152: Who the Hell is Richard Hanania? feat. Christopher Mathias & Henry Burke
Show notes
From 2008 to 2012, Richard Hanania wrote under the name “Richard Hoste” for white nationalist websites, where he argued for forcibly sterilizing people with IQs under 90 and warned that “race mixing” was destroying the white gene pool. Then he went to law school, got a PhD, founded a think tank, and reinvented himself as an “anti-woke” pundit beloved by Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel and Vivek Ramaswamy. Now he’s a repentant Trump voter writing for the Boston Globe, being praised by liberals, and defending Jeffrey Epstein. What are we to make of a guy like this?
Jared and Mike are joined by Christopher Mathias, the reporter who unmasked Hanania’s alt-right past in 2023, and Henry Burke, a senior researcher at the Revolving Door Project who shared a mountain of research for this episode. Together they trace how Hanania was accepted by three political worlds in turn: the white nationalist fringe, the MAGA-adjacent tech right, and liberals hungry for MAGA converts.
(Richard Hanania answered some of our questions by email for this episode but not others.)
Links for Christopher Mathias:
To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right
Bluesky: @letsgomathias.bsky.social / X: @letsgomathias
Links for Henry Burke:
Bluesky: @henryburke.bsky.social / X: @burkehenryt
Transition Music: “RIVULET” by TRIAGE
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