Guys like Hanania, Fuentes, Kirk, Shapiro are opportunists who are finding their niche in the rightwing hierarchy as intermediaries between the lost boys and the political establishment. Spokesmodels for fascism with a veneer of sophistication, dimestore Iagos whispering innuendoes to the thugs.
Excellent description. They seem to be building on the infrastructure created in the 2000s when people like Sam Harris leveraged the new medium of podcasts to try to bring people like Charles Murray back into mainstream public discourse.
Originally Murray's work on race and IQ brought him into bad odor in the academy, but made him a successful self-described "policy entrepreneur" who was well paid to help rightwing organizations dismantle social services. Then Harris helped spread the race "science" perspective to the sorts of Silicon Valley bros who were very sure IQ is the philosopher's stone for explaining everything from the Big Bang onward, and who found themselves "brave" for telling racist "truths."
Now a vast internet archive provides all the "facts" about "human biodiversity" that give precisely that veneer of sophistication to nazis dudes who want a funded sinecure of one sort of the other.
All things follow from the suits capitulation to Trump. Without gatekeepers, ambitious toads like Hanania are seizing the opportunity to vault past institutions that would have relegated them to the backwaters in a former world. This new unsettled playing field provides plenty of oxygen for the merely ambitious. Like Mr. Ganz sez Hanania's apologia is merely his next ploy for legitimization.
Yes, there also seems to be a kind of thin-blue-line, circle-the-wagons mentality in play. Celebrity agitators sticking together. If Hanania hadn’t slithered his way into the respectable pages of publications like the NY Times as a “controversial” figure and instead remained on the Stormfront beat, nobody would be rallying to his defence.
If I discovered that someone whose work I read and promoted was (at least for a time) a dumb-as-rocks neo-nazi it would probably make me question my judgment at least a little bit, don't you think? Yet this apology allows all your substackers who boosted Hanania to let themselves off the hook: see, the guy I read isn't *that* guy anymore, etc. This way no one has to step back and reconsider anything. You're right, John, it really is all bullshit.
All these dudes rolling their eyes or reflexively defending this misogynist racist dipshit are engaging in gang behavior. All sorts of people are suddenly remembering they have more power as a group, why listen to ‘them’? You only have to if other people succeed in utilizing norms against you. Destroy the norms, and any ability to enforce them, and you can say anything. In a gang, if you all stick together, you reciprocally promise to testify on each others’ behalf if other problems arise for any one of you. You get credibility from people you want to ally yourself to, increasing strength of numbers. If you can abolish all principled criticism by claiming it’s just criticism from another ‘gang’ (the snowflakes, the woke, the whining women, ‘those people,’ the cancellers), you make it harder to establish norms that threaten you if you ever want to transgress. You also open up the center which allows ideological latitude you can potentially benefit from since it makes it easier if you don’t have to think too much about implications of your ideas--what is impermissible is much worse than anything you can come up with. Of course, this means you’re also a racist dipshit in the eyes of people who care about such things but they don’t necessarily have to be your target audience. You may even expand your audience by reassuring others who want the same freedom to be dipshits you are winning for yourself.
Thank you for bluntly calling this shit out. The fact that doing so is necessary is depressing, though. The class solidarity within the commentariat is amazing sometimes. Hanania is a man of letters, a writer and a thinker, and thus has the presumption of fundamental worth even if he has erred. They’re the modern version of all the idiots in MI6 who spent years refusing to believe the hilariously obvious case that Kim Philby was a spy because he was a *Cambridge Man*, for god’s sake. Except, I guess, that that only happened once, while we go through this song and dance with one of these conservative functionary neonazi fuckers every few weeks.
Actually it happened five times, not once. Because Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross were also not very covert soviet agents who were assumed to be "only joking" because they were public school and Cambridge men. Blunt and Burgess were also gay, very openly so in the latter case. Which again was dismissed as the kind of thing that upper class public schoolboys got away with, at the very same time that the non-public school genius Alan Turing was being hounded to death as a "security risk" for being gay but from the lower classes.
Fair, I was kind of considering the Cambridge 5 as one episode, but considering that all of Philby, Blunt and Cairncross made it more than a decade after Burgess and Maclean were blown it really was many failures.
Yeah, processing your essay on spending time with alt-right folks, this is was the thrust of my response--that a fair number of them inhabit that space that Hanania ascribes to himself: believing in their own superiority and full of ressentiment for everything they believe is denying them what they're due, and that doesn't go away even when they are trying to claim some new-found respectability (unconvincingly, as you point out). And of course there are the usual crowd of "men of reason" eager to help someone launder their reputation because their particular grift is constantly presenting themselves as indispensible bridges between right and left, as trying to rebuild a healthy center whatever the fuck that is, etc.
"I wasn’t the greatest at forming normal and healthy relationships with other people. Around 2008, I had few friends or romantic successes and no real career prospects." I agree this feels really central. I'm worried admitting it, because 1. plenty of bigots have prosperous careers and social lives, and 2. plenty of people with the opposite aren't bigots.
But there does appear to be something there. The idea that a personal aggrievement makes fertile soil for ideologies of hate isn't new. I suppose I am curious about a few things though, as I've never really spent time around groups of bigots and find the psychology weird. How prevalent are personal stories of financial and social awkwardness? If one assumes bigotry, as a form of culture, is reinforced when given social community, how much has the internet actually contributed to it? As much as it allows new pathways of connection for those exploring hate, wouldn't it just as much open new pathways to connect with anti-hate? What would it be about people attracted to bigotry, its ideologies, and the internet itself that would be more reinforcing to bigotry than the opposite?
I assume this is due to my unfamiliarity with the inner workings of academia, but how did this guy go from being a self-described autodidact working fast food to getting linguistics and law degrees to being a published foreign policy expert to having a race science sinecure at a prestigious school, all in 10-15 years?
When a relatively young person who can string a basic sentence together goes down to the city clerk's office and registers himself as a conservative prepared to tweet and essay on the subject at volume, every month he keeps it up he finds a generous UBI check under his pillow.
it's gaslighting all the way down--they want us to think that we're crazy
hanania and his coterie's dipshit dilettante obsession with iq, crime rates, birth rates, folk genetics etc is copypasta'ed by white supremacist mass shooters and their voyeurist murder porn fans who often credit these academic racist memes for their red pill awakening (musk has since followed a prolific anon account of this renegade intellectual poseur, chan nazi type)
as you say of antisemitism, there is a stalking murderousness to this pseudoscientific, cod empiric bioracism, genocidal ideation of the icy rationalist kind lurking behind the counterfeit statistics
'This is what all pundits are able give and receive: being taken seriously. “Well, I may disagree but I take you seriously.” This yet more bullshit.'
Matt' Yglesias' tweet about Hanania, after the HuffPo article came out, illustrates your point up perfectly, and exposes the rot at the heart of punditry: "But what is the error in judgement? Was I running around vouching for Hanania's good character? Assuring people he's not racist? He's clearly quite racist! But I also think he's written some good pieces and it's important to read conservatives." The way he easily segues from "of course he's a racist" to "it's important to read conservatives" is an amazing indictment of the entire Yglesias/Chait centrist mindset - "We need to engage with these bad-faith thinkers, because there are people out there who read and agree with them" - that treats scumbags like Hanania as serious thinkers who should be engaged with.
Because girls he likes keep turning him down and that's not right because he's such a catch. So, he wants payback, and maybe actually to force someone to accept him as a partner one day. It's all grievance with these guys, all the way down.
I woudn’t be surprised if elon musk likes Hanania, I might be wrong but Hanania seems to be asperger type, they struggle to hide their difficulties and I don’t think they could hide their racism in the case of Hanania. I don’t want to justify him, but if it’s true what I suspect then these kind of people could be used by white supremacy group because of this. If Hanania doesn’t like black people he won’t hide much. They usually are proud of their IQ, struggle alot socialy. Elon Musk has Asperger and he had more children with different women because of his IQ, he believes he should safe the civilization. The other day I read article about his son X how he is already small engineer. He knows alot about space. These are subtle message of white supremacy. Elon won’t be criticized why he is leaving children behind because he is rich. Usually Asperger people support one another and Silicon Valley definitely is full of many of them. For that reason I appreciate John in insisting on this argument because it matters. I have to admit also that personally I don’t find negative that white People wants to increase their popolations and that they need to keep their previlage, It’s normal to think this way because every race does this, but I don’t agree with racism and treating other as inferior race.
Guys like Hanania, Fuentes, Kirk, Shapiro are opportunists who are finding their niche in the rightwing hierarchy as intermediaries between the lost boys and the political establishment. Spokesmodels for fascism with a veneer of sophistication, dimestore Iagos whispering innuendoes to the thugs.
Excellent description. They seem to be building on the infrastructure created in the 2000s when people like Sam Harris leveraged the new medium of podcasts to try to bring people like Charles Murray back into mainstream public discourse.
Originally Murray's work on race and IQ brought him into bad odor in the academy, but made him a successful self-described "policy entrepreneur" who was well paid to help rightwing organizations dismantle social services. Then Harris helped spread the race "science" perspective to the sorts of Silicon Valley bros who were very sure IQ is the philosopher's stone for explaining everything from the Big Bang onward, and who found themselves "brave" for telling racist "truths."
Now a vast internet archive provides all the "facts" about "human biodiversity" that give precisely that veneer of sophistication to nazis dudes who want a funded sinecure of one sort of the other.
All things follow from the suits capitulation to Trump. Without gatekeepers, ambitious toads like Hanania are seizing the opportunity to vault past institutions that would have relegated them to the backwaters in a former world. This new unsettled playing field provides plenty of oxygen for the merely ambitious. Like Mr. Ganz sez Hanania's apologia is merely his next ploy for legitimization.
Yes, there also seems to be a kind of thin-blue-line, circle-the-wagons mentality in play. Celebrity agitators sticking together. If Hanania hadn’t slithered his way into the respectable pages of publications like the NY Times as a “controversial” figure and instead remained on the Stormfront beat, nobody would be rallying to his defence.
If I discovered that someone whose work I read and promoted was (at least for a time) a dumb-as-rocks neo-nazi it would probably make me question my judgment at least a little bit, don't you think? Yet this apology allows all your substackers who boosted Hanania to let themselves off the hook: see, the guy I read isn't *that* guy anymore, etc. This way no one has to step back and reconsider anything. You're right, John, it really is all bullshit.
All these dudes rolling their eyes or reflexively defending this misogynist racist dipshit are engaging in gang behavior. All sorts of people are suddenly remembering they have more power as a group, why listen to ‘them’? You only have to if other people succeed in utilizing norms against you. Destroy the norms, and any ability to enforce them, and you can say anything. In a gang, if you all stick together, you reciprocally promise to testify on each others’ behalf if other problems arise for any one of you. You get credibility from people you want to ally yourself to, increasing strength of numbers. If you can abolish all principled criticism by claiming it’s just criticism from another ‘gang’ (the snowflakes, the woke, the whining women, ‘those people,’ the cancellers), you make it harder to establish norms that threaten you if you ever want to transgress. You also open up the center which allows ideological latitude you can potentially benefit from since it makes it easier if you don’t have to think too much about implications of your ideas--what is impermissible is much worse than anything you can come up with. Of course, this means you’re also a racist dipshit in the eyes of people who care about such things but they don’t necessarily have to be your target audience. You may even expand your audience by reassuring others who want the same freedom to be dipshits you are winning for yourself.
Thank you for bluntly calling this shit out. The fact that doing so is necessary is depressing, though. The class solidarity within the commentariat is amazing sometimes. Hanania is a man of letters, a writer and a thinker, and thus has the presumption of fundamental worth even if he has erred. They’re the modern version of all the idiots in MI6 who spent years refusing to believe the hilariously obvious case that Kim Philby was a spy because he was a *Cambridge Man*, for god’s sake. Except, I guess, that that only happened once, while we go through this song and dance with one of these conservative functionary neonazi fuckers every few weeks.
Actually it happened five times, not once. Because Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross were also not very covert soviet agents who were assumed to be "only joking" because they were public school and Cambridge men. Blunt and Burgess were also gay, very openly so in the latter case. Which again was dismissed as the kind of thing that upper class public schoolboys got away with, at the very same time that the non-public school genius Alan Turing was being hounded to death as a "security risk" for being gay but from the lower classes.
Fair, I was kind of considering the Cambridge 5 as one episode, but considering that all of Philby, Blunt and Cairncross made it more than a decade after Burgess and Maclean were blown it really was many failures.
Yeah, processing your essay on spending time with alt-right folks, this is was the thrust of my response--that a fair number of them inhabit that space that Hanania ascribes to himself: believing in their own superiority and full of ressentiment for everything they believe is denying them what they're due, and that doesn't go away even when they are trying to claim some new-found respectability (unconvincingly, as you point out). And of course there are the usual crowd of "men of reason" eager to help someone launder their reputation because their particular grift is constantly presenting themselves as indispensible bridges between right and left, as trying to rebuild a healthy center whatever the fuck that is, etc.
The thing that struck me about Hanania's mea culpa was the relative lack of culpa.
Further, insofar as he seems to have any regret it's less for the content of his earlier views and more for the vulgarity of them.
"I wasn’t the greatest at forming normal and healthy relationships with other people. Around 2008, I had few friends or romantic successes and no real career prospects." I agree this feels really central. I'm worried admitting it, because 1. plenty of bigots have prosperous careers and social lives, and 2. plenty of people with the opposite aren't bigots.
But there does appear to be something there. The idea that a personal aggrievement makes fertile soil for ideologies of hate isn't new. I suppose I am curious about a few things though, as I've never really spent time around groups of bigots and find the psychology weird. How prevalent are personal stories of financial and social awkwardness? If one assumes bigotry, as a form of culture, is reinforced when given social community, how much has the internet actually contributed to it? As much as it allows new pathways of connection for those exploring hate, wouldn't it just as much open new pathways to connect with anti-hate? What would it be about people attracted to bigotry, its ideologies, and the internet itself that would be more reinforcing to bigotry than the opposite?
I assume this is due to my unfamiliarity with the inner workings of academia, but how did this guy go from being a self-described autodidact working fast food to getting linguistics and law degrees to being a published foreign policy expert to having a race science sinecure at a prestigious school, all in 10-15 years?
When a relatively young person who can string a basic sentence together goes down to the city clerk's office and registers himself as a conservative prepared to tweet and essay on the subject at volume, every month he keeps it up he finds a generous UBI check under his pillow.
By operating outside a system of academic peer review, instead working in a system of ideological conformity.
it's gaslighting all the way down--they want us to think that we're crazy
hanania and his coterie's dipshit dilettante obsession with iq, crime rates, birth rates, folk genetics etc is copypasta'ed by white supremacist mass shooters and their voyeurist murder porn fans who often credit these academic racist memes for their red pill awakening (musk has since followed a prolific anon account of this renegade intellectual poseur, chan nazi type)
as you say of antisemitism, there is a stalking murderousness to this pseudoscientific, cod empiric bioracism, genocidal ideation of the icy rationalist kind lurking behind the counterfeit statistics
'This is what all pundits are able give and receive: being taken seriously. “Well, I may disagree but I take you seriously.” This yet more bullshit.'
Matt' Yglesias' tweet about Hanania, after the HuffPo article came out, illustrates your point up perfectly, and exposes the rot at the heart of punditry: "But what is the error in judgement? Was I running around vouching for Hanania's good character? Assuring people he's not racist? He's clearly quite racist! But I also think he's written some good pieces and it's important to read conservatives." The way he easily segues from "of course he's a racist" to "it's important to read conservatives" is an amazing indictment of the entire Yglesias/Chait centrist mindset - "We need to engage with these bad-faith thinkers, because there are people out there who read and agree with them" - that treats scumbags like Hanania as serious thinkers who should be engaged with.
Help me with the through-line from thinking he's superior to everyone else and that women shouldn't
have rights.
Because girls he likes keep turning him down and that's not right because he's such a catch. So, he wants payback, and maybe actually to force someone to accept him as a partner one day. It's all grievance with these guys, all the way down.
“Hey, it worked for Tucker? Give a guy a break.” 💩.
I woudn’t be surprised if elon musk likes Hanania, I might be wrong but Hanania seems to be asperger type, they struggle to hide their difficulties and I don’t think they could hide their racism in the case of Hanania. I don’t want to justify him, but if it’s true what I suspect then these kind of people could be used by white supremacy group because of this. If Hanania doesn’t like black people he won’t hide much. They usually are proud of their IQ, struggle alot socialy. Elon Musk has Asperger and he had more children with different women because of his IQ, he believes he should safe the civilization. The other day I read article about his son X how he is already small engineer. He knows alot about space. These are subtle message of white supremacy. Elon won’t be criticized why he is leaving children behind because he is rich. Usually Asperger people support one another and Silicon Valley definitely is full of many of them. For that reason I appreciate John in insisting on this argument because it matters. I have to admit also that personally I don’t find negative that white People wants to increase their popolations and that they need to keep their previlage, It’s normal to think this way because every race does this, but I don’t agree with racism and treating other as inferior race.
"becomes becomes" around the middle