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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.
Build a parallel status economy.
Every social system should either work for us or not work at all. Actively attack enemy-held institutions by any means necessary.
reject and subvert systems that work against our interests. Deny their power, hamper their operations, refuse their legitimacy, appropriate or destroy their resources.
Focus on outcomes, not process. Process is for coordinating cooperation, and that is not a thing our present society is capable of maintaining.
The goal should be a breakdown of federal authority, and acceleration in the decay of existing systems of social control such as the media ecosystem, educational system, academia generally, the courts, and the federal bureaucracy. Delegitimizing these institutions in the eyes of as much of the public as possible is a good first step.
I took one semester of anthropology courses in college and that was enough to tell me I don't want to return to a hunter-gatherer level of civilization.
There are plenty of forests available to you if you do want that. Until then, please stop trying to destroy my civilization.
In the first place, the deconstruction and seizure of institutional power did not reduce us to hunter-gatherers when blues did it, so there's no reason it should do so were Reds to reciprocate.
Secondly, we were here first.
Given that the first Blues came over on the Mayflower, I doubt that.
Seriously, (unless you believe one of the more radical anti-semitic conspiracy theories) the rise of wokism did not involve a hostile takeover of any institutions - the top universities and most prestigious newspapers in America were run by Yankees and Quakers in 1776, and are run by Yankees, Quakers, and Yankee-aligned secular Jews now. If you do the genealogical research, you will find that most of the individuals in charge are drawn from the same families. (Descendants of PMC Holocaust-era refugees excepted). The rise of wokism (beginning with the Civil Rights movement and the Sexual Revolution, and continuing through 1990's PC and ultimately the current Great Awokening) happened by some combination of conversion and generational replacement. There are several important books still to be written about how and why this happened - Moldbug certainly has a book-length treatment spread over multiple long blog posts, but I don't think his thesis (on my reading, that Yankees were always like this, they just increased in power slowly until they they didn't have to compromise with reality any more) is correct, and his presentation leaves a lot to be desired.
It is worth remembering the background though - in the period 1945-75,
Some form of moral upheaval was probably inevitable.
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