Young Fash Fellows

The (conservative) kids are alt-right, and worse

I had until recently been only peripherally aware of Richard Hanania as one of those ubiquitous young rightwing edgelord creeps — like Nate Hochman, whom Ron DeSantis recently fired when he got caught sticking Nazi imagery into a DeSantis campaign video, and Marjorie Taylor Greene contractor Nick Fuentes, and Holocaust denier/Fox News staffer Matteo Cina, et alia — whose promotion to wider public exposure is never a good thing.

Hanania is a specialist in Flight-93-election ravings about how Demo-commies are killing America (“the identarian Left has managed to radicalize even those institutions that were once relatively apolitical”) and Real-Racist ™ yap, complaining that the press is “selective” in that it doesn’t focus on black crime as much as he’d like, for example, and that “historical tragedies should not be used in the service of a political agenda that has a slanted perspective on American history and the modern causes of urban blight” in reference to, get this, the Tulsa Massacre.

As you may have heard, Hanania, who counts among his fans Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Matthew Yglesias, briefly achieved main character status at the end of last week when his earlier, more overtly racist ravings became known:

Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.” He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.

Hanania pleads his youth at the time, while simultaneously accusing the journalist who exposed him of “leading a mob on Twitter” — classic non-apology-apology stuff. But several commenters have pointed out that readers of Hanania’s more recent and better-but-still-barely-veiled white nationalist material would not be surprised to learn of his white nationalist background.

I sure wasn’t. Rod Dreher is a big fan — that’s always a tell. Oh, funny though – Dreher just did a Hanania – What Happened? post and it’s a lulu. Sample:

But I believe it’s important to be generally tolerant of intellectuals who may hold some immoral views, but who also can be penetrating thinkers whose insights are worth considering. It’s why I have always stuck by Andrew Sullivan, though I think he is seriously wrong about a very important moral issue…

LOL, LMFAO. It’s gotten to the point that whenever you see a skullface-neck-gaitered Proud Boy marching around and intimidating a drag brunch in a photo, you have to think: Which Republican House member, state senator, or lieutenant governor is he working for — or will be working for in a year or two?

Also: When will we see this young fash fellow’s byline in the New York Times, as we have with Hanania, Hochman, and others like them? I make fun of the Times and other prestige media outlets but, to be fair, in their pursuit of bothsider representation, they just aren’t going to find too many conservatives of non-Nazi provenance to platform: When the call goes out for a bold new conservative voice, odds are good it’ll be someone like Hanania, who’s fash but has learned some basic ass-covering maneuvers so someone like Yglesias can say sure, he’s a little edgy but he’s got some good ideas.

On the one hand, the seemingly endless supply of neo- and crypto-Nazis among the young up-and-comers in the conservative intellectual class is just a classic “Why do all these homosexuals keep sucking my cock” kind of joke. What, young Hitlerlove has been “milkshake ducked”? Pity what the Twitter mob can do! OK, give the next job to that whippersnapper Ian Killjew!

On the other hand, if you ever believed that Never Trumpers or even Just The Tip Trumpers were going to wrench their party back to respectability (I never have), you have to admit that seeing their junior varsity riddled with racist, nationalist creeps has be sobering. (Ha ha, just kidding — I’m sure there’ll be an article in the Times this week about how Chris Christie and Larry Hogan are the future of the party. They never seem to catch on.)

It’s funny, though: You think of all the rage rightwingers regularly exhibit at the “woke” beliefs and expressions of Young People Today — that is, the Young People who are not writing editorials and campaign ads for them. Indeed, it sometimes seems as if the primary signaling device for conservatives is a sputtering rage fit at these kids and the values and behaviors they have the nerve to endorse. They love trannies and Antifa and abortions and national health care and pronouns! Well, I’ll show them – I’ll boycott Bud Light! I’ll defend the Strurgis Rally from Antifa on Twitter! God damn kids!  

You would think that, given their rage at the bad liberal kids, their own youth brigade would be, in contrast, sober-sided and establishmentarian — or, hang on; you know what? I guess I only believe that because I’m old, and retain dim memories of the Young Republicans of the 20^th Century, who were the Good Kids who were respectful of elders (all elders, not just the ones who were paying them), well-groomed, in the Jaycees, and eager to shore up America’s institutions.

That was a long time ago. Now conservatives and Republicans hate the FBI, love Russia, storm the Capitol, and cheer a Mob boss. They celebrate resentment, brutality, pure power. They don’t even try to make it look nobler or more high-minded.

If today’s young conservative intellectuals really, without disintermediation, mirrored those beliefs — or maybe we’re dignifying those too much by calling them “beliefs”; perhaps better to say, irritable mental gestures? — what they would produce would probably be pre-verbal ululations, or something like the speeches of President Camacho in Idiocracy. At present, these are not suitable for op-ed pages or the Claremont Review.

So what we actually get is young conservatives who are subject to all those pathologies — but who, having discovered at a young age they were clever with words, and ambitious enough to develop that skill, have found a way to identify, and identify with, the intellectual traditions that best fit these brain-chemical and hormonal surges: monarchism, sedevacantism, white nationalism, fascism.

It would be one thing if they were inclined to become novelists or street-corner preachers or had some other relatively harmless outlet to run out their angst before joining the workaday world. But unlike young lunatics of previous eras, they have no motivation to chill out and become more or less normal (i.e., corrupt but establishment); the conservative and Republican systems won’t and probably can’t force them into it; if they get caught, they just give a bullshit pro-forma apology like Hanania’s and keep going.

Thus they pollute our political discourse with this, normalize this, and make it harder to remember what the world learned about it ninety years ago.