The Intellectual Poverty of Hanania, Karlin, Cofnas, and the Alt-Centre

Liberal Solutions Cannot Solve Liberal Problems

In this article we will critique the ideas of a class of pundit that has emerged since the Biden presidency that we will call the “alt-centre”. These are classical liberals on the edge of elite circles who are trying to pull conservatism variously toward HBD, race realism, or IQ fetishism while steering conservatism away from the illiberal right. They are represented here by Richard Hanania, Anatoly Karlin, and Nathan Cofnas.

This is perhaps an overly broad target, so we have focused on just a few articles. We will examine the critiques of the illiberal right in these articles, and then draw out the metacritique or basic assumption that lies behind them all. We will then refute that basic assumption and watch the rest of the worldview fall apart. At the end, we will lay out the direction conservatism needs to go in if it is not to atrophy under a one-party state and die.

Richard Hanania:

Hanania emerged as a conservative figure in 2015 when he wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post defending Donald Trump, and has written for The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and other centre-right outlets. He came to prominence in 2021 after writing a Substack article Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law which he has recently elaborated into a book The Origins of Woke. The thesis is essentially a rehash of Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement, but moderated so as not to indict civil rights themselves but later “innovations” on the law.

In 2023, the Huffington Post outed Hanania as anonymous writer “Richard Hoste”, who had written race realist articles for Taki’s Magazine, The Occident Quarterly, and Counter-Currents, three publications well to the right of the Overton Window. After the outing, he wrote an article Why I Used to Suck, and (Hopefully) No Longer Do where he characterizes his earlier beliefs as “repugnant”, but he is apparently a new man now:

So yes, I truly sucked back then. As far as my intellectual journey, I’ve come to firmly believe in classical liberalism, due to a process of elimination as much as anything else. Since I’ve started paying attention to politics, we’ve seen Iraq, the financial crisis, the rise and fall of ISIS, the continuing growth of China, the increasing relevance of social media, the Great Awokening, the Trump movement, covid-19, and now the Ukraine War. Having gone through all that turmoil, America’s economy remains strong, and for all our problems, each of the potential alternatives from Chinese technocracy to Islamist theocracy to Putinism has to be considered an utter failure. The Year of Fukuyama, or as everyone else calls it, 2022, only confirmed the direction I was already leaning in.¹

This is the basic reasoning of the alt-centre: (1) liberalism is the worldview of competent people, (2) competent people believe true things, (3) liberalism is the most truthful worldview. It is at bottom a pragmatic argument that Hanania sums up when he says “the more I looked at the data, the more I became convinced that liberalism simply worked.”² The actual content of liberalism is not under examination; we are judging the worldview by its effects. This is a perfectly valid mode of analysis, and is in fact quite conservative—Burke employed it when he said that “Old establishments are tried by their effects. If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.”³

Hanania’s analysis comes into question though when he unwittingly makes the case against liberal solutions to social problems. In addressing the obvious problem for classical liberals of free or even “merit-based” migration producing more socialist voters, he says:

If the worry is that migrants might vote for socialism or commit crimes, then the answer is not to exclude people from society or otherwise discriminate against them based on group averages, but to attack socialism and crime directly. The Bukele miracle saw an order of magnitude drop in the murder rate in El Salvador within a few years, and it did not involve changing the demographics of the country.⁴

In his haste to defend multiculturalism he has to look to a decidedly illiberal regime for the “Bukele miracle” which involved using emergency powers to lock people up extrajudicially. If this is the sort of data point he’s using to conclude liberalism, his methodology needs work. This sloppy analysis is a sign of things to come.

The alt-centre is contrarian by nature and so Hanania is a controversial figure even among friends. This is seen in the regularity with which he is ratioed in his own comment section, such as in the article Diversity Really is Our Strength, where he argues for accelerating immigration.

In this article he accuses immigration restrictionists of harbouring secret racial motives that a Palestinian-American like himself could not possibly have as an immigration accelerationist. In it he considers and dismisses two dog-whistle critiques of immigration: (a) that immigrants vote left, and (b) that immigrants are generally lower IQ. His response to (a) is to say that it’s fine because democracy isn’t a thing:

Basically, one can understand democratic capitalism as elites continually having to run circles around citizens, who would destroy our standard of living if they ever truly got what they wanted.

The question about immigration, then, isn’t so much whether it will lead to a public that is less pro-market. That matters, but the gap between public opinion and policy is so large that this is only a minor concern. Rather, the question is whether changing demographics will help or hinder our ability to achieve pro-market policy outcomes in the world as it exists.⁵

On this account, the will of the people doesn’t really matter because they’re too stupid to know what’s good for them anyway. But his view of the popular will changes when he is questioned in his own comment section by someone named David Hugh-Jones:

What is wrong with the argument that people simply prefer to live with others like them? I mean, why don’t standard preference satisfaction arguments win out here?

Hanania’s response:

Well, you can still move wherever you want. Most of your fellow Americans though are disgusted by white nationalism, so you're going to have to infringe on all of their rights if you want to shape the demographics of the country in your preferred direction.

We see that when people “hate markets, because it takes too high of an IQ to appreciate them”,⁶ their preferences simply don’t and shouldn’t matter. But when people’s revealed preferences favour segregation, especially among whites,⁷ suddenly Hanania switches gears and becomes a populist who defers to the wisdom of the crowd.

Perhaps the biggest embarrassment for Hanania is his article The Year of Fukuyama where, in homage to his predecessor, he does a rather premature victory lap around illiberal forces that seemed to be on the ropes by the end of 2022. The only certainty that comes out of this article is that, as China mogs America’s balance of trade and Russia mops up Ukraine, this article is going to look less prophetic by the year.

He does address China as a viable alternative to liberalism straight away:

But in recent years, smart analysts have made a serious case for the “China Model,” which emphasizes technocratic skill and political meritocracy over voting and a mobilized citizenry. Those who take human capital seriously, like Garett Jones, might point out that China still has the poorest Chinese people in the world, so we can’t really give that much credit to the CCP.⁸

One might also point out that America has the poorest Americans in the world,⁹ so this doesn’t really help the case for liberalism, but it sounds good. The fact is that Hanania’s worldview has no room for a China on the rise, so he points to lockdowns as evidence that China “will always choose maintaining control and sticking to vanity projects over freedom and economic progress.”¹⁰ Hanania has perhaps not considered that the “economically regressive” China crushes America in GDP (PPP) and steel production, and has eaten America’s lunch as world trading partner.

One might further point to the $8T Belt and Road Initiative, projected to run through over 100 countries,¹¹ vs. the American “answer” to it, which is predicted to cost a whopping $1B and run through a staggering three countries.¹² Or one might point to the fact that while the liberal UK was under “unbearable strain” by COVID,¹³ China built two hospitals in about 10 days.¹⁴ None of this is to deny China’s manifest economic¹⁵ and demographic problems,¹⁶ but between a system of economic freedom and a command economy, there is really no question who is the senior partner when the two are roughly at parity. It is only when the free economy dwarfs the command economy—always as a result of growing through economic protectionism—that the free economy can maintain an advantage.¹⁷

Hanania’s understanding of China’s economic position is primitive, and so is his understanding of its geopolitical position. So, when he says:

As a result, the US is growing more emboldened on the issue of Taiwan. Biden has broken with his predecessors by making it clear on several occasions that the US will defend the island against China.¹⁸

We are not surprised to find, checking in only a year later, that 80 percent of intelligence experts think it likely that China will enforce a PLA-led joint blockade of the island in the next five years, that Taiwanese confidence in US allied support has lowered, and that most Taiwan-watchers think China would intervene if it feels Taiwan’s 2024 elections are unfavourable.¹⁹

But where Hanania’s article has aged worst is in its analysis of Ukraine, where he argues that Russia’s performance in the war has discredited authoritarianism and traditionalism as viable social models:

This is not simply because [the invasion of Ukraine] morally discredits the regime, but because the way the war has gone reveals the state to be fundamentally incompetent and lacking in appeal even to Russians themselves that live outside its borders. Most serious analysts and intelligence agencies thought that Ukraine would be crushed in the run-up to the invasion. That did not happen, and Russia has been forced to double-down on a strategy that will, in the best case scenario, leave it with more land and people but economically crushed and internationally isolated.²⁰

While it’s true that the CIA thought Russia would win right away, the Ukraine war has demonstrated the resilience of authoritarian societies in 21st century global conflict.

Warfare is conducted very differently today than in the 20th century. Today, warfare is largely informational, and is conducted on economic, ideological, legal, and narrative fronts. Having effectively failed to meet its strategic objectives in every major war since the 1990s, the West is no longer able to project power conventionally with anything like the advantage it once had. However, it can also project power indirectly through means such as sanctions, isolation, lawfare, colour revolutions, etc, and these indirect means are supposedly its true advantage. The Ukraine war was a test case for the West’s ability to bring to heel a major competitor by these indirect means, and in this it failed shockingly.

In applying all the pressure it could—by removing Russia from SWIFT, by blocking access to foreign exchange reserves, by trade blacklisting Russian companies, by banning imports from and services to Russian energy companies—the West has made hardly a dent in Russia’s long-term economic outlook:

After Western export bans to Russia, Russian imports declined by around 40 per cent but recovered to pre-war level already in November 2022. This recovery came through shifting import sources to other countries like China, but also through parallel imports by third countries such as Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Georgia. As a result, consumer goods like smartphones, washing machines and refrigerators, freezers, passenger vehicles and vehicle parts are still reaching Russia, albeit with some price premiums that are charged on the alternative routes and generate additional income for companies acting as intermediaries.²¹

This was the West’s best chance to knock out Russia, but Russia has been preparing for economic warfare against the West for decades and the result has simply been to drive Russia and China together as trading partners. Meanwhile, America’s turning a blind eye toward one ally torpedoing another ally’s energy infrastructure has shown that even close partners might become cannon fodder for its imperial ambitions.²² We at Imperium Press have no particular love for Russia, and residing as we do within the broader Chinese sphere of influence, we say all this with no triumphalism, but a deep concern over the West’s incompetent, that is to say, liberal approach to geopolitics.

With its eyes now turned toward the Israeli conflict with the Houthis, America has failed to deliver $60B in aid to Ukraine, and the EU likewise with its own €50B pledge. What has been the result of all this embarrassment for the West?

A Russian victory would not just mean the end of Ukraine, the analysts warn.

It would give China the green light to flex its power over a weakened US and cost US taxpayers an "astronomical" sum to pay for beefed-up defense spending.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington, DC-based think tank, warned that if Russia wins, the United States would be forced to move American troops and stealth jets to Eastern Europe, stretching the US so thin that it could allow for China to claim Taiwan, expanding its territory and influence.²³

So much for the Year of Fukuyama.

Liberal analysis—both Fukuyama’s and Hanania’s—consists in looking at the immediate past and extrapolating wildly into the future, like a weather forecaster predicting that summer will continue forever based on modelling this week’s data alone. When Maistre says of Rousseau that “he bases his whole system on exceptions”, he might as well have been speaking of the alt-centre.

When you strip away all of the post hoc rationalizations for liberalism, Hanania’s metathesis is really quite crude. It is simply this: liberalism is the worldview of smart people, and smart people are authoritative, therefore liberalism is authoritative. However, the premises are false—as we will see further on, liberalism is not the worldview of the smartest people—and so, the conclusion is also false. But we will come to that.

For now, let us turn to the second of our three alt-centrists, the one who most stridently affirms Hanania’s metathesis.

Anatoly Karlin:

Karlin began as a Russian expat living in the West, but by 2016 had relocated back to Russia, becoming a Russian nationalist. Like Hanania, he has written for publications to the right of the Overton Window such as Mankind Quarterly and The Unz Review, but unlike Hanania he has done so under his own name. While not perhaps as influential on the centre-right as Hanania, he runs in the same circles, and has a similar Twitter presence.

Karlin is a transhumanist whom I have hosted on my old podcast back in 2022, when we discussed the recent Ukraine war escalation. To his credit, he has never made any bones about being a fellow-traveller with the radical right, especially with neoreactionaries, though he always considered himself an “ideologically neutral Russian nationalist”. He has recently had a change of heart though, and now considers himself “GloboHomo’s strongest soldier”.²⁴

His major ideological statement is a multi-part essay entitled Intellectual Restructuring, which runs to some 55K words. In it he lays out his worldview and reasons for leaving behind nationalism and embracing liberalism.

His reasons ultimately cash out to a kind of homecoming. Karlin is first and foremost a transhumanist, and transhumanism is the logical and practical conclusion of classical liberalism. He spent something like a decade trying to pound the transhumanist peg into the nationalist hole, only to give up and by an elaborated modus tollens, follow his intuitive conclusions back to their political premises.

His transhumanism is not particularly interesting because transhumanism is the preserve of Dunning-Kruger sufferers like Yuval Noah Harari who think they can disprove the idea of rights by saying you can’t see them.²⁵ Yet Karlin has certain similarities to Hanania and Cofnas that make him worth examining. First, he was until recently, notionally within the orbit of the illiberal right. Second, unlike midwits like Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson, he has actually engaged with the illiberal right. Third, his stated reasons for embracing liberalism amount to Hanania’s metathesis. Karlin is the most explicit of the three in affirming it—in fact, he can hardly write an article without fetishizing the high IQ of liberals.

If you don’t want to read a meandering 55K-word diary entry, you might start with his short article Nationalism is Implicitly Transhumanist, a sort of prologue to his journey away from nationalism. We get a foretaste of his later transition and his basic argument against the right:

Now certainly tradcons can play a useful role in society, helping leverage national competitiveness. […]

However, any country that allows the retrogressive and obscurantist worldviews that predominate amongst such insular traditional communities to unduly influence state policy is simply going to be left behind and will fade out of the pages of history. They are free to mutter about how transhumanism is transgenderism and how QR codes represent the number of the Beast to their heart’s content, but this should likewise disqualify them from any input on state technological or scientific policy. Their ideas are a recipe for long-term national helotization and precisely no nationalist would presumably want that that for his or her country.²⁶

For Karlin, as for Hanania, “rightoids” are simply intellectually stunted rubes, and for Karlin they are useful only as breeding material that can later be upgraded via genetic modification. This article shows Karlin in a transitional stage, cautioning against throwing pragmatism out in favour of ideology—including liberalism. By 2023 he has fully swallowed the soypill:

First and foremost, there is no longer any real question that Western liberal democracy has become ideologically hegemonic – that is, there are no longer any intellectually consistent or defensible alternatives to it, as opposed to the midwit notion that geopolitical contests have ceased in principle. This was already true in 1992 when Francis Fukuyama first advanced the End of History thesis, and while for a small moment of time in the 2010s I thought that the Chinese and Russian models might be competitive after all as the Wokes threatened to derail that hegemony, I agree with Richard Hanania that 2022 put the kibosh on any such fanciful ideas.²⁷

We need not rehash the inanity of Hanania’s “Year of Fukuyama”, but Hanania could at least perhaps be forgiven for not having seen the outcome of 2023. His error is one of myopia and inability to see into the near future; Karlin’s error is one of willful blindness to the present. First, not only are there intellectually viable alternatives to liberalism, there are pragmatically, geopolitically viable alternatives. Those alternatives have had a very good year—as they have had a very good decade—and liberalism has had a very bad year and a bad decade, having squandered the unipolarity it enjoyed as recently as the Obama administration.

Undeterred by the brute facts of reality, he soldiers on:

Second, one consistent lesson in geopolitics seems to be that if you cannot beat it, then you should join it. America has decidedly checked Russia’s attempts to become an America of its own while utilizing an insultingly and outrageously small percentage of its own materiel resources.²⁸

Now would be the time for the West to muster those materiel resources, because as the Atlantic Council tells us, “Putin scents historic victory amid growing signs of Western weakness”:

This optimism is in large part due to a weakening of Western resolve that has become increasingly evident during the second half of the year. The failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive has played a key role in this process, leading to widespread war weariness and increased talk of “Ukraine fatigue.” With no end in sight to the conflict, a major new American support package has become hostage to domestic US politics, while EU leaders were recently unable to secure unanimous support for a landmark multi-year aid initiative.²⁹

Unfortunately for the West, the Ukraine war has ground down to a war of attrition with Russia having the advantage, needing only to turn Ukraine into a money pit for the West in order to achieve strategic victory. This has been compounded by recent developments in Gaza which have completely killed Western appetite for signing blank cheques to Ukraine.

Karlin’s meme ideology of CRISPR maximalism cannot stand contact with reality, and the reality is that nation-states are useful and geopolitically adaptive social structures. Nevertheless, we are told:

There’s a good chance that currently extant nation-states will not survive the 21st century, and I am not even talking of just the paperclips. There is no escaping the inexorable logic of the coming Great Replacement through Open Borders and the brave new world of network states. But cultural elements from the current era will be preserved, and if anything developed to much greater heights. The primary units of human political organizations will come to revolve around the shared values, aesthetics, and targeted geno-modifications that will define the network states, which will resemble the transnational phyles of Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, as opposed to the arbitrary lines on the map that we call states that loosely correlate to the genetic and linguistic clusters that we think of as nations. It is absurd to mourn their passing.³⁰

Karlin is half-right here. Devolution to more local structures is indeed coming, but not because of a fanciful techno-singularity. It is coming because the fertility crisis is going to hollow out the third world and undermine the Great Replacement, and because technology itself is producing epistemic divorce, both of which we have written about here.[1][2]

Throughout all his articles, Karlin relies upon the alt-centre metathesis that liberalism is right because smart and capable people affirm it:

It is an indisputable observation that all the objectively most successful and functional countries within GAE tend to be strongly liberal and unironically committed to GloboHomo.³¹

In Karlin’s intellectual journey as a nationalist, it is curious that he never managed to read the foundational text of economic nationalism,³² where economic liberalism’s success is shown to be a function not of its truth, but precisely its maladaptivity for growing an economy—once you’ve already grown by protectionism, it’s in your interests to promote a growth-averse ideology for all, so that you remain world hegemon. This need not be a conscious but an emergent strategy, perhaps even believed in earnestly—and it will still work. The fact that something is adaptive has no consistent bearing on its truth value, which Karlin might understand if he paid better attention to his neoreactionary peers, or had read such obscure thinkers as Nietzsche and Darwin, or our best science on the matter,³³ or even arch-Pangloss himself Steven Pinker.³⁴

The fact that smart people believe something doesn’t make it true, or even probably true. But what’s worse for the alt-centre metathesis: it isn’t even the case that liberalism is the worldview of the super-intelligent. Before we move on to Cofnas, who is a much more serious breed of alt-centrist, let us address the metathesis head on.

Refuting the Alt-Centre Metathesis:

The alt-centre metathesis can be formulated as a syllogism:

1. Liberalism is the worldview of the most competent people

2. The most competent people are most likely to have true beliefs

3. Therefore, liberalism is the most truthful worldview

We have already pointed out that (2) is false, but this requires a more detailed argument that is given only in summary above.³⁵ However, it is also the case that (1) is false. How can this be? Liberals are obviously smarter than everyone else, because they’re the culture-creating class, right?

The culture-creating class is not a uniform group; there are gradations within it. As different as an illiterate peasant is from an Elizabethan dramatist, there is as much difference between a garden-variety Elizabethan dramatist and Shakespeare. There is the cognitive elite, and then there is the cognitive super-elite. If we’re going to take cognitive ability as the mark of epistemic authority, it’s the cognitive super-elite that matter. And they are disproportionately radical right in character.

Let us list off some of the greatest modern geniuses as an illustration. First, to set some parameters, by “radical right” we mean people who held views that would be considered very right-wing not only for our time, but even for their own time. We will exclude moderate holders of views that were once commonplace like eugenics and antisemitism. We will also exclude populists, political and military leaders, and hardcore anti-communists just to stack the deck against our own thesis. We will confine our list in time to only those people who lived during the 20th century, since any further back that that will yield a list comprised entirely of people who are far to the right of the alt-centre. We will footnote any contentious examples.

Writers:

• William Faulkner³⁶

• Cormac McCarthy

• J. R. R. Tolkien

• T. S. Eliot

• Ezra Pound

• W. B. Yeats

• Rudyard Kipling

• H. P. Lovecraft

• Wyndham Lewis

• Knut Hamsun

• D. H. Lawrence

• Thomas Mann³⁷

Business magnates:

• Henry Ford

• John McAfee

• John Harvey Kellogg

• Peter Thiel

Scientists and engineers:

• Werner Heisenberg³⁸

• Max Planck³⁹

• William Shockley

• Wernher von Braun

• All of Operation Paperclip

• Guglielmo Marconi

• James Watson

• E. O. Wilson

• Trofim Lysenko⁴⁰

Philosophers:

• Friedrich Nietzsche

• Martin Heidegger

• Gottlob Frege

• Giovanni Gentile

• G. E. M. Anscombe

• Nick Land

• Ernst Junger

• Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Composers:

• Giacomo Puccini

• Richard Strauss

• Igor Stravinsky

• Edvard Grieg

• Jean Sibelius

• Guiseppe Verdi

• Carl Orff

• Ottorino Respighi

Visual artists:

• Arnold Bocklin

• Albert Speer

• Francis Bacon⁴¹

• Arno Breker

• Giorgio de Chirico⁴²

• Salvador Dali

Scholars and humanities:

• Carl Schmitt

• Hans Freyer

• Rene Girard

• Ronald Syme

• Georges Dumezil

• Oswald Spengler

• Karl Pearson

• Mircea Eliade

Film directors:

• Leni Riefenstahl

• Mel Gibson

• D. W. Griffith

• Werner Herzog

• Charlton Heston

• Victor Fleming

• Clint Eastwood

• Cecil B. DeMille⁴³

It hardly needs noting that by the 20th century the Enlightenment and liberalism had long since attained ideological hegemony. And yet among the radical right you not only find some geniuses, where you would expect to find none given a culture of hostility toward illiberalism—but you find a wildly disproportionate number of the greatest geniuses of their time. Without the radical right, there is no:

• Quantum mechanics (thus transistors, thus computers, thus…)

• Radio

• Aerospace engineering

• Genomics

• Sociobiology

• Silicon Valley

• Mathematical statistics

• Mass-produced automobiles

• Literary modernism

• High fantasy literature

• Cosmic horror literature

• Continental philosophy

• Analytic philosophy

• Futurism

• Surrealism

The radical right produced dozens of Nobel laureates, the greatest jurist of the 20th century, the most commercially successful film producer of all time, all the greatest classical music of the 20th century, all the best poetry of the 20th century, and the greatest philosopher since at least Kant and maybe since Aristotle. Liberals are the cognitive elite but the cognitive super-elite is largely radical right, and we have every reason to expect that in a truly neutral cultural framework (if such a thing could exist), the radical right would utterly dominate the culture-creation space, as it has done historically.

Liberals are competent and innovative, especially in a cultural environment that selects for them, but only moderately so. They iterate on the innovations produced by others; they are fantastic managers, excellent at following procedure, and hopelessly tame and conventional in their thinking. Of course they are—liberalism is what is conventional today. The immoderately, foundationally, paradigm-shatteringly innovative man is often to the right of the Overton Window.

The basic error of Hanania and Karlin is to conflate the right-wing with conservatism—low openness and high disgust sensitivity. The radical right is, rather, high openness and high disgust sensitivity, a combination of far-seeing radicalism with a taste for deep bio-conventionality, what Karlin calls the “bioconservative”. At all stages in the history of ideas, and especially since the Enlightenment, the midwit liberal has been forced into dialogue with the cognitive super-elite illiberal right.

And so has the centre been forced into dialogue with the radical right since 2016. This will only keep happening, and the centre will continue to get the worst of it, hence the need for censorship, deplatforming, and lawfare. Honest engagement with illiberalism is precisely what the liberal establishment cannot survive, and so it invents elaborate post hoc justifications (hate speech, words = violence, misinformation, conspiracy theories etc.) for why engaging with it is unnecessary and even harmful to open discourse.

The mainstream is simply trying to bypass engagement with the radical right by citing liberals as the culture-creating class and reactionary boobs as failing to rise above the threshold of intellectual interest. In reality, the radical right is the culture-creating class—particularly if you lop off the bottom five standard deviations.

This is implicitly understood by Nathan Cofnas, who provides the only really interesting analysis in the alt-centre.

Nathan Cofnas:

Cofnas is a scholar working in Cambridge, who first engaged with the illiberal right in 2018 with his critical analysis of Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique series, a trilogy of works outlining a theory of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy.⁴⁴ Since then he has engaged further with the illiberal right on fairly open and honest terms.

He recently wrote a Substack article Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem in an effort to dialogue with Hanania’s book The Origins of Woke, as well as Christopher Rufo’s book America’s Cultural Revolution, both of which trace the genealogy of wokeness. In it, Cofnas tries to understand why smart people believe obviously nonsensical ideas like wokeness, and the results are flawed but interesting.

One indication that he is on to something is that he explicitly rejects the notion held by Hanania and Karlin that liberals are the cognitive elite:

At the very highest levels of intelligence and talent, I suspect that the political divide is not so lopsided, and may even favor the right. In my personal life, the smartest people I’ve known have been disproportionately right wing (and race realist). But great institutions aren’t built by lone geniuses. They require a large network of staff and supporters to competently execute the myriad tasks that keep the gears turning.⁴⁵

While he would not go so far as to endorse the stronger thesis held here—that the cognitive super-elite is characterized by a radical right worldview—he is moving in the right direction. Let us summarize his article before explaining where he goes wrong.

He begins by defining wokeness (he calls it “wokism”):

I argue that wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously, given a background of Christian morality. Both the mainstream left and right believe that innate cognitive ability and temperament are distributed equally among races, and probably the sexes, too. […] As I will explain, wokesters correctly follow the equality thesis to its logical conclusion, whereas conservatives fail to recognize the implications of their own beliefs.⁴⁶

This is surprisingly on the money. The assumption of mankind’s essential moral equality before God is indeed at the root of wokeness. Given the fundamental conflation in the Western mind between descriptive and prescriptive statements (both are taken to be a kind of knowledge), it is impossible to assert prescriptive or moral equality without asserting descriptive equality. And so, as soon as we accept imago dei and Socrates’ “virtue is knowledge”, it is only a matter of time and working out the bugs in our reasoning before we conclude that the only difference between a Bantu tribesman and a Finnish Sami is social environment.

Cofnas further recognizes that wokeness has its more proximal roots in liberalism:

The central tenet of wokism, namely, psychological equality, was first expressed by the English philosopher John Locke in 1690. Locke—the father of both blank slatism and political liberalism—declared that the human mind begins as “white paper, void of all characters.” In regard to race, he wrote:

Had you or I been born at the Bay of Soldania, possibly our thoughts and notions had not exceeded those brutish ones of the Hottentots that inhabit there. And had the Virginia king Apochancana been educated in England, he had been perhaps as knowing a divine, and as good a mathematician as any in it; the difference between him and a more improved Englishman lying barely in this, that the exercise of his faculties was bounded within the ways, modes, and notions of his own country, and never directed to any other or further inquiries.

In other words, race differences are environmental. In 1758, Claude-Adrien Helvétius, who was arguably more influential than Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the decades preceding the Revolution in France, developed a radically egalitarian political philosophy based on Lockean psychology. Another English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, may have been the first liberal in a semi-contemporary sense, and he was a Lockean with respect to group differences. In 1848, he wrote that “attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural influences” is the “most vulgar” way of “escaping from the consideration of the effects of social influences on the human mind.” In 1873, he wrote that “by far the greater part of those differences, whether between individuals, races, or sexes,” are “produced by differences in circumstances.”⁴⁷

This is, again, very incisive. Liberalism is not at bottom opposed to Christian morality, but is rather the secularization of it—the fundamental objection of the Christian is not one of doctrine, but of profanation. Liberalism is not simply a sin; it is a heresy.⁴⁸ As such, liberalism continues our millennia-old conceptual schema, which Cofnas traces through the second half of the 20th century, when (quasi-pagan) National Socialism provided the foil against the (post-Christian) West’s deep history of equalitarianism.

By the time major civil rights legislation was passed in the 1960s, respectable people had almost unanimously embraced the fantasy that legal equality would solve the race problem. Idealistic school teachers inculcated children with the dogma that race is skin deep, and that only a deranged hater could think otherwise.⁴⁹

So far, the genealogy is looking good. Cofnas then folds Rufo’s thesis of woke roots in the Frankfurt school, along with Hanania’s thesis of woke roots in Civil Rights law, into his own broader thesis of wokeness’ deeper roots in the Western tradition, making them late developments in an already old trajectory. In fact, he makes wokeness an outcome of our WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) psychology that arose some time around the High Middle Ages.

The existence of disparities between groups with supposedly equal potential is only interpreted as a moral emergency in the light of certain Christian-derived moral premises. An ancient Assyrian, a Roman pagan, an Aztec, or Genghis Khan wouldn’t have cared about the lower performance of different groups. But the WEIRD mind is deeply imprinted with the idea that all individuals are moral equals, and that this entitles them to equal opportunities to flourish and develop.⁵⁰

As such, wokeness cannot really be excavated without first excavating our Westernized psychology. He is not wrong about this.

He then turns to the crucial question of what to do:

In a recent article, Rufo acknowledges that “conservatives cannot rely on a populist, blue-collar coalition alone,” and he calls for “elevat[ing] a new class of professionals with the capacity to wield power within complex institutions.” “Conservatives,” he says, “should begin educating and organizing a counter-elite of their own.” The problem is that conservatives don’t have enough human capital to produce a counter-elite that can seriously contend with the reigning liberal elite.⁵¹

Rufo runs up against the old metathesis of the alt-centre—even if the right had all the infrastructure it needed, the right is simply not smart or talented enough to pull this off. Cofnas’ solution is to poach left-wing talent. “In short, Rufo’s strategy of creating a counter-elite won’t work unless left-wing elites start defecting to the right on scale.”⁵² This is why, as Cofnas has titled the article, we need to talk about the right’s stupidity problem. His strategy for winning them over is simple, though anything but easy:

But we have never tried the strategy of refuting the belief that forms the true basis wokism, which is the equality thesis. There is every reason to think that undermining the equality thesis is the ultimate solution. The entire woke system collapses when it is recognized that disparities are due to nature. That’s why the left fights so hard to defend the taboo on hereditarianism. Leftists understand what is at stake: everything.⁵³

It's not clear what Cofnas wants to put in place of colourblind liberalism, but one can only assume that it is a form of race realist liberalism. He explicitly forecloses on the possibility of incorporating the identitarian right:

The fact that the right’s stupidity stems from its failure to embrace race realism does not mean that current, publicly self-identified “race realists” are particularly intelligent or talented. In fact, they are often the opposite. [...] My call for a race-realist right is not a recommendation to look to these emotionally disturbed fools for leadership or support. Race realism needs to be incorporated into the right from the top.⁵⁴

Having spent so much time sketching out a brilliant thesis of woke origins in the deep history of the West, Cofnas has painted himself into a corner. If wokeness is rooted in the liberal (and even Christian) assumption of moral equality between peoples, how on earth are we going to embrace hereditarianism without dispensing with liberalism?

Just as the implications of Civil Rights law did not become clear until generations later, nor did the implications of classical liberalism become clear until centuries later—and those implications just are wokeness. Refuting equalitarianism is tantamount to refuting liberalism itself, for reasons that Cofnas himself has described. Since equality, “the central tenet of wokism”, is coextensive with classical liberalism from Locke to Mill to Rawls and beyond, asking right-wing elites—those most committed to classical liberalism—to embrace hereditarianism is asking them to abandon their core position and replace it with something radically different. While this is indeed what needs to happen, Cofnas does not seem to recognize the implications for his project. Race realism cannot be “incorporated from the top” because the top is ideologically opposed to it in its bones. What needs to happen is that the top needs to be replaced with something that is not retarded.

Wokeness is not believed on the basis of some fact that a convincing argument for HBD can defeat. Wokeness is a mythic complex that no argument will ever defeat, no matter how sound—indeed, the more facts that accumulate against it, the more hysterical and fundamentalist it grows. This is the story of the 21st century: as the genomic data pour in and refute environmentalism with almost cruel comprehensiveness, the essentially religious and mystical character of the belief asserts itself with ever more clarity.

Wokeness was not installed by reason and it will not be deposed by reason—only by power. And here the illiberal right offers much better resources for its deposition than classical liberalism: a more robust understanding of power relations and social ontology, a better account of wokeness’ genealogy, a stronger mythical framing in opposing it, and the intellectual resources to defeat its core thesis of equality. Mainstream conservatism is simply too stupid to defeat wokeness, and classical liberalism doesn’t ultimately oppose it—it amounts to demanding that we go back to when the cancer was third stage rather than terminal. While this is an improvement, it is not a solution.

The only solution is the illiberal right. Cofnas will never get on board with the illiberal right, and Hanania and Karlin have abandoned it to become uninteresting strivers. But others who are in positions of authority will get on board with it.

Hereditarianism and identitarianism—or better, folkishness—are a package deal. You can’t have one without the other. Hereditarianism says that race matters, and identitarianism says that race matters to politics. They are inseparable. You will only be rid of identitarianism when you are rid of multiculturalism—a cardinal value for Cofnas, Hanania, Karlin, and others in the alt-centre. This is why the alt-centre is ultimately not serious about destroying wokeness.

Multiculturalism guarantees identity politics. The illiberal right is willing to fight fire with fire, and this is the only real cure for wokeness.

1. Hanania, Why I Used to Suck.

2. Ibid.

3. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France.

4. Hanania, Why I Used to Suck.

5. Hanania, Diversity Really is Our Strength.

6. Ibid.

7. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.2747/0272-3638.10.5.434

8. Hanania, The Year of Fukuyama.

9. American average income is about $31K/year, whereas in every other country Americans earn more. This is simply because expats of any country tend to be more competent on average than those who remain behind. https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/30-countries-around-world-where-063316039.html

10. Ibid.

11. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-massive-belt-and-road-initiative

12. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-11-01/supply-chain-latest-us-lobito-corridor-project-in-africa

13. https://news.sky.com/story/nhs-under-more-pressure-now-than-at-peak-of-covid-19-pandemic-leading-doctor-says-12778154

14. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-03/china-completes-wuhan-makeshift-hospital-to-treat-coronavirus/11923000

15. https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d00942/

16. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-population-drops-2nd-year-raises-long-term-growth-concerns-2024-01-17/

17. For more on this point, see Ha-Joon Chang’s Kicking Away the Ladder.

18. Hanania, The Year of Fukuyama.

19. https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2024-01/240122_Lin_Surveying_Experts.pdf?VersionId=KpijDB0VBA6tKMBZd_TRr4DLn3YXcXsF

20. Hanania, The Year of Fukuyama.

21. https://www.ips-journal.eu/topics/economy-and-ecology/beyond-russia-the-impacts-of-sanctions-on-the-region-6959/

22. https://www.reuters.com/world/us-had-intelligence-ukrainian-plan-attack-nord-stream-pipeline-washington-post-2023-06-06/

23. https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-victory-ukraine-us-stretched-thin-china-invasion-think-tank-2023-12

24. https://akarlin.com/soypill-manifesto/

25. https://x.com/jimmellas/status/1750362027414233124?s=20

26. Karlin, Nationalism is Implicitly Transhumanist.

27. https://akarlin.com/the-z-of-history/

28. Ibid.

29. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/putin-scents-historic-victory-amid-growing-signs-of-western-weakness/

30. Karlin, The Z of History.

31. Ibid.

32. List, The National System of Political Economy.

33. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33231784/

34. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/back-to-basics-on-whether-truth-is-adaptive/

35. The classic formulation is given in Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense.

36. https://newrepublic.com/article/158710/william-faulkner-civil-war-biography-review-southern-white-guilt

37. During his most productive period; he later became a liberal.

38. https://physicsworld.com/a/werner-heisenberg-controversial-scientist/

39. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/10/22/max-planck-tragic-choices/

40. Responsible for more communist deaths than anyone apart from Mao Zedong.

41. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jul/26/how-dark-and-violent-fantasies-inspired-the-young-francis-bacons-art

42. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2019/09/24/beyond-the-metaphysical-milan-show-aims-to-reassess-giorgio-de-chiricos-late-period

43. https://www.screeningthepast.com/issue-43-first-release/the-lost-city-of-cecil-b-demille-political-antiquity-in-classical-hollywood/

44. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29526014/

45. Cofnas, Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid.

48. This is well articulated by Marc Barnes in Liberalism as Heresy. https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2023/03/liberalism-heresy-marc-barnes.html

49. Cofnas, Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid.