that disparate impact is something we need to look out for is what created wokeness.
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Bleeding in shark infested waters. I wish it wasn't so.
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Why do you want him to say his views have changed? Do you believe this to be true, do you want it to be, or do you want him to grovel in a less pathetic manner? Nothing he has said back then is substantially different in anything sans tone from his current beliefs, far as I can tell. And saying something like "In the course of my career as an irreverent political pundit, rude troll and dunker-on-outgroup extraordinaire, I've learned to eloquently pontificate on women's tears winning the marketplace on ideas and right wingers being obscene barbarians, but avoid being clearly hostile or pointing out when the Outgroup's vanguard happens to be disproportionately Jewish" is, in my opinion, worse than nothing.
I mean, that exact statement would both be in character for him and also be the sort of non-apology that points to how ridiculous the controversy is.
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I don't think his comment was even 'noticing', I think it was literally playing to his audience. If Hanania calls them the "white elite" in a wignat (or substantially wignat) comments section, all the usual respondants will "well akshually..." him, so he says "self-hating white and jewish" to pre-empt those responses. It's no different to here, the only place where I make sure to always mention I'm Jewish along with white when I discuss it because otherwise SS or someone else will "well akshually" me and derail/ignore the rest of my point.
Oxford commas save lives!
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I think there's not much to notice here, everyone knows (oh no, consensus building!) that Democrats love to hate on Palin and that rather more of prominent Democratic elite [understood extensively, a la Karlin's Elite Human Capital meme, e.g. Colbert and Stewart and even their target audience] are Jewish. Indeed it is through their mean-spirited clowning1* 2** that I still have vaguely negative associations with her name despite paying roughly zero attention to US politics at that time.*** («Sarah Palin writing notes on her hand shows she's not like those elites and their memory» – the subtitle helpfully communicates the important dimension of the conflict; no better way to highlight your claim to status than in clever dispassionate hinting at anti-elitism as ressentiment driven by deficiency, or as some naive conspiracy theory).
It is also my gut feeling that back then they've been somewhat more shrill, catty and obnoxious with that elitist hate and affected condescending mockery of Palin than generic whites, as it tends to be. I allow that maybe that's just muh Verbal Intelligence and loud NY culture showing, and their hate was driven by the same forces as in regular «self-hating white elite» rather than some genuinely tribal sense of hostility for Palin as unashamed, fecund Christian; white liberals do despise right-wing Evangelicals. Those factors suffice to casually "notice" a disproportionate contribution.
But yes, I think you're correct that he has mostly preempting that sort of akshually from the audience. But so what? I imagine those two words – «and Jewish» – get pattern-matched to dog-whistling from a much more extremist cluster, are precisely what pushes this «revelation» over the limit of being dangerous for his career, and not-so-coincidentally are the clearest, most undeniable delta from his contemporary messaging; which in itself adds the power to the accusation of witchcraft – «he's learned to hide his power level». It's one thing to begin writing more obliquely about Ungrateful Le Blacks (his recent Killer King piece), it's another to drop a token altogether.
* Amusingly, the site showed me an insanely pronatalist ad for BreastmilkCounts.com before proceeding to Colbert, even bereft of heavy-handed race-coded messaging; I guess not all is lost with liberal culture if they allow this sort of placement.
** Stewart's criticism is oddly relevant to Hanania's case.
*** I am aware that Colbert is a Catholic Elite Human Capital akshually.
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He no longer cares about white nationalism. On the contrary, he's opposed to it, in the way that one would typically be opposed to any policy prescription, and he has written about his opposition extensively. He doesn't reject it on moral grounds, nor does he thinks white nationalists are untouchable and must not be associated with in any capacity. Therefore, he should treat his radical past the same way that a typical Democratic party elite treats the communist phase that they had in college, and not the absurd way that society demands white nationalism or fascism or whatever the boogeyman is be treated.
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