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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.
He wrote about it.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-i-used-to-suck-and-hopefully
Unfortunate. It's not going to help him, probably will hurt him. He offered zero defense of anything he said, at best he comes out looking something like Freddie De Boer where he's straight up claiming he was nuts for a while. As my dad used to call it, the George W Bush defense: nothing that happened before I was 35 and found Jesus counts!
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His reply struck as me as earnest, particularly because he at least offers a why for the what. That said, I'm still annoyed, but not at all because of the content of his past opinions but entirely because they were left unacknowledged and hidden until a HuffPo expose forced the question. I would have respected him a lot more if he was more upfront and honest about how his opinions have changed, even with a perfunctory "I used to believe other stuff" passing reference.
Especially given how much his brand revolves around disagreeableness and bravery. Or rather: the denial that it's even brave to make certain noises online.
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That seems utterly banal? "I have held these exact opinions for as long as I've had conscious thought" is much more remarkable and would actually be deserving of a mention IMO.
It is banal with how I phrased it. I just want some sort of hint, because my current impression is that he pretended otherwise.
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Hard to overstate how intellectually unappealing this is. I actually empathize with it on some level, but it's sure not an argument that LoserCuckHanania was wrong and WinnerCareerHanania is right. I like Hanania in general, but it really is striking how much the change seems to be about having something to lose. I surely won't be part of any cancellation project against him, but it probably does diminish my view of him as an honest actor.
Why is it stated as self-evident even by supposed ideological dissidents like Hanania that romantically unsuccessful men are the only men holding so-called misogynistic views? I've never seen any evidence of this anywhere, and there are very obvious examples to the contrary.
Evidently they've never met any Chad types who (among men) hold their conquests in utter contempt.
I suppose one probable explanation is that such types don't bother to post their views on this on forums, so they aren't visible online that much.
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Because at least some scholars who study such men seem to think (e.g. William Costello) that they do tend to be more misogynistic (which, as pointed out, is different from them being the only misogynists)?
The linked study is based on scoring higher on scales for "Hostility Towards Women", "Rape Myth Acceptance", and "Sexual Objectification". Reading the appendix, these scales are sufficiently low-quality that it is difficult to conclude much from them, at least not without the data for how people responded to individual questions.
Some of the 10 items on the "hostility towards women" scale include "I feel that many times women flirt with men just to tease them or hurt them.", "I am sure I get a raw deal from the women in my life. ", and "I usually find myself agreeing with women. (Reverse coded)". It doesn't really provide novel information to learn that someone romantically unsuccessful has worse experiences with women and is less likely to have someone like a wife in his life that he is more likely to agree with than if the women he interacts with are strangers. (It's also a bit funny to imagine someone making a "hostility towards men" scale and making one of the items "I usually find myself agreeing with men. (Reverse coded).")
Meanwhile large sections of "Rape Myths" and "Sexual Objectification" are things the now-successful Hanania would presumably agree with. Questions like that are going to pick up on very broad demographic correlations with ideology. The ideological bias on display also makes me more skeptical about the people conducting these studies. Examples of the 11 "Rape Myths" include "To get custody for their children, women often falsely accuse their ex-husband of a tendency toward sexual violence.", "Many women tend to exaggerate the problem of male violence." and "It is a biological necessity for men to release sexual pressure from time to time.". (The last would naturally correlate with high sex drive and thus sexual dissatisfaction.) Examples of the 10 "Sex Objectification" items include "Being with an attractive woman gives a man prestige.", "Using her body and looks is the best way for a woman to attract a man.", and "Sexually active girls are more attractive partners.".
Also some of these seem sufficiently unarguable that it seems like it might be heavily influenced by the respondents' social desirability bias. For instance, if many of the men disagreeing that "Being with an attractive woman gives a man prestige." or "Sexually active girls are more attractive partners." believe otherwise but are the type to answer surveys with what they perceive as the most socially desirable answers, are they also more likely to misrepresent how sexually satisfied they are? And the second one would also measure sex drive.
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It’s a feminist meme that the only reason a man could criticise feminism is sexual frustration or a sense of inferiority. Basically so that to criticise feminism is to declare yourself a loser. Same principle as “what, you can’t handle a strong woman?”.
The same trick was pulled with gay rights - the meme that homophobia is usually a sign of suppressed gay lust.
It's just that it's somewhat strange that even dissident rightists fall for this garbage.
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It’s not implied, obviously there are whole regions of the world where every man holds misogynistic views. He’s saying that in cosmopolitan, white, blue tribe PMC circles, young male misogynists are probably highly disproportionately incels.
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He never said that only romantically unsuccessful men hold misogynistic views, he just implied that men who are romantically unsuccessful are prone to hold misogynistic views.
In a column meant to give an acceptable explanation for his past (supposedly) abhorrent views on women, he claims that such views "naturally" originated from his unsatisfying romantic life i.e. obviously implying that they cannot possibly stem from anything else.
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This seems to be a common trap people fall into, the second people gain any amount of status within the system their ideas quickly soften and become more in line with the cultural hegemony. Hanania isn't an exception. I don't even think this is necessarily intentional dishonesty per se, people are primed to shift their beliefs the second the costs of that belief become unacceptable.
I'd wager your average, well-adjusted person is engaging in motivated self-delusion on many different topics without being aware of it, and that it is the people who have nothing to lose (or think they do) who have the ability to entertain independent thought the most. This doesn't mean they necessarily come to the correct conclusions, it's rather that their conclusions are not constrained by social desirability and are more "honest" in that regard.
Why not just that each produces biases in its own way?
The opposite stance also seems to be true—those not entrenched in a system may be less likely to notice the value in it.
You're probably correct that each produces biases of their own - nobody is completely free from that. However, that specific bias you're mentioning cuts both ways - those who are doing well in a system are also more likely to view it positively, warranted or not. The skewing effect of social desirability, on the other hand, seems to be a pressure that just gets worse the more integrated you are in social life. The more you rely on other people, the more incentives there are to curry favour with them and adopt the beliefs of the group.
Personal experience probably isn't a great source for belief, but as I've grown my social circle over the years the more I have felt the pressures of social life encroaching. The tribalistic social pressures and incentive structures that drive people to adopt certain group beliefs for social signalling purposes are disturbingly strong, and it occurs even when no proper evidence has been provided to me that these beliefs are correct, and it's only by actively and consciously guarding against these instincts that I've managed to maintain my streak of heterodoxy. But doing that requires one to accept a level of discomfort they could otherwise shield themselves from.
Good comment. Sort of goes to disprove "Twitter isn't real life."
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See also here.
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It's eerie seeing him be so humble and self-effacing. Typically he gives Moldbug a run for his money as far as smugness and dismissiveness go.
It is eerie, and jarring. Like seeing Norm MacDonald be obsequious to The View.
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It's also funny that after years of him lambasting people for apologizing to the mob, he's now in full, grovelling apology mode, and more grovelling than any of the other cancellation victims he mocked.
I mean, did he not realize this stuff would come out one day?
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Me: Have favored classical liberalism since I was a teenager, no matter what personal issues I was dealing with, because the soul-crushing authoritarianism, collectivist-driven unfairness, and relative economic ineffectiveness of alternatives to classical liberalism has always been apparent to me. My audience: a handful of people on various scattered political forums.
Hanania: Was too stupid to realize the superiority of classical liberalism until at some point in his 20s. Hanania's audience: Huge SubStack audience, book deal, mingles with influential political figures.
I mean none of this is surprising of course. Think about how some of today's famous and well-compensated neo-conservative writers, for example, were Marxists in their youth.
I do of course think that being intelligent enough to change your mind is a good thing, but I think that it is an even better thing to have been right from the beginning.
Overall, this all encourages me to maybe write more long-form and actually try to become a famous political writer.
To be fair, while my commitment to classical liberalism has never wavered much, in my more emotional moments I have often longed to, and still long to, purge the world with authoritarian murder. But these are heated moments. Like Hanania, I have written some things in the past that would certainly not make me look like a classical liberal were I to be judged only by them.
Indeed one of the things that surprised me about reading Hanania's article is that he did not say that he had written those previous things in the heat of emotion while actually being a classical liberal. He instead said that he actually was not a classical liberal back then. That makes it harder for him, which increases the degree to which I think it is likely to be true.
However, like @Quantumfreakonomics, I find it very hard to believe that he is honest when he writes this:
However, relevant discussion thread where Hanania responds: https://twitter.com/NoahCarl90/status/1688214708094996485.
(Not sure why TheMotte auto-changes nitter to twitter)
Overall, I think that this article is a pretty good bit of writing, but I find it to be just a bit too polished, it has the feel of having been produced as much by tactics as by honesty. The careful reader will come away with a lack of faith in Hanania's willingness to ever write his true thoughts, but then the careful reader will not have had that faith about Hanania to begin with.
It is also possible that the whole essay is bullshit and that he actually is not and never has been a classical liberal. Which would actually maybe make me have more respect for him, since it would imply not only a truly fine commitment to and skill at the art of fakery, but also such a profound love of trolling that he willingly took on a greater burden of necessary fakery in order to be able to continue successfully annoying both sides.
One way or another, if Hanania's response helps him to sail through these stormy waters while keeping his book deal and his mainstream cachet, I will congratulate him and will look forward to hopefully seeing him tear the HuffPost a new one at some point in the future.
From a moral point of view? Of course. You have 20 more years on the side of the angels.
From a writer's point of view? I'm not so sure. For a local example, see Resident Contrarian's post on having a middle-class income:
Similarly, you know what it's like to be a classical liberal, but (presumably) it's just normal.
You make a good point about how one can sometimes better understand a view if one has not always held it. Point taken.
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I’m not sure how an “intellectual” could be right from the beginning. It takes reading a lot and just because of timelines you work thru one piece of works before others.
I also don’t think classical liberalism works everywhere. It hasn’t worked in Africa or a lot of the ME. Probably wouldn’t have worked until fairly recent in Russia (too much war risks required authoritarian/military politics). Just because classical liberalism roughly works in America doesn’t mean it’s the correct government. But it was for this place and time.
That is fair, I should say that I favor classical liberalism if and when it is possible.
I don't think that one needs to be an intellectual or to read even one book to figure out that classical liberalism is the way to go. Actually I distrust political theories that require one to be grounded in some entire corpus of writing in order to understand them.
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This is a pretty good response.
He makes it clear that he doesn't hold the same views, and finds them repugnant. At the same time, he doesn't back off from his current writings, and avoids grovelling.
It won't sate those who can't be sated, of course, but it will probably be sufficient for those who aren't put off by his current views, but who would be repulsed by his former ones, and aren't fans of cancelling when views have changed.
He certainly avoids many of the forced errors that commonly plague statements like this, but I would be remiss if I didn't point out the one clearly false statement that I don't think he ever would have made if his career and reputation weren't on the line
Ya and he basically says policing can reduce crime and implies lot of blacks in jail.
The left will hate him. Because he doesn’t believe in all these structural issues and it’s just genetics. But he works for the right who wants the policies they want without having to say the quiet part out loud.
I’ll downgrade him some as an intellectual because he really isn’t the hard truth teller he claims to be. He is trying to work in the system and get the things he believes are doable and most important. Which seems to be aimed at ending civil rights law and getting rid of a lot of pride. But it does seem like he’s down for saying what he needs to sit with the cool kids.
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Moron.
He could have ignored it and increased his chances of surviving, or he could have owned it and gone down with dignity.
Instead, he will go down as a cuck.
I suspect there's some other balancing act going on here.
Hanania doesn't need liberal approval or sympathy, nor could he possibly get it before all this anyway.
He does need to stay relatively acceptable to rich and powerful old boomer conservatives who control the media megaphones and purse strings and set the tone for where things are headed going forward within the shifting conservative movement, especially regarding public political priorities about legal matters (both in the Federal government and concerning cases conservative activists drag in front of the Supreme Court).
And old boomer conservatives are, I think, the only people left who overwhelmingly still cling to the rotting corpse of the old Reagan public settlement about race (namely, we all agree that racism is a truly awful thing, we legitimately believe in a goal of milquetoast equal opportunity, but we will also define racism such that it only applies to truly egregious acts by individual extremists that have nothing to do with almost anybody normal, and we'll likewise view it through a colorblind lens that also holds black Americans to the same standard as everyone else).
Fundamentally, on the ground (at least online), this settlement is over. If you're a younger male or traditional Christian or are white, you have been steeped in progressive activists salting the earth on this and related identity topics since, like, 2013, and so you've already acclimatized to the new reality, or for you this might be the only reality you've ever even known. "Racism" now means whatever it is that progressive activist networks say it means on any given day, and in turn it's just one more term of abuse hurled by self-aggrandizing partisans heavily steeped in conflict theory who want good zero sum things for their allies and bad zero sum things for you. And so it's no surprise to see conversation norms heavily shifting for younger conservatives, or the sorts of people who at the least are drawn to anti-woke discourse. Younger people who likely would've accepted the public moral legitimacy of the old Reagan settlement stop accepting the moral legitimacy of what has replaced it, and so all the guard rails come down.
I read an interview between Hanania and Chris Rufo the other day (IIRC), and Rufo was basically making something like this point - lots of old boomer conservatives are still very sensitive to how race is talked about, largely because they're insulated from all these changes out in the wild, and so he has to be quite delicate rhetorically about how he talks about race when trying to reach out to them. They can agree about policy goals, but the rhetorical frame that's required to convince them is quite different than what younger online anti-woke types would be receptive to.
This seems like I what I was getting at about a bit of a noble lie where we just ignore disparate outcomes.
One thing I’d add is a lot of the old agreements seem gone outside of race. Pride seems like the exact same thing where we had everyone can do what they want at home to now we teach pride in elementary school.
The right doesn’t want to come out and say they think homosexual lives are inferior. And that’s before we even get into the more extreme things being pushed.
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Have you considered the possibility that this is sincere? That is, that he genuinely doesn't hold or like his past views?
Now every time someone attempts to discredit him by posting the huffpost article, someone else can post this in response, which'll take off some of the bite.
This seems like the right play to me.
That would be the part that warrants the opening insult. "Oh no, I no longer hold hose views! If I apologize for the stuff I said pseudonymously, I'm sure that will clear things up" is extremely unwise.
Or it won't. In fact there's no reason to believe that it will.
That assumes he's looking to "clear things up" rather than to "tell the truth".
I always thought clearing things up involved telling the truth.
Your point is AFAICT that apologising is not incentivised by current cultural norms (or by the nature of his readership).
My point is that some people care more about honesty than incentives.
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Why? The way he put it doesn't really open him much to further attacks or attempts at pressuring further capitulation. The main negative to this, under my current model, is losing some people who'd prefer he was his former pseudonymous self, but I think these should generally have lower impact than the people that doing this could let him hold onto.
It'll obviously vary by person?
This is why. The way he put it is irrelevant, he will always be open to further attacks.
Yeah, but I don't think the kind of people who control access to mainstream gigs will be the kind of people who'll accept his apology and move on.
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It legitimizes the concept that he is now tainted goods because he once held those views. The claim that X conservative (was) racist isn’t about racism, it’s about saying that he is tainted goods and thus no longer worth dealing with. He backs away and thus the attack was legitimate— he was (and for the left, the past isn’t over) racist therefore anyone who has anything to do with him catches racist cooties and nobody wants that. It’s like being asked if you have stopped beating your wife — all answers are wrong.
His target audience is not the left, and people'd believe the article written against him anyway if he tried radio silence.
The left side of the people he's losing by acknowledging weren't going to listen anyway—they'd believe the accusation, or they'd just not care for his political opinions. The main loss to his audience by doing this are people who a) couldn't read the huffpost well enough to be convinced it was Hanania or b) people who thought he was currently still basically Hoste, and are disappointed at the ways he is no longer.
He also doesn't concede anything in the present. He doesn't consider himself tainted goods. He's not going "yes, I'm secretly racist and bad, sorry about that." He's going "I used to be racist and bad, now I'm right and good," and doing it in a way that isn't subjecting himself to anyone's judgment but his own—it's not an entreaty but a declaration.
It matters for mainstream conservatives. They’re the ones most afraid of guilt by association, because most of them have professional careers to defend. And because he’s now tainted, he won’t get that audience, nor get invited to their platforms to speak or write.
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Once you say "Yes, I was racist and bad, but..." nothing said after the but matters.
Maybe he's being completely sincere. It makes no difference. He's shown his enemies they can extract confessions through pressure, and shown his allies that there's no point defending him since he won't defend himself.
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If notable respectable figures continue associating with Hanania, it might signify a shift in cancel culture. These figures might argue that Hanania's genuine apology should suffice. Currently, individuals who have made racist remarks are offered little redemption even compared to those convicted of multiple violent crimes. With ever-changing definitions of racism, many important people could benefit from a system that forgives sincere apologies, like Hanania's. Moreover, associating with someone like Hanania, who undeniably made racially charged comments, could shield those who've made milder missteps in the past.
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