The Hanania Show

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comDue to Thanksgiving, Inez is taking the week off. Instead of our normal programming, I decided to do something different, and interview one of the most interesting and provocative voices I know from X. I am usually not a big fan of anonymous accounts. Friends often recommend them to me, and I find that what impresses them is people who think exactly like they do but feel free to express themselves in cruder forms. RFH, a self-described “radical feminist” (don’t ask what the H stands for!), is something completely different, and because of that I invited her on to have a conversation. As right-wingers with a deep revulsion towards online “trads,” we bonded over our dislike of the same people, and discuss the ways in which they are similar to the woke left. We also talk about her background, which includes growing up with a hot mom, starting out as a libertarian, supporting Trump in 2016, and having a child.RFH tells me about her fear of male sexuality growing up, and how that drove her to first become a trad, and later to her current idiosyncratic politics. We discuss whether men or women have more power in modern society, and whether that is even the right way to frame the issue. I think that any reasonable understanding of the state of the relations between the sexes has to acknowledge the male fear of rejection alongside the female fear of being raped, assaulted, or manipulated into sex and then cast aside. These two are not equivalent though; female problems are much more serious and outside of an individual’s control. By acknowledging this, I am also a radical feminist in my own way. RFH says men should maybe take some shrooms to see the perspective of women, while I argue that the reasonable things feminists talk about are discredited by blank slatism, socialism, and things like the trans issue. The answer to modern feminism isn’t some kind of “men’s rights” movement that switches the identities of the oppressors and oppressed, but a real understanding and appreciation for sex differences and how in many ways women do actually have it harder. I ask RFH what books I should read to continue my journey of becoming an understander of women, and she recommends works by bell hooks and Andrea Dworkin. RFH’s enthusiastic endorsement of the latter’s Right-Wing Women, which apparently captured her own experiences, made me want to check it out. Perhaps at some point I’ll have her back on to discuss. LinksRFH on Xbell hooks, The Will to ChangeAndrea Dworkin, Right-Wing WomenMe, Why Women Rebel against Pro-LifeLouis CK on dating as a woman

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comWe’ve done shows on Gaza in each of the last several weeks, so despite recent developments in that conflict we’ve decided to give everyone a break today and focus on domestic topics. Also, I’ve heard your complaints, so I tried a new microphone this week. People can let me know how it sounds. We start by talking about Republicans having another bad election night last week. Inez and I discuss how much it’s about abortion and how much it is Republican voters at this point just being the kinds of people who don’t show up for midterm and off-year elections. We then go into recent developments in the presidential campaign, particularly the rise of Nikki Haley, who is now in a comfortable third place and right behind DeSantis. I love her pro-Israel views, but the way that she seems to prioritize the issue of anti-Semitism above all else makes even me uncomfortable. Inez sort of feels the same way. I predict she’ll continue to rise or at least maintain her place in the race because she’s a good politician. Inez thinks that this is unlikely because her positions are not what Republican voters are looking for. That of course assumes that they care about the positions of candidates in the first place, so we’ll see who is right!We close by reflecting on how San Francisco was able to clean up its streets in order to welcome Xi Jinping. While we were talking, I looked up this article on how they did it from the San Francisco Standard. This leads to some Gavin Newsom talk, and we both agree that he’s a quite remarkable and talented politician. As a heterosexual man with big greasy hair who likes women, there’s a kind of nostalgic appeal that he brings to the table. Definitely someone to watch in future election cycles.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comMy friend Jeremy Carl (follow on X, see here for articles) of the Claremont Institute joins me to discuss the book Romney: A Reckoning, which I recently reviewed. He is also a former Trump official, which means he has experience in the practice of governing. Jeremy takes a view of Romney that is more representative than mine of where the conservative mo…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comInez and Philippe are back to talk about the conflict in Gaza (see also last week). This time, rather than focus on the practicalities of what Israel is trying to accomplish, we dig into the morality of the war.Topics include international law, the principle of proportionality, what stake the rest of humanity does or doesn’t have in this conflict, and t…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comFor the first time, we had a guest on this week. Inez and I pretty much agree on the Gaza conflict, so we brought on Philippe Lemoine to talk about his own position, which he has written about at his Substack. He believes in a more restrained Israeli approach, hopefully at some point leading to a two-state solution.I think we all agree that there are only a series of bad options going forward. Philippe’s moral commitments and estimation of the likelihood of success of various paths make him want Israel to try the dovish approach. We discuss questions like whether the current status quo is manageable, whether Hamas poses an “existential” threat to Israel, and whether it can moderate over time. The conversation also focuses on how much the history of the conflict matters. Philippe and Inez go back and forth on what previous events and rounds of negotiations can tell us about the prospects for peace today. At some point I ask Philippe whether the US would be in some way morally obligated to give land back to the Native Americans if their culture had not been destroyed and they still lived in the country in more substantial numbers, and he surprised me by saying yes! He’s quite the decolonizer. This shows that there are deep moral disagreements here that we only began to scratch the surface of, but maybe we’ll get to another time. As we realize at the end, it’s very easy to find reasons to be pessimistic with regards to any proposal going forward, and that includes Philippe’s. As we focused on his suggestions today, we’ll probably take the opportunity next week for me and Inez to discuss our own preferred approaches. If you haven’t read my two pieces on the conflict yet, they explain how I’m thinking about the issues involved.As soon as this conversation was over, I was struck by something odd. We sit there and say Israel should do X or do Y, like we’re their football coach or something, while we never say what the Palestinians should do, but rather discuss what we hope they might be incentivized to do. It would make sense if as Americans (or Frenchmen) we talked only about how we could influence our own governments. But we generally act as if Israel might potentially listen to people like us, or at least listen to the people who might listen to people like us, while the Palestinians are treated as an alien species that we can only understand at a distance rather than hope to influence by convincing them through logical arguments. I had already been thinking along these lines after reading Yglesias’ piece today on what it actually means to even have a “position” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I think the problem with thinking like this is that while Israel is culturally closer to us than the Palestinians are, it’s still quite distant, and we act as if that is not actually the case. So if Americans were talking about a conflict that the UK was involved in with an Arab state, it would make sense to assume that we have influence primarily over the British position, as us Anglos are all part of the same culture. But when you think about the religious and nationalist concerns that motivate different factions in Israel, it makes me suspect we’re making a mistake by assuming that people like me, Philippe, and Inez have much influence at all. In other words, maybe instead of writing about what Israel should do, I should write about what the Biden administration should do? Or better yet, maybe about what the Republican position should be, since that’s where I, and Inez of course, could potentially exert the most influence? It’s useful to once in a while take a step back and think about what we’re actually doing here.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comI’m taking a bit of a break off Twitter. A “break” for me means still tweeting maybe 10x a day, but also not scrolling during work hours, being only briefly on the site at night, and never checking the replies or mentions. This has reduced my time on the website by at least 90%, which has made me more productive. Inez and I talk again about our respective relationships with the site. Hers seems much more normal. Maybe Inez just does everything more normal than I do. Israel-Gaza is still in the news. We discuss Nikki Haley’s plan to clamp down on universities that “deny Israel’s right to exist.” I find odd the way that her branch of the Republican Party prioritizes the interests of a foreign country above all else, but nonetheless think it has some upsides. Haley has recently surpassed Vivek to be in third place, and we discuss the reasons why, including his recent contentious interview with Hannity. A good part of the second half of our discussion is on the new emerging conservative foreign policy consensus, based on what appears to be growing nostalgia for Trump. I argue that we’re seeing a kind of Trump-Bush synthesis (Tushism? Brumpsim?) regarding US foreign policy. There’s still a division between the civilized and noncivilized worlds, but unlike what the neocons advocated for, there is no desire to use force or longterm occupation to bring the noncivilized world along. Hence, we get policies like killing Soleimani, but not the occupation of Iraq. I think this is a defensible foreign policy on substantive grounds and close to what we’re likely to see the next time a Republican is in office. Inez, who was never a noninterventionist, agrees with this take. I had been something of a complete restrainer on foreign policy a few years ago, but this changed as I saw how irrationally much of the rest of the world behaves. There’s a parallel here to economics, where you would think third world countries would have figured out by now that neoliberalism is the path to growth, but they are too dysfunctional to remove subsidies and free their labor markets, whether due to stupidity, corruption, or responding to public opinion. Likewise, war is really dumb, but it’s become much more difficult to believe that we can simply count on it to go away on its own. Hence the need for a continuing US role in the world.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comInez and I start off by discussing the latest in the Israel conflict, covering topics from my two recent essays on the war, a Washington Post article showing the damage that the bombing campaign has inflicted so far, and Edward Luttwak’s recent piece on what a ground invasion would look like. We then go on to talk about the domestic political impact of what is happening in the Middle East. We have a debate on whether wokeness will eventually make the Democratic Party left wing on foreign policy. Inez takes the affirmative on this, while I argue the opposite position. See my recent thoughts touching on how the Democrats have been able to silo foreign policy and avoid it being swallowed by the Great Awokening. The campuses have always been anti-interventionist, while we’ve had half a century now of the liberal establishment keeping such views at a distance and not allowing people who hold them to obtain too much power. We also talk about the unrequited love that Evangelical Christians have for American Jews. Inez says that Jews have been bad friends and argues that they are irrationally transferring historical trauma from Europe to the American context. We close with some swing state polls showing that Trump has a very good chance of being president again, and the possible logistics of him being sentenced and then working in the White House. As a general matter, foreign policy chaos tends to help Republicans, and this will especially be true when the public will have reasons to contrast the relative peace of the Trump presidency with what is now happening in the world. Finally, good news on the transcripts. It now has the option of allowing us to label the speakers, so starting this week they’re a lot more useful. It unfortunately still gets our voices confused in at least one case I saw, but I trust the Substack team is going to continue improving this product.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comOne day later than usual, Inez joins me to talk about the war in Israel and its political fallout so far. We are mostly in agreement on Israel being in the right in how it is defending itself, as it looks like they are undertaking a plan of action consistent with what I recommended the other day. Closer to home, it appears that cancel culture is coming for the left, as individuals lose their jobs for being too pro-Hamas or anti-Israel. Inez stresses that she doesn’t oppose there being consequences for speech, and I basically agree, reiterating some points I made a few years ago while writing about the attempted cancellation of Steven Pinker. Those leftists who said “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences” were right after all!The problem with the left isn’t mainly that they cancel people; it’s that they want negative consequences for speech that is true and important for the world to hear. Cancelling people for being “anti-colonial” or pro-BLM is fine, as this is all part of freedom of association. The line of course should be government policy, where we should aim for neutrality to the greatest extent possible. To be fair, the pro-Israel stance on the right can be very over the top, but I can live with it as something deeply embedded in our civil culture. We also discuss my trolling of white nationalists, and recent anger among some conservatives that it took an attack on a foreign country to get our establishment to take a stand against the kind of pernicious nonsense that is being preached on university campuses. This leads to a debate on the extent to which Western society benefits from people who dissent from our dominant narratives. There’s so much more than could be said about these topics. It truly feels like we’re going back to the mid-2000s, when conservatives leveraged their rhetorical advantage on foreign policy to push back against leftists on a wide variety of fronts. Having its roots in the alt right, MAGA at one point seemed like it might challenge the militant pro-Israel posture dominant among conservatives, but it’s only managed to reinforce it. The causes behind our current moment are the same as those of the previous one. Many elites are anti-white, and it’s easier to criticize them for being anti-Semitic. At the same time, conservatives now don’t shy away from calling out anti-white hatred, so maybe the pushback will be more explicit and useful this time. Note: Some of you have previously asked for me to use the option to create an automated transcript. The main problem seems to be that it doesn’t differentiate the speakers, so you don’t know who is saying what. At the same time, if you’re confused you can just click on the part of the discussion you’re interested in and hear the recording. I hope they fix this.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comWe begin by talking about the removal of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House. Inez says she doesn’t think it matters and explains why. We get into the question of what Republican priorities should be, and what’s realistic to accomplish with a slim majority in one house of Congress.Also this week, not one, but two left-wing activists were murdered in major American cities. Ryan Carson was stabbed in NYC by a psycho with a knife, in what is a sad and all too typical occurrence. Josh Kruger was shot seven times in his Philadelphia home, so there’s a chance that this one was a personal dispute. Regardless, all of this has set off a large debate on Twitter, with conservatives going “ha ha, you’re dead now” and liberals going “you ghouls, how dare you.”I don’t think the gloating is helpful, but I tried to explain the online conservative position on X, and here’s Inez’s response. One of my reply guys asked if I felt the same way about conservatives who take positions that get people killed and end up dying in ironic ways, and I said that there’s something different about the ACAB crowd. People can have mistaken policy beliefs, but it’s another issue when they appear to be rooting for the criminals. Moreover, norms require a degree of reciprocity. In the case of Carson, his friends themselves are trying to politicize his death, which makes it hard for them to ask others not to. Moreover, the entire theory behind antifa is that violence is justified against people you disagree with, which means they can’t claim the high ground here. In the end, though, we are both anti-gloating but in favor of learning lessons from events when we can. Finally, Inez and I circle back to what is happening in Congress, and talk about why the right has a particular loathing for Ukraine, given what a small part of the budget support for that country is. Inez argues that the divide between the parties on this comes down to trust in institutions, and I bring up the “own the libs” factor, which is always the most likely explanation when conservatives are acting weird.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comThings start out peaceful enough, as I tell Inez about my appearance the other day on the Dennis Prager Show (go to September 27, 1 hour and 10 minutes in here to watch). We got along very well. I reflect on some amazing clips I just saw of Prager, a few hours after we spoke, explaining to young people at ASU that masturbation is not evil, which of all the weird religious views out there is one of those I find most puzzling. I particularly love when he told them that if you believe masturbation is evil, you alienate people from God, and you have a different God than he does. I originally saw that clip on Twitter, but the account that posted it got suspended. I then found it on YouTube, starting at 1 hour and 20 minutes here. See here and here for shortened clips from Twitter, but the entire 12 minutes or so in the original video are glorious, and I love that it’s been driving some of the biggest trad weirdos crazy. We then consider my idea of the pagan nature of Christian support for Trump. But the main event of this conversation is our chance to finally discuss the famous 2021 Time article, which is a starting point for getting to the heart of what we really disagree about, which is Trump’s actions between the 2020 election and January 6, and how bad they were. Previously, I had a well-known conservative friend bring the Time article to my attention. Then Inez talked about it. And just recently, I was reading a random profile of JD Vance, and it just appears in the context of a discussion about election fraud. So conservatives apparently think about this piece a lot. From my perspective, Inez acknowledges a lot of facts about what happened but has to engage in some serious mental gymnastics to deny that Trump tried to change the results of the election and this is really a big deal, and liberals are completely correct in freaking out about it. She wants to create an equivalency between that and how Hillary Clinton behaved in 2016, Russiagate, and other things, and I think this is conflating topics that have nothing to do with one another. Her view is that this gets down to “trust in institutions,” while I think that’s way too broad of a perspective to say much of anything when you’re jumping around from what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, to the Democratic Party, to the FBI, to the media, and whoever else. All this strikes me as a kind of moral “get out of jail free” card, the kind played by race hustler types when trying to argue for systemic racism. I have to reference once again my piece on conservatism as an oppositional culture. This probably got more heated than any other podcast, which is good, as you want to get to the root of serious differences. Many of you will agree with Inez, and she is a good debater, so let us know what you think.