You can like a thinker without endorsing all of their beliefs, even if their beliefs are evil. Why do people like Schmitt and Heidegger even though they were fascists? Or Foucault given his views on the age of consent? I agree that Hanania’s views are relevant context, but I think it’s fine to write a book review that doesn’t try to analyse the author’s motivations or the book’s place in a wider political context.

Hanania is clearly analogous to Foucault and Heidegger, and also is it even wrong to completely divorce a work from all context.

I think Scott was simply more interested in writing an article on arguments aginst civil rights law than an article on whether Hanania is engaged in an insidious project to smuggle rascist ideas into the mainstream via his legal arguments, and frankly I find that kind of review more interesting too. Perphaps this is irresponsible, but at the end of the day Scott is a modestly influential blogger that just likes to write about things he finds interesting.

uwu smolbean blogger with absolutely no agenda besides the pursuit of truth and civility strikes again.

Scott is of the opinion that being able to maintain peaceable discourse with people who you deeply disagree with on political issues is an important feature of society which we shouldn’t readily make exceptions to.

“Scott being nice to racists and reviewing their books positively actually means he’s less racist” is a good rhetorical trick.

Amazing how much they memoryholed the Scott emails.

So what exactly happens to people who get really into Scott et al. and then realize that they’re racist? I mean people like OP who genuinely seemed shocked by how buddy buddy their “unorthodox” intellectuals are with blatant racists.

Do they slowly disengage from rationalist-spheres, or do they just become cryptoracists like all the other idw types?