Richard Hanania

Richard Hanania
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Colorado (BA) University of Chicago (JD) University of California, Los Angeles (PhD)
Occupation(s)	Academic, columnist
Known for	Heterodox commentary, The Origins of Woke (2023), various essays

Richard Hanania is an American academic, who is the founder and president of the think tank Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI). He has been described as right wing or libertarian, and a supporter of "enlightened centrism".

Early life and education

Hanania grew up in Oak Lawn, Illinois. He is of Palestinian Christian descent.

He attended Moraine Valley Community College and the University of Colorado. He received a Juris Doctor from the University of Chicago and a Doctor of Philosophy in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Career

Hanania was a research fellow at the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies of Columbia University.

He was a fellow at the University of Texas at Austin's Salem Center for Public Policy. On August 9, 2023, after it was revealed he had written controversial blogs under the pseudonym Richard Hoste, the San Antonio Express-News called for the university to cut ties with Hanania. By August 10, 2023, the Salem Center had removed the "visiting scholar" link to Hanania's bio.

He is founder of the think tank the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI), which has received sums of money from Andrew Conru, the Mercatus Center, and Tyler Cowen. As of the summer of 2023, he was the organization's president.

He has a blog on Substack, which was received positively by figures such as the Economists Tyler Cowen and Bryan Caplan, J.D. Vance, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie, and Tucker Carlson, who invited Hanania on his show multiple times.

He operates his own podcast where he has interviewed various people including Amy Wax, Steven Pinker, Christopher Rufo, and billionaire Marc Andreessen.

Hanania wrote in one essay that the only way to reduce crime would be to have "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."The essay caught the attention of Elon Musk on Twitter, who called it "interesting".

Considered often as a right-wing commentator, Hanania has written in support of more immigration to the US and in favor of abortion rights.

Authorship

Origins of Woke

In The Origins of Woke, Hanania argues that "wokeness" is not something new, but that to some extent it has been codified into U.S. law since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Published in September 2023, it features promotional blurbs written by Vivek Ramaswamy, David Sacks, and Peter Thiel, who expressed support for the idea that "government violence" is the only way to defeat the threat of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Past Anonymous writing

In 2023, the Huffington Post analyzed digital records believed to establish that Hanania was the true identity of a poster, "Richard Hoste", who had written articles for multiple far-right publications — including AltRight.com, The Occidental Observer, Taki's Magazine, and VDare — from 2008 through the early 2010s. "Hoste" wrote his own blog called HBD Books (a reference to "human biodiversity") and operated a Disqus account. After Disqus was the target of a data leak, passwords and email addresses associated with many accounts became public. Several Disqus accounts (including "Richard Hoste" as well as multiple apparent alts) used Hanania's personal and student email addresses. Hanania, under the pseudonym, argued for strong eugenics programs (including the forcible sterilization of everyone with an IQ below 90); he was opposed to immigration to the United States, saying that "while an increasing Muslim underclass might not inspire as much bad art, the IQ and genetic differences between them and native Europeans are real, and assimilation is impossible". He cited a speech by William Luther Pierce, who had used Haiti as an example to argue that black people were incapable of governing themselves. The HuffPost described the persona as "a formative voice during the rise of the racist 'alt-right'".

Hanania does not deny that he was "Richard Hoste", saying: "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." In August 2023, he wrote in Quillette: "I truly sucked back then.” An editor's note by Quilette editor-in-chief Claire Lehmann offers a rationale for publishing Hanania, which includes the “scarcity of narratives portraying young men’s journey away from extremist ideologies through the processes of maturity and moderation."

Hanania's subsequent writing under his own name has taken a more moderate tone. New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie said that "though he may claim otherwise, it doesn’t appear that his views have changed much [...] he still makes explicitly racist statements and arguments, now under his own name". Zak Cheney-Rice, writing for New York Magazine, said that "Hanania is seen as more moderate today because he has shrouded many of his old arguments about race in the mainstream terminology of crime prevention, a subtle shift in emphasis that makes him appealing to both the transgressive right and the broad middle". He was described in that article as "an intellectual muse of the Silicon Valley right". According to The Nation, Hanania "now calls himself a supporter of “enlightened centrism,” he offers a message that can reunite the fractured right".

Bibliography

• Hanania, Richard (2020), Ineffective, Immoral, Politically Convenient: America's Overreliance on Economic Sanctions and What to Do about It., Cato Institute
• Hanania, Richard (2021). Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy: How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy. Routledge. ISBN 9781000514001.
• Hanania, Richard (2023). The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics. Broadside Books. ISBN 9780063237216.