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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.
Fallout of the Hanania doxxing. The University of Austin (not to be confused with the public university), which billed itself as a haven of free speech, has now uninvited Hanania after the latest revelations.
I think this says a lot about the "anti-woke right". It's basically just warmed over liberalism from 20 years ago. If you're not willing to cross the rubicon and talk frankly about topics like race and crime, then what's the point of your "heterodox" university anyway? This is why the right keeps losing: it's full of spineless cowards.
People make fun of SJWs but at least they have the courage of their convictions.
An alternate explanation is that these kinds of extreme pro-ethnic-cleansing arguments are genuinely unpopular among large swaths of the center right.
There are left wing university professors who used to be actual, no-shit, terrorists. Does that mean terrorism is genuinely popular (or at least not genuinely unpopular) among the large swaths of the center left?
Also, if Bari Weiss is now "center-right", I swear to god...
It's not so much that terrorists are popular (though I'd bet that some among the left don't mind having "dial a riot" in their deck of cards), as the fact that the center-left feels vastly more secure in its control over the direction of leftist politics than the center-right does. Realistically, any far left policy that gets memetically popular will be sanewashed into something the center-left either already supports (e.g. they might not want single-payer healthcare, but they would like a universal system) or can accept (race and gender grievance stuff). Bernie got swatted like a fly by the DNC whereas the GOP is praying that Trump gets imprisoned or killed because their other standard-bearers can't beat him (assuming the polling is remotely accurate, a fact about which I am presently agnostic). All those boomer bombings are easily forgotten about because all put together pale in comparison to one Oklahoma City Bombing. Joe Biden's anachronistic affection toward organized labor is a bigger threat to neoliberal economics than every commie professor in the country combined.
I don't think that the center right really thinks that some sort of far right is a serious threat (though it's entirely possible that they've been repeating it long enough that they believe it themselves), but a populist right very much is, and they're more than willing to conflate the two to stay in power. This isn't anything new. Not so long ago, Trump himself was calling Pat Buchanan a Nazi.
Funny thing in American politics today is the right rallies around Trump because he’s going to win the primary but they probably have better and more electable candidates behinds him. The left seems to rally around Biden despite no huge fan base because there is nothing behind him.
They don't need it. By now a majority of the nation simply won't vote Republican because it isn't respectable to do so. The Democrats can run a yellow dog and still win.
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No. The left could be filled with 100% terrorists. That doesn't affect whether extreme HBD policies are or are not popular on the center right.
Bari Weiss is running a university to attract customers. those customers may include the center right, woke-skeptic, and also find extreme HBD policies distasteful.
That's not the question I asked though.
You can find them distasteful without wanting to disinvite a dude for pseudonymously advocating for them on obscure internet forums, 10 years ago.
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