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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.
Saruman was ruined at that point, and all that was left to him was petty revenge. He no longer had the power, much less the wisdom, to carry out his plans about cosying up to Sauron and getting a place at his right hand, and when Sauron fell that was it, game over.
But he could still do something in a mean way, and even if he knew the survivors were coming back to the Shire eventually (and he may have gambled that the destruction of the Ring would also mean the deaths of Frodo and any others with him, or that the Hobbits would have been killed in the fighting even before the fall of Sauron), he still had time to get there first and spoil as much as he could.
Saruman didn't send an occupation force into the Shire because he didn't have one to spare; all the efforts were concentrated on the great final push against Gondor and Rohan, and in the aftermath of victory, he presumed, then he could put in his claim to be overlord of the Shire for Sauron. He didn't much care about it except as a way to poke Gandalf in the eye, it was too unimportant without anything there of interest for him. A slave-land filled with slave-Hobbits was enough for him after the dust had settled, but as it fell out, he couldn't even get that much, though he was able to gather together a rag-tag bunch of bandits to help him take over, with Lotho at first as his puppet quisling face of authority.
And they didn't have it all their own way, even from the first:
I think Tolkien was more interested in showing internal corruption; the Shire is not an earthly paradise, even if it is a good place to live. The dealings with the Sackville-Bagginses, where Lotho has his authority go to his head, and he is enriched by trading with Saruman, and hence gives Saruman a foothold in the Shire, and the co-operation of the likes of Ted Sandyman who are all too happy to help with 'progress' (but really wrecking and pulling down things), all done at first under the guise of working with the local authorities (i.e. Lotho) - that, as much as the unpreparedness of the Hobbits for an outside invasion force, is what lets Saruman establish control there.
An invasion force of Uruk-Hai that wiped out all the Shire Hobbits won't give you that, or the warning that you can't safely and smugly assume all the 'bad things' are out there, away over yonder, and not lurking at your own fireside.
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