Who is White Supremacist Richard Hanania? Tikvah Fund's Favorite White Supremacist Curtis Yarvin Will Tell You!
David Shasha
Three Questions for Richard Hanania
By: Curtis Yarvin
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ox8HLTimoMgollt5AIjS5l-CqwBxAx0E-ai4N8alI5g/edit
Richard Hanania used to suck—he tells us so himself. This is the hardest kind of post to write. And if I do say so myself—not having anything to hide, since I never tried to protect my pseudonymity—I think he does as good a job with it as anyone ever has:
Recently, it’s been revealed that over a decade ago I held many beliefs that, as my current writing makes clear, I now find repulsive.
I sympathize. I did not write stuff like Richard wrote—standard fare for the early “alt-right”—but I certainly read it. I even learned from it. For saying I was “not allergic to white nationalism”—which I am not, anymore than I am allergic to Ukrainian nationalism, Turkish nationalism, or Mongolian nationalism, let alone Zionism, Ras Tafari or the Juggalo Nation—I have been, and surely will be again in future, beaten up by the same sweet, lovely people who are trying to beat up Richard Hanania right now. So be it. Sweet friends, I’m still here. So are you! We all have our parts to play.
I hope these sweet people fail. I hope Richard keeps his book deal with HarperCollins, and all his nervous but good-hearted moderate institutional allies. In fact, I will go and pre-order a copy of his book right now. Health and long life to his foundation! Cheers to the Salem Center at UT Austin! Let us raise our glasses to Bryan Caplan! We all have our parts to play.
Yet I am not allergic to our sweet friends. My grandfather was an American Stalinist—could I be allergic to him? When he marched into Germany, he looted a copy of history’s most notorious children’s book. Today, in 2023, it lives next to my Little Red Book and my portrait of Robert E. Lee. Anyone who could be an “anti-fascist” could be a fascist—Hitler said that some of his best stormtroopers were the ex-KPD men. And some of the DDR’s best apparatchiks were ex-NSDAP men. Worms always turn.
Nor do our “classical liberals”—as we’ll see—have any excuse for smugness about these old “ideologies.” Friends, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart—including yours. The most dangerous men are those who deny this—those who think themselves utterly incapable of evil. Hitler himself thought this way! Everything our historians think they know about the Holocaust is thoroughly true. And almost everything else about that war that seems like it could be a lie, is.
History is not a Marvel movie. Nothing in the human story is alien or “repulsive” to me. To claim to be “repulsed,” to be “allergic,” is true or false. If it is false, it is a lie—it is shameful to let your enemies force you into a lie. If it is true, it is a confession of moral and philosophical smallness. As a philosopher, you cannot defeat your enemies—you can only exceed them. It is sad to let them trap you in so little a box.
If you think about it for five seconds, you will realize that each side in a war is blind to some truth, some vision of the good, seen clearly by its enemies. No one but a few psychopaths would sign up for a war of evil against good. Nothing could ever happen this way. Nothing ever did.
Hanania, who was and I hope still is on track to being a Respected Public Intellectual (a good gig, but don’t expect anyone to be reading your books in 20 years, let alone 50), writes eloquently of his youthful follies and the motivation behind them:
When I try to reconstruct my emotional status and reasoning of 12-15 years ago, a few things stand out. First, there was the desire to just adopt a posture that was the polar opposite of those I considered political enemies. So if liberals lied a lot about race, I needed to speak “harsh truths,” without much careful thinking about whether I was actually getting at truth or simply being similarly dogmatic. If they denied the overwhelming evidence in favor of heredity being important for individual outcomes, then I had to be a caricature of a genetic determinist. They required PC-speak, so my tone of course needed to be as offensive as possible.
When you do this—when you inhabit your enemy’s caricature of their enemy—you are living in their frame. This is especially true when you let them trap you into a lie, like Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial is the heroin of history—it is almost impossible to escape from. It feels incredibly right and is completely wrong. They are strong enough to lie—you are not. Read some real history instead.
There is even a case that the Holocaust itself was a result of this error—that in World War II, the Germans inhabited the false caricature of the “Hun” that Allied World War I propaganda created. When the Hun was a lie, it was in all the papers. When Hitler made the lie come true—the Times covered it up. Was that good for the Jews?
In the 1920s, the victorious democrats offered the Germans a choice between Anglo-American liberalism and its opposite—its opposite, as defined by Anglo-American liberalism. Its opposite—the Hun. Not satisfied with their Weimar experience, the Germans chose—its opposite. Was that good for the Jews? And yet—
Léon Degrelle—of whom Hitler said, “Had I had a son, I would have wanted him to be Degrelle”—denied the Holocaust for 40 years. He was a right-wing Belgian political intellectual who wound up as a general in the Waffen-SS. In 1945 he escaped to Spain in a stolen plane. He died in 1984. Are you afraid to read his World War II memoir? Can you only exist inside your little, little box? “Quite an experience, to live in fear.” Watch these videos, in order.
What would you say to Degrelle? Could you expand his frame? I’m not sure I could—but I know how I would try. Here is the text of his speech—on the same website that young Hanania wrote for. Are there any sentences you agree with? Are there any that Hanania’s cancellers would agree with? Turn off the Marvel movie. Could you argue with a Nazi? Or would you just have to kill him? If the latter—what kind of “small-l liberal” are you, really?
Yes, the reasons why the early “alt-right” that gave us “Richard Hoste” drew so many young and talented people, often to their later sorrow, to its obscure blogs and forums, were partly pathological. They were not entirely pathological. The reasons why the National Socialist German Workers’ Party drew so many young and talented people, generally to their later sorrow, to its Nietzschean crooked cross, were also partly pathological. They were not entirely pathological. Once you dismiss them as entirely pathological, you are living within a lie, a box, a false history you can never escape. The cure for lies is never, ever more lies.
When you act out as the “heel” in your enemy’s kayfabe narrative, you are doing them far more of a service than if you merely served them. You are, in fact, a cuck. However—when you do merely serve them, or even if you lie and pretend to serve them, or even if you do not serve them but only live, and encourage others to live, in their little box—you are also a cuck.
This is my problem with Richard Hanania. Across his journey from white nationalism to “small-l liberalism,” nothing about Hanania has changed. He has not just cucked. He was always a cuck. He was a cuck then and he is a cuck now. He sucked then, and he sucks now. He is one of the best young Respected Public Intellectuals working today—he may even be the best. But that says more about now than about him—about our stunted life in this little box.
And can he learn and grow and change? Sure. Hasn’t he already shown us that? He has. Peace and best wishes, Richard. Never stop thinking—never stop fighting. Most people who suck only suck because they set the bar too low. Dream a bigger dream! Dream of something marvelous… dream of something outside the box.
But if he is tempted to contest this judgment—let him answer some hard questions. Richard:
Are your takes always sincere?
I ask because you said this on Brian Chau’s podcast (everyone should subscribe):
RH: You can build a faction or you can build a movement that agrees with you. Or you can walk around, try to move every other movement, slightly, incrementally towards your preferences, right? You could do sort of what I’m trying to do, like make a right wing that’s less religious and less, like sort of, you know, prole.
And maybe to the extent that I can influence EA’s, you know, make them like sort of less woke and then sent back and influence liberals, you know, make them less woke and maybe see the good things and avoid their most harmful impulses.
I think that’s also a strategy that people should think of or maybe just do one of these. I mean, to do all these things is very ambitious. But to do it for like 1 or 2 groups I think is is plenty for most people.
BC: I don’t know. That seems very unsatisfying to me. I don't know why. Maybe it's just a kind of personality type thing.
RH: You want to be like the big man, like the philosopher who just comes down from the mountain and, like, gives the world, like, the commandments and have everyone.
BC: Not necessarily the philosopher. I want to be the follower. I just want this movement to exist.
RH: You want the joy of fighting for a righteous cause. Not to have to hold your nose and say these people are slightly better on average than these other people. I get it. I mean, the libertarians are close. I mean, they’re close enough to me that I can, in good faith, support most libertarian movements and causes and individuals. So whatever. Close enough.
BC: What libertarian individuals? Like, Paul Ryan?
RH: Paul Ryan’s cool. I like Paul Ryan.
BC: I don’t.
RH: [Laughs.] Come after me. I don’t care.
BC: [Laughs.] I don’t actually know. I wasn’t paying attention back then. I don’t really know—
RH: Paul Ryan’s passion in life is ending the gerontocracy, cutting Social Security and Medicare. That’s all you need to know.
It is a terrible thing to be an intellectual in a world ruled by the intellect. The feeling of having an impact is dizzying, disorienting, terrifying. Murray Rothbard—one of the 20th century’s greatest intellectuals, the inventor of modern libertarianism—once put forth “Rothbard’s Law:” that every intellectual spends the most time on the subjects he is worst about. And to prove it, Rothbard, when his intellectual power became so manifest that he felt that terrible sensation of impact, thrashed around between the John Birch Society, the Black Panthers, and the Libertarian Party. Sad!
J.R.R. Tolkien’s books are among the most lasting works of the 20th century not just because they appeal to children, but because their appeal to children runs parallel to moral themes that even a middle-aged man has to sweat when grappling with. And no question in his work is greater and more pregnant than the question of the Ring’s corrupting power—and why Gandalf or Elrond doesn’t just set himself up as the anti-Sauron, an FDR or Churchill to Sauron’s Hitler. With… Stalin as Saruman? Tolkien, of course, always denied that his epic was an allegory. But you gotta wonder.
When Richard Hanania, who had long since stopped being “Richard Hoste,” who had even gotten laid, realized that the combination of his talent and his credentials could be compelling to more than just the readers of Counter-Currents, he felt what Bilbo felt when he found the Ring of Gyges. He felt the power to matter.
He realized that if his Substack posts were compelling enough, if his foundation got enough media hits, he could even influence policy—he could maybe drive legislation—he might even bend the ear of Paul Ryan. Hanania likes to cite Robert Trivers’ work on motivated cognition and self-deception. Physician, heal thyself.
Motivated cognition is a terrible end for a true philosopher. Especially now, Richard Hanania will never, ever speak to Paul Ryan. Not that Paul Ryan even still matters. Not that, as anything like a statesman—as if any such thing existed in our benighted age—Hanania, for all his errors, is far beyond Paul Ryan. But—
What should a philosopher do? What should a shoemaker do? A shoemaker should make shoes. Fortunately, the world is not run by shoemakers. Shoemakers have never found the Ring of Power. Shoemakers do not become more important if they can get men to wear long pointy shoes. So the shoemaker has one job: to make good shoes at a good price. And men’s feet do not look like carrots and they do not trip over their toes.
In my view, a philosopher should make philosophy. He should be sincere. He should tell the truth as he sees it. He should not be a troll. He should not be a shill. Trolls are cucks, in a backward way. Shills are just cucks. A politician, like Paul Ryan, does not have opinions; he has positions. A philosopher, like Richard Hanania should be, does not have positions; he has opinions. But a Respected Public Intellectual…
When I started writing on the Internet 15 years ago, I had no audience and no impact. No one cared what I thought and I liked it that way. All I had was opinions. Now I have an audience—but I still try to just have opinions. I am not a Respected Public Intellectual and I will never be one, insh’Allah. And my takes are always sincere. Why else would I be praising Léon Degrelle? Am I being bribed with secret Nazi gold?
Yet I do live in the real world. But I have noticed that in the real world, the nominal “impact” of bending Paul Ryan’s ear, or whatever, which is the sad currency of the Respected Public Intellectual, is fool’s gold. Everyone takes it seriously and pretends it is real. Sometimes, rarely, it is slightly real. Generally everyone just pretends, and the pyrite vanishes in a bookseller’s season. Who reads the Respected Public Intellectuals of the ‘70s, the ‘80s, the ‘90s?
No, the philosopher who wants a real impact should be… a philosopher. Often he will go entirely unread in his time—often he will have to wait not until he is discovered, but until he is rediscovered. “A prophet has no honor in his own country.” But then his impact will not be a trickle, but a tsunami—and his descendants (if their copyright survives) will have the royalty stream of a Marx, a Rand, a Plato. He will be dead—but in his life, he will have his honor. Try it, Richard. You really are better than this.
Are you actually a classical liberal?
I ask because, in your apology, you segue directly from:
The more I looked at the data, the more I became convinced that liberalism simply worked. Steve Pinker’s books of the last decade are irrefutable on this point. Nonetheless, many pundits and intellectuals continue to argue that what we need is not sensible reform—for example, what I argue should be done with civil rights law—but an overthrowing of the entire system and a move to a new “postliberal” order. I’m convinced that most of them are just projecting their personal unhappiness onto the rest of the world, just as I once did.
To:
If the worry is that migrants might vote for socialism or commit crimes, then the answer is not to exclude people from society or otherwise discriminate against them based on group averages, but to attack socialism and crime directly. The Bukele miracle saw an order of magnitude drop in the murder rate in El Salvador within a few years, and it did not involve changing the demographics of the country.
No. But it did not involve classical liberalism, either!
In fact, the “Bukele miracle” involved a complete overthrow of the entire system of classical liberalism—of jurisprudential protection of human rights. It even involved arresting journalists! Ay de mi! Classical liberalism, it turned out, was the primary mutation that gave El Salvador a murder rate near 100 per 100,000. Cancel it with the stroke of a pen—and the nation’s cancer is cured. Bukele should get the Nobel.
Pinker has simply oversampled WEIRDness. Liberalism “simply works” in Iceland. Anything would work in (21st-century) Iceland. Iceland is roughly as hard to govern as Burning Man. It is not only postpolitical—it is post-human. Nietzsche’s Last Man is a natural libertarian and needs no government at all—just condoms, seed oils and weed.
But in the rest of the world—the world that is still human—normal human politics still operates, and Aristotle has not been superseded by Steven Pinker. In the rest of the world, which we call the Third World, the replacement of preliberal political philosophy with liberal political philosophy has a name. We call it decolonialization.
When we count the violent deaths that we can attribute to this process—start with the Partition of India, and work forward—we soon surpass the Holocaust. If we broaden it to encompass all the applications of Western political philosophy to previously nonliberal societies—thus folding in the whole Black Book of Communism—we are easily in nine figures of accelerated human mortality.
Moreover, look at the Third World today! While the revolutionary period of the 20th century has largely burned out, vast swaths of the globe—lacking the lucky genius of a Bukele or a Kagame—are mired in chaotic, corrupt, incompetent government. Seventy years ago, TIME Magazine called the Belgian Congo “a tropical cornucopia”:
The Belgians compare the Congo with the state of Texas, though in fact the Congo is bigger and far richer in its natural resources. The Congo's gross national product has tripled since 1939. Money is plentiful. Belgian investors take more than $50 million a year in dividends alone. Once the Congo depended exclusively on mining and farming; today it manufactures ships, shoes, cigarettes, chemicals, explosives and photographic film. With its immense reserves of hydroelectric power (a fifth of the world's total), the Belgians expect the Congo to become "the processing plant for all Africa."
Look at it now! What substance was added to the Petri dish, but the magic elixir of Dr. Pinker? Our virologists did a better job of stopping bat coronaviruses, than our liberal political scientists at bringing peace, order and human rights. Does anyone have eyes?
Today, there is no better ongoing natural experiment in the combination of normal, non-WEIRD human populations with a classical liberal, British-derived system of government, than the beautiful “Rainbow Nation” of South Africa. Richard, I encourage you to read the memoir of liberal Afrikaner André de Ruyter, who for three years had the misfortune of being the CEO of Eskom, South Africa’s electricity company. You’ll see why the power is out 8 hours a day.
You talk about “migrants” without considering the legacy systems, old 20th-century laws that no one really believes in anymore, that hold back the real pressures of human migration. As you know, Richard, being a classical liberal, no person is illegal. Your human rights as a person do not depend on the GPS coordinates at which your mother squeezed you out. How could they? Isn’t this just a blatant proxy for racism? How repulsive…
By 2050, there will be 2 billion Africans. What percentage of these people would make the rational decision to exercise their human right to move to North America? 25% seems low. What does it actually cost to transport a human being across the Atlantic? What would be the container-ship fare for this new Middle Passage? Breathes there an African so broke that he can’t afford a couple hundred bucks to move to paradise?
Imagine the country you now live in. Add 500 million African immigrants, and you will see why South Africa in the 2020s looks like a piece of the future that fell into the present—your future, Richard, and mine. And our children’s:
What’s especially hilarious is that the founding prophet of true 19th-century classical liberalism, none other than John Stuart Mill, understood this perfectly. As he wrote: “I myself always have been for a good stout despotism, for governing Ireland like India.” John Stuart Mill: repulsive? Fascist? Racist?
Richard—please comment. How did Mill go so wrong? How, as a “classical liberal,” do you “attack socialism and crime”—not just in Iceland or Vermont, but in Louisiana or South Africa? How, as a data-driven social scientist, considering the result of the last 30 years, would you have voted in the last illiberal election in South Africa, in 1994?
Do you actually expect your therapies to work?
As a monarchist, I have an easy solution to the question of government. People always admit that the best government is a good king—then ask how we will get a good king. The answer is easy: we should replace our current oligarchy with Frederick the Great.
Then these people ask me how we can re-animate Frederick the Great. I admit that this is a research problem. Modern medicine has made great strides, however. Maybe he can be cloned from dirt in his tomb? Maybe something something AI?
Our Respectable Public Intellectuals love to propose “solutions” that rely on similar levels of magical thinking. To wit, Hanania:
An anti-wokeness agenda would involve, at the very least,
1) Eliminating disparate impact, making the law require evidence of intentional discrimination.
2) Getting rid of the concept of hostile work environment, or defining it in extremely narrow and explicit terms, making sure that it does not restrict political or religious speech.
3) Repealing the executive orders that created and expanded affirmative action among government contractors and the federal workforce.
One reason to be optimistic is that much of this work can be done without having to pass laws, which is almost impossible to do on controversial issues in the current environment, but through the executive branch and the courts.
Through the courts! In fact, the “concept of disparate impact” does not exist in civil-rights law—nor does “affirmative action.” These laws are entirely color-blind. The legislators who wrote them were perfectly clear:
Senator Hubert Humphrey said that the bill “would prohibit preferential treatment for any particular group,” and then promised that if the bill had any language “which provides that the employer will have to hire on the basis of a percentage or quota related to quotas... I will start eating the pages.”
Quotas happened. American race communism (ARC) was justified—through the courts!—on the basis of “diversity.” Senator Humphrey kept eating his steaks.
Moreover, the enormous generational political effort required to put six Republican justices on the Supreme Court has had zero effect. Race quotas in college admissions will remain—as they remain in California, which has banned them. The Court has just required colleges to stop asking students about their race. So the students have to tell. We have merely added another layer of mendacity and hypocrisy to the septic tank.
By treating “the law” and “the courts” as automatic and impartial machines above sovereignty and power, Hanania is betraying the uselessness of his political science PhD. (Has he even read the Italian School?) He is asking his gullible readers to labor long and bring forth another mouse—by passing a new law which declares that the old law means what it has already said for the last 60 years!
And why have the Republican justices—after such long labor—delivered no more than a slap on the wrist to American race communism? After saying such clear and true and encouraging things, like “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race?” Surely when the Chief Justice of the United States, in his august black robe, tells us that 2+2=4, we can all hold up… four fingers?
Au contraire. The Chief Justice of the United States is not stupid. He knows that there is no way to end race communism with a court order. The fact that it took over the country—the public sector and the private sector; federal, state, local and corporate—not only without any legal approval, but directly in contradiction to civil-rights law—which not only is colorblind, but requires colorblindness—tells us that no law and no court order has the power to defeat this terrible force.
From a political-science perspective, the most important decision in the history of America is Dred Scott, because Dred Scott established that courts are not above power. The goal of the Dred Scott majority was frankly political: to prevent the Civil War by stopping the antislavery movement. Narrator: it didn’t work.
As Stalin said: “how many divisions does the Pope have?” Even when Republicans control the Supreme Court, there is no way for them to punish lower courts. They can only issue a decision at a time. Masterpiece Cakeshop’s owner, even after winning his glorious 7-2 victory, is still being litigated into oblivion.
The Supreme Court can unleash the power of a movement with the will and force to rule. Civil-rights law, which was written to confirm a uniformly color-blind America, could unleash the power of race communism. No law and no court has a thousandth of the power it would take to put this regime back in the box.
Chief Justice Roberts, a crafty and realistic fellow, understands this perfectly. He might want to end race communism, but he really doesn’t want to try to do it and fail—and the harder he tries, the worse he will look. So much for “sensible reform.”
How can we imagine this “sensible reform” being implemented? Sweet friends: please do not quote me out of context. I am not proposing this, but reducing it to absurdity. Let us imagine ending wokeness in the wrong way—which would still not work, but would work better than anything Hanania or Rufo can imagine.
We would take a tip from the Canadians—or for that matter, the Coloradans—and set up a parallel system of kangaroo courts. These organizations would be staffed by fanatical classical liberals—or, since there is inherently no such thing as a fanatical classical liberal, just fanatical Christian racists (if enough of these can still be found), or men’s rights activists, or all of the above—this would be an intersectional fascism. or just straight-up white supremacy, or something. These Sondergerichten would be empowered to fine any company, school, or agency practicing race-based hiring, admissions, etc—as an administrative punishment reviewable, of course, by the courts.
Does this feel retarded? Of course it feels retarded, because it is still using oligarchic methods to defeat oligarchy. It would probably still fail. Oligarchies want to oligarchy. The classical liberals, or racists, or whoever, would lack the energy and devotion of their prog enemies. Sooner or later they would get owned, and the kangaroo courts would turn into just what they are now. No reform is possible—even retarded reform.
I prefer Roberts to Hanania, Chris Rufo, and the rest of this new generation of pundits who imagine that a new oligarchy can displace an old oligarchy. Roberts at least knows he is a grifter—or, at least, knows his decisions are purely symbolic. Perhaps he hopes that this symbolism will produce some kind of intellectual leadership around which some new power will coalesce—but he knows he does not have the power to really act. This makes him useless, but at least not dangerous.
Richard—are you sincere? Do you believe “wokeness” can actually be rolled back by this kind of “sensible reform?” I have trouble deciding whether I prefer a world in which you, and your type of Respectable Public Intellectual, is clueless, or insincere. Whichever world this one is—it is the world we live in.
What do I think would work? I suspect that Roberts, Hanania and Rufo would agree with Machiavelli on what would work—absolute monarchy:
To found a new republic, or to reform entirely the old institutions of an existing one, must be the work of one man only.
As I have often said, America has only one problem: kinglessness. The problem with America is all the Americans who think they understand political science better than Machiavelli. Whenever you see any problem with American governance—from a free-range lunatic to a gain-of-function experiment, from a land war in Asia to a preteen sex-change clinic—the ultimate cause is always the same: the incomplete memetic propagation of Chapter IX of the Discourses on The First Ten Books of Titus Livius.
In an absolute monarchy, there is no need for oligarchical kangaroo courts. The king is the head of all agencies, the CEO of all corporations, the dean of all universities. Nothing will prosper which violates his will—anymore than white supremacy can prosper at Harvard. He does not even need to pretend to have a process for canceling American race communism—its survival at any level is just a management failure, as nakedly inappropriate as salesmen taking kickbacks, teachers selling A’s, or janitors stealing office supplies.
By definition, an absolute monarchy has no need for laws in the oligarchic sense—the king is above the law. There is no court above the king, who is the sole chief judge—a Supreme Court of one. More subtly, an absolute monarchy has no need for a virtuous and enlightened elite—only a talented and capable elite. Power in a monarchy flows from the top down, not the bottom up. Napoleon was neither radical nor reactionary; nor did he care about the ideology or religion of his civil servants, or what side they had been on in the Revolution. He cared only whether they could do their jobs.
The great mistake of the “anti-woke” pundits of the 2020s is that, living as they do in an oligarchy which pretends to be a democracy, they cannot imagine any solution to their regime which is not oligarchic or democratic. They seem to have found some abridged copy of Aristotle which only includes 2/3 of the political forms—by far the rarest two in human history, too. The story of man is the story of governments—of human collective action.
If the pundits are thinking oligarchically, they demand new laws and/or new elites. The new elites will have the right ideas and the right virtues. The new laws will order everyone to do the right things. The new regime will be the right people, doing the right things, just as the old regime was the wrong people doing the wrong things.
If they are thinking democratically, they demand new memes and ideologies. These righteous new ideas must appeal to voters and lead them to elect righteous statesmen who make righteous public policies. If there are no more statesmen with philosophies of government, only politicians whose only goal is to get elected—the only solution is to elect politicians who are really statesmen. Perhaps instead of Frederick the Gteat, we could exhume, say, John Adams?
It is true that since (without the Ring of Gyges) no man can take power by himself, the road from oligarchy to monarchy must involve either oligarchy or democracy—almost certainly the latter. If we have trouble imagining Americans deciding to elect a king, we have to remember that Americans—like the Roman predecessors we have always loved to larp—only disdain the word “king.” The emperors never called themselves rex; and if we wonder whether American voters could elect a king in fact if not in name, we have to remember that they did exactly that in 1932.
Could they do the same thing in 2024? It seems improbable. Yet as Sherlock Holmes said: when we rule out the impossible, all that is left is the improbable.
And the great advantage of the 21st-century voter is that he is not square. He is not a Norman Rockwell voter, attached to Puritan civic virtues at the navel of his soul. Nor is he the spergy social-science voter of mid-century Harvard America, convinced by the best statistical arguments in the marketplace of ideas.
The 21st-century voter, regardless of age, is a child. He is frivolous, vain, whimsical and ironic. We are fortunate to live in the most ironic age in history. As Bronze Age Pervert, who is not gay, has said: “learn that I don’t understand the gay idea of irony.”
This voter is not convinced by virtues or statistics. He is convinced by dreams, visions, stories and jokes. A dream of the return of kings is far more compelling than all the homilies of virtuous diversity and the statistics of increasing economic productivity. When true philosophy is the most marketable philosophy, true change is imminent.
From author Substack page, August 10, 2023
Richard Hanania, Rising Right-Wing Star, Wrote For White Supremacist Sites Under Pseudonym
By: Christopher Mathias
A prominent conservative writer, lionized by Silicon Valley billionaires and a U.S. senator, used a pen name for years to write for white supremacist publications and was a formative voice during the rise of the racist “alt-right,” according to a new HuffPost investigation.
Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.” He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.
A decade later, writing under his real name, Hanania has ensconced himself in the national mainstream media, writing op-eds in the country’s biggest papers, bending the ears of some of the world’s wealthiest men and lecturing at prestigious universities, all while keeping his past white supremacist writings under wraps.
HuffPost connected Hanania to his “Richard Hoste” persona by analyzing leaked data from an online comment-hosting service that showed him using three of his email addresses to create usernames on white supremacist sites. A racist blog maintained by Hoste was also registered to an address in Hanania’s hometown. And HuffPost found biographical information shared by Hoste that aligned with Hanania’s own life.
Hanania did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story, made via phone, email and direct messages on social media. (On Sunday, two days after this story was published, he posted an essay to Substack confirming HuffPost’s reporting. “Recently, it’s been revealed that over a decade ago I held many beliefs that, as my current writing makes clear, I now find repulsive,” he wrote.)
The 37-year-old has been published by The New York Times and The Washington Post. He delivered a lecture to the Yale Federalist Society and was interviewed by the Harvard College Economics Review. He appeared twice on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News’ former prime-time juggernaut. He was a recent guest on a podcast hosted by the chief writing officer of Substack, the $650 million publishing platform where Hanania has nearly 20,000 subscribers.
Hanania has his own podcast, too, interviewing the likes of Steven Pinker, the famous Harvard cognitive psychologist, and Marc Andreessen, the billionaire software engineer. Another billionaire, Elon Musk, reads Hanania’s articles and replies approvingly to his tweets. A third billionaire, Peter Thiel, provided a blurb to promote Hanania’s book, “The Origins of Woke,” which HarperCollins plans to publish this September. In October, Hanania is scheduled to deliver a lecture at Stanford.
Meanwhile, rich benefactors, some of whose identities are unknown, have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into a think tank run by Hanania. The think tank doles out cash to conservative academics, and produces political studies that are cited across right-wing media.
Hanania’s rise into mainstream conservative and even more centrist circles did not necessarily occur because he abandoned some of the noxious arguments he made under the pseudonym “Richard Hoste.” Although he’s moderated his words to some extent, Hanania still makes explicitly racist statements under his real name. He maintains a creepy obsession with so-called race science, arguing that Black people are inherently more prone to violent crime than white people. He often writes in support of a well-known racist and a Holocaust denier. And he once said that if he owned Twitter — the platform that catapulted him to some celebrity — he wouldn’t let “feminists, trans activists or socialists” post there. “Why would I?” he asked. “They’re wrong about everything and bad for society.”
Richard Hanania’s story may hint at a concerning shift in mainstream American conservatism. A little over a decade ago, he felt compelled to hide his racist views behind a pseudonym. In 2023, Hanania is a right-wing star, championed by some of the country’s wealthiest men, even as he’s sounding more and more like his former white supremacist nom de plume: Richard Hoste.
Unmasking Richard Hoste
Starting in 2008, the byline “Richard Hoste” began to appear atop articles in America’s most vile publications. Hoste wrote for antisemitic outlets like The Occidental Observer, a site that once argued Jews are trying to exterminate white Americans. He wrote for Counter-Currents, which advocates for creating a whites-only ethnostate; Taki’s Magazine, a far-right hub for paleoconservatives; and VDare, a racist anti-immigrant blog.
In 2010, Hoste was among the first writers to be recruited for AlternativeRight.com, a new webzine spearheaded and edited by Richard Spencer, the white supremacist leader who later organized the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. (“Little fucking kikes,” Spencer reportedly told his followers at a party after that rally. “They get ruled by people like me. Little fucking octaroons. My ancestors fucking enslaved those little pieces of fucking shit.”)
Spencer bestowed Hoste with the honor of writing one of the introductory articles for the launch of AlternativeRight.com, which would become a main propaganda organ of the nascent “alt-right,” the online fascist movement that exploded into the public consciousness due to its ties to former President Donald Trump. (Spencer shuttered the site in 2013, and it was later relaunched under another name.)
“We’ve known for a while through neuroscience and cross-adoption studies... that individuals differ in their inherent capabilities. The races do, too, with whites and Asians on the top and blacks at the bottom,” Hoste wrote in the 2010 essay, titled “Why An Alternative Right Is Necessary.”
He lamented that Republicans hadn’t done enough to stop Democrats’ “march of diversity” despite “irrefutable evidence” that some races are “better than others.”
“If the races are equal,” Hoste wrote, “why do whites always end up near the top and blacks at the bottom, everywhere and always?”
AlternativeRight.com used a hosting service called Disqus to allow readers to leave comments on articles. Hoste had his own Disqus account, @RichardHoste, to interact with his readers.
In 2012, Disqus suffered a data breach, with hackers stealing the details of more than 17.5 million users. Hoste was one of those users. HuffPost has reviewed data showing that Hoste’s account used a unique password on Disqus that was also used to log into other Disqus accounts that commented on AlternativeRight.com.
This indicates Hoste was using so-called “sock puppet” accounts — hiding behind yet more fake names — to comment on the site. The comments from these accounts are written in a style similar to Hoste’s, and they are linked to email addresses belonging to Richard Hanania. The account @RA74 was set up using Hanania’s Gmail address, which Hanania has shared publicly before. The account @RAH2, which uses Hanania’s initials, was set up with Hanania’s email address at the University of Colorado, where he was a linguistics student. And the account @CJusD was attached to Hanania’s email address at the University of Chicago, where he studied law.
The connections between Hoste and Hanania don’t end there.
Hoste’s author biography at AlternativeRight.com stated that he was the founder and editor of a separate blog called HBD Books. “HBD” is a shortening of “human biodiversity,” which in white supremacist circles at the time was the preferred euphemism for race science.
Hoste sometimes wrote about his personal life on HBD Books, explaining that he dropped out of high school, got his GED and attended community college, and was eventually “accepted to a flagship state university” before getting into an “elite college” for post-graduate studies.
All of this biographical information aligns with Hanania’s own. He once mentioned on a podcast that he dropped out of high school and received a GED. A 2004 article from a newspaper in Oak Lawn, Illinois, notes Hanania as being on the dean’s list at Moraine Valley Community College. And a copy of Hanania’s resume shows that he attended a state university, the University of Colorado, before going to another school, UCLA, for post-graduate work.
Moreover, the HBD Books website — where “Hoste” left all of these clues about his real, offline identity — was registered to an address in Oak Lawn, the same Chicago suburb, with a population of about 57,000 people, where Hanania grew up and where his parents still live.
Other points of overlap between Hoste and Hanania’s lives can be found online ― like when Hoste wrote about one of his first jobs.
“What is interesting to me is whether there are a lot of high IQ people who simply CAN’T do manual labor,” Hoste wrote in the comment section of a 2009 blog. “As a teenager I tried working at a pizza place and MacDonalds [sic]. I was the worst employee there. I actually felt sympathy for low IQ kids, knowing that this is what they must’ve felt like in school. Blacks and Mexicans shook their heads at me. It was really traumatic...”
Twelve years later, in 2021, Hanania also wrote about angering his co-workers as a hapless teen fast-food worker. “I worked at McDonalds, TGIFriday, other restaurants because I had nothing better to do as a teenager and young adult,” he tweeted. “I was really bad at it, my coworkers hated me because I screwed up the entire supply line.”
And in 2012, a sock puppet account registered to Hanania’s email address — which shared the same unique password as the @RichardHoste account on Disqus — posted about weight in the comment section of a racist blog: “I was fat since I was a little kid. In high school, I lost the weight and have yo-yoed back and forth a few times since.”
Hanania recounted a similar personal story, in an article on his Substack, nine years later in 2021. “I was always fat growing up,” he wrote, “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...”
The Eugenicist Blogger
Hoste sometimes expressed disgust with fat women. “If a woman lets herself be fat, she’s refusing to put the bear [sic] minimum effort into life necessary to experience love, respect, and esteem,” he wrote in the comments section of a 2012 blog. “Or maybe she’s accepted feminism and convinced herself that it doesn’t really matter.”
He added: “Fat people not only are disgusting to look at; their obesity reflects some ugly personality traits.”
This type of rank misogyny and fat-shaming was common in the online circles Hoste frequented at the time. One of his email addresses, according to data HuffPost reviewed from another data breach, was connected to an account on AutoAdmit, also known as XOXOhth ― a largely unmoderated message board, purportedly for lawyers and law students, that’s infamous for its anonymous users’ hatred of women.
In 2009, Hoste published a blog on HBD Books where he argued that “large-scale female involvement in politics” is a “bad thing.”
“Women simply didn’t evolve to be the decision makers in society,” he wrote, adding that “women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.”
That same year, Hoste wrote an article called “White Goddess,” first published at The Occidental Observer and later reposted by Taki’s, about a woman he deemed worthy for public office: Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican nominee for vice president.
“It has been suggested that Sarah Palin is a sort of Rorschach test for Americans,” Hoste wrote. “The attractive, religious and fertile White woman drove the ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite absolutely mad well before there were any questions about her qualifications.”
Hoste said he would be “rooting for Palin” in the 2012 election, “just so I can watch liberals’ heads explode after the goddess of implicit Whiteness beats” then-President Barack Obama. “If it’s going to be a long time until a White awakening,” he wrote, “we may as well be entertained while we wait.”
According to Hoste’s collected writings at the time, it appears that by a “white awakening,” he was referring to a realization by whites en masse that they are superior to non-whites, and that they’d be better off abandoning multiracial democracy for something resembling a whites-only ethnostate.
Hoste’s arguments for a whiter America and Europe most often relied on the false claim that white people possess a superior intelligence. “While an increasing Muslim underclass might not inspire as much bad art, the IQ and genetic differences between them and native Europeans are real, and assimilation is impossible,” he wrote in a 2009 piece for The Occidental Observer.
Hispanic people, he wrote in a 2010 article in Counter-Currents, “don’t have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation.” He then made an argument for ethnic cleansing, writing that “the ultimate goal should be to get all the post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America to leave.”
“If we want to defend our liberty and property, a low-IQ group of a different race sharing the same land is a permanent antagonist,” he wrote.
“Women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.”
- Richard Hoste, in a 2009 blog post
The bulk of Hoste’s bigotry, however, was directed at Black people. He lamented what he saw as the growing preponderance of “miscegenation,” or white and Black people dating each other. “For the white gene pool to be created millions had to die,” Hoste wrote once. “Race mixing is like destroying a unique species or piece of art. It’s shameful.”
For Hoste, white people were “naturally smarter and less criminal” than Black people; white women’s “fear of black men” was “very far from irrational”; whites had better “modes of moral reasoning”; and Black people had “low intelligence and impulse control.”
In 2009, Hoste live-blogged his reactions to a CNN docuseries called “Black in America 2,” which the network billed as an “investigation of the most challenging issues facing African-Americans.”
During a segment of the docuseries about Black American kids visiting South Africa, Hoste wrote: “If they had decency, blacks would thank the white race for everything that they have.”
Hoste also commented on the attractiveness of the host of the series, a renowned broadcast journalist who has mixed-race heritage. “Soledad O’Brien has a skin tone and hair that most other blacks would kill for,” he wrote. “I think I understand why mulattos associate with their black side. For a ‘black’ chick, she’s a 10, for a white chick, a 7.”
And when CNN showed footage of a Black teenager crying because she failed some classes at school, Hoste wrote: “Telling a race with an IQ of 85 that they can do whatever they set their mind to is cruel.”
When Hoste wrote about race science, claiming again and again that Black people are inherently less intelligent than white people, he often openly embraced eugenics as the solution, including coerced or forced sterilization.
“There doesn’t seem to be a way to deal with low IQ breeding that doesn’t include coercion,” he wrote in a 2010 article for AlternativeRight.com. “Perhaps charities could be formed which paid those in the 70-85 range to be sterilized, but what to do with those below 70 who legally can’t even give consent and have a higher birthrate than the general population? In the same way we lock up criminals and the mentally ill in the interests of society at large, one could argue that we could on the exact same principle sterilize those who are bound to harm future generations through giving birth.”
In a 2011 article on Counter-Currents titled “Answering Objections to Eugenics,” Hoste laid out a plan for sterilizing people with IQ scores of less than 90. From the article:
It would be hard to abuse a law that forcibly sterilized everybody with an IQ under 90 provided that the person scored that low on an objective test blindly graded. Somebody who wants to argue that he had a bad day would have the right to an appeal, which would consist of another IQ test.
If a libertarian wants to propose that even somebody with an IQ of 90 has rights, they would have to oppose government having the power to lock people up in mental institutions. We already let the state decide that some people aren’t fit to participate in society even if they’ve yet to do anything wrong. This is a system open to abuse, but still a necessary evil. Letting the unintelligent breed is as surely damaging to society as letting schizophrenics run loose.
Hoste’s racism was also evinced by the writers he chose to cite. In a 2010 article on AlternativeRight.com, Hoste described learning about a December 1997 speech by William Pierce called “The Lesson of Haiti.”
Hoste linked to a transcript of Pierce’s speech, without acknowledging who Pierce was: the leader and founder of the National Alliance, a violent neo-Nazi group, and the author of a novel called “The Turner Diaries,” a murderous race war fantasy that has inspired multiple white supremacist terrorists, including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
Hoste’s article on AlternativeRight.com was basically a recapitulation of Pierce’s speech about Haiti, recounting how a British explorer in the early 20th century traversed the country to answer the question, “Can the Negro rule himself?” The explorer had come to the racist conclusion that no, Black people cannot govern themselves ― a conclusion that delighted Pierce in 1997 and seemingly energized Hoste in 2010.
“The biggest enemies of the Black Man are not Klansmen or multinational corporations, but the liberals who have prevented an honest appraisal of his abilities and filled his head with myths about equality and national autarky,” Hoste wrote.
Goodbye, Richard Hoste; Hello, Richard Hanania
Hanania’s journey to conservative prominence started sometime in the mid-2010s after he appeared to abandon his double life as “Richard Hoste” and started writing under his real name. At this time, he was winding his way through academia, according to a copy of his resume ― earning a J.D. at the University of Chicago Law School in 2013 and a Ph.D. in political science at UCLA in 2018, and then landing a postdoctoral research fellowship at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.
In 2015 — five years after he’d used the Hoste pseudonym to argue that Black people can’t govern themselves, and four years after he laid out his plan to sterilize people with IQs of less than 90 — Hanania published an op-ed in The Washington Post with the headline: “Donald Trump never apologizes for his controversial remarks. Here’s why he shouldn’t.”
The article was based on research Hanania conducted as a Ph.D. student, which found that voters responded positively to public figures who didn’t show contrition after making racist or sexist remarks. (The piece referenced, in part, Trump’s refusal to back down from his bigoted remarks about Latino people.)
In the summer of 2020, Hanania started to build a readership for his libertarian political writing. Among his readers was Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder and chief writing officer of Substack. “The pandemic happened and huge numbers of people became addicted to social media and [Hanania] emerged from his cocoon in academia to start pushing some hot cultural buttons,” McKenzie recounted recently in an episode of his podcast, “The Active Voice.”
One of Hanania’s first viral pieces on Substack — a 2021 article titled “Why Is Everything Liberal?” — was cited by columnists at The Washington Post and The New York Times. It also led to his first invitation to appear on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” America’s most-watched cable news show at the time.
The Washington Post declined to comment this week on Hanania’s past appearances in the paper. A New York Times spokesperson said that “Hanania didn’t inform our editors or anyone at The Times, nor were we aware” of any writing he’d done under a pseudonym before the paper published one of his essays. Fox News didn’t respond to a request for comment.
A short time later, J.D. Vance — then a GOP candidate for U.S. Senate — called Hanania a “friend” and a “really interesting thinker” during an interview with right-wing YouTuber Dave Rubin. Vance, now a U.S. senator representing Ohio, didn’t respond to a request for comment about his relationship with Hanania.
Hanania’s star continued to rise as he found a receptive audience for his tirades against the supposed evils of “wokeness” and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Editors at right-wing and mainstream media outlets published his work, including at Newsweek, where he whinged about America’s history of anti-racist protests, lamenting how academia refers to the 1993 “Rodney King riots as an ‘uprising,’ as if it was an honorable struggle for freedom rather than a criminal rampage.” (Newsweek did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)
At the right-wing site Quillette, Hanania wrote about how Twitter supposedly discriminates against conservatives; at the National Review, the prestigious conservative magazine, Hanania wrote about how “culture, not economics, decides most voters’ choices.” At The Wall Street Journal, he argued that anti-Trump bias in media and academia was infecting the social sciences. (Quillette and the National Review did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment. The Wall Street Journal declined to comment.)
Elsewhere — including at the publications Task & Purpose, Reason, Palladium Magazine and The American Conservative — Hanania wrote about foreign policy, with a special focus on Afghanistan and China.
Hanania was making a name for himself. By 2022, he was selected as a visiting scholar at the Salem Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The center — funded through right-wing donors including billionaire Harlan Crow — is led by executive director Carlos Carvalho. “I have no comment,” Carvalho told HuffPost when asked about Hanania.
Hanania was also tapped to be a lecturer for the “Forbidden Courses” program at the University of Austin, the unaccredited school funded by venture capitalists and founded by former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, now a prominent right-wing influencer herself. The university did not respond to a request for comment about Hanania.
Earlier this year, Hanania spoke to the Yale Federalist Society, the school’s chapter of the conservative legal organization, about what the government has done to “discriminate against whites and men.” The chapter did not respond when asked for comment.
And this October, Hanania is scheduled to teach a seminar at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. The school did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Meanwhile, Hanania has continued to publish Substack articles that share the same obsessions as his former white supremacist pen name, Richard Hoste — IQ scores, eugenics, the need for fat-shaming — even if he writes about these subjects in a more moderate tone. An annual subscription to Hanania’s Substack costs $70, though free subscriptions are also available. It’s unclear how many of his subscribers are paying. Substack did not respond to multiple requests for comment about Hanania and how much money he’s making through the platform.
Hanania — just like Richard Hoste did — often writes warmly about Steve Sailer, a blogger for the white supremacist site VDare. (Sailer once wrote that Black people “tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups” and “need stricter moral guidance from society.”)
“Steve is one of the most agreeable people you’ll meet,” Hanania tweeted recently.
“What’s clear is that a coterie of powerful tech billionaires and millionaires are invested in Hanania.”
During his appearance on “The Active Voice,” Hanania recommended that McKenzie, the Substack CWO and co-founder, read Sailer and Emil Kirkegaard, a far-right Danish activist who has called homosexuality a “mental illness.” (McKenzie, who didn’t push back on Hanania’s recommendations, did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)
On other occasions, Hanania has cited the work of Ron Unz, the Silicon Valley millionaire and Holocaust denier who runs the far-right Unz Review, a site that publishes the work of neo-Nazis. (A “Richard Hoste” was a frequent commenter on The Unz Review in the early 2010s.)
On his podcast, Hanania recently had a friendly conversation with Amy Wax, the University of Pennsylvania professor facing disciplinary proceedings for, among other alleged offenses, inviting a white supremacist to speak to her class and making racist remarks such as that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer minorities.”
He also recently had an hourlong interview with Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and close ally of presidential candidate Ron DeSantis who is widely regarded as the architect of the moral panic about “critical race theory” being taught in schools. “We need to eliminate affirmative action in all of our institutions,” Rufo told Hanania.
And in May, Hanania tweeted a link to a Substack article he’d written about one of his favorite subjects: “the reality of Black crime,” or as Hanania alternately put it, “the pathologies of the inner city.”
“I don’t have much hope that we’ll solve crime in any meaningful way,” Hanania tweeted while promoting the article. “It would require a revolution in our culture or form of government. We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people. Blacks won’t appreciate it, whites don’t have the stomach for it.”
A short time later, the world’s richest man, and the owner of Twitter (since rebranded as “X”), replied to Hanania’s tweet. “Interesting,” Elon Musk wrote.
Who’s Funding Richard Hanania?
In 2020, before Richard Hanania was very well-known, he became president of a new, obscure think tank called the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. The only two other members of this think tank were also right-wing academics: George Hawley of the University of Alabama, and Eric Kaufmann of the Manhattan Institute. (Hawley and Kaufmann did not respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment.)
The journalist Jonathan Katz, on his Substack page The Racket, did a series of recent investigations into Hanania and CSPI ― finding that the organization, which describes itself as “interested in funding scholars studying woke attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors,” took in over $200,000 in donations in 2020, its first year registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
The next year, in 2021, CSPI received over $1 million in donations. Some of that money went to conservative grad students and Ph.D. candidates across the country, with grantees receiving anywhere from $1,000 to $45,000.
But it was Hanania who pocketed the most, with $137,500. He did even better the next year, taking home $160,000. Along the way, CSPI’s mailing address changed — just as Hanania’s did, according to public records — from the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles to Sierra Madre, California, indicating he’s running the think tank out of his home.
Here’s how Katz described the way CSPI has functioned:
In addition to being a laundering service for handing out money to reactionary academics, it is a paper mill for “studies” that back up reactionary talking points, to be spun into articles and opinion pieces with headlines such as “Social trends causing rapid growth in people identifying as LGBT, report says” (from the ideological astroturfing Sinclair Broadcast Group), “The Lockdowns Weren’t Worth It” (WSJ) and “The new class war is over identity” (Washington Examiner) — the latter being an anti-LGBTQ screed that ended, “My name is Dominic. I’m a trans woman, and my pronouns are me, me, me.”
But who would be interested in funding such a project? Especially one that has provided a nice yearly salary to Hanania, who, at least in 2020, was still a relatively unknown libertarian blogger?
Katz found a couple of answers. $200,000 came from the Conru Foundation, run by millionaire Andrew Conru, who created AdultFriendFinder.com, the matchmaking and hookup site, before he sold it for $500 million in 2007. (Conru didn’t respond to a request for comment about his donation to Hanania’s think tank.) Another $50,000 in donations came from the Mercatus Center, a think tank at George Mason University funded by the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers and run by the libertarian economist Tyler Cowen, whom Hanania has interviewed on the CSPI podcast. (The Mercatus Center also did not respond to a request for comment.)
But then the paper trail runs dry. Katz found that nearly a million dollars in donations to CSPI are from a dark-money donor, or donors, whose identities are unknown.
What’s clear, however, is that a coterie of powerful tech billionaires and millionaires — people with the kind of resources to fund something like CSPI — are invested in Hanania, maybe seeing him as a potential new éminence grise, an intellectual who can articulate and promote their specific blend of techno-utopian, anti-democratic politics.
Marc Andreessen — the powerful Silicon Valley venture capitalist and billionaire, and a buddy of Elon Musk — has appeared on CSPI’s podcast, hosted by Hanania, three times. He talked to Hanania for two hours in 2021, and last year sat down with Hanania twice to discuss their “Nietzschean” interpretations of the TV shows “Breaking Bad” and “The Shield.” (In the episode description for the interview about “The Shield,” a police show, Hanania argued that it’s “white cops” maintaining order in America, while Black cops are corrupt and tied to “gangbangers.”)
Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm where Andreessen is a general partner, did not respond to a request for comment about his relationship with Hanania.
Meanwhile, a number of billionaires and millionaires have supplied blurbs to promote Hanania’s book “The Origins of Woke,” which HarperCollins is set to publish in September. (The publishing company did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Tech mogul David Sacks gushed that Hanania’s book “offers conservatives a playbook for fighting woke ideology in the fields of law and politics, where they can actually defeat it.”
Peter Thiel, the right-wing venture capitalist and billionaire, expressed excitement over the book’s takedown of diversity, equity and inclusion programs. “DEI will never d-i-e from words alone,” Thiel wrote. “Hanania shows we need the sticks and stones of government violence to exorcize the diversity demon.”
And Vivek Ramaswamy, the GOP presidential candidate with a net worth over $600 million — a fortune derived, in part, from his work in biotech — wrote that Hanania is “unafraid to transcend the Overton Window on issues of race and gender,” and that his book “delivers a devastating kill shot to the intellectual foundations of identity politics in America.”
HuffPost reached out to Thiel, Sacks and Ramaswamy for comment and received no reply.
Hanania mentioned all of these men in a June Substack post while describing what he celebrated as the “Tech Right,” a new Silicon Valley-based conservative movement that, among other beliefs, embraces transhumanism and “longtermism.”
The cult of “longtermism” has swept through Silicon Valley in recent years, with Musk and Thiel among its most well-known acolytes. It’s a worldview that often prioritizes the health of future generations of humans — even ones millions of years hence — over people currently living in the here and now, suffering and getting by on planet Earth. (Musk’s goal to colonize Mars, for example, is a longtermist project.)
Its adherents are often obsessed with IQ scores and scientific racism, and the famous computer scientist Timnit Gebru has criticized longtermism as “eugenics under a different name.”
The scholar Émile Torres has also noted that longtermism’s “transhumanist vision of creating a superior new race of ‘posthumans’ is eugenics on steroids,” a recapitulation of 20th-century beliefs that ushered in “a wide range of illiberal policies, including restrictions on immigration, anti-miscegenation laws and forced sterilizations.”
It’s maybe unsurprising, then, that Hanania has emerged as a scribe for this new “Tech Right.” After all, he had years of practice writing about eugenics as Richard Hoste, advocating for precisely those types of policies.
“The maintenance of the quality of the population requires not just a stable population at all levels but the active weeding out of the unfit,” Hoste wrote in 2011 for Counter-Currents, the white supremacist site.
“There is no rational reason,” he wrote, “why eugenics can’t capture the hearts and minds of policy makers the way it did 100 years ago.”
From The Huffington Post, August 4, 2023
The University of Texas must cut ties with white supremacist
By: Express-News Editorial Board
To paraphrase Shakespeare, what’s in a name? That which we call a white supremacist by any other name would reek of racism, whether that name be “Richard Hoste” or Richard Hanania.
Hanania is a political scientist and rising star on the right who’s been published in mainstream publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. He’s a visiting scholar at the Salem Center, which is funded by far-right donors like billionaire Harlan Crowe.
Last Friday, the HuffPost revealed that for years, Hanania used the pseudonym Richard Hoste to write for white supremacist publications, where he espoused eugenics and warned against “race-mixing.”
He also warned against what he called the criminality of Black people and the threat that low-IQ people of color pose to the United States.
In a 2010 essay titled “Why an Alternative Right is Necessary?” Hanania wrote: “We’ve known for a while through neuroscience and cross-adoption studies … that individuals differ in their inherent capabilities. The races do, too, with whites and Asians on the top and blacks at the bottom.”
Hanania also wrote that Hispanic people “don’t have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation.” And because he believes “a low-IQ group of a different race sharing the same land is a permanent antagonist,” he argued for “all the post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America to leave.”
In his newsletter, published last weekend, Hanania admitted to his past writings and pen name. The essay is titled “Why I Used to Suck, and (Hopefully) No Longer Do,” and in it Hanania blames those writings and his views on his youth.
“My posts and blog comments in my early twenties encouraged racism, misogyny, misanthropy, trolling, and overall bad faith” he wrote. “Phrases like ‘racism’ and ‘misogyny’ get thrown around too easily, but I don’t believe there’s any doubt many of my previous comments crossed the line, regardless of where one thinks that line should be.”
OK. Perhaps we should be forgiving of a young man’s racist comments from 13 years ago. But what of that 38-year-old man’s racist comments from three months ago?
On May 10, Hanania tweeted, “Part of the reason interracial violence is rare is that whites have fled cities where blacks live and now live far away from them, due to the threat of violence. That gets the numbers down, but ignoring the history of the quasi-ethnic cleansing of our cities distorts the picture.”
On May 11, Hanania tweeted about Black people, “These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits.”
On May 13, completing his Triple Crown of racist tweets, Hanania wrote, “I don’t have much hope that we’ll solve crime in any meaningful way. It would require a revolution in our culture or form of government. We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people. Blacks won’t appreciate it; whites don’t have the stomach for it.”
It must also be noted that in his essay, Hanania doesn’t deny believing that white people are intellectually superior to Black and Latino people. Instead, he whines, “The reason I’m the target of a cancellation effort is because left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races.”
The title, again, of Hanania’s essay is “Why I Used to Suck, and (Hopefully) No Longer Do.” By his own standards, and in his own words, he still does.
We wait to see if Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick will be making any calls to the University of Texas chancellor.
From San Antonio Express News, August 9, 2023