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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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I mean this is pretty much word-for-word the apology offered by Richard Hanania in regards to his past writing for white nationalist publications under the pen name Richard Hoste, and the apology appears to have been broadly accepted. His substack is popular and, as I understand it, widely read among very powerful people in America, and his book (about the need to dismantle and repeal the Civil Rights Act, no less!) doesn’t appear to have suffered any decline in sales as a result of the revelation of his past views. I think an apology seen as sincere because it’s backed up by an observable alteration in behavior is easy for most people to accept in good faith.

I am skeptical of the claim that Hoste's deemed-offensive writing was comparable to Kendi's. I noticed that you did not give a sample, and neither does the Wikipedia article on him. Maybe that's because it's too distasteful to repeat, and maybe because it's really not that bad and nobody wants to pull back the curtain on no-big-deal that they are calling "racist" and "alt-right".

Wikipedia says he "argued for forced sterilization of anyone with an IQ under 90", but they don't quote him. Did he really? Can you, by chance, point me to one or more particularly offensive samples of Hanania/Hoste's writing?

Here are all of the articles he wrote for Counter-Currents, and here are the articles he wrote for the now-defunct AlternativeRight.com.

(And here is Hanania’s own apology post.)

Thanks for the info. I read Hanania's apology side by side with Kendi's, and I would not put Kendi's weak, semi-apology said in the same bucket of repentance and regret as Hanania's. Would you?

When did counter-currents go from dead to having multiple articles a day?

I dunno, it’s had multiple articles a day for as long as I was reading it. (I finally bailed on the site a few months ago, but I was a regular reader for a few years.)

Are you claiming that Hanania's case is representative of racial controversies of the past decade or two?