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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).
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.
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.
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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