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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.
It doesn't matter what he does because he doesn't matter. I've personally heard of him before but I had no idea what he did nor what his political opinions were. The internet wasn't even much help because the guy isn't prominent enough to have a Wikipedia page, which is, I believe, the bare minimum to consider one relevant to the public discourse. Best I can tell he's a conservative writer with a Substack, who may be more popular than other conservative writers with a Substack but since it doesn't appear he ever wrote professionally he's nothing more than a blogger. The only mention of this incident I've seen in the media is from Huffpost, and they don't have comments so it's hard to even tell what kind of engagement the article got. Besides that no one cares, which leads me to believe that Hanania is the kind of guy who's a celebrity in the extremely-online world but virtually unknown in the real world. There will be no consequences because no one gives a shit.
Fruck studiously takes notes for the next time he wants to shit all over someone in a way that also belittles the community but doesn't break any rules.
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