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Notes -
An obscure figure from the old Alt Right takes the Hanania Pill.
The main reason I am posting this is not that, but to highlight his insider's history of the 2015-2017 era Alt Right which makes up much of an accompanying article.
1: Hanania's apparent survival of cancellation for past extremism via telling his story and disavowing his most extreme past views may have been quietly influential. This is the 2nd guy I've seen do it without even being forced to by exposure.
2: This guy claims to have been a quietly very influential figure and tells a story where his actions had a very outsized effect on the world. Maybe truly, maybe not. But his general account of events besides his own part in them is an insider's history of that much-mythologized period of the Alt Right, which was very influential and did have have a very outsized effect on the world, and his account seems to be a reasonably well-calibrated explanation of how their influence rippled into events.
As someone that has adopted the Midwest as home, I'm glad that it's so bad for this guy that it twisted his political views and forced him to leave. Yes, we are basically hobbits, content to live in nice towns with little in the way of crime and no real desire to seek power over others. Yes, the "elites" in the small-city Midwest are less Machiavellian lunatics seeking power at all costs and more boring bureaucrats that just want the buses to run on time. No, this sort of community building doesn't manifest any sort of whites-only ethnic unity; Hmong, Indian, and other populations that would have been exotic here a century ago show up, adopt the culture, and basically wind up seeming about the same as other Midwesterners in a couple generations. That this part of the country remains relatively naturally egalitarian, welcoming, and so godawful boring for a status-seeking, power-hungry lunatic is exactly why I am much happier here than in a genuine power center of the empire.
There's also something that's just genuinely funny to see this guy finding out that Whiteopia isn't actually what he dreamed of and having that curdle into animosity towards the Whiteopian residents that don't even engage in serious racial introspection like residents of Diversitopias.
I think my problem with the hobbit mindset is that Hobbiton will not be left alone. Hanania seems to have a deep-seated disdain for mundane domesticity and, as the Zoomers say, "vibing". I just don't believe the hobbits will be allowed to vibe. If the ring doesn't get to Mordor, the Shire will be perfected by Sauron; if it does, the Shire will still be scoured. The hobbits' complacency only allows Saruman to sweep in and turn it into a police state virtually unopposed — and I don't believe for a second Tolkien didn't have an allegory in mind when he was writing that.
But the Hobbits did resist in quiet ways, and once they had leaders they turned the tables quickly. It's the great powers underestimating the Hobbits all the time that brings about their own downfall. Our friend here sneering at the Hobbits seems to have turned tail and run back to the big city, he didn't stick around and by virtue of his superior crinkled brain, get-up-and-go, and sharp, hungry, novelty-seeking contrarianism rise to the top of the heap and become cock of the walk round them there parts. The sleepy stodgy Hobbits ran him off because he couldn't deal with them.
The guy just does not understand people:
You know who moves around all the time going to where the money is? Beggars. Tramps. Hoboes. The Joads moving to California out of necessity, not choice. People who are the new serfs, being moved around by their bosses at the convenience of the business (move to the new plant/office three hundred miles away, uproot your family). Itinerant farm workers, seasonal workers like the immigrant labour brown people he probably wouldn't like being compared to.
By contrast, having something you own that is yours, where you can tell those who would move you around like a chesspiece to go to hell, is valuable. For all his talk about the bovine Bavarians versus the proud and fierce Ulster Irish, he has no realisation that the Scots-Irish also would tell him to go to hell if he tried moving them off the plot of land that is now theirs, and no landlord can evict them or make them shift.
You're not an entrepreneurial adventurer, Big Boy; you're a tumbleweed who goes with the wind, a servant like those of the Centurion who says "And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” You have no roots and nothing to fall back on against those who have power over you to say "come here, go there, do it now!"
Where do you come from? The Sun Belt? The various states your parents grew up in and moved to with their itinerant families? Where do you belong? Where are the graves of your ancestors, or do you even know that much? You're a disposable, replaceable cog in the economic machinery who will be discarded the second you can't "move to where the money is".
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