Appearance on Tucker, 2/14/22

I was on Tucker last night, talking about the supposed “democracy” in Ukraine that they tell us Americans have a duty to support.

Richard Hanania @RichardHanania

You already know Ukraine doesn’t matter to the US, it’s also important to know there’s no moral case for supporting Ukraine either. A country that arrests the opposition and bans media in an entire language is no “democracy.” Here’s me on @TuckerCarlson.

When Tucker does anti-war segments, it always triggers the Blob, but I don’t expect this one to get a lot of attention from this crowd because, with the exception of one error mentioned below, everything I said was indisputable. It’s hard to say something is “Russian propaganda” when you’re just quoting the Western press. Here is a story on the language law from Radio Free Europe of all places, and a thread of an article from Time. Ukraine is not even a democracy according to Freedom House, which has historically been run by former State Department and CIA officials. What’s happening in Ukraine is clearly pretty bad, and we see that just from looking at the English language press, which has an ideological bias towards downplaying what is happening.

The one mistake I made was when I said that former president Petro Poroshenko was under house arrest. He is indeed going on trial for treason, but is still free for now. Viktor Medvedchuk, the major backer of the opposition party, is the one under house arrest. Ukraine prosecutes so many opposition figures it’s hard to keep track, but I regret the error.

In my reflections on 2021, I wrote the following about how Tucker’s show inspired me to lose weight.

On the health front, I lost about 40 pounds this year. I was always fat growing up, and reached about 210 as a teen, before a rapid drop to around 160 when I was around 17 (thanks “bullying,” which kids aren’t allowed to do anymore apparently). I’ve been yo-yoing between 160 and 210 my entire adult life, being skinnier when I was motivated to eat less, like starting a new job or graduate program, and getting fatter when I was comfortable in life. For the last several years, life has been good, so I’ve been closer to 210, but then I got three minutes on Tucker over the summer. I thought I did a good job, but my face looked very fat, and I decided that if I was going to have more TV appearances I was going to need to lose weight in order not to be filled with self-loathing. Now I’m at around 170, but unfortunately Tucker has not invited me back on yet, so maybe I will eat more ice cream in 2022.

Here are screenshots of what I look liked on TV at 210 in June, and at 170 last night.

The lesson here is don’t be fat. Seriously, just don’t. If you can tolerate being fat, it’s only because you’re being dishonest with yourself about how much better you’d look skinny and how much more everyone would like you.

Being on Tucker allowed me to resolve my first prediction market, which I closed about half an hour after I was on TV when it was still at 82 cents. See the remaining markets here. Congrats to those who won, but people left free money on the table. Actually they didn’t, because Manifold Markets is not yet letting people play for real money, and this demonstrates the problem with markets when nothing is on the line but bragging rights. I really like the website though and hope to do more with it in the future, but every market creator needs to find a way to overcome this problem. For those in the policy arena, you can do a lot of good by working to change the laws here, as few things are as important as creating better systems for producing accurate knowledge.