Richard Hanania used to suck—he tells us so himself. This is the hardest kind of post to write. And if I do say so myself—not having anything to hide, since I never tried to protect my pseudonymity—I think he does as good a job with it as anyone ever has:

Recently, it’s been revealed that over a decade ago I held many beliefs that, as my current writing makes clear, I now find repulsive.

I sympathize. I did not write stuff like Richard wrote—standard fare for the early “alt-right”—but I certainly read it. I even learned from it. For saying I was “not allergic to white nationalism”—which I am not, anymore than I am allergic to Ukrainian nationalism, Turkish nationalism, or Mongolian nationalism, let alone Zionism, Ras Tafari or the Juggalo Nation—I have been, and surely will be again in future, beaten up by the same sweet, lovely people who are trying to beat up Richard Hanania right now. So be it. Sweet friends, I’m still here. So are you! We all have our parts to play.

I hope these sweet people fail. I hope Richard keeps his book deal with HarperCollins, and all his nervous but good-hearted moderate institutional allies. In fact, I will go and pre-order a copy of his book right now. Health and long life to his foundation! Cheers to the Salem Center at UT Austin! Let us raise our glasses to Bryan Caplan! We all have our parts to play.

Yet I am not allergic to our sweet friends. My grandfather was an American Stalinist—could I be allergic to him? When he marched into Germany, he looted a copy of history’s most notorious children’s book. Today, in 2023, it lives next to my Little Red Book and my portrait of Robert E. Lee. Anyone who could be an “anti-fascist” could be a fascist—Hitler said that some of his best stormtroopers were the ex-KPD men. And some of the DDR’s best apparatchiks were ex-NSDAP men. Worms always turn.

Nor do our “classical liberals”—as we’ll see—have any excuse for smugness about these old “ideologies.” Friends, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart—including yours. The most dangerous men are those who deny this—those who think themselves utterly incapable of evil. Hitler himself thought this way! Everything our historians think they know about the Holocaust is thoroughly true. And almost everything else about that war that seems like it could be a lie, is.

History is not a Marvel movie. Nothing in the human story is alien or “repulsive” to me. To claim to be “repulsed,” to be “allergic,” is true or false. If it is false, it is a lie—it is shameful to let your enemies force you into a lie. If it is true, it is a confession of moral and philosophical smallness. As a philosopher, you cannot defeat your enemies—you can only exceed them. It is sad to let them trap you in so little a box.

If you think about it for five seconds, you will realize that each side in a war is blind to some truth, some vision of the good, seen clearly by its enemies. No one but a few psychopaths would sign up for a war of evil against good. Nothing could ever happen this way. Nothing ever did.

Hanania, who was and I hope still is on track to being a Respected Public Intellectual (a good gig, but don’t expect anyone to be reading your books in 20 years, let alone 50), writes eloquently of his youthful follies and the motivation behind them:

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