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It's fairly obvious what Hanania's game here is.
The more interesting question is, why are these liberals and centrists playing along? Why are they invested in making Hanania a respectable conservative interlocutor?
Unlike Buckley a half a century ago, there's little to suggest that Hanania is personally charismatic or charming.
But maybe that's besides the point -- or rather maybe traditional understandings of charisma are meaningless in Silicon Valley/VC culture.
Maybe it's simply that Hanania's views are representative among wealthy VC-connected elites who essentially serve as the tastemakers of elite liberal/centrist culture, and his respectabilization, for want of a better term, is downstream from that.
May 6, 2025 16:01I think that a lot of Klein's work in recent years can be explained by his move to California. At the time, he made a big deal about all the new people he was meeting and all the new ideas they had.
It’s giving “abandon the Democratic Party or take it over” though. Because they are extremely clearly refusing to learn from anything including going all the way back to the 2000 election they allowed the Republicans to walk away with rather than fight like hell. But especially from the Trump era.
