I thought the Origins of Woke was a great book personally, although I shared a few of Scott's criticisms. Namely I thought it was a little weird how focused Hanania was on making sure workplaces be more conducive to finding sexual partners, and how much he cared about funding women's sports received. But overall I thought the book was great and captured a major causative factor of how Woke is so incredibly strong.
When people aren't allowed to acknowledge the flaws of Wokeness in the workplace or their employees will get sued, it creates an immense chilling effect. That's probably not the sole cause of wokeness, there are other factors like supporting impoverished minorities being a very convenient luxury belief to signal how much of a good person you are, but Hanania convinced me it was a major factor.
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Notes -
Richard Hanania defended the bill passed this week by the House adopting of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism, on the grounds that "making judgments about discrimination is what they're for." Ironic that he now supports massively increasing the scope of what is considered "discrimination" in the workplace and on campus.
Hanania is a very political guy, who's willing to make certain sacrifices to achieve ends he thinks is good. He'd want discrimination laws rolled back in general, but as long as they aren't, is happy to see them used against the Left.
Uh huh, "we should roll back Civil Rights law, but in the meantime let's massively expand the ability of Jews to use Civil Rights law to wage lawfare against their political opposition" is peak Hanania.
He's a "political guy" in the worst way. He threw his lot behind the Alt-Right when it was at its worst, obviously never going anywhere, and then turned coat to become cartoonishly pro-Israel and pro-Jewish at the precise moment their political and moral credibility has begun to collapse with every passing day.
He's a "political guy" in that he can apparently be trusted to grift onto whatever political movement is about to suffer a catastrophic loss of credibility. He's a loser, he's going nowhere. He wrote the book on how Civil Rights law has destroyed the West or whatever, and in his next breath he is supporting the massive expansion of those regulations on behalf of Jewish interests.
Nick Fuentes does this thing that many find irritating where he says something outlandish, follows it by "haha just kidding, but not really", in order to provide plausible deniability for sensational statements. He uses comedy to provide cover for his radical viewpoints. But at least when Nick does it you can read between the lines and see where he's coming from. Hanania says things like "nobody is more pro-Israel than me" and I genuinely do not know if he is being sincere or intentionally outlandish. The dude is a joke, his political instincts are terrible.
I think he is somewhat sincere. I think he looks at all Jews have contributed to civilization, e.g vastly disproportionate numbers of Nobel winners and establishing a democracy in the middle east as two examples, and considers them a culture worth supporting. Meanwhile he looks at the Palestinian culture and Hamas, and sees them as a blight on civilization worth bombing into obliteration.
He apparently hates leftist protestors too and I think a substantial portion of his support is just to "trigger" them. I don't really get that part of his motivation, I don't have any particular fondness of leftist protestors but I don't have any visceral hatred of them, I just consider them a bit dumb.
So the "we should roll back Civil Rights law, but in the meantime let's massively expand the ability of Jews to use Civil Rights law to wage lawfare against their political opposition" is a little bit out of loving Jews, but I think it's mostly out of hatred of leftist protestors. I don't really agree with that myself, but I don't really particularly care either way.
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