To Forgive or Not to Forgive?

How to think about Richard Hanania's past racism and recent apology

Racism

TO FORGIVE OR NOT TO FORGIVE?

How to think about Richard Hanania's past racism and recent apology

Michael Creswell

You might not be aware of Richard Hanania. He is a once obscure figure whose public profile has skyrocketed in the past couple of years. A high school dropout who went on to earn a law degree from the University of Chicago and a PhD in political science from UCLA, Hanania has his own Substack newsletter in which he opines on a variety of topics, mostly from a conservative/libertarian point of view. He has also published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and he has authored two books.

Hanania has had the support of some important people. His recently published book, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics, has gotten blurbs from conservative activist and best-selling author Christopher Rufo, entrepreneur Peter Thiel, GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, George Mason University economists Tyler Cowen and Bryan Caplan, the psychologist Rob Henderson, and others.

His rise was also aided by money from some wealthy institutions. In 2021 the Conru Foundation, a think tank founded by the multimillionaire businessman Andrew Conru, awarded $200,000 to the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI), a think tank which Hanania founded and serves as president. The Mercatus Center at George Mason University, run by Tyler Cowen, awarded CSPI $50,000 courtesy of its Emergent Ventures program. Unnamed donors have also given hundreds of thousands of dollars to CSPI.

In addition to praise, Hanania’s provocative opinions on many topics have also earned him a fair amount of criticism. His many critics have said unflattering things about him and his views, accusing him of promoting bigotry. Hanania’s reputation took a big hit in August when Christopher Mathias of the HuffPost revealed that in the 2010s Hanania, writing under the pseudonym “Richard Hoste,” contributed to anti-Semitic and white supremacist outlets, including The Occidental Observer, Counter-Currents, Taki’s Magazine, VDare, and AlternativeRight.com.

The views he expressed then will anger many. For example, in a 2009 review of Barbara Trepagnier’s Silent Racism: How Well-Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide, Hanania/Hoste wrote that “Despite being indoctrinated with the ideology of racial equality, white women still know in their gut that black men are dangerous.”

Writing for a blog in 2010, Hanania/Hoste argued that whites should avoid non-Asian minorities (NAMs).

He proclaimed in that piece that “individuals differ in their inherent capabilities. The races do, too, with whites and Asians on the top and blacks at the bottom.”

He takes up the same line of thinking elsewhere in the article:

“Schools should stop wasting time trying to close achievement gaps. And not only do whites have nothing to feel guilty about, they are the best thing to ever happen to blacks. Even ignoring race, humanity will not move forward through equality or by raising up the really stupid to the level of just plain stupid.”

In the same piece he asks:

“If the races are equal, why does the free market always produce results that favor some groups and not others? And why do whites always end up near the top and blacks at the bottom, everywhere and always?”

According to the reporting of Mathias, Hanania/Hoste deprecated any mixing between the races: “For the white gene pool to be created millions had to die. Race mixing is like destroying a unique species or piece of art. It’s shameful.”

Mathias also notes that Hanania/Hoste commented that the mixed-race heritage journalist Soledad O’Brien “has a skin tone and hair that most other blacks would kill for. I think I understand why mulattos associate with their black side. For a ‘black’ chick, she’s a 10, for a white chick, a 7.”

We learn from Mathias that in 2010 Hanania/Hoste advocated forced sterilization to rid the world of people with relatively low IQs: “There doesn’t seem to be a way to deal with low IQ breeding that doesn’t include coercion. Perhaps charities could be formed which paid those in the 70-85 range to be sterilized, but what to do with those below 70 who legally can’t even give consent and have a higher birthrate than the general population? In the same way we lock up criminals and the mentally ill in the interests of society at large, one could argue that we could on the exact same principle sterilize those who are bound to harm future generations through giving birth.” The Hanania that emerges from these comments, with his eugenic views about IQ, clearly would have liked to have seen many black people sterilized.

Two days after the HuffPost piece appeared, Hanania responded on his Substack newsletter: “Why I Used to Suck, and (Hopefully) No Longer Do.” He contends that “My posts and blog comments in my early twenties encouraged racism, misogyny, misanthropy, trolling, and overall bad faith. Phrases like ‘racism’ and ‘misogyny’ get thrown around too easily, but I don’t believe there’s any doubt many of my previous comments crossed the line, regardless of where one thinks that line should be.”

Hanania nonetheless dismisses the HuffPost piece. “One of the most dishonest parts of the Huffington Post hitpiece is the argument that I maintain ‘a creepy obsession with so-called race science’ and talk about blacks being inherently more prone to crime. I do no such thing, and ultimately believe that what the sources of such disparities are doesn’t matter.”

Without any sense of irony, Hanania writes that “This isn’t simply about my own personal journey, but can hopefully serve as a guide to others who are tempted to go in the direction of a race-centered view of the world.” If his recent public comments are any indication, he still has a race-centered view of the world.  

For instance, he tweeted in May 2023: “I don’t have much hope that we’ll solve crime in any meaningful way. It would require a revolution in our culture or form of government. We need more policing, incarceration and surveillance of black people. Blacks won’t appreciate it, whites don’t have the stomach for it.”

That same month he tweeted about a white man, Daniel Penny, who placed a black man, Jordan Neely, in a deadly chokehold on a New York City subway: “Daniel Penny getting charged. These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits.” Readers can decide for themselves whom Hanania thinks “these people” are.

We must ask ourselves if Hanania’s apology is sincere. Has he undergone a conversion? Is the racist Richard Hoste dead and buried, leaving the benign self-described “race realist” Richard Hanania in his wake?

True apologies include owning up to what you did without making excuses, as well as explaining why you did it, why it’s wrong, and what you learned from the experience. True apologies are also sincere and offered voluntarily. On this latter score Hanania’s apology is certainly unconvincing. Reading it gives one the sense that he considers it a minor flap caused by a politically driven reporter acting in bad faith. Hanania admits on his Substack page that his initial reaction was to “either ignore the story or simply denounce the source and its methods.” He ultimately chose to respond and denounce the source as a “supporter of antifa.” He also took to Twitter to condemn the HuffPost journalist and promote his book in one fell swoop: “If you hate this kind of reporting and want to see it completely discredited, you buy this book. Simple as that.”

Hanania claims that he has reformed and no longer holds the “repulsive” views he used to espouse online. New data, reading books, and talking with intellectual luminaries has persuaded him to renounce his previous views and embrace classical liberalism. He makes no mention of reaching out to black people, speaking to black organizations, inviting black people on his podcast, or making black friends. Doing these things would perhaps benefit him more than merely relying on “new data.”

In a flattering piece published in July 2021, Bryan Caplan said of Hanania that “Few modern thinkers are as wise and forthright.” One can’t help but wonder, however, about the extent of Hanania’s wisdom and forthrightness. Shouldn’t he have known that one day his past writings were likely to resurface? As a right-winger, shouldn’t he have known that progressives would be doing opposition research on him? If so, perhaps the wisest thing would have been to get out in front of the issue and reveal it himself. Not only would revealing his past writings have been strategically sound, but it would have been the right thing to do ethically.

Will Hanania recover from his public fall? I suspect he will (and he agrees). Not only have some bloggers and others risen to his defense, but some of the important people named in this article have so far remained silent. Whether it is due to embarrassment, or the inability to form a coherent response, or a lack of concern is unclear. Whatever the reason, so far they have not condemned his past writings.

Once the dust settles and a new outrage commands our attention, many people will forget about this sordid affair. Hanania will probably continue to blog, write books, attract grants, and perhaps influence public policy. However, we should keep an eye on him. We need to know if he really has fundamentally changed, or if he has just adopted a pose in order to remain acceptable to a mainstream audience.

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Michael H. Creswell is Associate Professor of History at Florida State University, the author of A Question of Balance: How France and the United States Created Cold War Europe, and an executive editor at History: Reviews of New Books. A specialist on the Cold War, Creswell is currently writing a book that examines the increasing difficulties Americans have in communicating in socially and politically productive ways. He has published previously in the Journal of Free Black Thought here, here, here, here, and here.