The Young Conservatives Trying to Make Eugenics Respectable Again
The pseudoscience of eugenics is making a comeback on the American right. In August, the HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias unmasked the Substack writer and academic Richard Hanania as “Richard Hoste,” a pseudonym under which Hanania blogged for white-supremacist websites about the evils of “race mixing,” advocated for the sterilization of people with a “low IQ” and for the deportation of all “post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America,” and declared that “women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.” He also wrote a tribute to Sarah Palin in 2009, gushing that her candidacy had made the “ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite absolutely mad.” (There’s a lot going on there.)
“White nationalism,” Hanania wrote as “Hoste,” is “the only hope that part of what made the American nation great will survive somewhere.”
Two days after Mathias’s story, Hanania responded, stating, “Over a decade ago I held many beliefs that, as my current writing makes clear, I now find repulsive.” He rejected Mathias’s characterization of his “creepy obsession with so-called race science” as “dishonest,” insisting that he does not believe that Black people are “inherently more prone to violent crime” than white people.
[From the September 2023 issue: How Bronze Age Pervert charmed the far right]
People can and do change, even those with extreme views like these, but there’s not much evidence that happened here. As the writer Jonathan Katz notes, Hanania recently wrote, “These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits,” in an angry tweet about the Black district attorney of Manhattan indicting a white man who strangled a homeless Black man on the subway.
It is understandable that Hanania prefers to present himself as a mainstream, respectable intellectual, rather than as a creep interested in the of cartoon characters and the of the Founding Fathers. The eagerness of some of his allies to accept his rather superficial apology—Katz notes that Substack CEO Chris Best praised him for “an honest post on a difficult subject”—is a little more puzzling. As Mathias writes, Hanania’s genetic determinism appears to be popular among wealthy Silicon Valley types, several of whom have blurbed his forthcoming book arguing that civil-rights laws should be dismantled.
