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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.
The place where that became unrealistic to me was how stupidly Saruman behaved after he got news the ring had been destroyed. The Shire under his control, like everywhere else in Middle Earth, would have felt the reverberations from the destruction of the ring and the fall of Sauron. Saruman would absolutely have known that the Fellowship hobbits were going to return back home soon (knowing their temprament and desire for domestic life) and would fight him for control there.
The very first thing a smart Saruman would have done would have been to completely ethnically cleanse the entire Shire of hobbits by genociding them all (and we know that by this point he was evil enough to do so) and replacing them with Uruk-Hai, so that when the inevetable battle happened at least the locals would side with him instead of against him. And if you read the chapter you'd quickly realise that the fellowship hobbits wouldn't have been able to muster their successful rebellion had there been no more living local hobbits left.
For whatever reason Tolkien didn't write the chapter in this way though... Perhaps it would have been even more anticlimatic than The Scouring of the Shire is on its own, but it would definitely have been more realistic.
Smart saruman would guilt trip the hobbits for colonizing traditional elf lands and tell them that not accepting their uruk-hai migrants into the shire would not be very nice.
"Today we meet to acknowledge that the Shire occupies a portion of the unceded ancestral lands of the Laiquendi branch of the Nandorin Elves, who were displaced by the colonizers from Númenor*" 😀
*After a long chain of natural and unnatural disasters
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