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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28971 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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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).

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:

I’m not one to be suspicious of an intellectual just because he happens to be Jewish. But Emory University’s Melvin Konner seems to be a character straight out of The Culture of Critique...

In another context, Konner called MacDonald “worrisome.” He must be. His work hits too close to home.

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:

It turns out, though, that Richard Hanania and I go way back, and I didn’t even know it. From 2009 to 2011, I published Hanania under the pen name Richard Hoste, first at TOQ Online and then at Counter-Currents. Hoste was a joy to work with. He was intelligent, versatile, prolific, wrote well, had interesting insights, and was enthusiastic about exploring ideas. He was also a prompt correspondent and never threw diva fits over editing.

Hanania characterizes the views he published at Counter-Currents and similar platforms as “repugnant” and renounces them. Beyond that, he says that he was not entirely in earnest. He was “trolling.”

Sorry, but I am not buying it. Trolls post one-liners on social media. They do not read thousands of pages of densely-written academic works and write carefully-crafted multi-thousand-word reviews.

Richard Hanania is asking us to believe that the things he wrote under a pen name at White Nationalist and human biodiversity sites, including endorsing ideas from Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique, were not entirely in earnest, but that the more moderate and socially acceptable things he wrote under his own name — when he was both subject to cancellation and rewarded with money and status — are actually honest and sincere. Only a fool would believe that.

The most charitable interpretation of Richard Hanania’s career trajectory is that he remained race-wise and Jew-wise, but edged up to the mainstream to inject good ideas and shift the Overton window.

He was wildly successful. Hanania is not just an intelligent and energetic writer. He’s also an entrepreneur. He had a good thing going. So, when his real views were revealed, he panicked, cucked, and doubled down on the classical liberal, color-blind meritocracy cover.

It is a depressingly old pattern: smart libertarian and conservative nerds start noticing collectives, especially Jews and blacks, but as soon as there is a hint of pushback, they say, “But I treat everyone as an individual.” Basically, they realize that this a world of clashing tribes, in which individualism is a sucker’s game. Then they get scared — because they have no tribe to protect them — and signal to the enemy tribes (almost always Jews), “I’m an individualist, so even though I notice collectives, I won’t act on that knowledge. So you don’t have to destroy me. You can just play me for a sucker.”

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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