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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.
Hanania’s “talk about race and crime” was fine with them. The problem is with his talk about eugenic sterilisation and justified racial discrimination and the necessity of getting Hispanic people to leave the US because of the inevitable antagonism between whites and racial minority groups with inferior intelligence, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…
To be precise, all of those things would also be fine, if he just picked a different group as his target.
Nonsense. Coerced sterilisation would be a human rights violation no matter who the target was. Removing a specific racial group from America is well outside the Overton Window. And even affirmative action is generally framed in terms of helping minorities, rather than justifying it with invective against white people.
Even the examples you list aren’t as extreme as Hanania’s pseudonymous writing, though. “Decolonisation is not a metaphor” does not say “perhaps we could coercively sterilise the colonists and take our country back in a few generations,” and the authors probably aren’t secretly thinking it; note that I come from a country where giving back land is government policy. Metaphors about “whiteness” are still putatively about mindset rather than genetics, and the paper you list was by a white person, which isn’t a complete defence but it does complicate things. We don’t have to trust these people completely but it does matter that they don’t actually mirror Hanania’s pseudonym.
You might reasonably ask whether someone who had called for extremist anti-white policies that truly did mirror Hanania’s would be more easily forgiven if they repudiated their earlier stance. Probably. But I have never seen such policies advocated in the first place, and I think that extreme white supremacy is feared because it actually has a constituency. It certainly has one here on this website. OP of this thread calls it “nothing very shocking.” This person blithely refers to “implement[ing] a few eugenic policies” as a way of getting rid of a racial minority.This person thinks that Jim Crow and slavery were “sane, stable solutions to the problem of having a racial underclass.” At least that last one is getting pushback?
It remains to be seen whether this even will scuttle Hanania’s book deal. You’re right that it could, but it might not. I am not certain that it should, but I may as well admit that it scares me a little that it might not. Without the possibility of strong pushback, would Hanania have changed his mind in the first place? Even if he would have, others would not. You can see plenty of them right here.
Hanania should lose trust over this. He should lose status. I don’t think he should lose the opportunity to regain some trust, and his explanation does matter, but it’s important that he takes a hit for this. Moreover, we don’t have to trust him.
You don't think a statement like "whiteness is a disease" has these sort of implications? Even after granting the point that forced sterilization is worse than non-metaphorical decolonization or treating someone's race as a disease, the difference between one being written pseudonomously, and the other publicly in academic journals completely overrides any conclusion that could be made from the comparison you wanted to make. Like I pointed out you can openly call for murdering people based on their race, and the "paper of record" will come to your defense. Hanania could have rewritten all his old posts verbatim, replaced other races with "white" and no one criticizing him, including you, would have cared.
Hanania should have never had any trust or status, but he should not lose any over this.
With all due respect, you cannot “openly call for murder.” What you can do is sing a song that calls for murder and then pinky promise you don’t mean it literally, and then the NYT will make sure to mention all that stuff about not taking it literally.
It’s not good! In a country where white people are a racial minority, it’s reasonable to see a serious potential threat. I sincerely hope we do not see violence as a result.
To be clear, I don’t support the pejorative usage of “whiteness” to describe cultural or personal qualities. However, I am not the one making a comparison, here. I’m responding to a comparison that I was given. It is indeed tricky to compare “aimed at white people, no claims of inherent racial superiority, disturbing in potential unspoken implication but not necessarily meaning what a person’s worst fears might make of it, continues to be openly held, not given strong social sanction” with “aimed at a racial minority, claims of inherent racial superiority, explicitly terrible policy suggestions, very recently repudiated, given some social sanction and we may see more.” That’s a lot of variables!
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