Luke Ford

According to Wikipedia:

Richard Hanania is an American political science researcher and right-wing political commentator. Hanania is the founder and president of the think tank Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI).

Between 2008 and the early 2010s Hanania wrote for alt-right and white supremacist publications under the pseudonym Richard Hoste.

He attended Moraine Valley Community College and the University of Colorado. He received a Juris Doctor from the University of Chicago and a Doctor of Philosophy in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Hanania authors a blog on Substack, which was received positively by figures such as the Mercatus economists Tyler Cowen and Bryan Caplan[12][third-party source needed] and J. D. Vance, noted by Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie, and publicized by Tucker Carlson, who invited Hanania on his show twice.[5] Hanania also operates a podcast where he has interviewed various people including the billionaire Marc Andreessen.

Hanania has been linked to the New Right. He is sometimes described as libertarian, although he has written in favor of curtailing civil liberties with increased police power targeting African Americans, and has praised mass arrests in El Salvador. In a 2023 essay, Hanania wrote that the only way to reduce crime is “a revolution in our culture or form of government. We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people. Blacks won’t appreciate it, whites don’t have the stomach for it.” The essay caught the attention of Elon Musk, who called it “interesting”.

In his 2023 book The Origins of Woke, Hanania argues that central causes of “wokeness” are the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and multiple inventive court decisions and executive orders. The book has promotional blurbs by Vivek Ramaswamy, David Sacks, and Peter Thiel, who expressed support for the idea that “government violence” is the only way to defeat the threat of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. In The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper called the book a “Trojan horse for white supremacy”, arguing that it is grounded in the assumption that “Black people and women are less competent, capable, and intelligent than white men.” Robert VerBruggen, writing in the Washington Examiner, called it “an interesting and mostly sober take on long-debated civil rights topics from one of the Right’s most frustrating figures”.

Richard Hanania’s out of control ego reminds me of Richard Spencer and Mike Benz, who claims he “ran cyber” at State.

Aug. 19, 2024, Richard wrote on Substack:

Hating Modern Conservatism While Voting Republican

Yes, I Still Want the Stupid Party to Win

…my main consideration is that economic growth is what matters.

If economic growth is your main concern, there’s no empirical reason to claim that either Republicans or Democrats are better.

If freedom is your main concern, there’s no empirical reason to claim that either Republicans or Democrats are better.

If in 2024 your main consideration in your political choice is economic growth, you’re not serious. We are closer to a world-wide conflagration than at any time in decades. The Biden administration has plunged us into unnecessary conflict with Russia, with the Middle East and with China (Joe Biden has repeatedly said the United States will fight to protect Taiwan even though Taiwan can’t be bothered to put much effort into protecting itself).

Hanania only mentions foreign policy in passing:

On foreign policy, Trump will likely support Ukraine, give Israel carte blanche to do what it wants, and take a strong stand against Iran. His first term Middle East policy was an unquestionable success, resting on bringing the Israelis and most Arab governments together and taking the grievances of the Palestinians less seriously. The same approach should work again. And while it wasn’t a good idea to keep NATO membership on the table before February 2022, the case for supporting Ukraine now that Russia invaded is strong.

This analysis occupies only one paragraph in a 23-paragraph essay and it is silly analysis. Nobody knows what Trump will do as president, let alone whether whatever he does will work again. Richard argues that the case for supporting Ukraine is strong, but I fail to see how that support enhances America’s interests.

Hanania writes: “Across time and place, conservatism tends to be the worldview of lower human capital, but mostly due to historical contingency, we live in one of those relatively rare societies where it is associated with more pro-market policies.”

Hanania is about 1% as deep as Rony Guldmann who noted in his work-in-progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression:

This conception of manliness is part of what animates conservatives’ embrace of the free market, whose association with conservatism is not as obvious as it seems. Conservatives have always defended property rights and opposed centralized economic control. But contemporary conservatives’ idealization of the free market as an all-purpose social panacea and flawless barometer of personal virtue seems inconsistent with conservatives’ bedrock commitment to pragmatism, stability, public morality, and tradition. Mark Henrie writes that post-war traditionalist conservatism originated as a reaction against the “homogenization of the entire world on the basis of contract theory” and was an effort “to name those ‘other’ elements of the human good, which are obscured by the liberal dispensation.” … chaos, unpredictability, and insecurity of the pre-modern condition of porous selves opened out to anti-structure. These are what enable manliness and the anarchic will of free men. And it is these discounted values that imbue untrammeled laissez-faire with its existential resonance for conservatives. Laissez-faire symbolizes the anti-structure denied by the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity, affirming our submersion in forces we do not control, our openness to powers that transcend our will and upset our designs. Liberals reject this openness as the relic of a barbarian past of less fortunate peoples, which they in their superior enlightenment have overcome. And it is this presumption that conservatives oppose in opposing the welfare state in the name of capitalism.

Hanania writes: “Republicans want to make it more acceptable to misgender people at work. But the right to do this is not worth all that much.”

The notion that we, rather than our biology, can choose our sex and gender is an outrage from a traditional perspective. Only someone insensitive to the fragility of civilization would toss off such a careless opinion.

Amy Wax notes:

For Burke and Oakeshott, conceptual relationships have little to do with how customs and traditions function in the real world. Because the powers of human reason are severely limited, all but the most intellectually gifted are incapable of engaging in sustained, rigorous analysis or of thinking through problems without falling into error. The dilemmas of human existence are particularly resistant to rational analysis because social practices and traditions are not derived from first principles, but evolve over time by trial and error. Human action in society and politics operates not primarily through reasoning, but through adherence to prescriptive roles, customs, and habits continuously adjusted to the messy demands of day-to-day living. The test of behavioral rules is thus whether they work well in the real world as guides for human interaction rather than whether they conform precisely to syllogistic demands.

Hanania writes: “Euthanasia is different, and if Democrats came out unapologetically in favor of a Canadian-type system, I would seriously consider voting for them despite all of their other flaws.”

If Hanania would seriously consider voting for the Democrats on the basis of euthenasia, what kind of politics would that spring from? Hananianism.

Hanania writes:

I also don’t think you should vote based on a general sense of cultural grievance. If I was convinced that electing one party would solve problems like young women getting tattoos, gender confusion among the youth, or diversity casting in movies, it would affect my vote. But although political views are often motivated by cultural grievances, the connections between election results and such phenomena are tenuous at best.

Cultural grievances aren’t trivial. They are as much of ourselves as our most treasured possessions and beliefs. Ernest Becker explained in The Birth and Death of Meaning:

You get a good feeling for what the self “looks like” in its extensions if you imagine the person to be a cylinder with a hollow inside, in which is lodged the self. Out of this cylinder the self overflows and extends into the surroundings, as a kind of huge amoeba, pushing its pseudopods to a wife, a car, a flag, a crushed flower in a secret book. The picture you get is of a huge invisible amoeba spread out over the landscape, with boundaries very far from its own center or home base. Tear and burn the flag, find and destroy the flower in the book, and the amoeba screams with soul-searing pain.

Usually we extend these pseudopods not only to things we hold dear, but also to silly things; our selves are cluttered up with things we don’t need, artificial things, debilitating ones. For example, if you extend a pseudopod to your house, as most people do, you might also extend it to the inventory of an interior decorating program. And so you get vitally upset by a piece of wallpaper that bulges, a shelf that does not join, a light fixture that “isn’t right.” Often you see the grotesque spectacle of a marvelous human organism breaking into violent arguments, or even crying, over a panel that doesn’t match. Interior decorators confide that many people have somatic symptoms or actual nervous breakdowns when they are redecorating. And I have seen a grown and silver-templed Italian crying in the street in his mother’s arms over a small dent in the bumper of his Ferrari.

Hanania posts this photo with the cutline “Typical Republicans”:

Hanania hates people who don’t bow to him.

Hanania writes: “Setting aside the now mostly moot…issue of covid…”

How many people died of covid for the week ending July 20, 2024? 566. That does not strike me as trivial. According to this 2023 study, the average lost years of life per covid death is over 12. What kind of person yawns at this?

In 2023, the CDC notes that covid was the tenth leading cause of death.

What Hanania really means is that covid is moot to him and therefore covid is moot for everyone.

July 12, 2024, Hanania posted:

I bet a lot of money on [Biden] being the nominee, and have staked my reputation on a long term prediction that 2024 would be Trump versus Biden, which I made back when both were only at about 33%. It would be nice to say that I called the next four years of American politics regarding something that markets only gave an approximately 10% chance of happening.

In the podcast, Hanania says: “I want the ego of having predicted it would be Biden and Trump in 2024.”

Steve Sailer wrote Oct. 11, 2023:

Pundit Richard Hanania, whose book The Origins of Woke I reviewed here recently, then weighed in with “Shakespeare is Fake: When we have objective measures, the past is never better.”

As I mentioned in my review, while I admire his intellect, “Richard needs to watch his ego.” And now we see him declaring:

…I could copy Shakespeare’s style and produce something just as appealing….

To prove it, Hanania emitted what he assumed was a Shakespeare-like rhyming doggerel, not realizing that Shakespeare’s greatest works are written in unrhymed iambic pentameter:

Man so powerful yet so weak. Conqueror of stars yet farts and squeaks. Oh man! An ape we know it is true. Darwin has revealed me and you. Yet we go on, forward still. For if not us, then who will?

Oh, dear…

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

Hanania gets on more solid ground by pointing to sports, where objective performances keep getting better.

June 16, 2024, Steve Sailer wrote:

Richard Hanania snarked about my post yesterday about the season-long campaign of racist violence by WNBA black players against white rookie Caitlin Clark.

Then, today, this just happened to Caitlin Clark at the forearm of loudmouthed rival Angel Reese:

Clark’s shot was already two feet past Reese’s hand when Reese hammered Clark in the head with her arm, knocking her to the floor. Reese was whistled for “unnecessary roughess” but not for “excessive roughness.”

If the races were reversed, this of course would be a huge on-going story, dwarfing, say, even the Central Park Karen of 2020.

But, of course, the New York Times treats the bigger story as Bad People noticing the racist violence against the white woman and objecting to it, when all Good People know that blacks can’t be racist because they have no power, such as in … the WNBA? … Anyway, that’s not the point, the point is 1619, which means that blacks get to abuse whites until 2619.

I’d say Steve Sailer got the best of that dispute.

One of Richard Hanania’s most-read essays is called “Why the Media is Honest and Good.” I dissect the silly piece here.

When you read Steve Sailer and Charles Murray, you’re reading serious men who believes in things greater than themselves, such as the pursuit of truth. When you read Richard Hanania, you’re reading the wildly unstable musings of a boy who venerates nothing more than himself.

Steve Sailer wrote Sep. 20, 2023:

Last month, the Huffington Post doxed Hanania as having written online 10–12 years ago as Richard Hoste, a tediously strident minor race realist. I would never dox anybody, but I had already looked into the Hanania-Hoste question myself. I saw many similarities, but Hanania was so much better of a thinker and writer than Hoste had been that I decided to remain agnostic on this mystery. How often do individuals improve that much?

It turns out that Hanania used to be a fat high school dropout, but now he has a J.D. from the U. of Chicago and a Ph.D. from UCLA, and has recently become a prominent skinny public intellectual. If he keeps improving at this rate, the sky is the limit.

Still, although he has much to be proud of, Richard needs to watch his ego. His editors at HarperCollins (and congratulations to them for not canceling the book after his doxing) do a good job of keeping it in check on the printed page. But online he’s been boasting like a rapper:

Why didn’t anyone do any of this before?… I don’t think anyone else could have written ‘The Origins of Woke.’

In reality, I have several books on my shelves from as far back as the 1970s that cover much of the same material. It’s a dry topic, however, so conservative intellectuals tend to forget lessons once learned in favor of highbrow speculations about Cultural Marxism and thus need periodic remindings such as The Origins of Woke.

Hanania goes on to outline his political strategy for rolling back the current legal/regulatory regime.

But perhaps what we need is to roll forward civil rights law to actively protect whites in this era of institutionalized racist antiwhite hate. For example, mandatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training should be seen as prima facie evidence of a hostile work environment for whites. (I outlined sixteen principles to guide legal reform back in June.)

It goes unmentioned in Hanania’s book (as a Palestinian-American, he’s wise to tread warily), but probably the single most important political task for winning support for extending civil rights protections to whites is to get Jews to notice once again that, whether or not they feel white, legally they are white.

Back in the 1970s, many Jewish intellectuals, such as Nathan Glazer, vociferously opposed affirmative action, seeing it as a threat to their working-class relatives’ jobs.

But, Jews were rapidly moving up and out of the working class into careers then much less affected by quotas.

Feb. 19, 2024, Hanania posted:

Shut up About Race and IQ

Why HBD is just white nationalism

Steve Sailer is insightful on many things, but if you assign him an article on housing, littering, or any issue really, it will just turn into a tirade against immigration. I searched Steve’s blog for “littering” and practically every result on the first page was somehow connected to Latinos or immigrants. I tried the same with “global warming” and although the results weren’t as extreme, the pattern was similar. It’s as if whenever you brought up stamp collecting with someone they shifted the conversation to how Armenians are always trying to pass off counterfeit stamps as the real thing. You would start to suspect that this person cared more about Armenians than stamps.

Imagine a leftist coming along and saying that all you have to do is show Sailer that Latinos don’t litter all that much, and then he’ll support immigration! Obviously the whole littering obsession is a pretense, just like his solutions for housing and global warming, and the same is true for other right-wing figures who’ve talked about the topic like Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson. Immigration restrictionists are mainly driven by aesthetic preferences — partly in the most literal sense, that is, what people in the country should look like — and only secondarily feel the need to come up with justifications for them. For the exact same reasons, talking about group differences in IQ is not the way to influence or ultimately defeat the left.

I’ve noticed that on the right, the more individuals accept group differences between races, the more they want society organized to satisfy the preferences of the worst whites and make excuses for their behavior. Those who fret about Hispanics changing our political culture tend to be those least likely to find anything disturbing in Trump’s behavior leading up to and on the day of January 6. Immigration restrictionists are some of the people most upset about fentanyl deaths, when right-wingers had little concern with what drug addicts did to themselves until whites were perceived as victims and they could fit a crisis into an anti-foreigner narrative. All of society should forgo the benefits of immigration and trade because the people at the very bottom might end up worse off. I don’t think globalization actually does make any large group of people worse off, but identitarians need to believe that it does, and will attack mainstream institutions from the left when necessary to argue against Americans being allowed to interact with foreigners.

If you read at least ten Steve Sailer columns, you will notice that he has valuable insights about many things outside of IQ and immigration. Only a petty jealous man such as Richard Hanania would think otherwise.

Hanania posts this cutline to the following picture: “Society’s most admirable heroes according to those who think immigration threatens western institutions.”

What historical examples do we have of a majority peacefully becoming a minority in a country they created?

Hanania writes: “When you buy and sell things across borders, you make both parties better off”

Has Hanania understood any skepticism about free trade? Millions of Americans lost comparatively high-paying manufacturing jobs when we gave China easy access to our markets and many of these Americans have never recovered. Covid came and America’s supply lines were largely shut down and we started wishing we had more domestic manufacturing. Does Hanania believe that during those dark early months of covid, Americans were better off without a domestic industry producing personal protective equipment?

Hanania writes: “Immigration restrictionists are mainly driven by aesthetic preferences.”

How does he know? Which of the most powerful opponents of large-scale immigration into America argued on aesthetic grounds? None. Even if their arguments were based on aesthetics, why is that weak? Why are aesthetic preferences unimportant?

As the percentage of people in America who are foreign-born increases, Americans social trust and cohesion has dropped. Navigating a society dropping in trust is easier for smart people like Hanania but not so easy for most Americans.

I don’t believe anything Hanania says unless I can verify it elsewhere. He’s out for himself and let the facts be damned. Why isn’t Hanania more diligent about facts? Because restricting himself to them would reduce his chances for self-aggrandizement.

Statistician Andrew Gelman wrote July 26, 2024 about entrepreneur Niall Ferguson:

At first glance it might seem that, for a successful academic historian, the expense of checking for, acknowledging, and correcting errors is small compared to the reputational hit of making these high-profile mistakes. Ferguson could just hire a research assistant, some Stanford student who could check everything he writes and flag the mistaken statistics and erroneous claims. The real cost would not be paying the student, however. Rather, the real cost is that, if Ferguson was restricted to only stating true facts, it would reduce his flexibility in making the larger claims he wants to make. Being willing to stretch the truth—not by flat-out lying, I think, but rather by following a general practice of not checking his statistical and historical claims—gives him extra “researcher degrees of freedom” (in the words of the famous Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn paper) in his theorizing. Fact-checking would reduce Ferguson’s effectiveness as a theorist and as a big-picture historian by constraining the sorts of things he could say.

That critique also applies to Hanania.

July 30, 2021, Hanania posted to Substack:

COVID-19 is an Easy Problem

Right now, we’re at about 267 [covid deaths a week]. If this pace continues (highly unlikely, due to more and more people getting ill or vaccinated), it’s about 97,000 deaths in a year. For sake of comparison, in 2017-2018, about 61,000 people died of the flu in the United States, though usually the number of deaths is closer to 30,000. So COVID is something like 1.5-3x as bad as the flu now, and the gap between the two is going to be closing for the foreseeable future.

According to the CDC, about 460,000 Americans died of covid in 2021 (about five times Hanania’s prediction). Not such an easy problem for those who don’t like people dying en masse. In 2023, covid was the tenth leading cause of death in America (according to the CDC).

The prestigious Nature magazine published February 18, 2021: "The average years of life lost per [Covid] death is 16 years."

Dr. Jeremy Samuel Faust wrote April 28, 2020 for Scientific American:

Comparing COVID-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is like Comparing Apples to Oranges — The former are actual numbers; the latter are inflated statistical estimates

When reports about the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 began circulating earlier this year and questions were being raised about how the illness it causes, COVID-19, compared to the flu, it occurred to me that, in four years of emergency medicine residency and over three and a half years as an attending physician, I had almost never seen anyone die of the flu. I could only remember one tragic pediatric case.

Based on the CDC numbers though, I should have seen many, many more. In 2018, over 46,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses. Over 36,500 died in traffic accidents. Nearly 40,000 died from gun violence. I see those deaths all the time. Was I alone in noticing this discrepancy?

I decided to call colleagues around the country who work in other emergency departments and in intensive care units to ask a simple question: how many patients could they remember dying from the flu? Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single one over their careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience.

The 25,000 to 69,000 numbers that Trump cited do not represent counted flu deaths per year; they are estimates that the CDC produces by multiplying the number of flu death counts reported by various coefficients produced through complicated algorithms. These coefficients are based on assumptions of how many cases, hospitalizations, and deaths they believe went unreported. In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, which far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts.

Surgeon David Gorski wrote August 31, 2020 about the nonsense that only 6% of Covid deaths are solely from Covid:

On the death certificate form, there is a space for the immediate cause of death and then several lines for underlying causes. In brief, death certificates are filled out by the medical certifier (who can be the physician who had treated the patient before death), who provides his best medical opinion regarding the cause of death. Part I of the death certificate includes the proximal cause of death, or what directly caused the death, and Part II lists conditions that contributed to the death…

For example, if a patient dies of respiratory failure due to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which was the result of pneumonia, which was the result of COVID-19, the proximal cause of death was the respiratory failure, but contributing causes were ARDS and COVID-19, with the one farthest up the chain being the underlying cause of death under Part I. If the patient had hypertension or asthma, that would go under Part II.

What is the true Covid death toll? The Economist magazine, using academic estimates that the true Covid death toll is 3.4x the official death toll, as of November 12, 2021, estimates the true worldwide death toll at 17.2 million.

Compare Richard Hanania’s thought about why liberals dominate American institutions with Rony Guldmann’s.

Hanania writes: “…conservatives are extremely bad at gaining or maintaining control of institutions relative to liberals. It’s not because they are poorer or the party of the working class – again, I can’t stress enough how little economics predicts people’s political preferences – but because they are the party of those who simply care less about the future of their country.”

Economics does predict voting. For example, rich people are more likely to vote than poor people. Report: “According to exit polling in the 2020 Presidential Election in the United States, 57 percent of surveyed voters making less than 50,000 U.S. dollars reported voting for former Vice President Joe Biden. In the race to become the next president of the United States, 54 percent of voters with an income of 100,000 U.S. dollars or more reported voting for incumbent President Donald Trump.”

Rony Guldmann writes:

Enjoying the plausible deniability provided by a façade of democratic idealism, the liberal elites have quietly colonized a host of powerful social institutions—the judiciary, academia, public schools, large foundations, the media, entertainment, and others—through which they now pursue unofficially what earlier clerisies had to pursue officially. They do not marginalize or excommunicate in the name of some codified orthodoxy like Catholic teaching or Talmudic law. But conservatives believe that the cumulative social prestige arrogated by this “rising class” is the functional equivalent of such an orthodoxy, endowing the liberal elites with a special power to cut off debate and silence dissent. Seeking above all to maintain this power, this new secular priesthood will badger, scold, and bully all who defy it. And this means conservatives. If the latter strike liberal professors like Connolly as angry and obstreperous, this is as a natural human reaction to such a regime, a response to provocations whose very existence the elites decline to acknowledge. Conservatives feel culturally oppressed because they are persuaded that the official face of contemporary liberalism conceals an agenda that is culturally and morally “thicker” than the supposedly “neutral” abstractions of freedom and equality through which liberals formally define themselves. Liberals may hold themselves out as selfless defenders of the public interest combatting the narrow prejudice and egoism of retrograde conservatives. But conservatives retort that these pretensions are an ideological screen behind which liberals foist a parochial vision of human virtue on an unwilling populace in a wide range of spheres, from politically correct education to avant-garde entertainment to creative constitutional jurisprudence.

I haven’t found any topic where one would be best served by reading Richard Hanania first.

Feb. 7, 2022, Richard followed Dennis Prager, Noah Carl and Amy Wax in developing the following ideas:

Women’s Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas

How belief in the blank slate plus residual gender double standards create “cancel culture,” and the difficulties of fighting back

We can understand the decline of free speech as a kind of female pincer attack: women demand more suppression of offensive ideas at the bottom of institutions, and form a disproportionate share of the managers who hear their complaints at the top.

What is left to contribute on the question of how feminization relates to pathologies in our current political discourse? First, I think that the ways in which public debate works when we take steps to make the most emotional and aggressive women comfortable have been overlooked. Things that we talk about as involving “young people,” “college students,” and “liberals” are often gendered issues…

For all our talk of equality, our culture treats violence, incivility, and aggression towards women much more seriously than the same towards men…

Conservatives can call antifa terrorists, use traditional methods of law enforcement against them, and even coordinate right-wing media attacks against professors who support their ideas. Stories on antifa professors and their outrageous antics have been a staple of outlets like Fox News, which regularly try to get them fired. But men tend to be puzzled by how to handle getting yelled at by women, and most will try to end the conversation as quickly as possible on whatever terms they can get.

…[W]e have a few options for how we treat public discourse. The first two are

Expect everyone who participates in the marketplace of ideas to abide by male standards, meaning you accept some level of abrasiveness and hurt feelings as the price of entry.

Expect everyone to abide by female standards, meaning we care less about truth and prioritize the emotional and mental well-being of participants in debates…

When public discourse operates according to male rules, women become more likely to select out of it. They focus more on career, children, hobbies, and family…

…a world that valued truth and objectivity over feelings would have fewer female executives, senators, and journalists, but be better for everyone because it would have more economic and technological growth…

The strength of any anti-wokeness movement depends in large part on the strengths of its antibodies to a certain kind of female emotionalism.

Aug. 20, 2024, Hanania wrote “the intellectual dominance of [Michel] Foucault was a matter of him being in the right place at the right time.”

By contrast, Rony Guldmann named important insight after important insight from Foucault:

* Foucault observes that whereas power in feudal societies operated only intermittently and inefficiently through levies, war, and sundry rituals of fealty to the liege lord, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries transformed power into a more all-pervasive and uninterrupted affair. No longer a matter of punishing defiance or disrespect, it became “a matter of obtaining productive service from individuals in their concrete lives.” Power now meant the minute regulation of acts, attitudes, and everyday behavior, the subjecting of bodies to “highly complex systems of manipulation and conditioning.” Whereas older elites wanted only to maintain their power and authority, modern ones demand not only obedience but conformity, which means a more regulated and predictable relationship to our own impulses.

* Here is Foucault’s “memory of hostile encounters,” which liberals understand shapes the objective social context in which African-Americans are compelled to operate. And I am arguing that something like this is also transpiring in the context of the regulations whose oppressiveness [David] Kahane and other conservatives seem to be histrionically exaggerating.

* Conservative claims of cultural oppression are, as Foucault says, “located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.” And this is why “the ostensible issues are always secondary,” why it does not “matter greatly whether the resentment and resistance makes sense logically or is backed by solid evidence.” Lacking the words for what is primary, conservative claimants of cultural oppression can only persevere in that resentment and resistance in the hope that this will eventually yield some insight into their true meaning. To accept the intellectual framework insisted upon by liberals would be to surrender the field at the very outset, and this they refuse to do.

* Foucault writes that “[e]ach society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth,” the types of discourse which that politics “accepts and makes function as true.” The truths of liberalism are made to “function as true” because, like any artificial social hierarchy, liberalism generates its own “truth” by progressively debilitating those who would challenge it. Just as racism can “create” black criminality by limiting blacks’ educational and economic opportunities and sexism can “create” femininity by enforcing female subservience, so liberalism creates conservative anti-intellectualism. This is to be expected given the “vision of the anointed” and its “pattern of seeking differentiation at virtually all costs.”

Aug. 5, 2024, Hanania wrote:

Democrats Have an Intelligentsia, Republicans Have a Personality Cult

Understanding the 2024 election cycle

Democratic leaders and the liberal intelligentsia more generally have to an impressive degree shown intelligence and a willingness to cooperate in order to achieve their strategic ends. At the same time, as the Vance pick and the messaging around their campaign shows, Republicans are only delving deeper and deeper into being a cult of personality centered around the whims of one man. This doesn’t mean they can’t win in November, only that Democrats have made a series of decisions that have maximized their chances. We can contrast this with how Republicans react to bad news, and their inability to either face reality or work together to converge on an outcome that achieves some greater good.

This seems like a strange analysis given that Donald Trump competed in an open Republican presidential primary while the Democrats insured that Joe Biden would face no opposition in his primary. How dysfunctional were the Democrats that they were saddled with a senile Joe Biden running for a second term for most of the past 18 months?

Hanania wrote: “Nobody serious in the Democratic establishment or liberal media was arguing that the polls showing Biden losing were fake.”

Joe Biden claimed that the polls showed he was just fine. Philip Bump wrote for the Washington Post July 12: “The impossibility of telling Joe Biden he can’t win”

Hanania wrote: “I’ve seen some conservatives say that it was clear Biden was out of his mind before the June debate and the fact that it took the liberal establishment this long to see it is in fact discrediting.”

Conservatives were right.

Hanania posted a picture of Ezra Klein with the cutline “The man who brought down a president.”

That’s nonsense. There’s no evidence that Ezra Klein brought down President Biden. Reality defeated Biden.

For three weeks after Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate, Hanania maintained that Biden wouldn’t quit. By contrast, July 2, I wrote:

Who’s the boss? Not the president, not the Senate majority leader, not the MSM. The situation is the boss. The situation determines the comparative power of all other factors including law and precedent.

The majority opinion of political elites as of July 2, 2024, is that it’s inevitable that Joe Biden will become the nominee of the Democratic party for president of the United States because that’s the law. That’s the precedent. That’s the procedure. He’s made it through the various bureaucratic hurdles and he’s the presumptive nominee and only Joe Biden can turn down the honor.

I think the dire situation of Biden’s cognitive decline will outweigh precedent.

This frenzy shows the elite catching up to the majority of grass roots Democrats who did not want Biden to run for a second term (and had minimal enthusiasm for him in 2020).

July 6, I wrote:

Liberals Were Blinded To Biden’s Senility By Their Own Speech Codes

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write for Axios July 6, 2024:

It is a fair conservative critique that many reporters ignored obvious signs of cognitive decline… Rarely did other outlets follow our exclusive reporting on accommodations for Biden's aging — shorter hours for public appearances, fewer improvisational or late-night moments, and the rise in handlers and devices to help avoid tripping and falling. Some reporters enabled the White House by piling on reporters on social media who questioned Biden's lucidity…

There were so many early signs. Biden rarely did tough interviews — much, much fewer than his predecessors. It was almost always friendly questions on friendly terrain…

The denials — including the favorite line that Biden works so hard he exhausts the youngsters — strained credibility then, and look ludicrous in retrospect.

Conservatives spotted Joe Biden’s cognitive decline years before liberals because conservatives don’t accept ageism and ableism as real moral categories.

We all have concepts of the world and some are more useful than others.

By July 2, it became clear to me that Joe Biden would go due to the desperation of the situation. At this point, most of the political elite believed that Biden would stay due to precedent. I don’t know as much about politics as they do, but if I am right, it is due to my having a superior conception – that the dire nature of the situation will prevail over precedent.

Similarly, most political elites believe that Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee for president if Joe Biden steps down. I do not. Due to the dire nature of the situation (that Kamala Harris has provided Democrats with no basis for believing that she can defeat Donald Trump), I believe the Democrats will select a different nominee.

Who’s the boss? Not the president, not the Senate majority leader, not the MSM. The situation is the boss. The situation determines the comparative power of all other factors including law and precedent.

Liberal elites had a concept regarding Joe Biden prior to the June 27, 2024 debate that ageism and ableism are so morally dangerous that we should require considerable evidence from experts before publicly raising the question of his competence.

How many of liberalism’s moral categories prevent people from seeing reality? Because of “racism,” we can’t discuss in polite company that different groups commit crimes at different rates. Common sense suggests profiling people according to crime statistics but liberals have made that, in many cases, illegal.

That which you are not allowed to say out loud is increasingly not thought. Once liberals speech codes are internalized, conservatives can’t even think like conservatives.

Liberals want to stigmatize frank and easy discussion of reality including the obvious fact that different ages, sexes, races, and religions have different gifts.

Jan. 6, 2022, Edward Luce wrote for the Financial Times:

On no topic is the bifurcation of America’s media more evident than that of the president’s age. To the conservative media world, Joe Biden’s imagined senility is a staple. Republican figures routinely call for him to take cognitive tests. The term “dementia” is bandied about. By contrast, the closest traditional outlets have come to addressing Biden’s age is a spate of reports into the low ratings of his vice-president, Kamala Harris. For them, it is as if openly acknowledging Biden’s advancing years would validate the conspiracy mongers…

There is no reason to think that Biden is suffering from anything more than traits that characterised him in younger decades, such as foot-in-mouth disease and a tendency to talk too much. Neither of these is degenerative… There are some grounds to suspect he is getting more forgetful — he implied twice last year that Taiwan was a formal ally of the US, a claim his staff had to correct. But there are none to suggest he is senile or suffering from dementia.

It turns out the conservatives were right and the liberal establishment was wrong.

Like most of the press corp, Edward Luce was checked out of reality with regard to Biden’s senility. And yet Luce is now making the rounds (including on the elite Morning Joe tv show) pronouncing on the story without admitting how wrong he was.

In a July 6, 2024 video, America’s best political reporter, Mark Halperin, says: “Republicans investigating Joe Biden during his presidency have been a clown show. They haven’t done it well and in part they haven’t done it well because like with the Hunter Biden investigations the press was against them. The press didn’t want to help them. Now the press is interested in these two stories too so the incompetent Republican party on Capitol Hill in terms of investigations is now going to have the wind at their back because they’ll be working with reporters. One is what did the president’s people know and when did they know it (his condition)… It’s been a conspiracy. The press has been in on it.”

Mark Halperin writes July 6, 2024:

Pretty binary options:

1. There was a massive coverup by the Biden White House to keep the president’s undiagnosed cognitive decline from being exposed.

OR

2. There was a massive coverup by the Biden White House to keep the president’s diagnosed cognitive decline from being exposed.

If it is (1), which it is at a minimum, it is very politically damaging to Joe Biden, his administration, and his campaign.

If it is (2), it is right up there w/ WMD & Russia-gate in its historic implications.

Would the Biden family, seeing the decline, really leave him undiagnosed?

Does one have to be a doctor to diagnose Chris Christie as obese? Maybe those fatty-looking layers are really muscle?

Veteran media reporter Brian Stelter writes July 3, 2024: “Many Trump supporters treated it as a given that Biden was senile, and any report that didn’t outright agree was seen as part of the alleged media cover-up.”

Isn’t “senile” the word that rises most readily to the lips with regard to Joe Biden’s condition over the past six years? “Senile” is easier to say than “cognitive decline.” What’s a better word to describe Biden’s cognitive collapse over the past six years? Perhaps “frail.” That’s regarded as a scientific and medical term.

How would you explain the MSM’s reluctance to point out Biden’s obvious senility?

According to the Cambridge dictionary, senile means “showing poor mental ability because of old age, especially being unable to think clearly and make decisions.”

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “Due to its negative connotations, use of senile relating to cognitive decline is now typically avoided in medical contexts and may be considered offensive in general contexts.”

Healthline.com notes:

Today, “senile” is generally considered an insult and is not used except as part of archaic medical condition names.

The more accurate way to refer to natural changes of aging, especially those related to mental and intellectual functioning, is “cognitive changes.”

Yes, and the homeless are just people going through a lack of housing phase and illegal aliens are just people without proper papers.

Liberals don’t like insensitive terms such as “senile” and “illegal alien” and “homeless” while conservatives embrace them. This verbal freedom enables conservatives to see and describe some parts of reality more easily than do liberals.

Every group has its blind spots. “Ties bind and blind,” notes Jonathan Haidt. Conservatives have their share of blind spots. For example, conservative distrust of expertise and big government placed them at a disadvantage with regard to minimizing Covid. Conservative veneration of certain first-hand experiences over expertise creates its share of problems. Conservatives who dismiss evolution are blind to much of reality.

June 28, 2024, the day after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate, lefty Ezra Klein said: “That isn’t to say he’s senile or any of the things that the more wild right-wing accusations say about him…”

Why is it wild to describe Joe Biden as senile? He’s clinging to power in a delusional way.

July 1, 2020, Axios noted: “Senility is becoming an overt line of attack for the first time in a modern U.S. presidential campaign.”

Red State publishes July 4, 2024:

One journalist who has not been hesitant to assess Joe Biden is Brit Hume. He said in a Fox Interview in September 2020, “I don’t think there’s any doubt Biden’s senile.”

Politifact did a “fact check” back then declaring Hume’s assessment “false,” while noting the term “senile” is an imprecise term.

PolitiFact contacted experts in the health care of older people for their take on Hume’s use of the word senile and its application to Biden. They said Hume’s characterization is wrong.

It’s “a shameful display of ageism and ignorance,” said Donald Jurivich, Eva Gilbertson Distinguished Professor of Geriatrics and Chairman of Geriatrics at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine & Health Sciences.

The word “senile” may create a mental picture of someone who has stooped posture, is slow moving and cognitively impaired, Jurivich said. “I don’t think any of these descriptors match Joe Biden’s demeanor and vigor,” he said.

From a geriatrician’s perspective, Jurivich said, “the use of ‘senile’ is a pejorative descriptor and reflects unmitigated ageism.”

Anyone talking about ageism and ableism sounds like a retard to red America. Liberal fidelity to the virtues of avoiding ageism and ableism blinded them to Joe Biden’s obvious decline.

July 12, I noted:

So how did the three books on the Biden administration deal with his decline?

Christian Lorentzen writes for the July 18, 2024 London Review of Books about the three books that have come out on the Biden administration:

It’s difficult to divine from the histories of the Biden administration written so far just how active a role the president has played in governing the country…

Whereas accounts of the Trump White House varied from clown show to cesspool, with backstabbing among hacks, mercenaries and scumbags, the histories of the Biden administration present a succession of earnest and credentialled professionals lining up to help the president better the country and the world.

…The issue​ of Biden’s age is not much discussed in these books. Whipple, whose previous books include a study of the job of White House chief of staff, recounts a Zoom meeting between Klain and some of his predecessors during the transition in 2020. Jim Jones, the 82-year-old former chief of staff to LBJ, asked: ‘Could a soon to be 82-year-old man, battered by four years of stress and crisis, serve effectively for another full term as president?’ The question became pertinent in April 2022 when at a ceremony at the White House to unveil a proposed expansion of Obamacare, the former president was mobbed by admirers while Biden, in Whipple’s phrase, ‘looked a little lost’. Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida said: ‘Let’s be honest here. Joe Biden is unwell. He’s unfit for office. He’s incoherent, incapacitated and confused. He doesn’t know where he is half the time.’ ‘This was, of course, false,’ Whipple insists. ‘Biden was mentally sharp, even if he appeared physically frail.’ Bruce Reed, the deputy chief of staff, told Whipple of a long flight home from Geneva in 2021 during which Biden regaled his jetlagged entourage with old stories, including the one about the time he visited the Kremlin and told Putin he had no soul, until everyone except the president passed out. But Foer writes that Senate Republicans ‘doubted Joe Biden was running his own show. Because of his advanced age, they whispered that he was a marionette, wiggling his arms as Klain manipulated him from above. Aides to Mitch McConnell were blunt in their analysis. They dubbed Klain “prime minister”.’ Tucker Carlson has made Biden’s age one of the central themes of his twerpy routine. Defenders of the president have written off such claims as ‘right-wing talking points’, but like left-wing and centrist talking points, right-wing talking points occasionally have some basis in fact.

A search of Google Scholar July 12, 2024, revealed there have been no academic articles on Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.

A search of Richard Hanania’s Substack reveals no examples of him noting the obvious – that Joe Biden often appears senile.

Aug. 5, 2024, Hanania wrote:

Democrats have an intelligentsia, which is sometimes right and sometimes wrong, but generally based in reality and able to strategize in the service of common goals… A Democratic intelligentsia can make arguments based in logic and data that its voters will accept because they have a critical mass of supporters who either consume credible sources of information or have good enough judgment to trust those who do. The Republican masses are less likely to respond to opinions formed based on election models, and more likely to be taken in with conspiracy theories or narratives that stress divine intervention in human affairs.

I don’t think the Democrats sticking with Biden until it became impossible is a strong argument on Hanania’s behalf.

I’d sum up partisan differences this way: Democrats believe in expertise and Republicans believe in common sense.

Hanania identifies as a globalist liberal. He posted July 29, 2024: “Elite Human Capital Is Always Liberal”

By contrast, Rony Guldmann wrote:

The “always new science of conservative phrenology,” writes [Jonah] Goldberg, is a “white-smocked effort to explain away conservatism as a mental defect, genetic abnormality, or curable pathology.”11Liberals routinely excoriate as beyond the pale all speculation concerning the genetic basis and heritability of intelligence whenever race or gender are in the mix. But then they are astonishingly hypocritical in their “gidd[iness]to entertain the notion that conservatives have broken brains—based solely on the fact that they are conservatives.”12Whether their analytical framework is sociological, as for Frank, or biological, as for the phrenologists of conservatism, liberals seem united in their determination to denigrate conservatives by any means necessary.

July 24, 2024, Hanania wrote:

I really, really dislike Trump supporters… Trump of course shares many of the flaws of his biggest fans. He’s conspiratorial, bigoted, and sees the world through an amoral tribal lens.

Most people see the world through an amoral tribal lens. Hanania also has a tribal lens – the tribal identity of the superior intellectual who wants to bully the common people.

Rony Guldmann wrote about people like Hanania:

* …the problem with liberal individualism is not its excesses but its fraudulence, the hidden tribalistic impulses operating underneath the façade of that individualism, in which liberals do not truly believe.

* Insensible to their creed’s hidden, subterranean heritage, liberals cannot recognize that gay rights is, like every liberal cause, driven onward by a subterranean tribalism that hides itself from the naked eye.

* the deceptive and self-deceptive histrionic mimicry of scientific disengagement can beget a self-fulfilling prophesy, as the surreptitious imposition of a hero-system provokes a “tribalistic” reaction by contraposition with which liberals’ claims to disengaged objectivity seems socially vindicated. In this way does liberalism create the very realities it purports to describe—as all hero-systems must.

July 24, 2024, Hanania wrote: “While Tucker hates everyone under the sun…”

Because of an absurd number of phrases like this, Hanania does not deserve the grace you extend to people who seek to operate in good faith. Hanania isn’t even trying. He’s a slur merchant and attention-seeker.

Hanania wrote: “The Tucker worldview has the effect of creating an all-encompassing sense of victimhood…” There is no strong in-group identity without an intense sense of victimhood. For most people, life goes better with strong in-group identity though expressing your raw sense of victimhood publicly is not usually a winning formula.

Hanania wrote: “Trump supporters are angry and distrustful towards all institutions.”

Given that most institutions are run by people with opposing hero systems, that Trump supporter orientation is understandable. Might there be good reasons for conservatives to have a cultural grievance? Yes.

Hanania wrote:

Trump simply likes strongmen. He loves Putin, Xi, and Kim because he sees them as tough. This is of course morally atrocious, but that’s the underlying motivation. When MAGA rightists admire Putin, it’s because they’re misanthropes. To the extent that they appreciate strength, it’s in the service of slapping around people they don’t like, including LGBT and Open Society types, and also Ukrainians, who all need to be humbled because American elites sympathize with them. I think Trump likes the idea of Putin locking people up and conquering territory too, but this is just a general appreciation of gangsterism, rather than a revenge fantasy of the impotent.

Trump recognizes he can get along with many of our enemies by flattering them and seeking common ground. Hanania recognizes that Trump’s foreign policy was a success. Joe Biden’s foreign policy has been a disaster (we’re closer to a conflagration than at any time in the past three decades).

An objective observer recognizes that Putin has been an effective leader of Russia.

Americans, like every other people on earth, don’t care much about strangers overseas.

Hanania wrote:

A good example showing the contrast between the two men was revealed during an interview when Tucker asked Trump if he was worried about the possibility of being assassinated, and the former president brushed it off. Trump plays the victim in the context of a script where there is a well-defined enemy of limited power and the triumph of good over evil is the most likely outcome. The role of the protagonist also requires some level of stoicism, which is why he is publicly nonchalant about the possibility of getting killed or going to jail. There’s a clear contrast with the victimhood porn that Tucker types are selling.

Tucker was once again on to something that Hanania missed.

Hanania: “if one’s morality is rooted in Christianity, liberalism, or virtue politics there’s literally nothing good one can say about Trump.”

Perhaps Hanania is right and Christians for Trump are wrong.

Trump promised Christians that they’d have power if he were elected president. That’s what happened and that’s why evangelical Christians embrace Trump.

Hanania’s perspective that people who disagree with him are stupid blinds him to much of reality. Unlike Hanania, I don’t take the perspective that people who looks at things differently from me are crazy, so I put in effort to understand why they see the world as they do. There’s nothing human that’s foreign to me.

Hanania: “I’m both a Nietzschean and a troll.”

There are smart and funny trolls who perform a public service. And then there are people like Richard Hanania.

Forensic psychiatrist Dr Sohom Das said: “Traits shown by those internet trolls include impulsivity, selfishness, and emotionless callousness. They have a mind-boggling sense of remorselessness and an absence of morality. There is also manipulation and exploitation of others, who they goad into joining in with their cruel and demeaning behaviour. There is also extreme narcissism mixed in with grandiosity and egotism. This is reflected in their desire to assert power and dominance for pleasure.”

Hanania: “Trump has mass appeal, but his base contains the most hateful and paranoid people within American society.”

Who has a higher rate of rape and murder? Biden voters or Trump voters? I don’t recall Trump supporters causing as much destruction as Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

July 26, 2024, Hanania wrote:

[Hillbilly Elegy] reflects an acceptance of therapy culture. Throughout his memoir, Vance intersperses summaries of studies about how trauma causes people to behave badly. I noticed that he accepted the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) checklist as legitimate. I had first heard about ACE from Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy as an example of the kind of pseudoscientific nonsense that causes more mental illness than it treats. Vance assumes that what he went through as a child left lasting scars, while I tend to believe that thinking like this is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m a genetic determinist, so I never believe events affect me all that much, and they generally don’t.

There aren’t many genetic determinists because common sense suggests that genetics display differently in different situations. Steve Sailer and Charles Murray, for example, are not genetic determinists.

Wikipedia notes:

Biological determinism, also known as genetic determinism, is the belief that human behaviour is directly controlled by an individual’s genes or some component of their physiology, generally at the expense of the role of the environment, whether in embryonic development or in learning. Genetic reductionism is a similar concept, but it is distinct from genetic determinism in that the former refers to the level of understanding, while the latter refers to the supposed causal role of genes. Biological determinism has been associated with movements in science and society including eugenics, scientific racism, and the debates around the heritability of IQ, the basis of sexual orientation,[5] and evolutionary foundations of cooperation in sociobiology…

[Francis] Galton popularized the phrase nature and nurture, later often used to characterize the heated debate over whether genes or the environment determined human behaviour. Scientists such as behavioural geneticists now see it as obvious that both factors are essential, and that they are intertwined, especially through the mechanisms of epigenetics. The American biologist E. O. Wilson, who founded the discipline of sociobiology based on observations of animals such as social insects, controversially suggested that its explanations of social behaviour might apply to humans.

I have no idea if the “Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) checklist” is “legitimate,” whatever that means. I suspect that like every other therapeutic tool, it can be helpful or hurtful depending on how it is used and on whom. That Richard Hanania has read one book by Abigail Shrier and come to a conclusion about the validity of ACE shows what a shallow thinker he is.

Hanania wrote:

I can understand both 2016 Vance and 2024 Vance on their own terms. The first was sensitive, cared about civility in public life, and was humble and introspective. His politics were anti-conspiratorial, he accepted the idea that poor life choices were what led to poverty, and rejected attempts by communities to blame or scapegoat others for their own problems. The Vance of 2024 believes that liberals are evil, and their embrace of globalism is what causes white rural poverty. He endorses a book that refers to liberals as “unhumans”, suggests that Biden is using fentanyl to kill off MAGA voters, and says insurance companies encourage BLM riots to be able to raise their rates (seriously).

Each of these guys is an immediately recognizable type. But how one goes from the first to the second in the course of a few years is something that has yet to be explained, and likely never will.

The two Vances are easy to explain. The situation changed. We all behave differently in different situations.

Though a supposed genetic determinist, Hanania wrote July 8, 2024: “I prefer cultural explanations [for why people have fewer kids].”

July 1, 2024, Hanania wrote:

[Matt] Yglesias notes that many academic historians have privately told him that they secretly agree with David Austin Walsh’s comment that white men have a harder time getting jobs in academia. What I find interesting here is not that individuals might be cowed into silence, which happens. Rather, it’s that they have no shame about this fact.

When I spent more time around academics, I often used to hear some variation “of course I agree with you, but I’d never be able to say that!” To me it’s like hearing someone say “you know, I couldn’t satisfy my wife last night. Us guys with small dicks, am I right?” Sure, anyone could have one bad performance, but to indulge in it is weird. This is especially true if you chose to go into the world of ideas as your profession. To me, this comes with a sacred duty to tell the truth that is fundamental to my personal identity.

There is of course a difference between courage and suicidal recklessness. Think about men on a battlefield. We praise a soldier who puts his life on the line in order to pull a wounded comrade to safety. If a guy simply rushes into a hail of machine gun fire with no strategic purpose behind his actions, he might still be brave but we consider his stupidity more notable than his courage. There would likewise not be much value in trying to save a wounded comrade if there’s a 100% chance you will not be able to do so and probably get killed in the process. Courage as a virtue we might say involves taking some measure of reasonable risk for a higher purpose or goal.

For that reason, I don’t advocate people go through life simply blurting out whatever pops into their heads. If you are a junior scientist working on a project to cure cancer and have a disgust towards transgenderism, your obligation to yourself and society requires you not to shove that opinion in the faces of liberal colleagues. Yet I think people in the world of ideas have a special obligation, and most of them could be much more courageous on the margins…

As someone who is openly in the public sphere, I see right-wing anonymous accounts as engaging in a kind of stolen valor…

Ezra Klein talks about how he has no idea what a left-wing version of Jordan Peterson would look like, given that liberals don’t really have a positive vision of masculinity.

People react to incentives. Though he claims to be a genetic determinist, Hanania doesn’t write like one very often. Why? Because he lacks courage.

Hanania: “Since contemporary Americans don’t face any substantial oppression based on political views…”

Compared to being put in a concentration camp, contemporary Americans don’t face any substantial oppression based on political views. Compared to claims of micro-aggressions and systemic racism, conservatives have as much of a claim to oppression.