Anyone Defending Richard Hanania Should Take a Long Look In the Mirror

He was racist before. He is still racist now. It's that simple.

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One of the funny side effects of the Trump presidency is that right-wing intellectuals are having the time of their lives. So-called “smart conservatives” have always been welcomed in elite, mostly centrist social circles, but in the Trump and post-Trump era, writers and thinkers with reactionary views and Ivy-league sensibilities have been in particular demand. The reason for this seems pretty simple to me.

If you are, say, a young-ish and very rich person who came up in the heyday of the mid-10s tech boom, the overt brutality and utter boorishness of the Trump administration and its most loyal fans was probably very distasteful. “Those” people—blotchy, leather-skinned, clad in star-spangled clothing, likely from one of those middle states you always get mixed up—were crude. They were uncouth. They were, above all, uneducated—not like the bright young college grads you hired, or the other wealthy founders and executives you hung out with.

Their ideas, too, were messy: too filled with bile and anger at the world, based on emotion and not reason, or data. The problem, however, was that the people who didn’t like Trump? Well. Many of them were uncouth too. Those leftists, those “wokes.” They didn’t understand how to build things, all they wanted was to cancel people for having made one little mistake, or making too much money, or simply by asking questions. You didn’t want to live in that world either: you wanted to live in one where everyone had “open-minded debates” and was willing to “think for themselves,” but not in the super-conspiracy kind of way that the leathery people said it. You wanted a “marketplace of ideas,” because marketplaces (especially app-based ones, shout out to microtransactions!) were a great idea. It’s how the economy would grow and innovation would happen.

Enter, say, a guy like Richard Hanania. Hanania was a seemingly smart guy—he had a Ph.D.!—whose CV included places like the “Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.” He had bylines in many major publications and other niche ones, and he was not afraid to make bold statements in public—even, say, ones that went against his chosen “tribe,” of other conservatives. He described himself as more of a “centrist,” and the fact that sometimes his language was a bit unsparing when it came to simple biological differences between people—their skin tones, say—just meant that he was brave enough to say things how they were. Things like this, for instance:

That tweet is taken out of context, of course. It’s part of a many, many-tweet thread Hanania did about one of his recent articles which basically fuses a lot of personal anecdotes about growing up near Chicago with a repackaged form of the intentionally misleading “Black on Black crime is off the charts” argument in order to argue that the solution to urban crime levels is more policing and incarceration (while ignoring the economic factors that lead to said crime levels). This is very run-of-the-mill right-wing stuff—but because of who Hanania is, it’s exciting, and subversive, and fresh, to people in the demographic I just described. It will not surprise you to know that the founders of Substack, Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie, are in that demographic.

Jonathan Katz has a very thorough breakdown of both Hanania’s relationship with Substack and the history of his politics, but I’ll just lift this section, which describes Hanania’s appearance on the Substack house podcast with McKenzie:

In the pod, McKenzie introduces Hanania as someone who seemed “to have kind of come from nowhere” in the summer of 2020. As he puts it, “the pandemic happened and huge numbers of people became addicted to social media and he emerged from his cocoon in academia to start pushing some hot cultural buttons.” Within a year, Hanania had a breakout piece on Substack titled “Why is Everything Liberal?” and made his first appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Here’s how McKenzie describes Hanania’s politics, nodding to his affect as a self-identified troll:

Hanania is proudly anti-woke and he’s found favor among a conservative readership. But at the same time, he’s not been scared to go against the preferences of many people who would otherwise be squarely in his political tribe. So while he’s written pieces that attack wokeness and criticize civil rights law, he’s also argued that the mainstream media is good actually, and that liberals are more culturally savvy than conservatives. He’s written in favor of immigration and diversity, while also pushing back against the liberal obsession with race.

He adds: “Hanania admits he’s a bit of a troll, but he also makes a strong case for what he calls ‘enlightened centrism’—people who hold views that can't easily be categorized as right or left.”

The other shoe to all of this dropped last week:

The article, written by the fantastic domestic extremism reporter Chris Mathias, is lengthy and incredibly damning. Here’s the gist:

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.

“Enlightened centrism” indeed. But what makes this story—racist commentator revealed to be even more overtly racist—interesting is that his patrons, Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie, are sticking by him.

Shortly after Mathias’s article, Hanania posted an essay on his Substack entitled “Why I Used to Suck, and (Hopefully) No Longer Do,” which largely cast the article as an attempt to “cancel” him and claimed that the views—which he admitted were racist, misogynist, etc—expressed in his past writings were not ones he still held. In other words, the classic “I was young and dumb then but I’m not now, does that make me evil?” defense, tempered with a little humility in which he basically admits that he was basically a weird incel when he wrote those things on Nazi websites. In Best’s case, at least, Hanania’s particular blend of self-reflective “plain speaking” found its audience:

What makes all of this so disheartening is that most critical (or, really, even casual) readers of Hanania’s work can see that he hasn’t really changed a bit. He’s just gotten smarter. He calls himself a “small-l liberal” now because he knows that people like Best and McKenzie will respond well to that. He writes self-effacing and borderline humble apologies that cast him as a reformed, mature thinker facing off a wave of politically motivated criticism based on a persona he’s left in the past. But what are the differences between Hanania the current Substacker and Richard Hoste, his former neo-Nazi-loving alter ego?

Back in the early 2000s, Hoste, I’m sure, would have told you that the solution to crime in urban areas was intensely militarized aggressive policing. This is still what Hanania believes. The targets—the people who will suffer under the policies he wants —are still the same. He is still someone who wrote these words after Daniel Penny, the man who strangled Jordan Neely to death in a New York subway, was charged with a crime:

He is still the man who, in his own apology blog, wrote that he was being canceled because “left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races.” (He added, “My mistake in a previous life was assigning collective guilt based on certain undeniable facts.”)

The language that he uses to advocate for them may be different, slightly, but the objectives are the same. As Mathias’s article makes clear, Hanania is still friendly with many of the same people Hoste was (bloggers for the virulent site VDare, for instance). The only difference is that he now has mainstream appeal—and a new audience that is clearly receptive to his views. Some of those people, like Best and McKenzie, would now probably describe themselves as liberals. They would not say that they are racist. But they are aligning themselves with someone who has clearly, publicly, and consistently said deeply racist things, and is still saying them. They might want to reflect on that for even one second.