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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.
Linking your real email adress to accounts commenting on outright white nationalist websites seems like an incredibly low IQ thing to do, and all the more weird for someone as obsessed with IQ as Hanania.
In recent years, he's been explicitly condemning the HBD right, even going on Emil Kirkegaard's blog to trash it to his face. I suspect Hanania probably understood that wignat politics was a dead end, but at the same time he couldn't pretend that HBD was false. So he tried to triangulate into a "moderate centrist" position, but apparently the ruling elite and its attack dogs are never far behind.
This will be an important test for the US right. The history of these doxxing events has shown that the right is all too happy to throw people under the bus for offending liberal sensibilities on issues like race. We'll see if this time is different.
I don't think it should be. That dude that was working for Tucker as a writer might have been worth defending. Hanania? Not only do I not understand how he was ever taken seriously, dude's basically the personification of Hlynka's "alt-right progressive" meme. Also, he seems pretty happy throwing people under busses himself.
This might be what does him in. He's been spending the better part of the recent past praising the liberal establishment and throwing people on the dissident right to the meatgrinder, even condemning them for racism.
In hindsight, it seems obvious he made a dash for respectability by opportunistically burning past bridges. Well, seen in that light, you could say this is karma in a sense. Who will now defend him after he did so much to alienate and even actively disparage those who used to read him?
To be fair, those he threw to the wolves defending him would make him look worse to the people he wishes to be associated with. There is a reason why every election year both parties try to accuse the other of being supported by David Duke.
Maybe he lost the substack gig of having a loyal following of dissidents, but if he sacrificed perceived truth for wider reach, I doubt he cares about such a career path.
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