Richard Hanania is lying to you.

For my New Liberal Readers

“That night, James impregnates Natasha. He does it because unprotected sex is Lindy. She goes along because she lacks self-control, and has gotten the idea that there’s something unfeminine about resisting. Or was it the other way around? It doesn’t matter. Soon she’ll have to decide whether abortion is Based or part of the Longhouse, and no one will care what she does anyway as long as she continues to say the right words about disgusting Hondurans. — Richard Hanania (The Based Ritual)

Richard Hanania is lying. He has a particular way of lying that is normally quite hard to explain to the many of his new readers who now see him as an honest de-radicalized voice. He won’t flat out give you a certifiably fake fact, that you can check. But he knows they are not part of the right and he was and will take his word for things on which there’s no specific data. Those of us who know differently are stuck peeking in, whispering or screaming “No that’s not right?!” with no way to make the charge stick.

Well, I’ve almost caught him. He’s lying. I know he’s lying, and that he knows he’s lying and finally I can explain it in a way that even you my new and previously unexposed to our sphere-liberal readers can quickly understand.

You see, in the “Based Ritual”, he describes a kind of conversational competition that he claims occurs among our elites. His essay is written as a fictional archetypal description of a meeting between some of these elites in a DC bar and it’s theme is that all they do is try to outcompete each-other in expressing maximally “based” positions to show that they are not cucks. You can think of “basedness” as synonymous with flaunting your sexist, racist, or anti-modern liberal values from an entire spectrum of technically traditional forms… while not living up to any other moral code.

I’ll try to write a more on it soon. A lot of it is accurate though some of it intentionally misrepresents the phenomenon it’s describing. There’s something there and something worth addressing.

But let’s get to the lie. After the based ritual ends, two of Richard Hanania’s participants go home.

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“That night, James impregnates Natasha. He does it because unprotected sex is Lindy. She goes along because she lacks self-control, and has gotten the idea that there’s something unfeminine about resisting. Or was it the other way around? It doesn’t matter. Soon she’ll have to decide whether abortion is Based or part of the Longhouse, and no one will care what she does anyway as long as she continues to say the right words about disgusting Hondurans. - Richard Hanania

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You may find a lot of divergence within the MAGA movement or the dissident right on any number of issues. You might find a Catholic who thinks abortion is always bad, and opposing abortion is “based”. You may find a hereditarian who thinks abortion in general is “based” because it kills babies from kinds of people we don’t need too many more of.

You will never find a person who gets away with declaring that a white cafeteria catholic aborting a baby with an elite educated white father in the same political movement is based! Not one. Richard Hanania has found the one example that would invite almost universal condemnation, and declared it to be representative.

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Now of course, Hanania always has his way out. If this goes viral enough he might write - “Didn’t I say James was Jewish, ie. non-white?” “Aren’t there Anti-Semites who think not aborting his baby would be evil?

But then the example would undermine the entire point of his shtick in the essay which is that the “basedness” does not reduce to clear moral imperatives, but can be whatever you want it to be. Natasha could not write, “Forgive me for sleeping with a Jew, I’ve made up for it with an Abortion. Based!" in any of her group-chats and get positive feedback. She’d have to leave those and gravitate onwards to the more marginal circles which are not the focus of his piece. And then these would absolutely judge her if she were to then one day marry him.

It would not be a logically inconsistent position.

Logical consistency is for cucks. What practitioners of the Based Ritual have is a constant grasping for avatars, symbols, and incantations of Basedness through which they find meaning.

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Hanania is a lying liar who lies.

And he’ll almost always get away with it.

So where he’s not making a clearly fact-based-argument, you should be wary that your model of the world is about to be perverted in some way.

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I’ll write more on the Based Ritual shortly.