The Exploding Rocket

Freedom and Fear, Part 1

Before heading out to vacation early this month, I wrote about the racism problem on the right. Talk about timing. While I was away, the Huffington Post published an exposé of anti-“woke” blogger Richard Hanania’s history, from the not-so-distant past, of writing explicitly racist articles under a pseudonym. It’s getting to the point where you just expect this sort of thing as a matter of course.

I had intended to write this as a quick follow-up to my earlier article, but then I started adding related observations and links to a few more interesting articles, and it led to me a much broader vista that explains far more than the rapid unscheduled disassembly of one anti-woke writer’s reputation. It’s so big I’m going to have to do it in three installments.

For the first segment, let’s just get our heads around the scope of the Hanania story, which is bigger and worse than I originally thought.

This is not one of those cases that’s a matter of interpretation. Hanania had a whole previously undisclosed career, not just as a disgruntled 21-year-old commenter, but as a leading voice of the white nationalist “alt-right.”

Starting in 2008, the byline “Richard Hoste” began to appear atop articles in America’s most vile publications. Hoste wrote for antisemitic outlets like The Occidental Observer, a site that once argued Jews are trying to exterminate white Americans. He wrote for Counter-Currents, which advocates for creating a whites-only ethnostate; Taki’s Magazine, a far-right hub for paleoconservatives; and VDare, a racist anti-immigrant blog.

In 2010, Hoste was among the first writers to be recruited for AlternativeRight.com, a new webzine spearheaded and edited by Richard Spencer, the white supremacist leader who later organized the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia….

Spencer bestowed Hoste with the honor of writing one of the introductory articles for the launch of AlternativeRight.com, which would become a main propaganda organ of the nascent “alt-right,” the online fascist movement that exploded into the public consciousness due to its ties to former President Donald Trump….

“We’ve known for a while through neuroscience and cross-adoption studies...that individuals differ in their inherent capabilities. The races do, too, with whites and Asians on the top and blacks at the bottom,” Hoste wrote in the 2010 essay, titled “Why An Alternative Right Is Necessary.”

Let’s just say that you don’t rehabilitate from that without a long and arduous road of apology and self-reflection. This is, as you might have already guessed, not what Hanania has done.