Mehdi I'm amazed

...at the way you're with me all the time. And Mehdi I'm afraid of the way I leave you. Though honestly? You kinda had it coming.

Smear merchant, plagiarist, careerist, and intellectual weathervane Mehdi Hasan, MSNBC host and best-selling author of Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking — which he may or may not have written, if past practices are any indication — has of late made waves as one of the media’s most aggressive peddlers of leftist agitprop. In the wake of Matt Taibbi’s Congressional testimony concerning “The Twitter Files,” for instance, Hasan accused the independent journalist of committing perjury, an intentional and scurrilous misrepresentation that nevertheless had the effect of prompting Democrat Stacey Plaskett to send Taibbi a letter repeating the perjury charge and suggesting his testimony before a House Committee could be punishable by up to 5 years in prison. This was an aggressive and largely unprecedented attack on journalism — one that Taibbi himself snapped back at:

I learned yesterday Virgin Islands Delegate and Ranking Member of the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government Stacey Plaskett is threatening me with prison, over her own error. Just after I ran a piece called “The Press is Now Also the Police” about the New York Times and Washington Post boasting of roles in delivering a leak suspect to the FBI, MSNBC’s new attack-caster, Mehdi Hasan, got his wish, inspiring first Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and then Plaskett to trumpet his incredibly vicious and mistaken claim that I lied to Congress.

[…]

It would be one thing if I really made the mistake. In that case, Plaskett’s letter would merely be an outrageous attempt to intimidate a witness by threatening a charge of intentional lying over a miscue. But that’s not the case. I did of course make an error, but what Plaskett is referencing is actually a mistake by Hasan, one she’s now repeating.

As Taibbi notes, Hasan appears to relish his role as wannabe destroyer of “right wing” narratives, a mantle he has taken on with increasing vigor — and with more pronounced dishonesty. Taibbi himself is hardly right wing; but for Hasan, all that matters is his own brand — and who and what he attacks appears to be based on who is most willing to pay him.

As independent journalist Lee Fang explains, for Hasan, while his more recent attacks may be new in form, in function they are nothing especially novel for the MSNBC host. Citing the blatant plagiarism in Hasan’s 2000 piece for US News and World Reports, Fang observes:

Later in his career, Hasan continued cribbing the work of others, but usually with better crediting.

Occasionally though, Hasan’s sloppiness shined through in his work. In his first book, which valorized the life of centrist Labor Party leader Ed Miliband, Hasan used scare quotes to describe Ralph Miliband, writing, that during the Second World War, he was “generally the only Jew, and certainly the only stateless, Belgian-born, French-speaking LSE student among the enlisted men, and the only one trying to set aside time to read Marx's Das Kapital.” There is no indication where this sentence came from. It’s only upon further investigation that I found that it was taken directly from an article published by journalist Andy McSmith in The Independent a year prior to the publication of Hasan’s book. Much of the rest of the book is taken from other histories published about the family, and contains little new reporting.

But even if we assume that Hasan’s more brazen plagiarism was a product of youthful indiscretion, the sum total of Hasan’s antics in public life speak to what it takes to get ahead as a news pundit. He spent much of his days in the UK cozying up to establishment Labour Party leaders – his hagiographic book on Ed Miliband is far from the only example. Now as an aspiring U.S. pundit, he falls over himself lavishing praise on President Joe Biden, and repeating the Democratic Party line on any subject of the day. It’s no wonder that just as it becomes fashionable among many liberals to defend the FBI and Department of Homeland Security from critical reporting about agency overreach, Hasan leaps at the opportunity to lie about Taibbi’s testimony and smear every journalist who has engaged with the Twitter Files documents.  

Hasan is more than happy to bend any principle in the service of his career. The greatest such example is Hasan’s attempt to work at the Daily Mail, seen as a British equivalent to Fox News. On television, Hasan castigated the “immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail,” clearly making the case that the paper is composed of unreconstructed racists. That prompted the British outlet to publish Hasan’s own application letter, in which Hasan pleaded for a columnist position [link added - JG].

What should be immediately clear about Mehdi Hasan, then, is that he lacks journalistic scruples. He evinces a blinding deficiency in personal integrity which, far from being an embarrassment to him, he seems content to flaunt. And this anti-intellectual social positioning colors everything he writes, reports, Tweets, or says on air.

Of late, this has allowed him to gather attention to himself by, eg., attacking Bill Maher and Glenn Loury for their supposed racism — then causing a ruckus when his Tweet on the subject was rightly met with a Community Notes backlash on Twitter. Not only was Hasan’s thesis risible and his math incompetent, but his intent, rather than to provide any kind of journalistic gloss on the problem of black-on-black crime, was to deny that any such problem even exists — then to racialize the claim by pretending to stand in solidarity with Blacks against what he referred to as “racist tropes,” all while falsely claiming white-on-white homicide is commensurate with black-on-black homicide in some meaningful way.

But as UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh argues:

it hardly seems racist to focus on black-on-black crime, if one genuinely thinks that black lives matter: If the black-on-black homicide rate isn't sharply reduced, blacks will continue to be vastly more in danger of homicide than whites. Indeed, if one just focused on the similarity in raw numbers (hey, black-on-black homicides and white-on-white homicides are all a titch under 2600 per year, so the level of the problem is pretty much the same), that would be wrongful neglect of black victims. Again, if we saw two cities with the same raw number of homicides even though one had 1/5 of the population of the other, I would hope that we'd sit up and take notice, for the benefit of the endangered residents of the smaller city (with its fivefold higher homicide rate). Saying "nothing noteworthy here, move along" would be the error.

What Volokh misses here though is that for Hasan, being correct isn’t his purpose. That is, Professor Volokh assumes Hasan is acting in good faith from within a Western liberal Enlightenment paradigm of reason, rationality, and science, when what he’s actually doing is giving voice to the left’s Social Justice pedagogy, which simply asserts truths — or “known knowns” — then treats any and every effort to dispute those truth claims as indicative of their critic’s immorality, ignorance, or a desire to re-assert a dominant discourse of power, which ipso facto is oppressive. Under this description of the world — which I suspect Hasan has adopted because he recognizes its hold on cultural power at this historical moment, and he wants to cash in on that — White Supremacy and patriarchy are everywhere and always the controlling discourses; whites, by virtue of their being born white, are complicit in the maintenance of this system of supremacy, and can do nothing to absolve themselves of that original sin save surrender epistemology to those whose intersectional markers grant them special insights into the world and how it is constructed. Born into dominant discourses of power, the argument goes, the marginalized or Othered are able to see the dominant discourse of the oppressor while living the marginalized existence of the oppressed. The more oppressed one is — an obese, handicapped, lesbian of color whose heritage can be traced back both to chattel slavery and to indigenous peoples, let’s posit — the more insight and experiential knowledges (lesbian knowledge, fat knowledge, disabled knowledge, Black knowledge, Native knowledge) one can plausibly lay claim to. It’s “fashionable nonsense,” as Alan Sokal once called it, elevating an almost surreal matrix of “authenticity” as de facto godhood.

Just as I’ve written here about the New Right and what its aims are, Hasan is best conceived of as a usefully Othered face of the New Left. Gone is the radical skepticism and playfulness of the High Deconstructionists who, having witnessed their Marxian Utopia devolve into Killing Fields and gulags, responded spitefully by tearing at every supposedly repressive Western institution they could lay hands on. Today, philosophically evolved and marshaled into a political movement, the New Left’s Social Justice orthodoxy takes the foundational assumptions of Theory and presents them as something akin to metaphysical gospel. This is Theory as its own ascendant and incontrovertible meta-narrative — albeit one in which the oppressor / oppressed power dynamic described by Foucault is helpfully inverted so that the dominant discourse is now constructed and maintained by the supposedly marginalized and oppressed.

— which, I liked Revenge of the Nerds better when it was a movie.

This maneuver into third-wave Theory is what James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose have called “reified postmodernism” — the replacement of classical liberalism as an intellectual framework for the West with a ferociously policed intellectual absolutism born of applied postmodernism run through Social Justice Theory and Pedagogy.

In this New Left paradigm, people like Mehdi Hasan act as media arm for the normalization of Social Justice narratives and practices. They use their platforms in concert with academics, left-wing politicians, bureaucratic enforcers in DEI, ESG, CEI, et al., to create and maintain the narratives of this new epistemic framework. It is a path to power and control.

For true believers, this illiberal march through the West is justified because its strategic aim is the Social Justice it believes dominant discourses have always denied the marginalized. For people like Hasan, though, it’s the wave to ride when one is looking for both the thrill of bullying and a liberation from having to defend assertions with anything resembling rigor. It’s authoritarianism, but it’s an authoritarianism that grants Hasan fame, wealth, and social power — and these are to him the things that truly matter. He’s a miserable and profoundly unimpressive man. A craven and un-serious man. He’s also a poseur. But give him credit: he knows a good grift when he sees one.

So for instance, when this morning Hasan responds in a Tweet to Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s joint praise of the US and Israel as conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality, he rotely argues that “America was founded with slavery and the three-fifths compromise, and Israel was founded with the nakbah and the dispossession of the Palestinians” — narratives that signal to New Left fellow-travelers that Hasan has (at least perfunctorily and performatively) internalized some of the origin stories of the Social Justice movement.

One can respond to Hasan with facts, as I did in a Tweet, but because I am “white,” and because I cannot escape my own whiteness, I cannot escape my complicity in the Genesis myths of those who have reified Theory into absolute Truth. Therefore, Hasan — having adopted, however temporarily, the armor of the Social Justice warrior — is under no obligation to answer criticisms. To question is to commit violence. To criticize is to oppress. What this amounts to is a cult that functions as a fundamentalist religion. And Mehdi Hasan likes to be tithed. Accordingly, he lies as easily as he breathes. And he has all the remorse of a sociopath.

For the record, Hasan’s faux-outraged quip seeks to position the US and Israel as uniquely oppressive — which requires his bracketing the history both of US slavery and the formulation of Israel, which as a new country was immediately attacked by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and expeditionary forces from Iraq. Too, by 1821, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade had ended — and the US and Britain, two predominantly white countries, became the first and only two nations to end slavery on moral grounds and with volition, with the US engaging in a bloody Civil War to stop the practice. It was the Arab world that continued to import African slaves in the millions into the Middle East long after the Western world had ceased buying Black Africans from mostly Black Africans, who were responsible for collecting and trafficking weaker Black Africans for profit.

For Hasan, though, repeating the narratives — and using that repetition to aid in the manufacturing of historical consensus — is the primary aim, so inconvenient facts serve as little impediment to his rhetorical practices. He is a liar; but his lies serve the greater Truth the Social Justice Movement asserts as universal.

If it seems strange that Theory, which began as an attack on the universal and the individual, has found its most aggressive footing in epistemic absolutism and the increasingly atomized collection of identity markers that are said to construct each of us, that’s because it is. But it was also inevitable that it would become all that it sought to criticize, and to do so with more implicit violence to the experience of being human than anything it thought to replace. It is a dehumanizing philosophy that has become a totalitarian political movement.

And Mehdi Hasan, with his brown face and his claim to Otherness, is happy to give it succor as long as it benefits him. If it takes an increasingly dangerous attempt to overthrow the social order to collect a few more shekels, Hasan is willing to compromise any principle he may have once held. He’s an opportunist of the most vile sort, and a thinker of the lowest order. He is every bit as despicable as he is fraudulent.

If I had any say in the matter, I’d revoke his US citizenship; and then I’d counsel Great Britain to do the same. Mehdi Hasan doesn’t belong on television lecturing us; his more rightful place is smeared on the torn bottom of a homeless man’s shoe, where eventually he may be scraped off on a curb should the smell grow too foul.

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Buy me a cup of coffee? Lunch? A sports car?