Basking in powerlessness
Hanania is correct: the Right needs to be more than an entertainment product
The dissident right enjoys a sweet luxury that only the powerless can taste: unaccountability.
We can say whatever we want; our predictions and demands will never become policy, so who cares? Our tweets can be outrageous, ungrounded, explosive, hilarious - and then totally forgotten… (if they turn out to be wrong).
The evolutionary pressures of social media encourage this, favoring contrarian hot takes - nuance and context optional. We can throw as much intellectual spaghetti at the wall as we like, safe in the knowledge that no one is going to dredge up the misses that don’t stick.
Conversely, when we’re right and a mainstream journalist is wrong, the victory is timeless: evergreen evidence of the manifest intellectual superiority of Frog Twitter. And don’t let them forget it!
We must not be seduced by the pleasures of our disenfranchisement. We shouldn’t be smug about a track record rife with survival bias. Again - this seeming advantage is only available to those whose takes are not tested and immortalized by becoming national policy.
If we mean business, we have to be brutally honest, and we have to be ready to be wrong.
To paraphrase Napoleon: no hot take survives first contact with reality.
How did we end up in this trap? I see three primary causes:
The Right doesn’t hold political power, so our takes don’t have to be politically prudent. Our incentives are to be as entertaining as possible, both to garner engagement from existing sympathizers and to seduce new converts.
The Right is, in fact, correct about the grand questions of our time (on sex, race, faith, class, and human flourishing), and it’s tempting to (incorrectly) assume that this makes us automatically correct in factual debates about particulars.
The Right faces structural challenges in undertaking key parts of the journalistic process (like the expense of hiring investigative journalists to gather facts from primary sources), so it cedes this ground entirely, and retreats to commentary.
At some point, however, our intellectual output will have to become more than philosophy-flavored entertainment - if we are to become worthy of power.
As part of the construction of parallel institutions, our ambition should be to construct the entire vertical apparatus of truth generation, from the cultivation of primary sources, to data collection, to confident reporting, to editorialization, to academic excellence. Right now we only have high-quality editorial output.
This brings us to
's explosively controversial piece, ‘Why the Media is Honest and Good’. I will argue that the critics of this piece have been swept up in an emotional - if understandable - reaction to his narrative, and that they’ve failed to grasp the lessons it contains.Hanania’s contention is that “while the American media has serious flaws, it is one of the most honest, decent, and fair institutions designed for producing and spreading truth in human history.”
He argues that given the sheer magnitude of content produced by the mainstream media (‘MSM’) - millions of articles a year - there will inevitably be grave mistakes, but this should not cause us to discard the value of the MSM outright. Any judgment should be tempered with the recognition that the majority of their reporting is factual and informative.
Hanania contrasts this with the alternatives to the liberal media: the right-wing press, the foreign press, and influencers on social media. A brutally honest evaluation of these sources - whether you’re ideologically aligned with them or not - reveals a worse ratio of factually accurate reporting, as well as a fair amount of unsophisticated analysis, posturing, and grifting.
“In late 2021, I read in the NYT that Russia would invade Ukraine in a few months. Practically every major critic of the media that I saw on Twitter doubted that reporting. When Russia did invade Ukraine, people forgot that the press, and the “deep state” for that matter, had gotten things right. Had the NYT been wrong, we would’ve never stopped talking about the great Ukraine invasion hoax of 2021-2022.”
The factual assertions and material predictions that the press get wrong typically regard complex matters on which flawless analysis is unrealistic: “like Russiagate and WMDs… often issues that are extremely complicated and involve weighing different claims made by various states, shadowy international figures, and factions within the American government.”
Many of my readers will reflexively reject Hanania’s position, as you recall all of the insane commentary you have read in the NYT on race, gender, and sex. I ask you to suspend consideration of these issues for the moment, as we will return to them. Regardless of any objections on this front, what I think we must concede is that elites read the New York Times - and they’re doing this for a reason.
Elites on both sides of the aisle read the NYT because it is a sophisticated publication that provides reporting of a quality and reliability that is required if you are going to maneuver effectively as an elite. This is why I respectfully disagree with
's assertion in an excellent discussion with and Nightmare Vision that I very much recommend listening to:“It’s an interesting claim to claim that the mainstream media is far more factually accurate, and that that is why the people who read the NYT - meaning urban educated liberals in particular - read the NYT… my rebuttal to that would be: I think that you could make the NYT less factually accurate but as or more liberal, and the people who read it now would rather read that than if you made the NYT more factually accurate and more conservative.”
For people who want to read more radically progressive publications than the NYT, they can do so - these publications exist. What is attractive to liberal elites about the NYT is the carefully maintained balance between the comforting progressive narrative and the factual accuracy of assertions. This second facet is, in fact, essential.
Elites have something to lose: they can neither gamble wildly on unadulterated far-left hysteria nor on provocative but esoteric right-wing Twitter musings. They have to make high-stakes, concrete decisions with near term consequences: where to invest their wealth, which winning candidate to back, which viable policy to support to secure their ambitions. To do this they need reliable intel.
Consider: if you’re a newly promoted executive at BAE, and you have to convey credibility in a meeting with a senior decision maker at the State Department, would you feel more confident in your preparation by reading the NYT (perhaps supplemented by Stratfor & RAND), or Fox News supplemented by RW Twitter?
Hanania notes:
“Intelligent conservatives in their revealed preference show that they largely agree with me. Every few weeks or so, I post links to what I’ve been reading. Probably 80% of the news reporting goes to liberal writers or institutions. Despite my readership being overwhelmingly right-leaning, no one ever questions why I link to so many left-wing sites when there’s all this great reporting being done by conservatives on paleoanthropology or the Ukraine War. No matter how conservative you are, if you want to know what’s happening in Myanmar, the latest news on nuclear fusion, or what researchers have been saying about the pace of scientific innovation, one has to seek out liberal reporters and institutions. Your choices are to rely on leftists to be an informed person, or to live in ignorance.”
This is why The Guardian has a comparatively small readership in the UK - but it includes ‘everyone that matters’. I’m going to argue that the right-wing has profound lessons to draw from this situation, but before I do so, let’s go over criticisms of Hanania’s position.
There’s an obvious caveat to the narrative of liberal media quality that Hanania puts forth, which he concedes:
There is a major exception when it comes to the “holy trinity” of liberalism, that is topics having to do with race, gender, and sexual orientation, but even here the problem is not lies as much as that the press is blinded by ideology. The facts they give you even on these sensitive topics are usually correct, but it’s simply that the interpretation of these facts is wrong.
Many of Hanania’s critics (understandably) had such a visceral reaction to his pro-media stance that they fixated on this caveat as if it invalidated his whole argument, as exemplified by Charles Murray’s dismissive quip:
“As long as the topic does not involve sex, race, class, genetics, IQ, illegal immigration, the effects of social policy, constitutional law, or life in flyover country. On everything else, they’re terrific.”
Others added a layer of sophistication to this criticism by framing it in transactional terms:
: “Advancing their woke agenda is much more important to the activists running NYT than worrying about the number of tanks on the battlefield in Ukraine. They're happy to do a good job providing accurate data for the latter, if it will help build the trust necessary to facilitate the former.”
and noting that the negative effect of the ideological commentary outweighs the positive utility of the factual assertions:
“...most of the reporting in Pravda was probably fine too. The point being that 5% or so that’s worst probably intersects a lot with the 5% that’s important. It’s likely the stories that are most read, and most likely to have an impact. Just quantifying what % of articles have issues isn’t the right metric.”
and describing the translation of this effect, for ordinary people, to real world pain:
"...learning true facts about the world" is at best a top 10 human activity. People rightly care far more about, among other things, seeing their values reflected in their community and in the world more broadly - especially in public policy. I don't care if my neighbor is super well informed about the latest details in the Russia-Ukraine war. I do care if my neighbor is an advocate for banning gas stations in my town…”
All of these criticisms are entirely correct. But to use this insightful piece by Hanania as just another opportunity to bash the Left is to miss an incredibly important moment for self-reflection and the possibility of the beginnings of the path to recapture this power.
The Right needs to build parallel institutions, and building out a mature information apparatus is relatively low hanging fruit. This is a domain in which we already possess talented and dedicated individuals: the search for truth.
Constructing this apparatus would fulfill the requirements (as defined by
) of a true victory: a victory that makes future victories easier. A more complete and sophisticated intelligence-generation network can be used by emerging right-wing elites to accelerate and refine their decision making.In the absence of this, our elites will be forced to rely on a crude marriage of left-wing primary analysis coupled with speculative intellectual theory from the Right. This cedes a domain in which we have a natural advantage: it is leftists that should be theorycels, obscuring the natural order with walls of text. Rightists should perceive and accept the world as it is - direct and unfiltered. The current paradigm must be transcended.
For this information network to become anti-fragile and sophisticated, it will require direct contact with reality through testing and accountability. This necessitates contact with institutions. I will write a future piece encouraging right-wingers to join elite liberal organizations - not to capture them (likely impossible) - but to gain exposure to executing projects on the highest level, which requires a very different muscle-memory to pontification, however insightful.
The tech companies might be staffed by furries - but these furries know how to build billion dollar, world-changing products. You might be able to own them on Twitter - but what good is that if you have no idea how to run a world-leading enterprise?
Building this truth apparatus will require strategic planning. It will not be easy.
The Guardian, for example, loses tens of millions of pounds a year, and is only able to survive due to a dedicated trust - the Scott Trust Limited - which manages billions for the sole purpose of supporting liberal media businesses. Dissident investigative journalists can get de-platformed by social media companies, and investigations of non-regime-approved targets can be labeled harassment.
If we conceive of the vertical apparatus of truth generation as a stack, ascending from the cultivation of primary sources, to data collection, to reporting, to editorialization, to academic excellence, I suggest that we actually have to work from the top downwards. The bottom of the stack (having a large number of dedicated reporters, pollsters, sources, etc.) is still some distance off.
Conversely, higher up the stack, we already have talented commentators and nascent academic publications. The key to improving this level of the stack is to introduce structure and accountability. This will involve the formation of think tanks that release specific policy papers, and editorial boards that attempt to coalesce the current Twitter firestorm of opinions into curated, coherent, definite positions.
The next level down that we should be investing in is data science, even if we initially have to draw upon liberal sources for the raw data. On the subject of data, Hanania notes:
“…even here, the media is still in many ways more useful than most of its critics. Steve Sailer does a fantastic job of scouring MSM race coverage, but his articles often rely on the NYT for the reporting of basic facts, which he interprets in his own ways.”
And then ultimately we must find our path to the bottom of the stack. As one commenter notes:
: "Even if the right-wing magazines were as data-driven as their liberal counterparts, they'd still be inferior because they're consuming rather than producing information. People ultimately value innovation over reaction."
As inspiration for this, we could turn to some of the traditionalist Catholic publications, which have made a point of ensuring that they have full time Vatican correspondents that live in the city state, speak multiple languages, and have deep connections within the class of sympathetic cardinals and bishops.
This is straightforward for them because the Vatican-beat is well defined and clearly important. At the initial stage when we only have funding for a few investigators, we will need to find our own equivalent high-value beats.
If you’re aware of other friendly media organizations doing this well already - please leave a comment and point me their way. I’d love to learn more and elevate good work.
I’ll return to this theme in the future to continue the journey. Please subscribe to catch it, or like if you’re already subscribed. Cheers!
Sic transit imperium,
Johann