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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.
Unfortunately this could basically kill his influence. It won't completely obliterate him and he will likely still be able to make a solid living from writing things on Substack, but his days of being quoted by people like Musk and being a central player in the battle against wokeness are likely coming to an end. A tactic that woke defenders love to use is the quippy ad-hominem about how ideologically repugnant their opponent is. Hanania's book is coming out in September and I can already hear leftist retorts along the lines of "this is the guy who said Blacks should all be sterilized". Nuance doesn't really matter because trying to defend against the attack or adding context concedes the central point that this person uttered thought-criminal ideas in the past. Mainstream conservatives are still utterly terrified of being considered "racist", and linking to someone's book who said something like that could pose a risk to them that way. As such, these attacks can be pretty successful for at least trashing people's reputation in polite company, which is all the woke defenders really need to do to make someone mostly irrelevant.
He's legitimately the only person who understands how to defeat wokeness. His career being terminated would be sad for him, but not an absolute disaster for the movement, so long as someone with a cleaner history is able to pick up his talking points and run with them.
But I fear that that won't happen. We've gone decades without mass opposition to Griggs or the other excesses of the Civil Rights Act forming. It could take decades for another influential figure like Hanania to pick up the torch. (Yes, I know about Caldwell, but he never reached the popularity of Hanania.)
I've read a few of his things linked from here but don't follow him outside of that. What's different about how he's opposing wokeness compared to other people?
He believes wokeness is downstream from the civil rights act.
Seems plausible, though I haven't seen comparisons of legislation vs wokeness in other similar Anglo countries like Canada and Australia who have frequent first nations prayers before government meetings.
Or better yet - other entirely different non-Anglo countries, where they had BLM protests with scarcely any black people living there, chant about punching TERFS, etc...
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If only they were only before government meetings...
We also have e.g. a Racial Discrimination Act. I'm sceptical about the impact of legislation on culture, but the legislation exists.
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