'Brahmin Hitler' responds to Richard Hanania
Or, a Tale of Two Richards
An aside: I think you should buy Richard’s new book. Also, having met Richard in real life and shared a meal with him, I feel compelled to say that he is witty, insightful, and was extraordinarily gracious to me. A good man, a husband, and father. You will profit intellectually from reading his book, which recent “revelatory” hit jobs shouldn’t change if your native territory is the mind.
A bit before his current cancellation ordeal and his apology, long after he wrote for Richard Spencer, back in May, Richard Hanania wrote “Ron Unz confronts the far right”. The object of the note, in retrospect, was likely for Richard to establish and solidify some amount of personal distance from—but not invite the impression of intellectual unfamiliarity or puzzlement with—the “far right”.
It’s written in the style authors of those pieces inThe Atlantic orVanity Fair discussing the gatherings of the online right wing seem to wish theirs were actually written in (and aren’t because of editor constraints): ‘gonzo journalism’.
The piece is mildly amusing, parodying various personages on the right (including Hanania), and I note with some wry satisfaction, I was among them:
Hanania sock puppets Unz a bit more and then begins his parody of my views:
What Richard posits is immigration’s critics—for reasons of lack of confidence in the moral posture of their arguments—are all attempting a rhetorical legerdemain, where what they don’t like is BLACK CRIME but what they feel is more respectful and prudent to talk about is MASS MIGRATION, or ‘DIVERSITY’ as general codewords for NON-WHITES ruining the WHITE-defined West.
And if you are a non-white (or at least non-WASP in totality; Hanania is an Arab, but is also Christian, and is something like Pantone 3Y01 to my 3R11) foreign-origin person who has succeeded within the US and through no fault of your own developed the spectrum of aloofness towards or contempt for white working class people not in any way connected to institutions of your success, but whose bile you receive (or think you do) by dint of your position, then sure.
But to do some figuring in my own words, pace Richard Hanania suggesting I would ever outsource to Bronze Age Pervert (never hire a Wallachian farmer to the job of a Brahmin dvija), I don’t assert utterly strict homogeneity is dispositive for success. That’s a consequence of knowing forbidden things about HBD, too.
To be brief: the problem with mass immigration is actually just the replacement of people—that’s the grounds on which a nation lives or dies, because living nations aren’t, again, fungible. An American country which becomes massively more peaceful and has a higher IQ because (there aren’t enough Japanese to do this, but, just imagine) some 100 million Japanese people arrive to the US and all become citizens overnight and live all across its most dysfunctional areas in big enclaves isn’t a better America than the one that exists today—for Americans. Americans who have the means to move, and even admire Japan, don’t actually individually move to Japan to be surrounded by Japanese people all the time.
Richard is often confused online about these simple observations, though perhaps it was all performative because he had some foreknowledge of the cancellation that was coming his way and wanted to buy some credibility.
For example: Hanania posits that middling IQ, resentful proles are mute when it is simply asked why Alabama—jewel of the world—can be richer than Japan:
A interlocutor perhaps a bit more quantitative in his training despite not being a political-scientist, and ‘better known for other work’, offers another perspective:
Possessed of the Hitlerian/Brahmanical rhetorical fire that disturbs Richard, I couldn’t resist; but Richard fell silent when his position was taken seriously:
Why does this mystify Richard? Besides immigration, Richard will weigh in on fertility rates and natalist policy, to also criticize conservatism. South Korea is currently abolishing itself: the world’s lowest birthrates, far below replacement;
But it is not:
Richard isn’t dumb—so besides course some performance which he can point back to, while courting a new audience and perhaps a new set of patrons—what explains his repeated obtuseness in these matters?
I think Richard Hanania is worried he’ll be seen as similar to Richard Spencer.
Richard Spencer has made quite the transformation himself: where once the man whose Faustian spirit led national conversations on race, politics, and the destiny of a new Roman Empire with Elle Reeves, sometimes donning the Red of a Trump hat, today, the most 2014 fashwave aesthetics you’ll get from him is his NATO header and tears about how it all went wrong, again with Elle Reeves.
But some of us remember NPI and Depeche Mode…We remember Charlottesville:
Beginning with the absolute fallout of Charlottesville and the farcical Sines v. Kessler lawsuit which sees officers of the Federal courts trying to interpret what memes in a discord from uncertain anonymous shitposters really meant, Spencer has become increasingly contemptuous and vocally opposed to what he sees as the compromising and pollutive association with people called‘wignats’ (that’s “‘wigger’ nationalists”) and the bankruptcy of conservatism in general.
His position today is that, actually, if you want to look towards supra-national governing bodies for white countries and trans-national military alliances that assert the white man’s power against a rising tide of the Global South, you have to look towards the EU/NAFTA and NATO—ultimately, the very US Empire he spent a decade raging against alongside the paleo-conservatives and ‘wignats’.
Throughout Richard Hanania’s apology letter, he articulates the kind of self-castigation that only an approaching middle-aged man can articulate: I was young and dumb then, and I’ve learned from my mistakes. I’m not the guy that I was. But it’s coupled with a critique of the contemporary right—which he wants you to know he still does disavow—because he was like them, a self-important loser who was bad with women and so retreated into Nietzsche and racism.
These Twin Richards, Richard Spencer and Richard Hanania, both strike me as having grown up as sensitive young men with an intellectual verve and thirst for truth, and a profoundly unmastered sensitivity for justice, which—when they saw it violated by Liberal pieties which still tell us obviously false and therefore evil things about the two sexes, about race, about history, etc.—caused them deep, lasting emotional injuries of the kind only find soothed by activism.
They took slightly different paths of course:
But they did in fact meet up at Radix. Yet where even the Alt-Right has blisteringly true observations to make about Spencer and his attitude, you can’t really pin those faults on Richard Hanania. The men are similar, but Hanania is not trying to create a trans-national Whites Only Empire. Again, he’s an (Palestinian? Jordanian?) Arab, and to the extent he’s a Christian Arab, despite his critiques of Christianity, he’s certainly not an ‘Apollonian’ à la Spencer.
But unless you’ve been reading all of this and nodding along, not even needing to click on the links and getting all of the references and are perfectly aware of the ins-and-outs of post-paleo-con re-organization of a too-online right wing,
(I date it to 2010; the last time someone like the late Joseph Sobran’s death could have made it into the New York Times and NPR with begrudging respect:
), then it’d be really easy to get the Twin Richards mixed up. Not just because of the shared name, but because the powers that be and define who is good and who is evil, what is acceptable and what is not, are monists regarding anyone to the right of Mike Huckabee. Everyone’s a Nazi, and Nazis must die. That may appeal to the Faustian spirit of Spencer, but it sure doesn’t appeal to Hanania.
So—both men disavow the losers they were slumming it with, but Hanania makes his disavowal contingent not on revealed insufficiencies of political thinking and operational capacity like Spencer, but the materiality of life:
With this explanation for the basis of his ideas, what am I supposed to make of Richard’s critiques of his former (so he says) ideas themselves in this lens, when having met (for example) L0m3z a few times, I can confirm that he is a physically fit, handsome young man, a sophisticated professional with more than gainful employment, who is happily married to an attractive young wife who (charmingly) raves about him at social gatherings—the ones which right-wing anons actually go to, not the figments of Hanania’s imagination? Well…