The Hanania Show

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comAnatoly Karlin joins me for the second time on this podcast. In our previous conversation, he talked about his move away from Russian nationalism. This time, we discuss his new article, “Navalny Died a Barin.” I am fascinated by the idea of Putin as a kind of charisma vampire, who destroys anyone who is interesting and full of life, leaving a regime of gray mindless mediocrities willing to do his bidding. I was touched reading about how Navalny once asked the judge and court officials who were persecuting him whether this was what they wanted to be doing with their one God-given life on this earth. According to Anatoly, it doesn’t matter whether you are pro- or anti-Putin. What the regime cares about is that you don’t have your own voice and can be controlled. The enemies of liberal democracy are today boring, cowardly bureaucrats. I don’t know if this is a blue pill or a red pill, but it’s certainly a good reason to oppose modern authoritarian regimes.We discuss the logic of killing Navalny, where any future threats to the regime might come from, what would happen if Trump came back into office, and how Putin is a TV watcher driven by a combination of self-preservation instincts and mind-melting Boomer memes. At the end we touch briefly on Anatoly’s current experience in Próspera, what cryptocurrencies he’s bullish on, and whether he’s tried any gene therapy while there.I find myself disliking Putin more the longer he stays in power. After Prigozhin’s death, I noted that the man may have been a war criminal, but there was a masculine heroism in how he lived and died. If only Putin was a more worthy adversary of Western civilization! Not a guy who is still scared of covid, hides behind bureaucratic procedures to wear down his enemies, and poisons their underpants. The fact that the populist right has embraced the man only reinforces my view of how much they suck.Anatoly predicts that the Russian election next month will basically be a nonevent. The death of Navalny feels like the end of Season 4 of the show or something. Already having taken out Prigozhin and on the offensive in Ukraine, things are looking up for Putin. Assuming he gets past this election without much trouble, we’re just waiting for the next health scare, mass protest movement, economic crisis, shift in the war, or attempted coup. Russians deserve better, and may the memory of Navalny inspire them to work towards their liberation from this lifeless and particularly vicious gerontocracy.

The podcast discusses topics such as a debate on democracy versus monarchy, Tucker's trip to Moscow and criticism of US foreign policy, finding a healthier balance in criticizing America's flaws, and Edward Luttwak's analysis on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comBryan Caplan joins me to play a very special game. Building off my “Why the Media Is Honest and Good,” and Bryan’s response, “Mainstream Media Is Worse Than Silence,” we decided to browse some major news sites and analyze the headlines in order to explore our differences. We cover the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Economist, and the Wall Street Journal.You can listen to the audio here, but to get the full benefit you should watch the video to follow along as we go through the major news sites and react in real time to what we see. We previously agreed not to read the news today until our conversation, which would allow us to spontaneously react to the articles. I realized here that the question of whether the media is good or not depends on one’s framing. In my original article, I assumed the perspective of someone who wanted to be informed about the world, and was comparing the press to twitter and right-wing alternatives. Bryan is more arguing that it’s better not to pay attention to the news at all, which I think is probably the right choice for most people. He moved me a bit towards his position. Very few of the “problems” that the media focuses on are actually problems in my view, and the ones that do exist are often made worse by coverage. I had a realization that I really couldn’t think of many instances where the media warned people about something and government went and made things better, although that probably reflects my libertarian bias, which Bryan isn’t the best person to check. Perhaps I was too quick to dismiss other potential ways of making important information available to the public, like the torts system. I’ve always assumed in these arguments that the press would be replaced by some other source of information, not that the people would do what’s most healthy and just focus on their own lives. Our MSM is good relative to most institutions that have controlled the marketplace of ideas throughout history, and also, as mentioned, its right-wing antagonists who have built alternatives that are rife with sensationalism and misinformation. We digress into a few other areas, like Prigozhin’s attempted coup, coverage of Bukele and what’s happening in El Salvador (see here and here), how awful conservative media is, and what we know about Balochistan. Enjoy.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comRon DeSantis recently came out in favor of a bill that would outlaw lab grown meat in Florida. This provides a reason to talk about something I’ve been thinking about for a while, which is the degree to which cruelty to animals is polarized across party lines, and how Democrats are preferable on this issue. Most people don’t think of this as a kind of culture war topic, but there are consistent differences between the two major parties. If you’re an effective altruist, or even a utilitarian of any sort, animal cruelty is one reason to clearly favor the left. See here for my article on how although I still eat meat, my hope is that technology can one day put an end to factory farming. In addition to the substantive differences between the two sides, I discuss the psychological and ideological motivations behind Republicans trying to stand in the way of animal rights. I identify the increasing hostility to all forms of progress among conservatives, based on the naturalistic fallacy. Before, the right might have been pro-life, but leftists were more opposed to “messing with nature” in non-religious contexts, by being more skeptical of things like GMOs and vaccines. I also go into how conservative parties have often supported government intervention to favor farmers, in contradiction to free market principles. With our recent political realignment, the right has become the tribe of less educated and less trustful individuals. This means that rather than the naturalistic fallacy sort of being split into different domains, conservatives are just more consistently anti-technological progress, regardless of the costs. Opposition to lab grown meat can be seen as one more manifestation of this, along with hostility to vaccines and reproductive technologies. This is potentially a very disturbing development, although if leftists become more pro-progress in response the net impact could be positive. On a different note, my debate with Curtis Yarvin this Friday, hosted by Anna Khachiyan, has sold out its original venue in East LA, so we’ve moved it to Glendale. More tickets are now available here, either $100 for regular seats or $55 for discount tickets. Look forward to seeing everyone there.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comThe abortion issue is dragging down the rest of the conservative movement. While many have pointed this out, there hasn’t been much thinking yet about what, if anything, can be done about it. The goal of this podcast is to look back on how the pro-life movement came to dominate American conservatism and investigate whether that history has any lessons for today.As discussed in Randall Balmer’s Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right, Evangelicals did not care about the abortion issue until the late 1970s (see thread). The origins of the Moral Majority can actually be found in resistance to civil rights law, and attempts to set up and protect religious schools that either implicitly or explicitly excluded students based on race. In addition to the book, this monologue relies on a BBC podcast I would highly recommend (audio, abridged text) on the origins of the culture war. It talks about the important role of Francis Schaeffer’s documentary series Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, which was screened across the country in early 1979.In this podcast, I go into Evangelical-Catholic differences and what the history of the anti-abortion movement tells us about political change over time and the potential for conservatism to shift again. Here, the Trump cult can be an advantage, since one man has such a disproportionate influence on political attitudes. He has already shown skepticism about the pro-life agenda; whether he currently has the actual ability to execute a pivot given his current mental state is a different question. Near the end, I talk about the ways in which conservative meanness and their desire to “own the libs” can potentially convince them to change their minds on the abortion issue. The results of the 2024 election will be key here. Parties don’t like to repeatedly lose — especially in a hyper-polarized era like our own— and pro-lifers being at fault for yet another bad year may help move conservatives closer to the rest of the public on reproductive freedom.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comI discuss the Republican primary in New Hampshire last night, widely considered to have been for most practical purposes the end of the campaign. Last week, I talked about Bullying Grandma Syndrome, which explains why Trump has and continues to dominate the Republican Party. Haley’s relatively strong performance with Democrats and Independents last night brings to mind another dynamic, which is how the current Republican Party relates to the wider electorate. Many people aren’t content to get bullied by senile grandmas forever. They end up leaving the party, and this is why we’re seeing an exodus of more educated voters from the GOP. In politics, there’s something called the “median voter theorem.” I think that while there is something to this idea, the best explanation for why moderate candidates tend to win is that they have personalities that are more appealing to wide swaths of the public. Watching Trump and Haley supporters, it seems to me that Republicans really don’t understand the most important contrast between them, which is that one group is composed of people who might be your neighbors or family friends while the other is a collection of the elderly relatives who you have to put up with during holidays but otherwise do everything to avoid. I also discuss why I’m less bullish on Trump’s chances of winning the general election than a few weeks ago, his diminishing mental capacity, and why the combination of the abortion issue and Republicans generally being seen as the party of weirdos means we may be entering an era of Democratic dominance.LinksNBC exit poll on NHTracingWoodgrains on the Republican Party being doomedInterviews with Haley votersTrump being senile, confusing Nikki Haley for Nancy PelosiTrump supporter with bad hip fantasizing about civil war

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comIn this podcast, I review Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (2023). The producer made the movie center around the relationship with Josephine. I thought that there was a missed opportunity to show her time in prison, which would have added depth to the character. This is from Andrew Roberts’ biography. From April 22, 1794 until shortly after her husband’s execution on July 22 that year, Josephine was herself imprisoned as a suspected royalist in the crypt underneath the church of Saint-Joseph-des-Carmes in the rue de Vaugirard. One of her cellmates, an Englishwoman named Grace Elliott, recalled how ‘the walls and even the wooden chairs were still stained with the blood and the brainsof the priests’. Josephine had to endure truly inhumane conditions: air came only from three deep holes to the underground cells and there were no lavatories; she and her cellmates lived in daily fear of the guillotine; they had one bottle of water a day each, for all uses; and since pregnant women weren’t guillotined until after giving birth, the sound of sexual couplings with the warders could be heard in the hallways at night. It is cold down in the Saint-Joseph crypt even in midsummer, and inmates’ health broke down fast, indeed it is possible that Josephine survived only because she was too ill to be guillotined. Her husband was executed just four days before Robespierre’s fall, and had Robespierre survived any longer Josephine would probably have followed him. There was a paradoxical symmetry in the way that the Thermidor coup released Josephine from one prison and simultaneously put Napoleon into another. The stench, darkness, cold, degradation and daily fear of violent death for weeks on end makes the Terror well named, and it is likely that for months, possibly even years, afterwards Josephine suffered from a form of what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder. If she was later sexually self-indulgent, became involved in sleazy business deals and loved luxury — her dress bills became higher than Marie Antoinette’s — and married for stability and financial security rather than for love, it is hard to hold this against her after what she had been through.Here’s the X review, for paid subscribers only. The transcript of the podcast review is below, not checked for accuracy, but hopefully more readable than last time because I took some speaking advice.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comThis week I’m doing something new. Rather than having a guest every time, I’m going to begin sometimes doing an audio monologue about issues of the day. You can give me feedback on whether you like the new format.Last night saw Trump’s expected blowout victory in the Iowa caucuses. Since the polls were almost exactly on point, we don’t have to really update anything in our model of the world. Rather, I’m going to take this opportunity to share some thoughts on the Trump movement, namely the relationship between the really crazy people, who I’ve come to think are truly in control, and more educated and normal Republicans going along for the ride. People talk about the Trump cult as the core of the party, and the rest as either anti-Trump or Trump-friendly and persuadable. That division is mostly correct, but one thing that is overlooked is how and why the Trump-friendly middle group always ends up supporting him in the end, and never decisively breaks against him.In this podcast, I explore what I call Bullying Grandma Syndrome, which refers to the ways in which the QAnon supporters and Trump NFT-buyers are setting the tone of the Republican Party. This is a moral and aesthetic nightmare, and has the potential to be an electoral one too, though I’m not too sure about that part. Bullying Grandma Syndrome explains why Trump is almost certainly going to be the 2024 nominee, and the theory implies that, if the former president loses the general this time, he’ll still be the favorite to be the GOP candidate in 2028 and maybe even beyond that. I’ve had a long record of predicting Trump’s continuing hold on the party. In spring of 2021, I said he was going to be the nominee in the aftermath of January 6 when people were counting him out. I’d actually been arguing Trump would be the 2024 nominee before he even lost in 2020, but I don’t have a public record of that. For a few weeks after the 2022 midterms I thought that DeSantis had a shot, but saw how he was afraid to criticize Trump, realized that his grip on the base was solid, and quickly went back to arguing that the Florida governor didn’t have what it takes. In June of last year, I said the DeSantis campaign was close to over and he needed to throw a Hail Mary by challenging Trump to a physical fight. He didn’t, and instead continued to feed the narrative that American politics was a Manichaean struggle between Trump and the forces of darkness.I’m not sure that there’s anything anti-Trump Republicans can actually do. The Bullying Grandma wishes we could go back to the 1950s, wants Trump to execute imaginary pedophiles, and takes her hero both literally and seriously. The modern right-wing intellectual’s understanding of her is worse than that of any liberal, but without realizing it he has surrendered his agency to her whims. He doesn’t believe Dominion voting machines were hacked, but social media censorship basically means the election was stolen, right? And maybe it’s hard to believe all the stuff under #DiedSuddenly, but they’ve lied to us so much, who’s to say what is true and what isn’t? The Bullying Grandma is driving the car and normal Republicans are only coming along for the ride. Hopefully, Trump can at least cut taxes, bust some unions, and defend Israel along the way. Relevant linksMe versus Rob Henderson and Zach Goldberg on blacks and white liberalsConservatism as an Oppositional CultureWashington Post exit pollThe Economist on Trumpism as a religionThere are two AI-generated transcripts of the monologue, and readers can pick which one they prefer. The first you can get by scrolling below, where I added headings, and the other is a tab built into the Substack platform, which tracks the audio. Neither has been checked for accuracy.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comNathan Cofnas is the Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He joins the podcast to talk about his latest essay, “Why We Need to Discuss the Right’s Stupidity Problem”, which is framed as a response to Chris Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution and my The Origins of Woke. The topic of how honest society should be about group differences is something I’ve been thinking a lot about, and my views have developed even since my conversation with Amy Wax last month. The more I debate this with people and ask them how exactly individuals will behave and talk in a society more honest about race, the harder it is for me to see how it can work, at least without deeper changes in our culture. That said, it’s fair to point out that I don’t necessarily have a great alternative, even though I can point to the French example to argue that different laws can at least make things somewhat better. People who want us to “talk about HBD” often imply you could do that and not change everything else about our society. I get Cofnas to acknowledge that it would require something of a cultural revolution for such ideas to be accepted. Maybe it’s worth it, but like all cultural revolutions this one is bound to have unforeseen consequences. I want a society that puts more value on truth, but would hesitate before demanding unfiltered truth in this one area of life without thinking more carefully about what we’re doing. Part of me feels that going straight to the science puts the cart in front of the horse. People are attracted to certain values, which lead them to accept particular social science theories, not the other way around. We also touch on Cofnas’ experience on college campuses, attempts to cancel him, and the differences between American and British academia. I express surprise that someone with a history of writing about biorealism could receive a prestigious fellowship, which I take as confirming what I’ve heard about there being more right-wing representation at elite British universities, particularly in areas like philosophy and classics. Subscribe to Nathan’s Substack or follow him on X. You can find his academic writing on his website.The video and transcript of our conversation are below. Note that the transcript is AI-generated and has not been checked for accuracy.

Anatoly Karlin, a guest on the podcast, discusses his political evolution, AI timelines, Russian nationalism, and the problem with the 'rightoid international.' They explore disillusionment with conservatives, the dangers of AI, and the shift in thinking towards Putin. They also analyze Putin's goals in Ukraine and compare decision-making processes in democracy and autocracy.