I hadn’t heard of this guy, Richard Hanania, until recently — but I sure was familiar with his old pseudonym, Richard Hoste. He was one of the more hateful, obnoxious, stupid racists who was busy stuffing the internet with lies a decade ago. Now I learn, in one of the most thorough, devastating journalistic takedowns I’ve ever read that Hoste and Hanania were one and the same, and that he’s broken into the mainstream with the complicity of conservative billionaires.
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.
I remember Hoste, because I’ve long kept half an eye on nasty little websites like Taki’s Magazine, The Unz Review, VDARE, the Occidental Observer, and anything linked to the Pioneer Fund. These are the places some of the most openly racist people, like Richard Spencer or Steve Sailer, let it all hang out nakedly. I’ve always marveled at how they can write such vile, repugnant articles in their safe little hugboxes full of racists, and then walk out in public without shame, even to friendly appreciation from notable academics. It’s one of the tells I recognize for closet racists — people who praise Sailer, for instance, are the kind of slimeballs who read VDARE approvingly, even if they’d never dare to write such things themselves.
Now I’m going to have to add “following Richard Hanania” as another marker for the shy racists.
You’re on notice, guys. Scuttle for the kitchen cabinets as fast as you can, the light has been turned on.
Anyway, a major data leak from Disqus has exposed Hanania’s history, and it’s interesting to see how a low-life troll mainstreamed himself and started grabbing attention and money from more respectable venues. First, he dropped the pseudonym and was writing under his real name, Hanania. Then he started writing somewhat less inflammatory, but still crackling with racism, op-eds and articles that he’d submit to big-name sites, where he’d get picked up by sympathetic editors (they’re everywhere). It also helps to cozy up to rich white people, many of whom already share his views.
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 CEO 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.
Yes, he has a “think tank,” a term that is long past its past-due date. Hanania’s is called the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. It’s run out of his house, and mainly seems to be a drop-box for donations that pay his substantial salary. The function of CSPI is…
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.”
It’s a profitable gig, collecting donations from insufferable rich Republicans and shuffling it into bad publications that pollute the body politic, but there’s no “thinking” involved in a think-tank. But it paid off for Hanania! He could use that illusion of serious scholarship to work his way up the grifter’s ladder.
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.
He may be dropping a few rungs off that ladder, though. Bari Weiss has said she didn’t know him and wouldn’t have hired him if she had. Oops.
The University of Austin, founded by a group including Bari Weiss in reaction to progressive campus culture and promising freer speech, has drawn a line at the right-wing writer Richard Hanania, after HuffPost revealed that he’d written in favor of eugenics and racism under a pseudonym.
“Richard Hanania has no affiliation with UATX. He was invited once as a speaker. Like many other institutions, we were completely unaware of his pseudonymous, racist writings. Had we known, we would not have invited him,” a spokesman, Hillel Ofek, told Semafor in an email.
His invitations to speak at the Federalist Society probably still stand — they eat up the racist white nationalist stuff there. He’s probably going to face some opposition at Stanford, I hope, but you never know. Apologists for hate seem to have infiltrated many higher levels of society. You don’t have to worry about Hanania’s prospects, he was already gearing up to jump to a new grift.
Hanania mentioned all of these men [Andreesen, Sacks, Ramaswamy, Thiel] 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.”
New grift, same as the old grift.
The rational reason to reject eugenics is, of course, that we know where it led when it captured “the hearts and minds of policy makers” over a century ago: to suffering and death and a world where an asshole like Hanania can thrive.
P.S. I neglected to mention that another important rung on the racist grift ladder is publishing in Quillette. You will not be surprised to learn that Claire Lehman, the creepy mastermind behind Quillette, still supports Hanania.
May this ogre be banished to the garbage heap of history
Sadly, many will conflate the pseudoacience of eugenics with the possibility of using GM tech to cure hereditary disease (my home region has surprisingly many lethal excessive genes for diseases that exist nowhere else).
If the eugenicists would start with the eugenicists, they would achieve their goal of removing those most unfit for a civilized society..
My perception is that apologists for inclusiveness have started, slowly, to infiltrate the higher levels of society. Apologists for hate have long been dominant.
I also have a “think tank” perched above my “philosophizin’ bowl” to hold water used to flush down my thought-fewmets.
Why am I not suprised here? Texas, no surprise.
A better question.
Why is he still at the University of Texas. He has been outed as a mindless white racist.
For which there is no scientific basis whatsoever.
There is however a scientific basis for race mixing.
.1. Hybrid vigro also known as Heterosis is a known property.
It is in fact, the basis of our agricultural systems and how we feed 8 billion people on planet earth.
.2.
In any event, despite this racist clown’s plans for the US population, mixed race children are common and their percentage is steadily going up.
14% of newly born babies in the USA were mixed race in 2017.
It is likely that in a few centuries at the most that the US population will be mostly a mixed blend of all races.
.3. We are all mixes already anyway!!!
Just about everyone in the US is already mixed ethnically or racially.
Most of the white population is mixed European.
The Black population is about 20% white.
Most of us are part Neanderthal.
Going back a little further, Europeans are a mix of a lot of different genetic groups that are distantly related.
It’s pretty bad when you’re toxic enough that Bari Weiss won’t touch you.
I’m really enjoying the way we’re all getting to recapitulate the 20th century, with the added fun of global warming tossed in for good measure. It’s gonna be great.
Maybe Star Trek was just off a few decades, and we’ll have the Eugenics Wars and then crawl out of the rubble to face a brave, united, new future. … Nah, probably not.
raven@#5:
1. Hybrid vigro also known as Heterosis is a known property.
There would have to be more “racial” characteristics for that to matter. Our perception of “race” seems to mostly surround the effect of a small number of alleles. The rest of the differences appear to be cultural. Offhand, I’d say that the most significant “racial” features are lactose tolerance, or sickle-cell anemia, or white fragility and love of imperialist violence. I almost put something about prediliction for alcohol addiction on that list but I’m not sure if that has actually been linked to inheritance. I suppose there’s also blindness among the Amish, hemophilia in some bloodlines (but not races) and the british aristocracy’s tendency to produce chinless drooling twits. There has been so much mixing there that the british are probably not a distinct gene line. Speaking of hybrid vigor…
My recollection is that there were some prominent black proponents of eugenics as a means of…ermm…improvement for blacks themselves. WEB DuBois was not immune:
https://nursingclio.org/2017/06/01/the-black-politics-of-eugenics/
Promoting “race” mixing for the genetic reasons seems rather enlightened on its face, but still quite creepy and…well eugenic:
“Little noted even in recent treatments of modern eugenic thinking are those (admittedly few) eugenicists (many, although not all, of them African American) who believed in “hybrid vigor” and therefore advocated racial mixture as a means to improve the individual American and the nation as a whole.” From Unnatural Selections by Daylanne K. English
It was a cutting against the grain and not into racial purity or superiority per se, but still a eugenic endeavor nonetheless.
Raven @ 5
…And of top of that, Europeans got a lot of Yamnaya DNA ca 3000-2000 BC (possibly part of EEF).
“Cheddar man” is a very early English man with blue eyes and brown skin. Tolkien et al may have projected their estetic ideals on the description of the elves, but the earliest English would have looked like the Southren allies of Sauron.
What?!? Weiss’ “university” would have deplatformed him for his beliefs?
It’s almost like they don’t actually believe in the free speech absolutism they espouse.
Some folks are excellent examples of why some animals eat their own young. This specimen though, is a finer example of why one shouldn’t engage in such behavior, lest the parent suffer from severe food poisoning.
Still, it is nice to have the global village properly introduced to one of its newest idiots.
birgerjohansson @ 1, founder effects are both profound and well documented. Isolated populations are especially prone to experiencing those effects. I personally know one researcher who’s extensively studied both Amish and Icelandic genetics for specific genetic maladies.
Then, there are the isolated populations with less founder issues, such as Sicily, an island notable for being invaded by pretty much everyone on the planet save South America and Asia. I mention that, as I’m of pure Sicilian genetic heritage, whatever pure actually means. The kids did a genetic test some time back, I’ll suffice it to say that it was immensely entertaining and reflective of Sicilian, ahem, cultural exchanges over the centuries.
But, remember, ogres are like onions. They’re stinky and make people cry.
When all your friends are racists, maybe, just maybe, you’re a racist. Racist?? Did I say racist? I meant race realist….
When a farmer wants to begin ‘improving’ a breed they first make sure that the population they have to choose from are well-cared for so that admirable characteristics are not obscured by poor conditions. Additionally, they specify what characteristics they want to emphasize. Eugenicists apparently do neither of those things – they do not advocate for everyone having enough to eat, good medical care, good education, opportunities in society, and so on…all of which are essential for a human to be the best person that individual can be….nor do they specify what characteristics they would like to be breeding humans for, or how they will test for the presence of those characteristics (unless you count ‘being able to make lots of money’ and ‘have lots of money’ as answers). I’ll consider believing that a eugenicist really does want to improve the species when they start advocating for everyone to have good food, medical care, education, opportunities, and so on – and when they specify what they want to breed for and how they will accomplish that goal without interfering with any human rights. Until then their grunts and whines are not worth listening to.
profpedant@13: “ …nor do they specify what characteristics they would like to be breeding humans for…”
I suspect they could sum it up in 14 words or so.
profpedant @ 13, I’m going to totally wing it here and guess that you’ve never observed a farmer’s pig pen.
I have to believe, from that photo of him above, that he has at least a few custom-tailored SS Das Reich uniforms complete with Death Head caps in a locked closet somewhere, just waiting to see the light of day
LOL.
I try not to judge on appearance but he looks like his parents are closely related.
Any eugenicist would decide that he looks too inbred and reject him as breeding stock.
Outbreeding is good.
The converse case, inbreeding, is not good.
We have a huge amount of data that says inbreeding is not a good idea.
And populations that end up too inbred also end up with a huge number of medical and other problems, i.e. some of the Mormon cults such as the FLDS.
wzrd1 @ 15 – I have. There is at least a pretense of taking care of the animals so that they weigh as much as possible when it comes time to be slaughtered. Most, probably nearly all, eugenicists don’t even make noises, much less action, about making sure that people have the medical care, food, education, etc. that enables them to become the most profitable/exploitable workers. The closest they come to trying to maximize value is to declare that “some people should labor for the benefit of their betters”, just exploitation and only exploitation. They see human suffering as desirable and have bent their thoughts to trying to cast themselves as ‘the good guys’ while taking maximum advantage of that suffering (even though a well-educated/well-paid/good-medical-care/significant opportunities population produces more surplus value, providing them with the possibility of becoming even more rich if they would make some serious efforts to reduce human suffering).
tedw @ 14 – and those fourteen words would be? (I am familiar with a lot of things, but not everything.)
and
The FLDS has had a rare genetic recessive lethal invade their gene pool to very high levels.
They now know they have a problem with inbreeding and are taking serious measures to correct their gene pool.
In my area, there is a secretive cult of faith healers who routinely kill their children. It’s just 3 or 4 families heavily intermarried by now.
I once thought they might end up with problems from inbreeding if they weren’t careful.
Then a saw a photo of a young couple in court for a faith healing child death.
They looked eerily the same, a lot more similar than most brothers and sisters.
It’s very likely they are far past the “inbreeding causes problems stage” and into the “look, we are pure bred clones stage”.
@18- profpedant
It went past me too but:
https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/14-words
Hanania does not sound very “aryan”. In an earlier time he might have been considered a “mischling” and been denied the rights* of a citizen in das Reich.
*not that those rights were particularly impressive.
To borrow a sentence from a parody of Hill Street Blues in MAD magazine, “I have a bigotry problem. People of every race -including my own- think I am inferior to them… and they are right!
Hemudactylus @ 20
I was previously only aware of “88”.
Hemudactylus @ 20
I was previously only aware of “88”.
Should be “hemidactylus”, my fingers are too fat to hit the right key.
I had to look it up.
From the link in 20.
ADL ALTERNATE NAMES: Fourteen Words
“14 Words” is a reference to the most popular white supremacist slogan in the world: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The slogan was coined by David Lane, a member of the white supremacist terrorist group known as The Order (Lane died in prison in 2007).
.1. David Lane did one thing right by dying in prison. No loss, huge gain.
.2. To secure our people’s existence and a future for our children, we need to have guys like Hanania sterilized by vasectomy, followed by a brain upgrade, and a major personality repair job.
Rationalwiki has a writeup on this guy,
Richard Hanania is one sick puppy.
and
Hanania isn’t even white.
He is a Palestinian xian which means he is a Middle Eastern Arab.
Any white racist eugenicist would sterilize this guy in a second.
People will look back on the first few decades of the 21st century as the time when fascism in all its manifestations came roaring back into the world with the acquiescence of “mainstream” politicians and media. The tactics have been clever, with the use of labels like “woke” (meaning any left wing policies or thoughts) and “cancel culture” (meaning saying anything you like on the right while shutting down all speech from the left) all accelerated by the US malign “first amendmen” rights (and its promotion in other countries) as well as by vile billionaires using the internet, and reported approvingly by mainstream media. And all of this with a background of a world burning. At my age I probably won’t see the final stages of the results, but I cry for my beloved world.
Making stable populations requires culture change. Race / biology is not a part of that.
Origins of woke? people finding the old “slurs” to “Politically Correct / Political Correctness” & “SJW” weren’t working well and needed a relabbelling sicne they’d become too transparent and tainted?
Are Harper Collins still going to publish that I wonder?
StevoR, you’re underthinking it.
The book is about the rise of woke ideas, to use its terminology.
cf. https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-origins-of-woke-richard-hanania?variant=41004650528802
In short, it’s not about a relabeling, it’s about using the current label to spruik old ideas.
I don’t really believe that you actually wonder.
Shorter Bari Weiss: A person who shares my worldview is a white supremacist and supports eugenics?? How can that be?
21st century racism looks a lot like 20th century racism. Hanania/Hoste and his ilk just move sentences and paragraphs around etc. For example: Hanania/Hoste writes in early 21st century, “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,”
Thomas N. Page in his book The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem(1904) writes: “…the Negro was taught two fundamental errors: first, that the Southern white was his enemy, and secondly, that his race could be legislated into equality with the white.”
I just read these two odious screeds, the Clansman by Dixon and the above mentioned by Page. I do not recommend them! History in all its shame. One benefit is that I discovered two writers that I hadn’t heard of before, Sutton E. Griggs and Kelly Miller. Miller penned a response to Dixon’s book ‘The Leopard’s Spots’ one of a trilogy of racist dross including The Clansman and The Traitor, horrible books. Miller’s response is worth a read.
https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbaapc.19201/?st=gallery
@27 raven
You are correct. It is called “useful idiot” for a reason. The moment “the idiot” stops being useful, they will be killed with the rest of fascists’ enemies.
Its a great and intentional misunderstanding that being a fascist means that you are safe from being killed by other fascists. It is simply untrue. Just ask strasserists. Its simply useful for the movement to have people like him around at this point in time, as well as any POC, trans or other minority groups. They shield the movement from valid criticism from outside (racism, mysoginy, terfnes). Once the fascists actually win and don’t need them as a shield because they’ll have actual power of state violence to shield them from all criticism, those people will be purged.
eastexsteve @ 33, nothing far right terrorists do is new, it’s all retreaded, worn out bullshit. Their problem is, it’s trivial to point out the retread overtop of the dry rotted tire that they’re trying to run on, but keeps going flat.
Then, they fall back to their tried and true methods of violence, like all terrorists do.
Every such interaction after wasn’t pleasant at all, but it was necessarily brief. I used to terrorize very real terrorists for a living and that I’m alive is testimony to my being quite effective at it. I was called a monster and I completely agree, I’m the monster that hunts monsters.
But, I really value just simple peace and quiet.
The only real problems is, their leaders aren’t rank and file idiots, so they’re harder to isolate and prove out. The rank and file, well, not a treasure trove of rocket scientist class intellect there, half the time they blow themselves up trying to build a bomb.
The worst thing that can be done is to embolden them, for anything that doesn’t have massive push-back and resistance results in confidence building in their notion of being able to win the day.
I’ve an unfair advantage though, beyond experience and training, to them, I’m just a defenseless old guy with a cane.
They never expect to find that I’ve surrounded them. I need the cane due to a deficiency in proprioception, not strength. And I still retain both strength and speed. And of course, I do “fight dirty”.
But, violence is the first recourse for the incompetent. It remains a frequently forgotten recourse for progressives, but it should always remain an option, for when all other measures fail. Otherwise, one simply becomes yet another victim.
And never stick around to take credit, let some other sap take credit for one’s good works.
The only validation one should require is success in one’s efforts to help others.
@31. John Morales :
ideas might be putting it generously in my view – its the same hate from the regressive side at everyu bit of social progress and left wing notion that they’ve stuck another label on -a label appropriated from African American cyulture so I gather since the reichwing lack originality as well as honour.
Well, I do. I hope they don’t and have more ethics than to do so now its known whoand what he is but, I don’t know.
StevoR, as I wrote and as you quoted, “to use its terminology”.
No point telling me what you think about it, I’m telling you what the book is about, and it’s not about the genesis of the term. And yes, it’s just more of the same.
As far as publishing it, I did give you a link to HarperCollins own site.
“On Sale: September 19, 2023”
Given that, you are actually hoping against hope, not wondering.
@ 30 StevoR
@ 31 John Morales
So to be clear Juan Ramón – after your entire shtick for the past decade has been to deliberately interpret others’ words in a hyperliteral and obviously wrong way in order to manufacture an argument – you’re criticising StevoR for interpreting “origins of woke” literally?
Hahahaha. X-D
Your donkey braying and your attempt to troll me is feeble, yappybob.
For someone who still claims to believe I’m a troll, you sure like to elicit retorts from me. Ah well, another blog, another thread, another attempted jibe from you.
PS Your [sic] is rather amusing in its inappropriateness.
@39- John Morales
You are splitting hairs with StevoR in a non-obvious way, perhaps due to a previous history. It would help the reader if you were more explicit as to what is the actual issue with how “woke” is addressed in a yet to be published book instead of keeping it bottled up. Seems more an inside joke where the only insider is you.
In @36 StevoR wrote:
“…its the same hate from the regressive side at everyu bit of social progress and left wing notion that they’ve stuck another label on -a label appropriated from African American cyulture so I gather since the reichwing lack originality as well as honour.”
That pretty much nails it right there. The book to me is yet another in the cottage industry of stoking the culture war for the Desantis-Rufo types who will uncritically lap it up. Own them libs.
John seems to be carrying over from “That’s Texas logic” where he was demonstrating his superior knowledge of how a term like Latino is used in the US.
@37. John Morales :
That’s true. I’m hope they’ve cancelled it since and not updated the page yet but yeah. That could just be wishful thinking – or lack of adequate pressure on them maybe? I would have thought they’d consider their reputation when it comes to publishing open, well formerly open (albiet disguised before being exposed) White Supremacist propagandists.