It's Actually Really Easy Not to Give Props to a Huge Racist

Pro tip: if someone is blatantly racist all the time, maybe give their material a wide berth.

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Last Friday, HuffPost’s Chris Mathias (who is, full disclosure, a former colleague and very nice person and excellent reporter) revealed that a guy named Richard Hanania who has been making a name for himself as a “right-wing intellectual” type has a semi-hidden secret lurking in his past. That semi-hidden secret is that he used to write very blatantly fascist things online under the pseudonym “Richard Hoste” (which, by the way, if you’re gonna adopt a pseudonym, maybe don’t use your entire real first name and the first initial of your last name?). Here’s a sample:

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.

Trust me, there is plenty more where that came from, but you can go read the whole thing on HuffPost.

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

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Hanania has since published a lengthy response on his Substack—yes, he is On Here too, and has even been featured on Substack’s quasi-official podcast, complete with a drawing that makes him look like the Joker for some reason—basically declaring that, yes, that was him, and he is no longer that guy, and can’t we all just move on?

On one level, sure, let’s move on, who cares about this guy. But the weird thing about Richard Hanania’s “I’m contrite I swear” routine is that he is Racist On Main all the time, under his very real name, in the present, and has been for many years. Which makes it very strange that places like the New York Times and HarperCollins have kept giving him opportunities to be racist.

It’s actually really easy not to look at an obviously racist person and go “hmmm, we really gotta get this guy on our op-ed page, stat!” But this simple decision appears to elude our most prestigious outlets time and time and time and time again.

First, the evidence. Hanania’s racism is not hard to find, since he is constantly putting it on display.