HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias did an amazing exposé of Hanania, formerly known as the more blatantly racist Richard Hoste.
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.
Now, under his real name, Hanania has been published by The New York Times and The Washington Post and oh, yeah, he's appeared twice on Tucker Carlson Tonight, HuffPost says. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance are fans, too. “Meanwhile, rich benefactors, some of whose identities are unknown, have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into a think tank run by Hanania,” Mathias reported.
I highly recommend reading the entire piece as a good example of how Nazi-level extremism is now mainstream in the world of rich, powerful conservatives.
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.”
His influential pals may not know who Richard Hoste is but there’s little doubt they know and love who and what Richard Hanania is.
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.
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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.
It’s not as if Hanania has recanted or changed his views much. He’s not hiding them, either. In addition to Substack articles “that share the same obsessions” as white supremacist Hoste, Hanania has a podcast:
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.
I have to wonder: How many other Hananias are out there or, more to the point, hiding in plain sight among the right-wing elites?
