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Richard Hanania's Journey
The internet personality Richard Hanania has been on a journey. Wikipedia:
Between 2008 and the early 2010s, Hanania wrote for alt-right and white supremacist publications under the pseudonym Richard Hoste.
Now he is getting published in the Boston Globe. You can see why in his recent Substack post: “Why the Tech Right Failed.” Says he:
One of the most important political developments of recent years is the surge of the Tech Right. The conservative-leaning Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is pouring unprecedented sums into the midterm elections, helping to prop up a dangerous Trumpism at a moment when it is weak. The crypto industry is taking regulatory capture to new heights. And Elon Musk’s X is poisoning the public conversation.
And this:
I once believed that tech billionaires entering the Republican coalition would take it in a more fact-based and less populist direction. This did not happen. There is a bitter irony in the fact that adding smart people to the coalition did not raise the collective intelligence of the movement, and may have even made it dumber.
You can see why Hanania is getting published in The Boston Globe. He is telling its liberal editors and readers exactly what they want to hear.
Hey, Hanania has tried to steer the tech bros in the right direction.
I noticed that many members of the Tech Right, if not embracing the most extreme forms of misinformation, were still confident that there was something suspicious about the 2020 election and the scientific consensus on mRNA vaccines. Talking them out of such views was difficult.
But it didn’t work.
It is interesting that Hanania is still saying there is nothing to see here about the 2020 election and COVID vaccines. But maybe he wrote the article before the Fauci Diaries came out. I don’t think his narrative would sell any more outside The Boston Globe and The New York Times and CNN/MS-NOW axis.
Can he really believe the following:
[N]one of us are all that smart on our own. The only way one can expect to have reasonable opinions on political and social issues is to be embedded in a knowledge-producing ecosystem. That doesn’t mean only journalists and academics can be informed. But it does mean that those who reject educational and media institutions are destined to live in ignorance.
I mean: surely it is common knowledge that the Education Industrial Complex is utterly corrupted. And so is the Media Industrial Complex. And why? It’s really not about the characters of the educators and the journalists. They are corrupted because they are adjacent to political power and money. And power expects to hear what it wants to hear.
That’s why President Eisenhower coined the term “Military Industrial Complex.” Because he understood that the corporations getting contracts to supply the US military were necessarily corrupted by that adjacency. And, he went on to say that the same thing applied to scientific research.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Can you spell “climate change.”
And the opposite was true, he said, “that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Yet Hanania thinks it is crazy. For him it makes a lot more sense to believe in “prestigious newspapers” and “scientific institutions” than “hysterical nobodies on social media.”
I have a different approach. It starts with “trust nobody” and it proceeds with comparing what I am reading with what I believe from other sources. And as for “hysterical nobodies,” I tend to assume it’s all rubbish unless there is an assertion interesting enough to warrant more research with other resources.
I am the most suspicious about things you are not allowed to disagree with. Like World War II. Like Churchill. Like climate change. Like January 6. My antennae are particularly tuned to receive new information on subjects where I am not allowed to disagree.
| Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:39:09 GMT |
Let's Not Have a Constitutional Convention
Our DSA friends want to rip up the Constitution — “Workers Deserve More” — and replace the three branches of government with a single legislature that runs the show.
The key proposals include eliminating the U.S. Senate, abolishing the Electoral College, and making the executive and judiciary subordinate to a single legislative chamber.
Then there in E. Donald Elliott, former Yale law professor that writes “Our Worst Problem? Our Antiquated Constitution.” He cites a number of problems:
The deficit/debt.
Supreme Court under attack.
Presidential war powers.
Guns, violence.
Central banking.
Use of “lawfare” on the opposition.
Policy flip-flops from one administration to the next.
Rigged elections.
I would say that right now is absolutely the wrong time to have a constitutional convention to solve all our problems. We are in the middle of a soft civil war, with the DSA on one side and MAGA on the other, and each side is using the current political system to steal a march on the other side.
The time to have a constitutional convention would be after the current war has ended in victory for our side.
And, more important, the constitutional convention should take place after our side has decided what kind of a state we want and how we think it could work. And that means a political culture that has achieved agreement on the Big Political Issues raised by Donald Elliott.
Taxes and spending. How to we get away from the current situation where, as Milton Friedman said, “History shows that over a long period of time government will spend whatever the tax system raises plus as much more as it can get away with.”
Supreme Court. It wouldn’t be a problem after the current regime had been replaced.
War Powers. I haven’t seen any serious discussion of where we want to be.
Central Banking. Right now, nobody has a clue about central banking and its glorious product, inflation.
Lawfare, Flip-flops, Rigged Elections. These are all a feature of the current 50-50 politics, where everyone cheats to get a momentary advantage.
Let’s review Milton Friedman’s quote. He says that governments spend and tax as much as they can get away with. As far as I know, it was ever thus. The basic theme of history is its wars and its governments running out of other peoples’ money.
But Lee Kuan Yew brought the government spending of Singapore down to about 15% of GDP. How did he do it? In 1965 constant GDP per capita was $4,125, versus US at $22,526. Today it’s $70,384, versus US at $67,946. All numbers in 2010 dollars.
How do we even start to figure out how to do all that, never mind encode it in the Constitution?
Then there’s central banking. The Dutch invented it to finance their war of independence against Spain, or Eighty Years War from 1568 to 1648. I call it Dutch Finance. Then the Dutch took it to Britland in 1688 and the Brits founded the Bank of England in 1692. That’s when the British Empire really got going.
In the US, our central bank is the Federal Reserve System that was set up in 1913 just in time for World War I and World War II a generation later. Central banks operate by inflating the currency — debasing the monetary assets of citizens — and using the proceeds to fight wars.
How we would be able to end the Federal Reserve, end inflation, and return to a stable currency is beyond me. And everyone else.
So, first of all we need experts to figure out how to end the Inflation Epoch, and then successfully refigure the Federal Reserve System without causing a major depression. And then we have to figure out how to encode it in the Constitution.
And hovering above all this hopeful thought is the brute fact of the political distinction, as made Real Simple by two expert philosophers:
Curtis Yarvin: There is no politics without an enemy.
Christopher Chantrill: There is no politics without a handout.
Whatever regime we have in the United States, it is still a political regime, and it still needs an enemy. And it still needs to reward its supporters.
Go figure.
| Fri, 24 Jul 2026 22:23:58 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Reynolds’ Laws: 1. Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them. 2. The more a government wants to run its citizens’ lives, the worse job it will do at the most basic tasks of government. 3. Whatever politicians control, they will use against you to get what they want. 4. Longevity of political service does not make a politician more qualified; it only ensures they are more corrupt 5. Proposed legislation will fail if there is not enough opportunity for graft or control.
Critical Race Theory creates more racial tensions, not less.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Confronting the Left's Pejorative Politics
