Four years ago, Richard Hanania was a little-known right-wing intellectual, one of many posters building a brand with tweets and Substack posts attacking “wokeness” and other conservative bugbears.
But in the middle of 2021, one of his ideas took off. In an article called “Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law,” Hanania argued that many issues conservatives worry about aren’t just cultural, but also stem from civil rights law — and specifically from Executive Order 11246, an order signed by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 that requires most federal contractors to take “affirmative action” in their hiring. In 2023, Hanania expanded on the article in a book, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics.
That year, Hanania appeared on Vivek Ramaswamy’s podcast, where he talked to the then-presidential candidate about EO 11246 and suggested that the next Republican president should repeal it and replace it with an order banning affirmative action from government contractors. Ramaswamy said he liked the idea.
On President Donald Trump’s first day in office, he followed Hanania’s blueprint to the letter.
“I was happy,” Hanania recently told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. “I wasn’t anybody special. I didn’t have any reason to think anyone would listen to me. And eventually I saw the outcome that I wanted.”
This episode is not unique. Many Trump 2.0 decisions, from purging the federal workforce to re-hiring a DOGE employee who made racist comments online, have their origins in a small group of ring-wing intellectuals, what Vox’s Andrew Prokop has called the “very-online right.” This group encompasses well-known figures like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, as well as posters like Hanania.
Today, Explained co-host Noel King recently spoke with Hanania about his journey from anonymously posting racist and misogynist diatribes to wielding real political influence in the early days of Trump’s second administration, and why he’s now grown disenchanted with the movement that adopted his ideas.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. Listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
In the summer of 2023, you were a public intellectual. You’d been writing op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic. And then that August, the Huffington Post reported that years earlier you’d written racist, misogynist posts on right-wing websites.
I’m going to read a couple of those here: “For the white gene pool to be created, millions had to die.” “Race mixing is like destroying a unique species or a piece of art. It’s shameful.” “Hispanic people don’t have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first-world nation.” You said Muslims can’t assimilate because of “genetic and IQ differences between them and native Europeans.” And you suggested that people with low IQ might be sterilized.
Were those sincere beliefs that you held?
Yes. I can’t lie to you and tell you that those weren’t sincere beliefs. Some of the ways I phrased it was sometimes getting a rise out of people. But I can’t deny that I did hold those views. This, I should note, was around 2010, 2011. So by the time it came out of the Huffington Post, it was about 12, 13 years later. But, yeah, I had some views that I now consider repugnant, and [that] I was actually writing against, before that August 2023 exposition.
What led to you holding those views?
I think I was just young and angry. I saw these ideas that you couldn’t talk about, certain things like male-female differences, the idea that America was a racist country, which I didn’t believe at the time and I don’t believe now, or at least racist enough to explain disparities between groups of people.
I didn’t like censorship. I didn’t like a lot of the things that conservatives in later years would turn against, [like] DEI, which was at an early stage right there. And so I was angry. I was looking for people who were angry like me. And I think it was probably a lot of personal things going on in my life. By about 2012, 2013, I had sort of grown out of it, which I think often happens.
In November of 2023, after the Huffington Post exposed you, you tweeted, “people complain about Jews running America. Do they actually believe it should be run by the voters of Baltimore or Appalachia? Doesn’t seem that anti-Semites have thought this through.” So that was years after you were young.
Well, I would make a distinction between that and the earlier stuff. There’s a long intellectual tradition of people not believing in a kind of naive form of direct democracy, going back to the American founders, to today — and even before the American founders, going back to the ancient Greeks.
I said Appalachians and inner-city Baltimore — I was saying generally poor communities, which are on average less informed about politics and have views that might not be the most coherent about making policy.
Bringing up the Jews in that context was defending Jews, saying, “Accepting your premise, if Jews do control America, what’s the alternative?” They are disproportionately a smart, educated group of people. And I say smart, educated people having disproportionate power in society is a good thing. So I don’t see that as as racist or hateful or anything like that. While those quotes you read at the beginning, I will grant you that those are things that I wouldn’t stand by and nobody else should.
By the summer of 2023, you had built a broad audience in both mainstream media and also on Twitter and Substack. What was the thrust of your main argument?
I had an article which eventually turned into my book, The Origins of Woke, which argued that a lot of the cultural issues that conservatives were mad about — a lot of the ideas about disparate impact, a lot of the ideas that, you know, you couldn’t be hard on crime because it has an impact on one group of people more than the other group of people, or you couldn’t have standardized tests or and so forth — a lot of that was kind of baked into civil rights law. Not necessarily the text of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but a lot of judicial interpretation and executive action that came in the years and decades that followed.
So I was arguing that conservatives were upset about this thing they called DEI or wokeness, and they were seeing it as mainly a cultural issue. Oh, look at Target, look at the State Department, look at what they’re all doing. And my argument was [that] there is a policy agenda here that you can focus on.
When did it become clear to you that this argument that you were making was resonating?
It was right away. It was something that conservatives were already interested in and they needed to understand that there was a policy solution to the problems they were concerned about.
Vivek Ramaswamy, when he was unknown before he was running for president, wrote a book called Woke, Inc. I reviewed it for a publication called American Affairs. I criticized it based on some of my ideas, that he didn’t talk about civil rights law. We were concerned about the same things, but he didn’t bring up the kind of history that I talked about here.
He actually reached out and we started to be in touch based on that. I explained to him a lot of these things. I appeared on his podcast. He started talking about it. He started going on campaign stops later when he was running for president and saying, “First day, I will repeal Executive Order 11246” [the law requiring affirmative action in federal contracting], and this was the executive order that I mentioned in my book that Johnson signed in ’65.
Trump actually gets into office and Trump does sign a repeal of Executive Order 11246. It does a lot of the other things that I recommended. So it was quite a journey where I think I played a role in putting these ideas on the map.
What was the goal of ending 11246? What did you want to happen?
Ending Executive Order 11246 was part of a broader project to take the government out of the idea that it should be taking consideration of race and sex, or enforcing such considerations onto the private sector, in terms of hiring, in terms of promotion.
There’s perhaps a role for the government to play in terms of ensuring non-discrimination as discrimination was understood. The concept was understood in 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed. But a lot of cultural changes within institutions were adopted as a defense against potential lawsuits and against potential loss of government contracts. So I wanted less DEI, less race- and sex-based governance, and less encouraging institutions to take positions that a lot of Americans don’t agree with.
Richard, was corporate America actually complaining? Because it seems like if you run a big American corporation… [you] would look at the idea of diversity and would say, this is a good thing, because I want to sell things to American people and therefore having people within the company at a very high level who understand how to sell things to American people is a great thing. It’s good if they come from all kinds of backgrounds.
Well, that’s true. I would respect business decisions on these things. If they want to have a program, that’s one thing. But these were mandates coming from the government and also the subjects of lawsuits.
And sure, you can say, “I want to do market research on Hispanics,” or maybe have someone in the room who knows something about women’s products or things like that. I don’t think that there’s necessarily a strong correlation between that and, say, demographic balancing based on census categories.
And I go into how the census categories were determined. It’s kind of arbitrary, right? I mean, it’s like the government cares that you have a certain number of Blacks or Hispanics, they don’t care if they are immigrants who just came here yesterday, or they are people who are culturally completely assimilated into the mainstream, as long as they have a Hispanic name. So there are good corporate reasons to sometimes take into account race, sex, cultural background. I don’t deny that. I don’t think that that’s necessarily what civil rights law has been forcing on companies.
The Trump administration did what you wanted. It eliminated DEI. And then it put Pete Hegseth in charge of the Pentagon, and Kash Patel in charge of the FBI, and Dan Bongino as the deputy director of the FBI. These gentlemen are not merit picks. And these are obvious examples.
But this is why Americans who are skeptical of your argument will say, look, you’re never really going to get merit. If we eliminate DEI, we’re going to go back to “the president picks a guy who he thinks looks handsome on TV.” Do you put any stock in that argument?
Absolutely, Noel. I’ve had some contacts with the Trump administration. I think one reason I have not been even closer to the Trump administration is that I’ve been highly critical of a lot of the non-DEI-related actions that he’s taken. I agree with you.
I think some of these picks are certainly not merit-based. They don’t even rise to the level of public decorum and ethics you often expect from someone who’s going to be the FBI director or the head of the Department of Defense.
I don’t think those are the only two choices: DEI/race-based governance or people that Trump thinks looks good on TV. I think you could have a merit-based system that looks at people, takes them as individuals, takes into account their qualifications, takes into account what the president is trying to accomplish, and that has more responsible people in positions of power.
You’ve clearly become disenchanted with MAGA. You wrote a piece this week that’s making the rounds. It’s called “Liberals Only Censor. Musk Seeks To Lobotomize.” What happened, Richard?
When it looked like Trump was going to be the nominee and he might be president, I wanted my ideas to be listened to, and I wanted them to do certain things. At the same time, I don’t just write about DEI. I write about a wide range of topics. I say what I believe on those topics.
I think there’s a level of corruption here, a level of blatant sort of corruption to the way government is working that is unprecedented, at least in our recent history.
I was always against social media censorship. I thought this was a way to suppress conservative voices. But then Elon Musk buys Twitter. I’m happy. I say, “Okay, we’re going to have free speech.” And my goodness, it’s become a sewer! And I think that honesty and virtue and politics matter, and what I’ve seen from the conservative movement, that I’ve seen from MAGA, the conservative movement in general, as it’s become MAGA-fied, has just horrified me. And I’ve felt the need to speak out about this.
How do you feel about this movement that you are a part of, descending into what we have today?
I’m unhappy. We all know Trump’s flaws. The first administration, though, we saw him surround himself with mostly responsible people. And so you can have a distaste for Trump and say, “Look, he’s still putting the same judges on the federal judiciary that DeSantis — or in many cases, Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush — would have.” And so you could say, “Well, I don’t like Trump, he can be sort of distasteful, but the movement is more than just Trump.”
Now, you can’t really say that anymore. I mean, he’s picking people who nobody would have believed it possible to have a high-level government position, like Robert F. Kennedy [Jr.], like Kash Patel. These are people who would only be chosen, appointed by Trump. The Trump administration, if you’re just looking in terms of pure policy, there’s a lot I like, there’s no reason to be too upset there. But if you’re looking at where the movement is going, [when it comes to] how political movements and how people in power should behave and act in their relationship to truth and the relationship to the rest of society, I think it’s gotten pretty bad.
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