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Fallout of the Hanania doxxing. The University of Austin (not to be confused with the public university), which billed itself as a haven of free speech, has now uninvited Hanania after the latest revelations.
I think this says a lot about the "anti-woke right". It's basically just warmed over liberalism from 20 years ago. If you're not willing to cross the rubicon and talk frankly about topics like race and crime, then what's the point of your "heterodox" university anyway? This is why the right keeps losing: it's full of spineless cowards.
People make fun of SJWs but at least they have the courage of their convictions.
There are literal zero people autistic enough to cross that rubicon. Donald Trump wouldn’t. Some random blog posted here went with I’m not a scientists but what if it’s true on hbd. Hannania himself will posts IQ data by race but won’t come out and say it. And in his apology just said differences exists I don’t know why, but I have a degree of confidence he doesn’t believe in structural racisms.
I’m starting to think the rubicon needs crossed. Hannania apparently began to believe he could get policy in the right place without crossing. Something like 1 in a 150 African Americans were shot in Minneapolis last year so not crossing the Rubicon seems like it has real world negative effects for all.
Well I guess everyone is opaque about "crossing the Rubicon". Assuming Hanania is honest, we don't need to guess about what he thinks because he responded to the huffpo piece on his substack. He finds his old views repugnant; largely explained by immature, emotional reasoning. His solution was intellectual advancement, and personal development. After looking at the data he realized hbd is true, and small-l liberalism is the best path forward.
I think this sums of where he was when he was writing anonymously.
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An alternate explanation is that these kinds of extreme pro-ethnic-cleansing arguments are genuinely unpopular among large swaths of the center right.
There are left wing university professors who used to be actual, no-shit, terrorists. Does that mean terrorism is genuinely popular (or at least not genuinely unpopular) among the large swaths of the center left?
Also, if Bari Weiss is now "center-right", I swear to god...
It's not so much that terrorists are popular (though I'd bet that some among the left don't mind having "dial a riot" in their deck of cards), as the fact that the center-left feels vastly more secure in its control over the direction of leftist politics than the center-right does. Realistically, any far left policy that gets memetically popular will be sanewashed into something the center-left either already supports (e.g. they might not want single-payer healthcare, but they would like a universal system) or can accept (race and gender grievance stuff). Bernie got swatted like a fly by the DNC whereas the GOP is praying that Trump gets imprisoned or killed because their other standard-bearers can't beat him (assuming the polling is remotely accurate, a fact about which I am presently agnostic). All those boomer bombings are easily forgotten about because all put together pale in comparison to one Oklahoma City Bombing. Joe Biden's anachronistic affection toward organized labor is a bigger threat to neoliberal economics than every commie professor in the country combined.
I don't think that the center right really thinks that some sort of far right is a serious threat (though it's entirely possible that they've been repeating it long enough that they believe it themselves), but a populist right very much is, and they're more than willing to conflate the two to stay in power. This isn't anything new. Not so long ago, Trump himself was calling Pat Buchanan a Nazi.
Funny thing in American politics today is the right rallies around Trump because he’s going to win the primary but they probably have better and more electable candidates behinds him. The left seems to rally around Biden despite no huge fan base because there is nothing behind him.
They don't need it. By now a majority of the nation simply won't vote Republican because it isn't respectable to do so. The Democrats can run a yellow dog and still win.
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No. The left could be filled with 100% terrorists. That doesn't affect whether extreme HBD policies are or are not popular on the center right.
Bari Weiss is running a university to attract customers. those customers may include the center right, woke-skeptic, and also find extreme HBD policies distasteful.
That's not the question I asked though.
You can find them distasteful without wanting to disinvite a dude for pseudonymously advocating for them on obscure internet forums, 10 years ago.
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What you call the anti-woke right is really the institutional anti-woke right — the version of the right that can get editorials in national newspapers, books with major publishers, and professors at good universities. It is beholden to liberal norms because of the utter collapse of the traditional right in major cultural institutions and its failure to build alternatives.
This is why right-wing anti-elitism (as exemplified by Trump) is a fairly anaemic long-term threat to the left: it doesn’t build anything to compete with their long-term bases of power.
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Hanania’s “talk about race and crime” was fine with them. The problem is with his talk about eugenic sterilisation and justified racial discrimination and the necessity of getting Hispanic people to leave the US because of the inevitable antagonism between whites and racial minority groups with inferior intelligence, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…
Exactly. But that's not stuff he's believed in the past decade, and he's the only person arguing against them from a place of sympathy and understanding. To cancel him is to say that "fascists" can't change and/or that you don't want them to.
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Agreed. Under his old alias he expressed explicit support for ideas that are so far outside the Overton Window that even Putin or Xi Jinping wouldn’t publicly endorse them (even if they carried them out in practice).
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To be precise, all of those things would also be fine, if he just picked a different group as his target.
Nonsense. Coerced sterilisation would be a human rights violation no matter who the target was. Removing a specific racial group from America is well outside the Overton Window. And even affirmative action is generally framed in terms of helping minorities, rather than justifying it with invective against white people.
Even the examples you list aren’t as extreme as Hanania’s pseudonymous writing, though. “Decolonisation is not a metaphor” does not say “perhaps we could coercively sterilise the colonists and take our country back in a few generations,” and the authors probably aren’t secretly thinking it; note that I come from a country where giving back land is government policy. Metaphors about “whiteness” are still putatively about mindset rather than genetics, and the paper you list was by a white person, which isn’t a complete defence but it does complicate things. We don’t have to trust these people completely but it does matter that they don’t actually mirror Hanania’s pseudonym.
You might reasonably ask whether someone who had called for extremist anti-white policies that truly did mirror Hanania’s would be more easily forgiven if they repudiated their earlier stance. Probably. But I have never seen such policies advocated in the first place, and I think that extreme white supremacy is feared because it actually has a constituency. It certainly has one here on this website. OP of this thread calls it “nothing very shocking.” This person blithely refers to “implement[ing] a few eugenic policies” as a way of getting rid of a racial minority.This person thinks that Jim Crow and slavery were “sane, stable solutions to the problem of having a racial underclass.” At least that last one is getting pushback?
It remains to be seen whether this even will scuttle Hanania’s book deal. You’re right that it could, but it might not. I am not certain that it should, but I may as well admit that it scares me a little that it might not. Without the possibility of strong pushback, would Hanania have changed his mind in the first place? Even if he would have, others would not. You can see plenty of them right here.
Hanania should lose trust over this. He should lose status. I don’t think he should lose the opportunity to regain some trust, and his explanation does matter, but it’s important that he takes a hit for this. Moreover, we don’t have to trust him.
Well, I call it nothing very shocking because I routinely see even more extreme right-wing content, not because I agree with it. I myself am not a white supremacist.
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What exactly are you pushing me for, when it comes to using “whiteness” to describe the set of effects that being white in a racist society might have on people? I think it’s bad terminology and people should stop using it. Are you asking me to conclude that everyone who uses such terminology actually intends white people harm? Because, if so, I don’t think that’s true. Alternatively, you might be asking me to be outraged, in order to campaign more effectively for people to actually stop. I am not sure if my outrage would actually be helpful, though.
There are a lot of situations in which a more measured argument would be more persuasive. After all, most people who support such terminology believe that outraged people are mistaken about its meaning. By not being outraged and instead taking people at their word, I might well have a better chance of changing people’s minds. I’ve not tried to make this argument, but I am pondering whether I should engage more with people to my left, now that this place is becoming less interesting to me.
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I appreciate you as a dissenting voice, but I genuinely believe Hanania's upcoming book is the most important conservative book of the last 20 years and possibly the most important American book of the past decade. I can't afford for him to lose status because I can't afford for this book not to be a smashing success.
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You don't think a statement like "whiteness is a disease" has these sort of implications? Even after granting the point that forced sterilization is worse than non-metaphorical decolonization or treating someone's race as a disease, the difference between one being written pseudonomously, and the other publicly in academic journals completely overrides any conclusion that could be made from the comparison you wanted to make. Like I pointed out you can openly call for murdering people based on their race, and the "paper of record" will come to your defense. Hanania could have rewritten all his old posts verbatim, replaced other races with "white" and no one criticizing him, including you, would have cared.
Hanania should have never had any trust or status, but he should not lose any over this.
With all due respect, you cannot “openly call for murder.” What you can do is sing a song that calls for murder and then pinky promise you don’t mean it literally, and then the NYT will make sure to mention all that stuff about not taking it literally.
It’s not good! In a country where white people are a racial minority, it’s reasonable to see a serious potential threat. I sincerely hope we do not see violence as a result.
To be clear, I don’t support the pejorative usage of “whiteness” to describe cultural or personal qualities. However, I am not the one making a comparison, here. I’m responding to a comparison that I was given. It is indeed tricky to compare “aimed at white people, no claims of inherent racial superiority, disturbing in potential unspoken implication but not necessarily meaning what a person’s worst fears might make of it, continues to be openly held, not given strong social sanction” with “aimed at a racial minority, claims of inherent racial superiority, explicitly terrible policy suggestions, very recently repudiated, given some social sanction and we may see more.” That’s a lot of variables!
Well, that would be what I'd call "bending over backwards". I somehow doubt that the problem with what Hanania said was the lack of musical background, and the famous "it was just irony, bro" defense.
I also don't support anything Hanania said, not just under his edgy persona, but the "respectable" one as well, but that's neither here nor there. The question is whether or not something should happen to Hanianias respectability as a result of his old posts getting discovered, and in my opinion as long as stuff like this can be published in broad daylight, I see no reason why what he posted should result in any consequences.
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The NYT has just finished bending over backwards in order to whitewash a literal call for a genocide, do you want to make a bet about any negative consequences coming their way as a result?
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To be fair, "the right" in question here is Bari Weis and her friends.
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