Anti-Woke Sweetheart's Past As Eugenics-Loving White Nationalist Revealed
Anti-Woke Sweetheart's Past As Eugenics-Loving White Nationalist Revealed
Surely you are just as shocked as we are.
A deep investigation into the background of conservative writer Richard Hanania by the Huffington Post’s Christopher Mathias has revealed that before the anti-woke superstar was promoting white supremacist beliefs on Tucker Carlson, palling around with billionaires and writing op-eds for The New York Times, he was writing anonymous white supremacist screeds for some of the most notorious racist and far-right sites on the internet.
Under his real name, he is putting out a book this fall called The Origins of Woke, published by Harper-Collins. Under his real name he has, over the past few years, been published in mainstream publications, appeared on television and become a favorite of the world’s cringiest tech billionaires (but I repeat myself).
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.
He has also, unfortunately, done interviews with Hamish McKenzie, Substack CEO. Since we really like our home here, we’d like him to not screw it up by making the wrong friends. Oh! And he was recruited to be a “professor” at Bari Weiss’s fake college.
The investigation into Hanania’s background revealed:
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.
Under the Richard Hoste pseudonym, however, Hananaia wrote for right-wing extremist websites like Unz Review, operated by noted Holocaust denier and anti-Semite Ron Unz, Taki’s Magazine, known for its association with Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys, the anti-immigration site V-Dare, and the openly white nationalist and anti-Semitic sites Occidental Observer and Counter-Currents.
He was also heavily involved with the genesis of AlternativeRight.com, the site launched by noted “dapper Nazi” Richard Spencer, for which he wrote essays about how and why he thinks White people are intellectually superior to Black people and his fears that Republicans have not done enough to stop “the march of diversity.”
This is not terrifically surprising, given Hanania’s current body of work, which really is not all that far off what he wrote under his pseudonym. As Mathias points out, this is perhaps less because he has gone mainstream as much as he no longer feels the need to hide in the shadows. He’s not necessarily less racist, he’s just a little more mellow.
The fact is, nothing has shaped the Right’s anti-woke ideology as much as late 2000s/early 2010s online white supremacist groups, messageboards and media. Scarier than that, however, is the fact that when people see these connections now, they don’t think “Oh no, I’ve been agreeing with a Nazi this whole time? I better go and do some serious soul-searching and reevaluate all of my beliefs” as often as they think “Wow! Guess I should find out more about what those Nazis have to say! They could be onto something!”
However, what should be fixable is the thing where mainstream publications give platforms to obvious white nationalists. The New York Times responded to an inquiry about their choice to publish Hanania from the Huffington Post by saying “Hanania didn’t inform our editors or anyone at The Times, nor were we aware” of the fact that he had written these things under a pseudonym.
But here’s the thing — as much as people may love to talk about the “liberal media,” The New York Times in particular has relished publishing op-eds from the “anti-woke” establishment, stubbornly refusing to see the connections between where they are going with their bullshit and blatant white nationalist ideology. The paper of record spent years sounding the alarm about the horrors of liberal college students, of scary neologisms and “cancel culture,” and what they saw as the “excesses” of the Left and I’m sorry, but it’s in no way a coincidence that we are now living through a less-than-golden era of right-wing censorship and extremism.
Perhaps they could just worry a little less about “the excesses of the Left” and concentrate on the real threats. Someone putting their pronouns in their Twitter bio isn’t going to kill them, but fans of The Turner Diaries just might. After all, it was Timothy McVeigh’s favorite book.
The Right isn’t going to reject Hanania over this and we shouldn’t expect them to. But perhaps this very direct connection will make it just a teensy bit clear to the center and the Bill Maher types out there what it really is that the “anti-woke” crowd is fighting for.
It's shit like this that makes me stare in wonder at my father's assertion that the NYT is a liberal news rag.
Isn't it unusual that-- considering "anti-woke" as a cause that generates such masses of attention-- if it vanished this minute from the universe, nothing would have changed?