Hanania extends hbd logic to justify not only racism and sexism but to literally reinvent the concept of noble blood. Our billionaire overlords are so superior by nature that it’s a failure on our part we don’t give them even more free millions at birth to develop their incomparable awesomeness.
Meanwhile, in the real world, Elon Musk just publicly challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a dick-measuring contest.
Hanania is another worked example of wingnut welfare. He has - or had - a single rich benefactor funding his entire job.
I’ve been really appreciating the work Jonathan Katz and John Ganz have done tracking fascist-adjacent nerdery. 🙂
One thing I’m having trouble figuring out. There seems to be a lot of evidence that the rationalist right is heavily astroturfed - if you remove the billionaire funding I’m not sure you still have a neoreactionary movement. On the other side, this stuff has a genuine base in nerd/tech culture. There are oodles of frustrated geeky white boys out there who read someone like Hanania and feel he’s expressed their deepest feelings, I don’t think money alone can make that happen.
think neo-Nazis in the 1990s. There were a certain number of committed Nazis. But they had no funding and no traction.
More generally, I think we get into fascism as an exploit on liberalism.
May I ask what your preferred solution is?
In other words, either (1) what specific policies would you recommend to patch the gaps in liberalism’s armour, or (2) with what specific less exploitable alternative would you replace liberalism?
it turns out i don’t have a general solution to fixing liberalism’s extremely well known vulnerabilities to fascist thought which others have written about at length over decades floating at the top of my head, or i’d have been putting them into action