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As some are already aware, Huff Po is attempting to cancel the controversial writer/pundit Richard Hanania over some far-right posts he wrote a decade ago under an alias, which has been tied to his real identity. This coincides with his release of his book by Harper Collins, with the intent to have the publisher cancel it. v
The Huffington Post article: https://archive.is/YbIpz
(it would have been a 'boss move' had Elon suspended Huff Po account over this, declaring 'cancel culture is over'. )
There is already a prediction market about it, with 80 percent 'yes' it will be published
https://manifold.markets/AnonPlz/will-harper-collins-publish-richard
I agree overall though that nothing bad will happen to him, as I discuss here on my own blog post. First, cancellation does not work that well on academics/pundits as it does on other professions/careers (such as tenure). Even top CEOs are easier to cancel than pundits. Second, the left's credibility has been eroded in recent years due to hoxes , fake news, and 'mission creep' (when everyone is a racist or other bad person, the term loses its meaning/potency).
Part of me is stunned that he isn't cancelled due to the extreme nature of his old posts. However, Richard has God-tier levels of cunning. If you look at his latest twitter posts, he's still referencing racial issues, ADA scams, and even retweeted Steve Sailer. This has to be endlessly frustrating to his would be cancellers.
How did he thread the needle? Some assorted thoughts:
Richard isn't the most sympathetic cancellation target, but this episode is heartening in that it shows that there are ways to avoid cancellation and that it's not inevitable that the left will always define the boundaries of political debate.
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I think the fine folks over at the Huffington Post had a pretty clear goal in mind. Fortify the media landscape and the Overton Window. Make noise about Hanania and then attempt to squeeze him out behind the scenes through people like Bari Weiss and Ben Shapiro before he is given any traction by them.
As far as I can remember there was a similar gambit against Stephan Molyneux after Dave Rubin decided on having a conversation with him. To that end I'd put my tinfoil hat on and say that the mainstream elements had already decided that this was something that needed to be done prior to the 'dox' thing of Hanania being published.
I think the idea of a 'cancellation' is kind of retarded without properly addressing who is functionally doing the cancelling. Yes, lib/left/progressives hate guys like Hanania. They have already 'cancelled him' by never associating with him and doing everything they can to make him fail. Like, this was always the case. So who is actually cancelling Hanania now and from what? If it's not Musk banning him off twitter, what is actually going on?
Well, it seems simple, now Hanania will never ever be on Joe Rogan or any show that exists in a mainstream sphere of center/right discourse. I.e. the Daily Wire and any affiliates. If you want in with the mainstream right wing grift you can't freely associate with Hanania anymore.
Or maybe that was always the case and now it's just official.
I thought Huffington Post and Gawker and other "new Media" folk of the early 2010s were no longer relevant. But they can still wipe the floor with upstarts like Substack it seems.
I think you are misunderstanding the dynamics at play. The Huffington Post is not cancelling Hanania, mainstream right wingers are. Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss have certain things they care about a lot more than the inane shibboleths of 'left vs right'. In fact these kinds of gatekeepers for mainstream right politics make no effort to hide their distaste for any outsider who potentially recognizes and therefor threatens their perceived ingroup.
And who can blame them?
I blame them, because their short-sightedness will come back to bite them just as much as it will everyone else.
I fail to see how. These same tactics won them their spot as the mainstream to begin with when they ousted everyone not sufficiently zionist out of mainstream publications like the National Review.
"Zionist" isn't the word you're looking for. Zionism is complementary to nationalism, especially ethnonationalism.
Anyway, giving white people no options other than self-loathing and extremism is going to lead to extremists.
Zionist is exactly the word I was looking. How else would you describe people so desperately in favor of Israel?
People have always been given the option of believing and doing exactly what they are told. And they wont do shit no matter how bad things get. Because they are told this is normal and they believe it, just like their idiot parents did back when a new normal was being established for their generation.
To that end the pool of 'extremists' has stayed the same.
That they're in favor of Israel isn't the problem.
Also, I don't agree with the idea that human nature is infinitely malleable, and the desire to stand up for oneself against a constant torrent of hatred is a part of human nature. But the people in China have yet to overthrow their totalitarian government, so maybe I'm wrong.
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A mainstream right winger wrote the huffpo piece?
No. You are still misunderstanding what's going on.
Like I stated in my first post, The Huffington Post and the like had already functionally 'cancelled' Hanania before they ever published anything about him. They did not publish anything from him, they did not report anything positive about him, they would not associate with him or his associates. At best they would slander him. So who can still effectively cancel Hanania after this 'dox' thing drops?
If he is not getting banned from twitter then Elon is not cancelling him. He was already considered a hostile element by the likes of The Huffington Post. So they can't cancel him more than what they had already done. So who can cancel Hanania? People who would or could potentially have worked with him!
Bari Weiss is tagged in the twitter thread because she can effectively gatekeep Hanania from the only gate he could potentially walk through to get more mainstream. That gate being the likes of The Daily Wire, Joe Rogan and any other smaller connected mainstream center/right wing media. If that gate is locked, Hanania can go nowhere and can't easily grow beyond the dissident right containment zone. That's the point of this 'dox' thing.
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Definitely not. Hanania's podcast has been host to accepted figures like Bryan Caplan, Marc Andreesen, Richard Posner, and Steven Pinker. Sure, hardcore lefties might have really disliked him, but from the center to the right, he was accepted enough for these kinds of people to chat for an hour on a podcast.
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those who are doing the cancelling want to turn him into a fringe figure like David Duke, Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, or David Ike, who have little or no academic or intellectual credibility or even much credibility in the mainstream, even if they have large audiences, and also to persuade his wealthy and influential backers and friends, such as Marc Andreessen, disavow him. They, the left, see Hanania as being more than just a dissident or a heretic, but more transgressive. It's not so much as cancelling Hanania, although that is part of it, as it's trying to get the rest of the establishment to know where the boundaries are, and that Hanania is outside of them.
This did not work for Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan, it only sort of worked for Jones, and it wasn’t even attempted with David Icke. The only truly canceled figure on that list is David duke, and that appears to have been a bottom up cancelation that spread to institutions after he didn’t have any support yet.
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Which seems to have worked no?
Molyneux still has his podcast. But I haven't seen anyone mention him for years. He used to be quite viral back in the day
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It sure did?
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The other possibility is that Hanania is used as a sort of sanctioned dissident to divert the libertarian to dissident right pipeline back to "individualist libertarianism" but with more racism.
HBD denial among libertarians is probably the leading cause for that pipeline, Hanania could be useful for the establishment by integrating it with libertarianism. I think it's his Occidental Observer associations that are a bridge too far, though.
Pipeline from libertarianism to fascism?
I can understand it.
I can understand someone who wants to be radical and "edgy", and the edgiest thing possible (and still respectable among his peers) was putting up poster of Ayn Rand. Times move, Overton windows moves too, and othere, edgier things become salonfahig. Portrait of Ayn Rand goes down, portrait of Adolf Hitler comes up.
I can understand someone who hates, really hates leftists and communists (for whatever definiton of "left" and "communism" he holds), and becomes a libertarian because it was the most anti-communist movement around. Then, when harder things come up, he joins too.
I can understand someone totally cynical and disilusioned, someone who freed himself from any delusions about "morals" "human rights" or "value of human life" and grokked that only might is right and only law is law of tooth and claw, but is highly optimistic about himself, someone who is certain that in fascist regime he will not end as ordinary disposable piece of goosestepping meat, but join the movement early, support the right side, play the right cards and rise high in the party hierarchy.
I cannot understand someone who ever sincerely held freedom as value, whether idealistically as freedom for all mankind or pragmatically as freedom for himself, who decided that the best life is total subjection to some self proclaimed "great leader".
Classical liberals had no problems integrating beliefs in race and HBD (far harder than even the most edgy 4channer today) with dedication to liberty. No reason why modern people can not manage it too.
"Total" is the key word that makes this impossible, but an appreciation for violence and the strong man that does what is necessary to maintain natural rights? Lots of lefties tend to round that up to "fascism".
Consider Hoppe or Tolkien. Neither could be accused of not loving freedom on a deep level. But I summise they're both perfectly okay with throwing Sauron off the helicopter.
In my experience this is the real source for this "pipeline" meme: the same confusion that makes people delude themselves into thinking Starship Troopers has anything to do with fascism. When you're far away from something politically, even large distances appear small, and so just as Bakunin and Stalin may appear identical to the libertarian, so do Pinochet and Hitler to the communist.
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Right off the bat, this is just extremely wrong. The contradiction of liberalism and HBD led to a Civil War, segregation, integration, and racial conflict that has never actually stopped, it's just changed form. Liberalism completely lost the plot on HBD, to the extent that HBD itself is radical and edgy, though true, and it is not accepted within our scientific or social institutions. Liberalism has led to a demographic replacement in the United States and Europe that is unprecedented in human history except in military conquests or war crimes. Classical liberalism in fact cannot integrate HBD, this has been proven by the fact that HBD denial became entrenched under its hegemony.
There is a niche that Hanania could have tried to fill by saying "HBD is true and it matters for policy, but classical liberalism provides the best policy taking into consideration the importance of HBD." But even he couldn't bring himself to say that, he just joined every other classical liberal in denying the importance of HBD to policy. So Hanania himself seems to think branding himself as a classical liberal means denying the importance of HBD to policy.
In my experience, the libertarian to dissident right pipeline is not motivated by people dropping concern for morals or rights, it's motivated by them realizing they have been completely duped into a sucker's game by embracing an individualist ethos while the rest of the world organizes collectively and along tribal lines, and in doing so crushes them politically and culturally. They then accept HBD and notice that all the libertarians they have known tend to be white or Jewish men, and reciting some Milton Friedman lectures is going to be unlikely to convert the masses to drop their own tribal identities. Their ideological commitment to Freedom and Liberalism in the English Tradition is just a figment of their own whiteness. They then notice that they are stopped from having any similar identity by forces which themselves heavily organize on tribal lines.
In Rationalist parlance you could say they go from mistake theorists to conflict theorists, which is not the same thing as dropping concern for morals or rights. It's when libertarians realize the claim that it's a "self-evident truth" that our rights come from God and our government is merely formed to protect them with minimal force is an outright Noble Lie. Our rights come from our government, our morals are framed by our culture.
"Caring about rights or morals", then, doesn't mean watching Milton Friedman lectures or trying to convince everyone to stop being collectivists while being crushed by the organizing power of those collectivists, it means competing for the reins of political power and cultural influence. This is understood by those who organize and identify on tribal lines, and who use that same collective group-behavior to deny white classical liberals the ability to do the same.
Your post touches on a lot of thoughts I’ve had lately. I no longer consider myself as having a political ideology anymore. Political systems to me seem to rely on time and place far more than 2005 me would have believed in let’s Democratize the Middle East and make them good people. The US of course doesn’t believe in any concept of Democracy on the world stage. It’s basically a dictatorship. We don’t let Indians and Chinese dominate decisions because there are more of them and they would. And I believe that would be a bad thing.
Running on time/place I don’t believe Russia should or could have been a Democracy for most of its history. The military threat was too great that a centralized autocracy diverting large amount of resources to military was likely their necessary form of government. Though under the American umbrella now and with nukes seems obsolete.
Democracy worked in America because we had a continent of people sharing the basically the same big cultural things. If we were say 51% Muslim and 49% Christian with the Muslims basically getting what they wanted on everything it wouldn’t work. Democracy requires that you are basically one tribe moving in one direction. And I think a certain average IQ is necessary.
The whole Democracy thing seems to break when those factors aren’t in place. It hasn’t worked in places like Syria and it seems to be failing in S. Africa.
Which perhaps the one thing I believe in is a form of true Christian Nationalism. With Christian Nationalism being the foundation of America. By this I mean a belief in human rights and values of humans that comes with being a Christian where those in power have a limiting force on oppressing the weak. A belief in a common good.
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Because this is where libertarianism inevitably ends up anyway. There is a reason that every attempt to imagine a libertarian utopia ends up adding in an all-powerful world council guaranteeing exit rights, education rights and so on. For example, see Scott’s Archipelago. If you value freedom for the sake of building a stable culture that you admire, that’s not good! If you want the freedom to live in a community that’s not full of opioid addicts, that’s not good either. Freedom is not a values-neutral proposition, it smuggles in a lot of other stuff.
And of course in practice a sufficiently powerful world policeman (cough, America) ends up doing all sorts of selfish/ideological things too, because that’s what happens when you give lots of power to actual human beings.
It’s wholly possible to be someone who cares about freedom, consider the likelihood that you will be left alone by any given Guarantor of World Rights, and instead sign up with a Great Leader who is badly inclined towards freedom in general but whose practical preferences are vaguely matched with yours.
Of course, you can bite the bullet and go with full anarchy instead, then get ruled by whichever gang lord rises to the top. Not a popular choice, but it’s there.
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Or, maybe people have genuine beliefs and aren't just coordinating to keep people from the truth of your ideology.
I can't help but laugh at far right people accusing anyone not as red pilled as them as being a 'sactioned dissident' or whatever the new term is. Can you not believe that people actually believe something different than you for a real reason?
I don't think you really need to claim that his ideology is true in order for a pipeline of the kind being described to exist. While I'm sure SS does believe in his own ideology, the idea that there's a funnel where people who get into libertarian politics get sucked into the extreme right doesn't require lots of epicycles. It is an observed phenomenon that even people on the other side of politics have spoken about, and governments across the world are spending money to disrupt it. Some people do really have genuine beliefs, but that doesn't have anything to do with the people who are openly coordinating how to prevent people from believing what SS here does.
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Nothing about what I said in this comment here is speaking to the sincerity of Hanania's beliefs, my comment is talking about Hanania being potentially useful to establishment thinking by providing an outlet for HBD acceptance within a classical liberal subculture.
I take Hanania at his word, I don't question his sincerity. Just because he's sincere doesn't mean he's not running from one bad idea to another on a poor intellectual foundation.
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It may not cancel the publication of his book, but it's going to limit his ascendency. It would be remarkable if it did not. The biggest issues aren't even the edgy things he has said about sterilizing black people. He wrote for Counter-Currents and The Occidental Observer, which is Kevin MacDonald's publication. Here is one of his articles on The Occidental Quarterly:
Either he gets cancelled, which he deserves for such an intellectually dishonest groveling (i.e. saying it doesn't matter for policy whether social outcomes are driven by racial differences), or he doesn't get cancelled and it's a big step towards the normalization of Dissident Right thinking.
Greg Johnson at Counter-Currents apparently did not know that Hoste was Hanania:
yeah i do not believe he truly renounced the old views. once he started to get academic cred, he had to pivot. the stuff he writes now about crime hits harder and is still even more 'extreme' than stuff i have read on actual white nationistst websites. the guy is a normie in some respects, like immigration, yet so 'extreme' in others, like about euthanasia, death penalty, toughness on crime (including even the suspension of habeas corpus), etc. I call this 'normcore' . it combines normie politics and beliefs, but sometimes either taken to their extreme conclusions or mixed with extreme views. 'Immigration is good' is a normie view, but the extreme version is, "...and people who are displaced or lose their jobs deserve to or this is good for the economy, and this should be encouraged," or "people who do not get the Covid vaccine should be denied treatment" (the Taleb view). Kevin Williamson writing for NRO pioneered this format in 2016 by being a never-Trumper and rejecting economic nationalism , but then taking that to an extreme, which made him off of as sorta an asshole to everyone but did solidly his popularity and position in a tiny by powerful group.
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I think there’s a good case that Hanania’s views have actually changed. Have they changed to the extent that he doesn’t believe immigrant demographics have any effect on a society’s future? I rather doubt that, but I don’t think he’s “hiding his level” on most of these issues, or he wouldn’t so capably troll and embarrass his ideological fellows (which he freely admits has cost him money and acclaim with his audience, eg. his opposition to anti-abortion politics by itself means half of dissident right/trad twitter vehemently hates him, and may even have doxxed him).
And you have to admit, by OO standards, Hanania’s writing is pretty mild. My guess is he’s still in the bottom quartile of antisemitism for Palestinians.
No it's not, his emerged writings on sterilization and anti-feminism are more extreme than anything I've read in the DR in memory, although I was not around for the Dionysian 2016 "Alt-Right": the blind transgressionism did not appeal to me as it seemed to appeal to Hanania. I clung to the "racist libertarian" sensibilities to which Hanania has now retreated until having to face the reality that begging for everyone to be individualists does not work, and I became more influenced by the DR as it moved away from that sort of rhetoric that Hanania contributed to.
And I do believe he has changed his mind, I just don't think he's changed his mind for the right reasons. I don't think he's been influenced by arguments, I think he's been influenced by the incentives that could reward him or punish him based on what he says.
But that's not the population group we care about, it's elite or elite-adjacent influencers we should care about, and if Hanania is able to retain some status in that population that is significant. How many in that population group have gone on the record endorsing The Culture of Critique?
I would be interested in Hanania explaining the arguments that he may have formerly found in The Culture of Critique to be compelling, but now he does not think so. Given that he has retreated to "HBD doesn't matter for policy" I doubt he would give an honest answer for why his opinion on that work changed (if it has, technically nothing he wrote in his apology indicated a shift in view on this particular topic). He's just going to say whatever maximizes his chances of retaining his status, and he'll retcon it as a sort of moral enlightenment.
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It’s still too early to call it. We don’t know if the big guns at The New York Times and The Washington Post will open fire. Taylor Lorenz could be hunting down Hanania’s 2nd cousins as we speak.
NYT hit pieces change people. Any mass public scrutiny will. Scott Alexander, Louis CK, and Joe Rogan will spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulder before speaking. Even if he “survives”, the fun-loving Richard who loves owning the libs and trolling the cons may die.
short of footage of him showing up to Charlotteville, Jan 6th , or a Klan rally, not sure what else they can dig on the guy. Maybe chat logs. it is scarry the lengths they will go to destroy someone even if their views are actually truly repugnant. The NYTs and other big media has close ties with the people who are literally hacking this data. they have the connections. It's like "we need footage or logs of someone doing or saying something" and they can find that one person who has the goods even if years or decades old.
you are right in that it does change people. Louie CK does still have a career but he was def. knocked down a peg and took a long hiatus. In the case of Mr. Hanania, it does put a dent in terms of academic aspirations, but if he goes the full Substack/Twitter route I think he will be fine.
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Scott Alexander might be afraid of Taylor Lorenz. But the human race is not made up of Scott Alexanders.
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I guess it’s possible. Thing is, all the major publishers have ‘conservative’ imprints where they can publish these books. Ann Coulter has said stuff as bad as most of the unearthed Hanania quotes and she’s still published by Penguin (or rather by Sentinel, which is an imprint of Penguin).
What publishers tend to do is hand over these imprints to conservatives they hire, then keep them at arms length, while continuing to profit. There was a brief period during BLM when it appeared they might stop doing it, and Milo Yiannopoulos got his deal cancelled (albeit ultimately only for his comments on the age of consent) but for the most part they’ve continued as before.
good point. her success is evidence it's possible to be extremes yet not fall out of favor by the media completely
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