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Notes -
The Origins of Woke has not become a best seller. As of this writing, the top non-fiction book on both the Publishers Weekly and NYT best sellers lists is The Democrat Party Hates America by Mark R. Levin. While I haven't read Levin's book, I'm sure it's as disposable as any other political tract by a Fox News host, while The Origins of Woke is legitimately the most important conservative book of the last 20 years.
Argument: It's not selling well because of the Huffington Post article that exposed his old blog posts to the masses. Counterargument: Conservatives are the target market, and they tend not to "cancel" people over things like this.
Argument: It's not selling more copies because the name is cringe. Counterargument: Donald J. Trump Jr's book "Triggered" became a best seller.
Argument: It's not selling more copies because Hanania isn't a celebrity. Counterargument: Andy Ngo doesn't host anything or do many public appearances, but his book was still a best-seller.
I don't care whether Hanania is personally successful, but I really, really want the ideas in this book to gain widespread recognition. Hanania offers provide a plausible-enough plan to defeat not only wokeness, but also all of the ideologies that have gained popularity in the wake of Conservative Inc's failure to stop wokeness, including white nationalism and NRx. Speaking as a former white nationalist (or whatever you wanna call VDare readers), people with moderate temperaments adopt extreme beliefs because the mainstream hasn't offered any believable alternative.
Ben Shapiro says that we should just argue people into adopting our views because it'll suddenly work, even though we've been trying for years and it hasn't worked. Peter Brimelow says we should close the border and have white babies. Curtis Yarvin says that we should put a dictator in charge, or at least whatever FDR was. Caldwell says that we should repeal the Civil Rights Act, even though it's as much a part of our national identity at this point as the Constitution.
Hanania's proposal is essentially a modification of Caldwell's that takes political realities into account. Instead of repealing the Civil Rights Act, we should just re-interpret it in an originalist light and repeal the modifications made in the decades afterwards.
I can't say for certain why this book isn't making bank, but I theorize that it has to do with the fact that no mainstream conservative figure like a Ben Shapiro or a Steven Crowder has reviewed it or interviewed him. They're ignoring him, even though his politics are totally aligned with theirs, because they don't want to platform someone who was once a racist. National Review hasn't even reviewed The Origins of Woke.. and they reviewed Christopher Caldwell's Age of Entitlement!
So, here are three questions I have in no particular order.
I was randomly looking up Adam Carolla's podcast yesterday and watched a recent episode, which happened to feature Hanania and his book, so I just assumed he's been making the rounds. He was good and fit in fine as a guest with only a little bit of airtime, although it looks like the youtube views at least are only around 20k per episode (probably better numbers for other audio-only spots).
Holy moly! That's the guy who voiced Spanky in Drawn Together! Nevermind, I guess he IS doing mainstream appearances. Thank you!
What a weird take. That would be like "oh the joe rogan podcast, what a BIG deal, that's the guy from Zookeeper!" Carolla had one of the most popular podcasts in the world for like a decade and it still seems to be doing numbers in the last 5 years (though I already mentioned it may be dwindling). Looking at it, just within the prior 3 weeks before Hanania, they had Candace Owens, Tucker, and Vivek as guests, each pushing one thing or another, and getting more views to the extent that they're a draw.
I'm even subscribed to Hanania's channel, yet the only reason I knew he had a book out was due to stumbling across this particular mainstream appearance (hence my assumption that he had been doing normal rounds like this, and thus my surprise to learn that it's not the case - taking your word for it, I haven't been searching for him).
That's literally what I know him from. It's relatively obscure, but significant to me. I believe you when you say his podcast was hugely successful. I just didn't know about it.
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