A few quotes I wanna speak on:

Richard Hanania specifically was coming, and Hanania was one of the several speakers cited in the Guardian article as like a, person who had like a troubled background.

I just think Hanania himself as a person has been, growing. He recently voiced strong support for the Shrimp welfare project.

I think it’s heavy downplaying—potentially even disingenuous—to leave racism out of the discussion when talking about Hanania. It’s a demonstrable fact that he wrote for neo-Nazi and white supremacist organisations in the past, but when Austin talks about him ‘growing’, it’s not that he has denounced this work (FWIW, he has), but that he now supports animal welfare. It’s a bit of a non sequitur, nobody is arguing he used to be racist against shrimp?

it is the case that we care a lot about things that are outside the traditional overton window, you might say, like modifying, genetics of, embryos, for example, or like doing screening on embryos. It's like a kind of thing that we had people come and talk about, and sometimes it's very controversial

The same goes for the other speakers. They aren’t controversial because of their opinions on embryo selection. They are controversial because they routinely endorse human biodiversity. Austin knows this, because all of the controversy around Manifest was about the topic of human biodiversity.

I think it is probably the case that like, because of the speakers, we chose some people who are more on the, oh, I want to like, argue about race. thought oh, this is the conference for me

I'm worried actually about something like an evaporative cooling effect where people who are more sensitive to this, stop showing up to manifests and people who feel like, oh yeah, I want to argue about, I do, things do show up.

Evidently, Austin understands something about the dynamics here. But the language such as ‘people who are more sensitive to this’ feels indicative that he doesn’t believe that the racism is the problem; rather, it is the reactions of a particular profile of person.

I don’t feel like Austin has internalised that people aren’t merely offended or sensitive to racism; they are harmed by it, and want to both avoid spaces that cause them harm, and prevent future harm caused by spreading those ideas. The difference is that offence is a reaction that you can behaviourally train yourself out of, but harm is a thing that is done to you.

More broadly, Austin repeatedly speaks about trade-offs between ‘winning’ (success, sometimes framed as harmony) and ‘standing up for what’s right’, which is sometimes framed as a form of truth-seeking. But this implicitly frames inquiry into and discussion of human biodiversity as a form of truth-seeking. David Thorstad has already written at length about why that’s harmful, so I’ll defer to his work on that.