Ok I’ll engage with it.

(Jamison is a solid dude and we disagree but he’s a good egg)

I acknowledge that Richard Hanania or however the fuck you spell his name was on some substack podcast and mentioned in some substack editorial newsletter. I just don’t care. It’s not like the things that were promoted were him calling for the Jews to be put in ovens. That would be bad!

Instead, it’s just that he is a schmuck who has a history—that I’m not even sure had been revealed at that point—of white nationalist comments. So toxic and unpopular were those comments that even this dipshit had to at least do some minor apologizing for. I don’t know if he meant it. I don’t care. He still seems like an idiot.

Regardless, even blind squirrels gets nuts every now and then, and if people want to find value in other thoughts of his that are unrelated to the core problem of him being a racist, I don’t care.

Like the only way it is even conceivable that I should care is if 1) I just don’t want people with bad beliefs to be rewarded ever and substack by promoting him probably led to some more subscriptions which led to him making more money, or 2) I just am so terrified of people seeing evil thoughts, that I think he is going to get more subscribers from the promotion, and then further down the line, he will hit them with a call to put Jews in ovens, and they will say “good idea.”

I don’t care if he makes money because of the former and I am not afraid of the latter. If he does expose people to ideas like that, I’m confident that they will reject them. Maybe not all. Maybe a few will be like “you’re right, Nazi.” About I then confident that they will be dissuaded by the legal system of the a United States which would prosecute them for murder should they put me in an oven. And if they decided, as some people do, to call in the punishment of the state by nevertheless murdering me, well, sometimes shit happens. Pretty wild odds that it worked out this way but I implore my survivors to both avenge me by sending the killer to jail and to not get too bent out of shape about speech shit because of it.

I have had the daily stormer release my address multiple times and call for people to come visit me. I’ve temporarily left my home twice because of that. (It’s actually happened more than that but I didn’t bother leaving when I had a doorman.) 1) they didn’t come to fuck me up, because law, and 2) they’re just cosplaying like their antifascist critics who want them deplatformed.

But more importantly, it is pathetic and weak and embarrassing to give people like that so much power. This is America. This isn’t fucking Europe where the German government feels it necessary to ban discussions of the Nazis because they think so little of their citizens that they think they might start goose-stepping into France again should they see a swastika in the wild.

The reason I didn’t bother addressing this element of it in my last note is because it is ridiculous! It is disingenuous! Like 90% of the people on the “substack has Nazis and must apologize or I’ll move to mailchimp” email have spent the last two months retweeting the Hamas News Network Twitter account. They are not, like, deeply invested in solving antisemitism. The only thing they are deeply invested in is the intellectual argument for deplatforming. And the point of the people pushing back against them is that we are deeply invested in countering that.

Whether Richard Hananaia got 15 new paying subscribers is just beside the point.