This is from 2023, but I am seeing it for the first time here. Richard Hanania asks “hypothetically,” in a Twitter poll, if it’s OK for Epstein to have sex with a 14-year-old if he pays $10M to a fund that the child will receive when reaching the age of majority. And if everyone involved “agrees.”
“Should this be allowed?” asks Richard Hanania. 👇
I thought: maybe he’s actually jumping on the (frankly, very healthy and needed) bandwagon of pedophile haters, he’s posting clickbait, and this will come out in a follow-up tweet.
But no.
He is, of course, denounced and ratio’d. He doesn’t seem to care. Or, who knows? He’s not stupid, but maybe he just has bad judgment. Many academics have terrible judgment. So, maybe he was surprised at the negative reaction? But probably not. My hunch is that he is, even today, still laughing about it.
Look at his follow-up tweet, which is shocking in what it openly, publicly reveals. Not the fact that he thinks this way; lots of people think this way. But that he was willing to reveal it openly and publicly is…really something. 👇
He could have simply said, “I would say such a thing should be illegal.” But he did not. He doubles down, by saying “the people mad at this have names like Bob456Flyers and their photos indicate that they can’t afford a recent phone.” In other words, they are stupid, lower-class rubes. He adds, “Moralism and inability to consider hypotheticals are hallmarks of the lower classes.” Now, if he had hastened to add what his position was (and he were taking a principled stance against pedophilia), then the bit about moralism might merely signal typical sort of left-wing disdain for moralism as such.
But he doesn’t. He is clearly implying that Epstein’s deal is reasonable, and only stupid lower-class moralists could oppose it. 👇
Now, I know very little about Richard Hanania. I think I’ve heard the name before. But at this point, I’d assume that he was a typical upper-class lefty, the sort of person invited to an Epstein party.
Imagine my surprise then when I did a web search on his name and found a RationalWiki page about him: rationalwiki.org/wiki/R… The article calls him “an American white supremacist, eugenicist and misogynist who currently promotes a far-right technocratic elitist ideology termed Elite Human Capital with Anatoly Karlin.”
In the footnotes I find this interesting tweet, defending a pedophile: 👇
Now, it seems to me that people who say such things have nothing important in common with conservatives. They do, however, have much in common with the immoralistic elements of the left wing.
As it turns out, his book—published and endorsed before the above tweets—is endorsed by people like Christopher Rufo, Peter Thiel, Vivek Ramaswamy, and college professors. So he appears (to the idiots at RationalWiki, at least) to be a creature of the right; but if so, he is a creature of the weird, newfangled right that has nothing whatever to do with traditional American conservatism. This “right” is radically libertarian, hostile to Christianity, elitist, openly and shamelessly focused on their own ethnicity, and perfectly comfy with pedo-signaling. 👇
