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Richard Hanania

@RichardHanania

Nov 30

Ayn Rand on racists as losers: “The overwhelming majority of racists are men who have earned no sense of personal identity, who can claim no individual achievement or distinction, and who seek the illusion of a ‘tribal self-esteem’ by alleging the inferiority of some other tribe”

“Observe the hysterical intensity of the Southern racists; observe also that racism is much more prevalent among the poor white trash than among their intellectual betters.”

“The simplest collective to join, the easiest one to identify—particularly for people of limited intelligence—the least demanding form of ‘belonging’ and of ‘togetherness’ is: race.”

Read 5 tweets

Richard Hanania

@RichardHanania

Nov 19

If you haven't looked into their claims, you are always going to underestimate just how much and how blatantly anti-vaxxers lie.

If you are on the right, I want you to open your mind and realize that no matter what problems you have with the left, Robert F Kennedy is a uniquely sinister figure who should have no role in public life. Here's just one example as to why.

RFK wrote the foreword for a book by an anti-vaxx organization he once led that claimed to list young people dropping dead from the covid vaccine. The 12-year-old boy on the cover hadn't even been vaccinated against covid. He was just a random kid who died for unrelated reasons, anti-vaxxers put him on the cover of a book, and RFK promoted it.

When the family tried to tell them about this, the publisher ignored them.

The AP reports:

When 12-year-old Braden Fahey collapsed during football practice and died, it was just the beginning of his parents’ nightmare.

Deep in their grief a few months later, Gina and Padrig Fahey received news that shocked them to their core: A favorite photo of their beloved son was plastered on the cover of a book that falsely argues COVID-19 vaccines caused a spike of sudden deaths among healthy young people.

The book, called “Cause Unknown,” was co-published by an anti-vaccine group led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President John F. Kennedy’s nephew, who is now running for president. Kennedy wrote the foreword and promoted the book, tweeting that it details data showing “ COVID shots are a crime against humanity.”

The Faheys couldn’t understand how Braden’s face appeared on the book’s cover, or why his name appeared inside it.

Braden never received the vaccine. His death in August 2022 was due to a malformed blood vessel in his brain. No one ever contacted them to ask about their son’s death, or for permission to use the photo. No one asked to confirm the date of his death — which the book misdated by a year. When the Faheys and residents of their town in California tried to contact the publisher and author to get Braden and his picture taken out of the book, no one responded.

They finally took the boy off the cover of the book after it became a story during Kennedy's 2024 run. Kennedy supporters have harassed the boy's parents, maybe because they believe they're lying about the covid vaccine and part of the conspiracy.

12-year-old Branden Fahey isn't the only person they were lying about. They were just taking random people who died and made a book about them. One even died in 2019, before covid vaccines were invented.

The AP found dozens of individuals included in the book died of known causes not related to vaccines, including suicide, choking while intoxicated, overdose and allergic reaction. One person died in 2019.

AP asked Kennedy’s campaign, CHD, Dowd and Skyhorse president Tony Lyons several questions about the book, including why they chose to feature Braden, why they didn’t speak to his family first and what steps they took to fact check.

Kennedy's former organization says that Fahey's obituary didn't list a cause of death, so they just decided to take his picture and put it on the cover of their anti-vaxx book. I'm serious. This is how anti-vaxxers reason. "Maybe your son who died in 2019 actually died because he was vaxxed? Just asking questions! Why are you afraid of debate? What are you hiding?"

In emails, Lyons did not address why Braden specifically was chosen for the cover but defended his inclusion by saying that news stories and his obituary did not mention his cause of death.

Hundreds of deaths are cited in the book, though Lyons said it only attributes nine of them to the vaccine. Lyons said Braden’s death and others are never explicitly attributed to the vaccine, and that the book explores many possible reasons for deaths that have appeared in headlines since 2021.

Still, the book several times refers to its “thesis” that mass administration of COVID-19 vaccines caused a spike in deaths. Braden’s parents said his appearance in the context of the book implies he died of the vaccine, putting his death in a false light.

Anti-vaxxers are very dedicated and put out a lot of material. People see this and assume that there must be something to what they're saying. How can they produce so many books, papers, and podcasts if vaccines are safe? What's wrong with opening up a debate?

You'll never have the time to go through all of their claims. The thing to realize is that these are some of the stupidest and most dishonest people in public life. They've been shunned from mainstream institutions for good reason, and it's a troubling sign that they're now being given political power.

If you think elites are the problem, know that they at least want nothing to do with anti-vaxxers. I consider this a litmus test. The degree to which institutions reject these people can be taken as a direct measure of how well they're functioning.

https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1827882382843867483

Remember that RFK personally lobbied against vaccines in Samoa, where over 80 children died due to lowering rates.

Oh yeah, and here's the story about how he drove his wife to suicide after she found a notebook of all the women he cheated with.

https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1827882382843867483

More on the claims of anti-vaxxers here. richardhanania.com/p/vaccines-and…

Read 4 tweets

Richard Hanania

@RichardHanania

Nov 6

Trump won 45% of Hispanics, a 25-point increase in vote share in one election cycle.

I explain why the main lesson of this election is that it is time to retire the "demographics is destiny" talking point on the right. It's been completely discredited. richardhanania.com/p/time-to-reti…

Here's a poll on support for Trump and Harris across the world. I guess if demographics are what count the US needs more Turks, Nigerians, and Egyptians and fewer Northern Europeans. This would be a dumb argument. So is extrapolating a generation into the future based on race.

Think about this Pennsylvania woman when you think "demographics is destiny." Her main issue is protecting her Social Security checks. So she voted Republican. How can less educated voters vote their values if they don't even realize half the time which party supports what?

Read 4 tweets

Richard Hanania

@RichardHanania

Oct 26

NYT on one of the first things Kamala Harris did after becoming vice president:

Paging through intelligence reports just weeks after she was sworn in as vice president, Kamala Harris was struck by the way two female foreign leaders were described. The reports used adjectives that, in her view, were rarely used to describe male leaders.

Ms. Harris, the first woman to hold her office, ordered up a review that scrutinized multiple years of briefing reports from various intelligence agencies, looking for possible gender bias.

The study found some questionable word choices but no widespread pattern, according to a senior intelligence official, one of five who requested anonymity to discuss the review. (None would disclose the words flagged by Ms. Harris because the reports were classified.)

Still, the exercise had an impact: Intelligence officials added a new training class for analysts on how to judge and assess female foreign leaders, according to another official.

Remember all the race craziness during covid? Guess who was the driving force behind it in the administration:

During the pandemic, she repeatedly asked her vice-presidential staff for demographic breakdowns on Covid vaccination recipients and pressed the administration’s health officials to address gaps, according to two former administration officials.

She pushed the federal bureaucracy to incorporate concerns about equity into routine business — so much so that her advisers seldom briefed her on domestic policies without having prepared a ready answer about their impact on women, Black and Hispanic people and other racial minorities.

When Trump says that these are stupid, unserious people, stories like this are what make his charges sound credible.

She doesn’t talk about it during the campaign. But this is where her heart is at. nytimes.com/2024/10/25/us/…

Her staff knew that DEI was her obsession. This ended up influencing everything about how they did their jobs. They knew that Kamala would have DEI-related questions on every issue and prepared with that in mind.

She pushed the federal bureaucracy to incorporate concerns about equity into routine business — so much so that her advisers seldom briefed her on domestic policies without having prepared a ready answer about their impact on women, Black and Hispanic people and other racial minorities.

“She was always interested in race and gender,” said one former aide who requested anonymity because of lack of authorization to speak publicly. “We all knew it was really important to her, so we would proactively add that to her briefings. She didn’t have to ask for it.”

Read 4 tweets

Richard Hanania

@RichardHanania

Sep 16

The human capital problem on the right is bad and getting worse. Eating pets and imaginary whistleblowers today. What's next? Diagnosing it is easy. Finding solutions is hard.

I do have one though: conservatives should help abolish the electoral college.
richardhanania.com/p/the-conserva…

My theory of our politics would suggest it's hopeless. There are lots of stupid people out there, and they used to be kept out by gatekeepers and distributed across the parties. Now they're increasingly in one party, and have the internet. A simple story of supply and demand.

But the electoral college makes it much worse.

For most of US history, the electoral college hasn't mattered. But two things have changed since 2000 that have made the electoral college go from an afterthought to vitally important to presidential politics.

Read 17 tweets

Richard Hanania

@RichardHanania

Sep 2

Happy Labor Day.

To celebrate, I've written an article on why you should not support labor unions.

They are anti-meritocratic cartels that achieve gains by harming the rest of society. If you are concerned with poverty, there are better ways to help. richardhanania.com/p/unions-are-n…

We can have reasonable debates about the size of government or how much it should distribute wealth. But the way to help the working class is not to favor one group of people and let them take from everyone else, lower economic efficiency, and harm consumers and other workers.

The story of American ports. They are the least efficient in the world because unions fight technological innovation. Labor bosses actively benefit from making everything function worse.

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