You don’t have to hand it to Richard Hanania

Support independent journalism by subscribing to The Handbasket. Upgrade to premium to keep this work alive and well, or leave a tip. Thanks!

This is a guest post by journalist and author Christopher Mathias. An excerpt of his recent book “To Catch A Fascist” was published on The Handbasket in February.

Three years ago this month I published an exposé for HuffPost about a guy named Richard Hanania. It revealed the rising right-wing star, beloved by Silicon Valley billionaires and future Vice President JD Vance, had used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to secretly write for the most extreme white supremacist websites. “Hoste” wasn’t just some random online shitposter, but one of the formative “intellectual” voices of the nascent “alt-right,” the fascist movement that would later partner with Donald Trump to take the White House and help shape his first and second presidencies. 

My story about Hanania went viral, setting off a chain of disapproving op-eds in places like The Atlantic and The New York Times: But in the years since, I’ve watched many of these same elite media institutions rehabilitate Hanania over and over again, credulously accepting his claim to have left the alt-right behind. And they’ve allowed him to brand himself as perhaps America’s foremost “former” white nationalist— despite what I’d argue is plenty of easy-to-find evidence to the contrary. 

As the American right in 2026 continues to be so wholly enveloped by the absurdities of Trumpism, some centrists are increasingly desperate for conservatives who appear “reasonable.” Only by pointing to such phantom right-wing figures can they rationalize their own conservative mode of politics and their distaste for the left (or morally justify their fecklessness in the face of rising fascism.) But such “respectable” conservatives, who can pretend to be above the MAGA fray, are in short supply; so in recent months we have been inundated with interviews and articles treating a murderer’s row of far-right clowns as interesting thinkers. This includes the likes of Laura Loomer, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ben Shapiro, and Chris Rufo. 

For his latest act, Hanania is presenting himself as someone who has turned against Trump, leading to a recent Atlantic profile titled “The Anti-Populist.” He says he regrets his vote for the president in 2024 and that, by elevating unqualified figures like Kash Patel and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump and his movement have abandoned the experts and “elite” consensus needed to govern. Hanania’s writing now revolves around the “need for a ruling class,” or what he calls “Elite Human Capital.” It's the argument that forms the foundation of his new book, “Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends In Disaster.” 

The Atlantic piece actually does a good job documenting how loathsome Hanania is—including his recent provocation that Jeffrey Epstein was not a pedophile because his victims were “post-pubescent”—but nevertheless allows Hanania to portray himself the way he is so desperate to be received: as a serious, “heterodox” thinker bravely “staking out lonely territory” between what he argues are the equivalent evils of MAGA populism and the populism of the left. 

This is how The Atlantic describes Hanania’s purported political pivot:  

But as an observer of Hanania for some years now, I promise you that he does not have a point. His screeching about “Elite Human Capital” is just a not-so-slick recapitulation of the vile eugenicist worldview he espoused as “Richard Hoste” over a decade ago. To paraphrase the famous Dril tweet, you really do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to Hanania. 

He has been consistently, outrageously wrong his entire career. First as a white nationalist; then as a white nationalist who claimed to no longer be one; then as a Trump supporter who helped shape some of Trump’s signature, racist, and anti-democratic initiatives; and now as a newly-minted “former” Trump supporter who would have you believe the same calipers he’s used to measure skulls his entire adult life are more liberal calipers this time. He swears.  

It feels essential now to remind people of who Hanania really is and why it’s dangerous to treat him as some voice of reason. Normalizing and sane-washing figures like him, or allowing them to position themselves as somehow “moderate” or in the “center,” amounts to a complete surrender of the Overton Window to fascism. Hanania deserves our scorn—but so, too, does a media establishment that continues to elevate him. 

Hanania abandoned the “Richard Hoste” nom de plume in the mid-2010s, weaving his way through academia while starting to publish articles under his own name in major outlets like the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He appeared twice on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight. And he became a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, delivering lectures at Ivy League universities, all while gaining a devoted following on Twitter (now X) and Substack for his brand of “anti-woke” punditry. Among his biggest fans were billionaires Elon Musk, Marc Andreesen, David Sacks, and Peter Thiel. Vice President JD Vance once called him a “friend” and a “really interesting thinker.” 

In late July of 2023, before my story was set to publish, I repeatedly reached out to Hanania for comment. He never bothered to reply. Instead, days after the instantly-viral story dropped on HuffPost, he published a response on his Substack titled “Why I Used To Suck, And (Hopefully) No Longer Do.” 

It is a remarkable document to read now, knowing how many people somehow accepted it as a sincere apology. “Recently, it’s been revealed that over a decade ago I held many beliefs that, as my current writing makes clear, I now find repulsive,” Hanania wrote. He explained that from roughly 2009 to 2013, he was but a lost, lonely, and self-loathing man in his “early twenties” (he was 26 years old in 2011) with no “romantic successes” or career prospects. His many resentments, he said, found an outlet on neo-Nazi websites, where “Richard Hoste” was a star.  But his purported apology took little responsibility for his history of advancing the noxious ideology of the alt-right,  calling my article “cancel culture” at its worst and an attempt at “unpersoning” him. 

It quickly became obvious that he resented getting exposed for his vile past against his will.

In the very Substack article in which he claimed to denounce white nationalism, Hanania explicitly defended the piece of disinformation at the heart of white nationalism itself: race science. “The reason I’m the target of a cancellation effort,” he wrote, “is because left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races.” (Emphasis mine.) 

Still, Hanania’s “Why I Sucked…” Substack received praise from an array of centrists and conservatives, eager to offer him forgiveness. “An honest post on a difficult subject, and the kind of genuine self-critique that is necessary to move past ideas,” wrote Chris Best, the CEO of Substack, the publishing platform then worth $650 million, where Hanania had some 20,000 subscribers. (He now has 50,000.) 

David Frum, the former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, waxed lyrically about Hanania’s post, calling it “a writer's reckoning with his own recently exposed record of racist and antidemocratic extremism,” adding: “Is redemption real? Only God knows for certain. But we mortals can judge by acts and words. We should affirm: there can be a road back from extremism to normality; that people who veer to the margins are not doomed to stay there forever if they want to come home.”

Unmasking Hanania as the man behind “Richard Hoste” had taken a month of reporting, a painstaking process of piecing together clues from myriad sources. It also involved hours of reading the absolute bile “Hoste” published across “alt-right” media, for outlets like VDare, The Occidental Observer, Counter-Currents, Taki’s Magazine, Radix Journal, and HBD Books—a blog he ran himself. (HBD is short for “human biodiversity,” a euphemism for race science.) 

Hanania had hidden behind his pseudonym to lash out against “race-mixing” and “miscegenation,” demanding, for example, that Black Americans “thank the white race for everything that they have.” He called for “low-IQ” people—who he described as largely Black—to be forcibly sterilized. Other abhorrent views included the idea that Hispanic people were without “the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation” so should be expelled en masse; fat people were “disgusting”; and women “didn’t evolve to be the decision makers in society.” He wrote: “women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.” 

Hanania’s revisionist history was even more galling if you understood the central thesis of my HuffPost piece: He’d never really left fascism behind at all. And it ignored the receipts I had for many of the outrageous, bigoted statements Hanania had written under his real name. 

A mere month before my investigation was published, Hanania had claimed African American Studies departments at U.S. universities were run by "street hustlers and illiterates.” Two months prior, he tweeted that “we need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people,” adding: “Blacks won’t appreciate it, whites don’t have the stomach for it.” That same month, he tweeted that Black people were “animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits.” During a lecture at the Yale Federalist Society, Hanania had held forth on how the government “discriminates against whites and men.” 

Hanania has still been openly obsessed with eugenics in recent years, suggesting in 2023 that the elderly perform a ritualistic form of suicide upon reaching a certain age. “Maybe old people shouldn’t all commit seppuku,” he wrote, “but we need to think creatively about how they can have dignity in a world where many are only burdens. With technological change becoming more rapid, they no longer even have wisdom to offer young generations. Need new solutions.”

And he’s continued citing, praising, and promoting the same fascist thinkers he’d cited, praised, and promoted as “Richard Hoste”; that includes Holocaust denier Ron Unz, and Steve Sailer, the founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute, an online forum for eugenicists to discuss how to best selectively breed the human species. When Richard Lynn, a self-described “scientific racist” who spent his life trying to prove the genetic superiority of white people, died in July 2023, Hanania mourned him on Twitter. “RIP,” he wrote, “... He’ll be remembered and read while his useless critics will be completely forgotten, if they’re ever even known.” 

In the weeks and months after my HuffPost exposé, Hanania taunted me online, pointing to just how precisely un-canceled he was. He posted a chart purporting to show sales of his forthcoming book, “The Origins of Woke,” surging after the “HuffPost Cancellation Attempt.” 

“The HuffPost journalist who wrote the hit piece on me is still contacting my publisher every day trying to get them to cancel my book,” Hanania wrote, referring to the emails I sent to Harper Collins, asking for comment about publishing a bigot like Hanania. “He’s growing increasingly frustrated as he’s realizing he’s only brought more attention to it. Preorder now.”

The world’s richest man then responded to Hanania’s tweet. “Interesting, will read,” Elon Musk wrote.

Prior to this exposé, my stories had gotten a lot of white nationalists fired from their jobs. There was the neo-Nazi who marched at the deadly “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville—working as the security guard for “alt-right” figurehead Richard Spencer—before returning home to Massachusetts where he put on his police uniform. There was the neo-Nazi podcaster in Virginia who told his co-hosts stories about his work as an EMT, often calling Black patients slurs and comparing them to animals. There were half a dozen U.S. servicemen who belonged to Identity Evropa, the white nationalist group whose members carried torches in Charlottesville, chanting “Jews will not replace us!” 

I’m glad my stories helped these men face consequences for their actions. They were in positions of power where they could do harm. Similarly, yes, I believe Hanania should have faced consequences for his white nationalism. I don’t think unreconstructed bigots like him should be rewarded with money and influence, or the imprimatur of being affiliated with this country’s most prestigious, “elite” institutions and figures. 

All of the places where Hanania had lectured or written—The University of Texas, Stanford, the Yale Federalist Society, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and others — did not take steps to “cancel” or condemn him after my story. But this was actually proof of the thesis at the center of my reporting career, which I later made the foundation of my own book: that the white nationalism of the “alt-right” was going mainstream. Hanania didn’t abandon “Richard Hoste” because he’d actually moderated his views; he just didn’t exactly need to hide his views behind a pseudonym anymore. 

Still, in the ensuing three years after my story I watched mainstream, centrist media outlets and figures fall over themselves to legitimize Hanania and accept that he really had left white nationalism behind him. The Boston Globe gave him a monthly column. Reporters at The New York Times regularly called upon him for his analysis, describing him variously as “a political scientist who once wrote for white nationalist publications… before moderating his views”; a “pundit who used to post in favor of eugenics”; and simply “a conservative political scientist and writer.” Times columnist Ross Douthat routinely cited and promoted Hanania, who was sitting down for interviews with Vox and Derek Thompson at The Atlantic. 

Eventually Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom was retweeting Hanania, and Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Jared Polis was calling him an "intellectual" who was doing “actual thinking which is rare these days.” 

There is maybe a genuine debate to be had about where on the political spectrum a white nationalist can land to be considered a “former” white nationalist. I’d argue, however, that spending the last three years promoting a book—Hanania’s “The Origins of Woke”—which calls for overturning the advances won by the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, is not a sufficient act of atonement. The Trump administration in its second term has attacked the Civil Rights Act, with Hanania even taking credit for inspiring Trump to repeal Executive Order 11246, a directive requiring affirmative action when hiring federal contractors. 

I’d argue a “former” white nationalist would not be one of the country’s foremost “anti-DEI” pundits, agitating like Hanania has for ending "diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs; nor would he be listed as a “contributor” to Project 2025, the MAGA blueprint for an authoritarian presidency. He would not call the Supreme Court decision to gut the Voting Rights Act, which safeguarded racial equality in elections, a “great day for our democracy.” Moreover, a “former” white nationalist would not be a public Trump supporter throughout the 2024 campaign, when the president was using explicitly fascist rhetoric, promising to mass deport, or “remigrate,” millions of immigrants while falsely claiming Haitian immigrants were eating their pets. 

Even now, in 2026, as part of his anti-Trump gambit, when Hanania is claiming more loudly than ever that he is not a bigot, a closer look at his “Elite Human Capital” philosophy finds him repackaging race science for supposedly liberal ends. 

He is more supportive of gay people and certain immigrant groups, not because every single human being is deserving of dignity and rights, but because sometimes they possess higher IQs. Mass migration might be good, he argues, insomuch as it has the potential to create a permanent underclass. “If racists were smart they’d understand that mass migration is good for their own people. Under a system like the [United Arab Emirates], Americans could live like gods,” he posted on X in December 2024, seeming to extol how the UAE lures and then entraps migrant workers, largely from South Asia, into grueling jobs that human rights describe as modern slavery. 

Hanania has never shaken his fascist preoccupation with sorting human beings into hierarchies of those who get to rule, and those who should be ruled. It’s always a safe bet that Hanania, from his days as “Hoste” until the present day, will place himself near the top of this hierarchy, the kind of “elite worthy: of a profile in the Atlantic. 

What’s infuriating about it all is that over the last decade I’ve talked to many actual former white nationalists. Some were sources for stories, offering up insights or intel about various fascist groups. Others sought help, asking me to connect them with “de-rad,” or "de-radicalization," groups that could ease their exit from the far right. When these people were genuine about leaving white nationalism behind, I witnessed them undertake a painful process of accountability. Some of these “formers” chose to speak out forcefully against the movements to which they once belonged, seeming earnest in their efforts to save younger Americans from being drawn down the same dark path they had taken. But most did the work of moral rehabilitation quietly, navigating their shame and remorse out of the public eye, making private amends with those they’d harmed. They’d learned a deep, abiding humility. They had, after all, been so profoundly wrong, embracing an evil which sought, in no uncertain terms, to inflict the worst cruelties upon other human beings. They understood this inflection point in their lives largely as a time of shutting up and listening, not talking. They very rarely, for example, became pundits. It seemed to me they were seeking forgiveness—from others and themselves—in real, authentic ways. 

I do not believe Hanania has taken these steps. It is a sobering indictment of the American media that people believe he has.

Christopher Mathias is a journalist and author based in New York. His writing can be found in the Guardian, MS NOW, The Nation, Talking Points Memo, Zeteo, and HuffPost. His book, "To Catch A Fascist: The Fight To Expose The Radical Right," was named one of the "Best Books of 2026" by The New Yorker. He goes by @letsgomathias on Bluesky. To get in touch: [email protected].