Boots, The Ginger, forgiveness

In the beloved cult Canadiana TV show Letterkenny, a crude comedy set in small-town Ontario with an unexpected moral core, is a running joke. There’s a rumour that some guys in town, Boots and The Ginger, fucked an ostrich.

The rumour inspires horrified fascination every time Boots and The Ginger come up—We don’t KNOW they did it. How could they even do it? We’re hearing it was a sick ostrich. Allegedly. You’d need two guys. Etc.

Recall Ken White’s The Rule of Goats:

“Boots, The Ginger, and forgiveness” draws on a the same joke that inspired The Rule of Goats: A guy with a long list of accomplishments fucks a goat. From that day on, no matter what else he did or does, people remember him as the goat fucker.

Boots and The Ginger teach us that if you fucked an ostrich, the normal reaction you should expect people to have is to think about that ostrich when they think about you.

People who make a mistake have to deal with the doubt that their mistake inspires in others. Especially if they made a mistake that calls their character, allegiance, and/or motives into question. It’s reasonable to think of this as an ongoing demand and not a one-time thing. You can't just apologize and move on if you want to be part of the gang.

Someone who made a mistake is at least partly responsible for overcoming the fact that people hear their name and think of their metaphorical ostrich. It is not reasonable—and it’s not realistic—to demand that people just forget the ostrich and let the past be the past.

This is, crucially, not the same as saying someone can’t be forgiven.

Redemption is really important. It takes work and that work is worth it. Not everyone can or will do that work. Most people don’t have the time or inclination for deep dives into bad behaviour. They need signals from those of us who do.

We also need to remember that redemption is something that smart, sophisticated bad actors will take advantage of. Very often, they will not tell you who they are. We should expect them to exploit undemanding forgiveness.

Hanania’s ostrich

Richard Hanania, in case you’ve missed this, is a political commentator (I guess). His pseudonymous work as Richard Hoste for Richard Spencer’s “AlternativeRight” website in the early 2010s was the subject of an exposé in August 2023. I wrote for Liberal Currents about Hanania shortly afterwards, contrasting his story with Adrianne Black (born Derek Black), a prominent former white nationalist.

Black famously broke from her former life and her family, including her father, Donald Black (who started the white nationalist website Stormfront) and godfather, David Duke.

After she renounced white nationalism, Black not only told her story but gave interviews and lectures. She worked to build understanding and awareness of white nationalism as something understandable and organized for which there is sympathy. She demanded we reckon with it as something to which smart people are emotionally attached and intellectually committed. This meant taking ownership of and explaining her former beliefs and how she justified them. It meant explaining that we can't assume that good wins. The purpose of this work was to help people understand white nationalism and how to fight it. She said:

I also mention in Deradicalizing the Center the story of Katie McHugh, an ex-alt-righter whose life had been blown up by her time in the alt-right. She, too, was speaking up to raise awareness of how ordinary people could get pulled into the movement, how dangerous she believed it was, how to spot and counter it. She made an appeal to those who were still in to get out. It wasn’t in vain! As I mention in Liberal Currents, several libertarian organizations took stock and made admirable changes based on her story, which touched the libertarian world.

Wait. Is it libertarian story time?
OK.

Contrast Black and McHugh with Jeffrey Tucker.

Back in 2014, Jeff Tucker made a splash with his article Against Libertarian Brutalism.

It was splashy because Tucker had earlier been involved in the Mises Institute and worked with Lew Rockwell during the days of the Ron Paul and Rothbard-Rockwell Report newsletters. He had been associated with the neoconfederate League of the South (he denied membership). After “Against Libertarian Brutalism”, he was writing for, working, and travelling in more respectable libertarian circles (Reagan fusionist, not Pat Buchanan fusionist, to borrow a distinction from Cory Massimino).

I am sure I’m not the only one who wanted Tucker to do what Black and McHugh did. After Charlottesville, I asked people who had known him for a long time—will he talk to us about that world? Will he tell us how they work, what they’re thinking? Why does anyone who likes Hans Hermann Hoppe or Jared Taylor think they believe what we say we believe? What can we say to turn people away from the far right? To turn the far right away from us?

Again and again, I got the same answer: That brutalism piece shows he’s changed. We have to be willing to give people another chance. We have to let the past be the past. But we didn’t just accept Tucker. We lifted him up.

And we got played. By 2022, Tucker was (among other things) on Fox News pretending to be a random visitor to Monticello to complain that it’s woke for tour guides to talk about slavery on tours of Thomas Jefferson’s slave plantation. He’d rebranded “libertarian brutalism” as libertarianism that recognized that Covid-19 is a dangerous disease that required us to act on behalf of one another. Now he bashes immigration and fawns over MAGA. He’s returned to form.

When I watched Richard Hanania’s unmasking, I saw Jeff Tucker, not Adrianne Black. I didn’t see someone using their experience to make the far right understandable, to protect those who might fall for the same thing, to fight those looking to radicalize others. Hanania wrote his white nationalist chapter off as a stupid mistake of his youth (he was 24 and at Chicago Law but whatever). He wanted to let the past be the past.

Forgiveness is worth the effort

The thing is that redemption is important. Letting people join our side is important. We need a way to approach forgiveness in a world with bad actors.

We need to remember (waves small Canadian flag) Boots and The Ginger.

If we think of forgiveness as a two-way street, then we can expect people who have given us reasons not to trust them to work to earn our trust. The rest of us assess those efforts while remembering the importance of genuine redemption as motivation. This can even be (guardedly) collaborative. It is worth working at and it is something worth taking risks for. It is something we need as part of building a coalition to defend liberalism.

It has not even been two years since Hanania was tweeting about needing more brutal policing for Black people and being exposed for supporting eugenics and opposing race-mixing. Yet Hanania is being hosted by Vox and welcoming Atlantic writers to his podcast. Hanania not dealing with his ostrich problem, but others are avoiding it, too.

A common rejoinder if you bring up Hanania’s past is that he is anti-Trump now. And he seems to be! But so is Richard Spencer.* Hanania is also pro-trans (trans people, he says, are high-IQ and so good and deserving)—and hey, I’m on the record saying that gender is a political sorting issue. I can buy that if he’s committed to supporting trans people, even for weird reasons, he can end up on the right side of a big tent.

This defence of trans people is otherwise not reassuring. IQ was also at the root of Richard Hoste’s arguments for racism and eugenics. Adrianne Black tried to tell us years ago that ”race science” tries to tie IQ differences to racial ancestry to cloak and legitimize racial discrimination. Besides, whether racial or otherwise, ”group” IQ science is junk science. It’s no more meaningful for LGBTQ+ folks than it is when applied to races. People deserve protection not because of their IQ, but because of their humanity.

Hanania is also the guy still being profiled because of his work to make DEI a bad word through his book(!) advocating for victory over wokeness by overturning Civil Rights policies and legislation. Hanania, a one-time acolyte of 2017’s most famous Nazi-saluter, is also back in 2025 to explain the logic behind…Nazi saluters*.

Most recently, he argued for what he sees as social catharsis from the death penalty as a method to keep society from becoming “too gay” (h/t Mike Brock). Once again, he is carving up humanity, presenting a world where some are deserving some should be (in this case, literally!) sacrificed for the good of society. He’s only haggling over who gets what treatment.

It’s not like Hanania is completely unrepentant. But the haste to get back to the way things were feels too much like unwillingness to hold up his side of the redemption bargain. I’m glad to have him defect from the opposition, but if his pitch is, “Trust me, I’m not like that anymore”, I do not trust him. I don’t know why anyone would.

He isn't helping us fight the world he fell into. He’s showing us why he was vulnerable to it. He's saying, “I'm still like that, and trust me.” There’s no reason to elevate this guy.

In the end, Boots and The Ginger don’t do the work to be brought back into polite company. Wayne and the crew will occasionally call on Boots and The Ginger in case of emergency—they need muscle in a brawl and there aren’t good alternatives. Boots and The Ginger are sometimes useful. But they’re still gross, and everyone still knows it.

Richard Hanania might be benign going forward. That would be great. But (hopefully) he doesn’t matter that much. It’s the inability or unwillingness to deal with Hanania’s history that should worry us.

——

*Obviously, I do not trust Richard Spencer. He is, first of all, still horrific, and there are reasons that someone still on the far right would say they supported Kamala Harris—accelerationism, trolling, whatever. But Hanania worked for this guy!

*I am not a Free Press subscriber, so I can’t see what’s below the paywall. Maybe under there, it says that there is no excuse for normalizing the most far-right gestures while far-right figures command the most powerful government in the world. That would be great. Hiding it way down behind the paywall would also be a terrible way to show people like me that we can trust Richard Hanania to be on our side if they’re put to the test.