 great desire to say exactly what he wants to say. And I also identify with Richard Hananya's desire for social acceptance, right? These are both strong desires, and one is easy to meet, and one is difficult, right? Saying exactly what you want to say is easy, right? That's like playing tennis with the net down. It's like writing free verse as opposed to poetry that scares. Now, saying what you think in terms that are most likely to get your ideas a fair hearing from a broad public is difficult. And Steve Saylor and Charles Murray about as good at this as anyone I know when it comes to controversial ideas. So Richard Hananya tried to have the best of both worlds. He presented a moderate front publicly, and then he did all this alt-right stuff under a pseudonym. So generally speaking for the individual, right, trying to phrase things so that they have the best chance of achieving social acceptance, or at least a decent social hearing, and provide the least ammunition to your enemies to destroy your life, that's the best way for most of us to operate most of the time, right? So if you have a strong in-group identity, enjoy it. Feel free to unburden yourself to your in-group if that's a safe place. But you should also take time intermittently to consider how your words and deeds might be perceived by those outside of your group. So enjoy the in-group and also step outside of yourself occasionally think about how what you're saying and doing could be considered by people on the outside. Now there is a through line in pretty much all of Richard Hananya's work. And that's the smirk, all right? I think Richard Hananya and I just, we tend to broadcast with a smirk. And so I assume that's what underneath that smirk is that both of us feel pretty cocky about what we're saying. Right? Who decodes the decoders? Now we have at least one answer. Yes, I do. Luke does see through the BS. He has only a few blind spots as Art Bell. Oh, thank you. I'm sure I have many blind spots I do the best I can. Decoding powers activate. Blessings and guessings. The chat is ready to decode. Okay, so this smirk. All right, I wonder if Richard Hananya is going to be able to keep up this smirk after this extensive Huffington Post takedown. So from his pseudonymous work to his upfront work, Richard Hananya is a smarty pants, you know, attention seeking equal opportunity provocateur who reminds me a great deal of myself. Now, one problem with our approach is that you incentivize people to take you down. And also you minimize your audience because many people don't like a smoker. I also wonder if Richard Hananya is neurotypical. Now I wonder about the quality of his relationships when he was writing under the Richard host persona. So this is the advice that I try to follow when I'm operating in public, whether it's on a live stream on a blog or just in public in general, right, always assume that five people are watching your best friend, your worst enemy, your boss, your mother, and a lawyer. Right. So I try to create from the persona who only thinks about what I think. But then I usually strive to broadcast my thoughts with my most important relationships in mind. So it's a lot easier to say what you think when you don't value your relationships and your community. My sneaking suspicion is that Richard Hananya, like myself, has consistently chosen his free expression over the quality of his relationships. I've had various girlfriends who try to put limits on what I wanted to say on my blog. And I did not take that well. Another point I think that's applicable to this Richard Hananya situation is even if his writing for these all right websites was impeccable, you're going to be judged by the company you keep, even if your own conduct is exemplary. It also sounds like Richard fell into some unforced errors because he's writing under a pseudonym, people tend to get sloppy. So Richard Hananya talked about some races are better than others. It's normal and natural to think of your own race, your own people, your own group as best is really wise to broadcast this thought. Now I notice many right wingers such as Scott Greer on Twitter protesting this Richard Hananya doxing. I think that's a misuse and abuse of the term doxing. So I understand doxing as publishing somebody's home address or someone's private work information. Richard Hananya was publishing his thoughts in public under a pseudonym to presumably hundreds of thousands of people. There's no moral obligation to protect Richard Hananya's pseudonym. Richard Hananya has chosen to play in the big leagues and this kind of investigation seems to me is completely fair game. They don't out his home address. Now identify with Richard Hananya in that he seems to me to be a bloke like me striving for the heroic, right? Not something you're supposed to admit publicly, but we do. And so the whole idea of a hero system is something that I first found out about in Ernest Becker's classic 1973 book The Denial of Death. So the community you live in our society is itself a codified hero system, right? Society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life. It's a defiant creation of meaning. And most of us get our hero system from our community. It's not something that we just come up with internally. So pretty much every man of spirit children. And yet, as we grow up, we tend to be ignorant of what we really want and really need. And that is to feel heroic, right? So as we get older, the heroic may seem too big for us on a conscious level, but on a non conscious level, we're still striving for it. Now, we disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth, or by having just a slightly better home than the average in our neighborhood or a bigger car or brighter, more accomplished children. But underneath all this throbs this yearning for cosmic specialness, no matter how we try to mask it. Now, occasionally, someone will publicly admit that he takes his heroism seriously, which gives most of us a chill. We kind of shudder the crassness of earthly heroism. But the urge to be heroic is natural and normal. And maybe we should be more honest about it. So you usually get our hero system from our community. But if we are blessed with special powers, special abilities such as art, or architecture, or athletic accomplishment, right, we yearn to create something that will outlast us, right, that will outshine death and decay that says, you know, my life counts. And I think this is exactly what Richard Ananya was trying to do through both his writing and logging under his own name, as well as his pseudonymous work. And you see it in a lot of people, right, particularly those who don't have the strongest relationships and connection with reality that in, and I've done this myself, am I striving to be a hero? I frequently alienated myself from everyone around me. Like I, when I went into writing on the pornography industry and exposing an HIV outbreak and the probable origins of the outbreak and the role of organized crime in the industry, I thought I was, I was being a hero. Right. But for most normal people in my life, they were just a part, right? I thought he saw wrongdoing on Wall Street. It took over his life. Years ago, Peter Clothier thought proxy firms were counting shareholder votes incorrectly. His life fell apart after he reported it by Justin bear photographs by Jose Alvarado, Jr. for the Wall Street, Germany, August 6, 2023, nine a.m. Eastern time. Peter Clothier checked into a Santa Fe, New Mexico hotel in 2017, alone and suicidal, drunk on red wine uninterested in the opera festival. He had come to attend Clothier Fume. For years, he had been trying to call attention to what he believed was wrongdoing in his corner of Wall Street. He felt unheard by his former employer and the government. Clothier emailed a former colleague, saying he intended to kill himself, and laying the blame on other former coworkers. He didn't follow through, but one thing was clear Clothier's life was falling apart. Whistleblowers sometimes win widespread acclaim, as when an Enron employee appeared on the cover of Time or when Russell Crow starred in a movie about a former big tobacco executive. The US government believes in rewarding tipsters who call attention to misbehavior. This year, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued its biggest ever Whistleblower Award for $279 million. But most whistleblowers don't become rich or famous. Many destroy their relationships, lose their jobs, turn disillusion when their big revelations are greeted with ambivalence. Since the SEC launched its whistleblower program more than a decade ago, the agency has received more than 64,000 tips. By late 2022, 328 of those whistleblowers had received financial awards. As all the things we believe or hope are true's children, that eventually the rightness of what they say will be recognized, said C. Fred Alford, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland who wrote a book about whistleblowers. When that doesn't happen or even when it does, the whistleblowing becomes their world. That is what happened to Peter Clotheer. Clotheer worked in a humdrum part of finance, managing proxy votes for mutual funds run by some of the world's biggest money managers. He started in the business in 1992 when he was in his mid-20s and joined a... Okay, so he tried to be a hero and ended up blowing his own life. So many people take on a heroic role and find that they can't really live up to it. Okay, so Richard Hananya has now posted a response on Substack, but first of all, let me get to the Huffington Post article that came out on Friday. Richard Hananya, rising right-wing star, wrote for his white supremacist sites under a pseudonym. Richard Hananya is championed by tech moguls and a U.S. senator. The Huffington Post found he used a pen name to become a more important figure in the alt-right. So a prominent conservative writer, lionized by Silicon Valley billionaires and the U.S. senator, used a pen name for years to write for white supremacist publications and was a formative voice during the rise of the racist alt-right. Richard Hananya, visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name Richard Host 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. We argued were most often black. Now, that's a matter of fact. So either he's factually correct or he's factually incorrect. He opposed miscegenation and race mixing, and 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. Okay, so just because he cited William Pierce, doesn't mean that he endorsed everything that William Pierce said. Decade later, writing under his real name, Richard Hananya has ensconced himself in the national mainstream media, writing op-eds in the country's biggest newspapers, bending the ears of some of the world's wealthiest men, lecturing at prestigious universities, or keeping his past white supremacist writings under wraps. Yeah, most of us try to put forward a public presentation of ourselves that we believe aligns with our best interest. So the 37-year-old Richard Hananya has been published by The New York Times or The Washington Post. He delivered a lecture to the Yale Federalist Society as interviewed by Harvard College Economics Review. He appeared twice on Tucker Carlson Tonight, and he was a recent guest on a podcast hosted by the CEO of Substack, where Hananya has nearly 20,000 subscribers. Hananya has his own podcast too, where he's interviewed the likes of Stephen Pinker, famous Harvard cognitive psychologist Mark Andreessen, the billionaire software engineer. Another billionaire, Elon Musk, reads Hananya's articles and replies approvingly to his tweets. Third billionaire, Peter Thiel, provided a blurb to promote Richard Hananya's books, The Origins of Woke. And in October, Richard Hananya is scheduled to deliver a lecture at Stanford. Rich benefactors have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into a think tank run by Hananya, which doles out cash to conservative academics and produces political studies that are cited across right-wing media. Although he has moderated his words to some extent, Richard Hananya still makes explicitly racist statements under his real name, maintains a creepy obsession with so-called race science, arguing that black people are inherently more prone to violent crime than white people. Okay, so I've noticed that whenever someone is accused in the press of being obsessive, that simply means that the person is paying more attention to something than the writer believes is cool. And if the writer had a more profound and devastating attack to make on the person, he'd make it. But because he doesn't, he falls back on a cheap shot like a creepy obsessive. Richard Hananya often writes in support of a well-known racist in a Holocaust denier. Who's that? And he once said, if you're on Twitter, he wouldn't let feminist trans activists or socialists post that. Why would I? They're wrong about everything and bad for society. So starting in 2008, the byline Richard Host began to appear at top articles in America's most vile publications. All right, everyone's got a hero system. So for the hero system of the author of this piece, all right, these vile publications for people with a different hero system, these are stellar publications. Richard Hose wrote for anti-Semitic outlets like the Occidental Observer, a site that once argued that Jews are trying to exterminate white Americans. Okay, I don't think that's the overall thrust of the Occidental Observer. He wrote for countercurrents, which advocates for creating a white-only ethno-state, or plenty of Jews advocate for creating a Jewish-only ethno-state. Tacky's Mag, a far-right hub for paleo-conservatives, and Videre, a racist anti-immigrant blog. So in 2010, he was among the first writers to be recruited for alternative right, new web scene spearheaded and edited by Richard Spencer. Spencer bestowed Hose with the honor of writing one of the introductory articles for the launch of alternativeright.com. Really, is that some great honor? I think Hose probably produced content that was convenient for Richard to publish. Hose wrote in a 2010 essay, Why an alternative right is necessary? We've done for a while through neuroscience and cross adoption studies that individuals differ in their inherent capabilities. The races do too. Well, he says with whites and Asians on the top of blacks at the bottom, will depend on which capabilities. So that's an own goal. He didn't need to phrase things that way. He could have just stuck to the science. Instead, he went for something that was crowd-pleasing, but not true and obnoxious, unnecessarily obnoxious. He lamented that Republicans hadn't done enough to stop Democrats march of diversity despite irrefutable evidence that some races are better than others. All right, another own goal. There's absolutely no need for the most realistic person to say that some races are better than others. Yeah, totally normal and natural to think that your group is better than everyone else, but it's an own goal to broadcast that publicly. Obviously, different people have different gifts. In the news, says the chat, Americans now owe one trillion in credit card debt. Luke might decode the no agenda show. Tough, they are snarky at worst and easy to bunk as the news is fake. Guys, we're irritating at times. That's infinite plain radio says heart bell. So Richard host had his own discus account to interact with his readers in 2012 discus suffered a data breach. Everything you do affects other people. The more you can conform your life to what you want your public image to be, generally speaking, the happier and more effective you'll be. So the more you're trying to hide and silo off the vast sections of your life, generally speaking, the less happy and less effective you will be. So Richard host frequently use sock puppet accounts hiding behind more fake names to comment on the site. So this writing was done when he was at University of Colorado as a linguistic student. And when he was at University of Chicago where he studied law, and he was the founder and editor of a blog called HPD books, human by diversity, read about his personal life on HPD books explaining that he dropped out of high school, got his GED, attended community college was eventually accepted to a flagship state university before getting into an elite college for postgraduate studies. All of this biographical information that lines with Ananya's own. So yeah, if you're trying to hide your identity, probably not a great idea to write about your personal life with this kind of specificity. Another point of overlap between host and Ananya's life can be found when he wrote about his first jobs. Host sometimes expressed disgust with fat women. Okay, so women often feel disgust with weak men or short men. What's so awful about a man feeling disgust with fat women? So who said fat people not only are disgusting to look at their obesity reflects some ugly personality traits. And I'm sure sometimes that's accurate. And sometimes it's not. Host argued that large scale female involvement in politics is a bad thing. I think that's a pretty normal right wing reaction. Women simply didn't evolve to be the decision makers in society right adding that women's liberation equals the end of human civilization. Right, that's a dramatic overstatement. We've got women's liberation in the Western world for 50 plus years now. It hasn't meant the end of Western civilization. We read an article called the White Goddess first published at the Occidental Observer about Sarah Palin praising Sarah Palin. She's a raw shock test for Americans the attractive the religious and the fertile white women have driven the ugly the secular and the barren white self hating and Jewish elite mad well before there are any questions about her qualifications. You want to root for Sarah Palin just so I can watch liberals heads explode. The Richard host wrote about a white awakening referring to realization by whites on mass that they're superior to non whites. Okay, you don't need to feel superior to have an in group identity. Alright, just wanting your environment to be optimal for your thriving and your family's thriving and your in groups thriving. Right, that's enough to seek your in groups best interests. Right, so feeling a strong in group identity does not require intellectual arguments about how your in group is superior to others though it's a natural predisposition of the mind once you discover your in group and glory in your in group you will naturally start to look for reasons why your in group is superior to others. So catch my breath here play a little bit more from Robert right and making house spectacle and certainly he I think it's a disaster because unless it's thrown out quickly by an appellate court on some sort of summary judgment motion or something like that it's a it's gonna you know he's gonna be convicted by the DC jury it's gonna completely polarize the country then it will probably be thrown out on appeal which will further polarize the country and the and the less will be pissed off and explain that the right controls the Supreme Court and you know it's it commits Biden whether he likes it or not to a strategy of you know running against the demon Trump but Trump's now going to get the nomination it's a disaster all around and it shouldn't have been broad. Well and again I from what I know the fraud thing is dubious the fraud count is dubious the other one I'm not sure about well let me ask you a question the um do you think there's a chance this definitely doesn't hurt Trump in the primary do you think there's a chance that it does hurt him in the general there's a chance that hurts him in the primary there was a poll today starting if he is convicted 40 prime percent of republicans would hold that against him now does that mean they really vote against him I don't know but uh it's not nothing is it gonna come to trial he's falling a little bit in Iowa he's only ahead by 24 points over to Santa's who's back up a little bit um it's uh sorry I don't think we know yet where it's gonna come to trial people seem to feel that Smith is trying to get it in before the election it's certainly the most important of the cases so he'll still run he won't be in jail it'll be on appeal right I mean it's not gonna run even if he's in jail okay so Richard Ananya has now responded on a sub-stack seems like a pretty reasonable defense he says it's been revealed over a decade ago I held many beliefs that I now find repulsive my posts in my early 20s encouraged racism misogyny misanthropy trolling and bad faith races like racism and misogyny get thrown around too easily that I don't believe there's any doubt many of my previous comments crossed the line this is why I read such things why I no longer hold such views Ananya says my initial instinct was to ignore the story or denounce the source and its methods the journalist behind the piece is a supporter of antifa that doesn't matter right this is a very solid piece of journalism it's a very solid piece of writing right before publishing his article he reached out to everyone he could think I have to try and get them to cut ties with me well he did what a normal journalist would do right this is a normal work of reporting and so to try to you know attack the journalist as a supporter of antifa is silly it's now leading him up on twitter and telling people to watch for the fallout while tagging those in a position to hurt my career well the bigger the fallout then the more powerful he will feel yeah the guy's just following out his own hero system so even five years ago the media could set the narrative tell people what was important how they should react to any particular story well none of us not even the media get to control what goes on in your head and so my reputation resides in your head I don't own it and so the media can try to set a narrative but frequently people don't agree with the media narrative or you would never get a republican elected president right Richard Nixon was elected twice even though the media tried to set a narrative that he was not worthy of being president Ronald Reagan was elected twice president of the United States even though the dominant media narrative was that he was not worthy to be president George W. Bush was elected president of the United States twice even though the dominant media and elite narrative was that he was unworthy of the position so there's never been a tie where the media and the elites can just unilaterally set a narrative for everyone because narratives and reputations reside in our heads and if the media and the elite are telling us something that we don't believe right they're not going to be able to brutalize us into accepting it in our heart of hearts now we may stay quiet if that is to our advantage that doesn't mean that we you know give into this propaganda right Nazi propaganda didn't change many minds Maoist communist propaganda didn't change the minds of many Chinese Soviet propaganda didn't change the minds of many Soviets right it simply supports those who are already predisposed to believe something but media narratives elite talking points don't change many minds and so Hananya is kind of whining here the goal of the media is not to engage with ideas but to silence a person and remove them from polite company well every living thing is trying to make their environment the best for their way of life and that's true for people on the left and that's true for people on the right so it's it's pointless to get to get angry when people simply try to create the best way of life for them and for their in group having your post asked me to comment and practically every question was along the lines of does your previous employer know how about your academic affiliations it's not about informing the reader trying to bring understanding this is a journalistic endeavor around the goal of unpersoning you don't need to complain about this this is just how the world works says I think I owe my readers an explanation of how I came to the positions that I once held and why I find many of them so repugnant and Richard Ananya says this is why a large portion of my current work involves attacking right-wing collectivism and illiberal beliefs part of it is self-loathing towards my previous life I too clearly notice the kind of sloppy thinking emotional immaturity immoral shortcomings that can lead one to adopt the quasi fascist ideology now I'm hard on others because I'm harder myself for once hoarding such views and then he tries to reconstruct his emotional status and reasoning from 12 to 15 years ago one to adopt a contrarian posture the opposite of his political enemies so if liberals lied about race I needed to speak harsh truths if they denied the overwhelming evidence in favor of reddy I needed to be a caricature of a genetic determinist and he admits that my thinking was not purely the result of dispassionate analysis I wasn't the greatest at that time forming normal and healthy relationships with other people yeah I think this is key around 2008 add few friends or romantic successes and no real career prospects this led me to look around come to the only logical conclusion was that I was naturally superior to everyone else and women in particular shouldn't have any rights strangely enough now that I have a fulfilling personal life and objective career success such ideas don't appeal to me anymore yeah so when you're burning up inside when you feel like your life has gone up in flames right it's a normal natural human desire to you know burn up everything around you so that this rings true right so one reason I like Richard Ananya's writing consistently is that it rings true and he does seem to be coming from an honest place he's argued against anonymity in writing about political and social issues this is a veiled form of self-criticism well some people can handle anonymity and some people can't right those generally speaking with a family with connections with bonds with with community with friends right usually make better decisions on these matters than those who are as isolated as Richard Ananya but I was writing anonymously there was no connection between the flesh and blood human beings that I'd see in public and the internet personality who just grew more rabid over time secure and his belief that nothing but the lol's mattered because the internet was a place where we just went to have fun yeah so he developed the the dangerous personality that often comes along with the e-personality right he succumbed to audience capture he started writing things that would get him applause in alt-right circles and this was directly contrary to his own best interests then as he became more successful he sought to align himself with more conventional points of view became convinced that liberalism worked it's even Pinkers books the last decade evil is irrefutable on this point so yeah the more your life works the more invested you'll be in the current order so prior to 2016 particularly between 2012 and 2016 my life wasn't working very well and so I was much more amenable to revolutionary perspectives after 2016 my life started working well and I became more invested in the status quo talks about how Brian Kaplan and Alex Narasta have argued that even if groups differ in skills or cognitive abilities we can still benefit from the division of labor one of the most dishonest parts the washington having imposed hip peace is the argument I maintain a creepy obsession with so-called race science and then you say I do no such thing we need simply to come down hard on crime I believe that reason I'm the target of a cancellation effort is because left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races and also someone who has as much success and influence as Richard Hananya does one of my most popular pieces about how women negatively influence the ability of institutions to maintain cultures of free speech the influence of women on politics isn't an unalloyed good and he says though he got carried away I know that many will troll me you say someone just told me the media is honest and good which is a Richard Hananya essay from about six months ago and he says it's still true the media does some bad things but there are many good journalists out there doing valuable work since I sucked so much a decade ago it's fair to ask whether I still suck today right in certain ways yes I have the least empathy in situations where I should probably have the most something I need to work on growing older is a process of trying to suck less and less over time and says I'm making progress on that score okay hot felt and reasonable response by Richard Hananya that would be interesting there's no way we don't run