Media Matters’ Eric Hananoki: Fool, Liar Or Compulsive?

03/18/2017

It’s not surprising that my Daily Caller defense of Rep. Steve King attracted the ire of totalitarian Cultural Marxist thug group Media Matters: Daily Caller Publishes Pro-Steve King Piece By White Nationalist Leader, by Eric Hananoki, March 15, 2015.

But it is surprising that Hananoki (email/ twitter) would so totally misstate my (and for that matter King’s) argument. Hananoki wrote:

Brimelow’s Caller op-ed defended King and argued that America should remain white because the “Founding Fathers were all white” and they wanted “‘to form a more perfect union… [for] ourselves and our posterity’ — by which they literally meant their physical descendants. … the U.S. was to be a nation-state, the political expression of a particular (white, British) people, as in Europe." [Link in original]

But what I actually wrote was:

Rep. King … could quite legitimately have argued that, yes, I certainly meant there’s a white ethnic core to America and there’s a limit to how far that can be displaced.
But, it’s vital to note, King did not actually do that … Instead, he made a purely cultural argument:

It’s the culture, not the blood. If you can go anywhere in the world and adopt these babies and put them into households that were already assimilated in America, those babies will grow up as American as any other baby with as much patriotism and love of country as any other baby. It’s not about race. It’s never been about race. In fact the struggles across this planet, we describe them as race, they’re not race. They’re culture based. It’s a clash of culture, not the race. Sometimes that race is used as an identifier.
So King in fact apparently does think “that our civilization” can be restored “with somebody else’s babies” — if they’re assimilated (which, of course, is notoriously hard to do).

I've added emphases here because Hananoki did not, in fact, note the vital point. But real white nationalists certainly did: here’s Occidental Dissent’s brilliant (but undeniably radical) Hunter Wallace:

Steve King has positioned himself at the edge of mainstream conservatism. He doesn’t go full White Nationalist. Instead, he has adopted the familiar Tom Tancredo position on the superiority of Western culture and the need to preserve Western civilization, which is about as far as it is possible to go within conservatism short of edging into explicit ethnonationalist territory.

So why did Hananoki not report King’s fairly subtle, but important and internally consistent, distinction? There are three

possibilities:

Hananoki is a fool. He just didn’t notice the central argument of my column.
Hananoki is a liar. He did notice it, but preferred to smear King (and me) as dreaded white nationalists.
Hananoki is a compulsive. This is a phenomenon I discussed in the Afterword to Alien Nation, referring to a stupidly disingenuous New York magazine review by Jacob Weisberg, now Editor of Slate: "My theory: Weisberg is a type, common in New York, whose verbal slickness exceeds his intellectual powers. Faced with an argument that disturbs him emotionally, he compulsively lies about it, like a lunatic exposing himself to a nubile woman."

Hananoki’s bland face lacks the rat-like neuroticism of Weisberg’s (right), so I’m inclined to think he’s just a fool.

Still, this episode raises the question: how much worse off would Steve King be if he had actually gone "full White Nationalist"?

< Previous

Next >

This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.