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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.
Hanania is too much of an intellectual, he's bad at the politics game. He doesn't know how to be tactfully silent. He constantly goes around attacking people's sacred cows, often somewhat disingenuously: 'look at how South Korea has porn bans, tight abortion restrictions and the lowest fertility rate on the planet - checkmate trads'. As if South Korea could be described as having 'traditional gender roles', it's one of the most feminist countries on the planet.
He constantly goes around irritating people, calling conservatives low IQ. The tone of his writing is often excessively confrontational or it'll have a clickbait title that goes further than what the text argues. He's a smart troll IMO.
I agree that the Origins of Woke is useful and could be effective if implemented but Hanania has not been good at marketing himself except to the small set of intellectual, contrarian rightwingers who follow him. He even apologized and backed down on the Huffington matter, when that was possibly the one time he should've lashed out against a leftward enemy. Strategically speaking, apologizing to enemies and attacking allies gets you sidelined by the rest of the team.
Is South Korea all that feminist? Their current president was elected on a platform that included a promise to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality, and his most committed supporters are vociferously anti-feminist. Hard to imagine such a man getting elected in, say, Sweden.
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