 And we're going to talk about Richard Hananya for a little bit. I'm not particularly eager to talk about this. I have to admit, I feel like I'm going to talk about this a little too early, although I'll tell you why I've gotten over that. So this breaking story about Richard Hananya that we're going to talk about, and I don't like to talk about breaking news because you don't have the time and you don't have all the information and the commentary that comes afterwards. But I'm pretty comfortable that I've got enough to say here given what I know and given what Richard has posted since this news has come out that there's enough to talk about. This is not a pleasant topic. Only reason I'm doing this is that I have for a year now, two years maybe, talked very positively about Richard Hananya and encouraged you to read him, encouraged you to go to a sub-stack. I have retweeted some of his tweets. I've retweeted a lot of his tweets. So I feel obligated to let you know what's going on with him and to kind of think aloud, if you will, about lessons to learn from this. All right, so let's get to it, right? Because Richard Hananya, as you probably know, is a public intellectual out there. He has started his own think tank. He is a scholar at the Salem Center at the University of Texas. He is taught at the University of Austin. You remember that university that was started as an alternative university. He has published in the New York Times in the Washington Post. He has delivered lectures to the Federalist Society. He's been invited to do a teacher course at Stanford later this year. He has got a book coming out on world culture. He's been on Tucker Carlson twice. He has become an incredibly, incredibly successful intellectual on the right. On his podcast, he's had world-famous people. Elon Musk has favorably tweeted about him. His book has blurbs from Peter Thiel and many others. Anyway, he's an up-and-coming rising star on what you would kind of consider the right. Although, again, as you'll see, he is not easy to pigeonhole into a particular place. Anyway, so rising star, lots of interesting stuff. He's written a lot of stuff. He's published a lot of stuff. And anyway, yesterday, the Huffington Post, not a publication I read, but in this case, I read the article. The Huffington Post had an expose on Richard Hananya, revealing that about 10 years ago, somewhere around from 2008, probably until 2012, during that period, Richard Hananya used the persona of Richard Haste, H-O-S-T-E. And it was a regular poster and a regular blogger and a regular writer of articles on pretty much every racist website out there. I mean, some of the worst, most horrible places that you could imagine. I'm not going to mention names, but just really bad stuff. He, you know, this Richard Haste, Richard Hananya, now we know, was advocating for anything from against mixing of the races to basically sterilizing anybody with an IQ below 90. Right, IQ below 90, and of course, as part of that mentioning and highlighting the fact that that would be mostly black people, that is, that this involved mostly blacks. You know, his rants, his essays, his articles, his posts, his comments are now documented throughout there. And, yeah, I mean, this guy was an out and out, unequivocal, horrible racist of the worst kind, a defender of white supremacists. Now, what's interesting about Hananya is that, you know, whether you want to call him white or not is questionable. Hananya is a Christian Arab from half Palestinian, half, I think, either Lebanese or Jordanian or Syrian, I can't remember, but, you know, and he's not your standard, what you would consider standard by, I don't know whose definition, but whatever it means, standard white person. But this is who he was. This is between 2008 and 2012. I mean, he was some of the expounders, some of the most ugly racist ideas that one really can imagine. And Hobnobs was cited by Richard Spencer and, you know, all the big names on the racist right, on the racist, I don't know, right, left, and on the racist spectrum. And it was part of that entire community, I guess you would call it, that entire world. And again, as ugly as it gets, right, as ugly as it gets. And then it looks like he stopped, right? And that kind of went to school. He got a lot of, he went to a BA. He got a law degree. Then got a PhD from all from top-notch universities. He had a postdoc. He had a postdoc at Columbia University. So he fit into academia quite well in his postdoc. He, I guess, his dissertation was on American foreign policy. And the inadequacies of American foreign policy, much of which his critique of American foreign policy I agree with, much of which I don't, but much of which I do. And he reemerged, if you will, with using his real name, Richard Hananya, sometime just before COVID, but really became a big hit during COVID. He wrote the first piece that really got him attention. It was a piece on why liberals are winning, why liberals are everywhere, why liberals dominate, why the left dominates. And his conclusion was, I mean, really two things. One is they care more. They're more engaged. They work harder. They get out there and do stuff. They're engaged. They actually show up, if you will. They care about ideas, if you will. And the second one is, you know, he argued the smarter. The better educated, the better connected. And those two things explain why the left dominates American cultural institutions. That's the first piece I read of his. And to logic then, I thought he was right. And it was, I thought it was a really good piece. And that's the first time I started engaging with Hananya, not knowing anything about this past. He obviously never revealed it and never expressed it. The second piece that really made his big name for him was a piece on civil rights law, on how civil rights law led to today, what we know as DEI, and led to logic into world culture. Again, I thought it was an excellent piece. It was not completely new, but it was an integration and a presentation that was new and I thought important and true. And a good article, one of the best I'd seen on the topic. Over the next few years, he picked up a lot of subscribers. He's got 20,000 sub-stack subscribers. He's got a sub-stack account. He's got a lot of followers on Twitter. He doesn't do well, I think, on YouTube and other platforms. But at least on those platforms, he's done phenomenally well. And as I said, he is part of the Salem Center. He is part of the University of Austin. And he is very, very well entrenched within this world of right of center. But he's not typical right of center. This is what's interesting, right? And this is what I have to say, fooled me, even though there were signs. There were signs, and I'll talk about those signs in a minute. He's pro-immigration, very pro-immigration, very, very... He has expressed, at least from what I've seen, disdain for the Republicans' focus on immigration, for the Republicans' focus on keeping people out. He is pro-abortion. Now, that might turn out to be consistent with his pro-eugenics old views from 10, 15 years ago. But he's pro-abortion. He was very anti-Trump and anti-the whole MAGA phenomena, which I thought in a smart way. And he was also, while he started out, he's supposedly an expert on foreign policy, he started out being tentatively sympathetic to Russia. He quickly flipped and became quite strong on Ukraine, very critical of the right. And anyway, a lot of very appealing views. But there was always something about his writing. There was always something that kind of always snuck in about him that I have to admit, I didn't pay enough attention to. And I will try never to make that mistake again. So even though he had some really good articles and some really creative stuff and some original thinking, things that snuck in were things about IQ. And generally I think now that anybody who talks about IQ a lot is probably hiding some real racist agenda. I just think that the discussion of IQ is so silly and so primitive and so superficial. That it's hiding something deeper. It's hiding something deeper if you're really, really, really focused on that. So he kept mentioning IQ and that kept coming up. And IQ turns out to be really, among so many people, just another word for black people, right? Low IQ equals black people, and therefore we can discriminate against them because they were low IQ people. The other thing was that once in a while you would mention characters who are unequivocally, clearly unambiguously racist. Mark in the chat means a sailor. Sailor is one of these people that, and once in a while Hananya, so I didn't know who sailor is. I had to look it up today and figure this out. But it turns out sailors, yeah, one of these alt-right explicitly racist website writers and so on. The other one, the other one is Ron Unz, UNZ, who is very active in Republican politics in California, who is run for office several times in California, done fairly well in California as a writer. And who is, who is a, unapologetic, anti-Semite, Holocaust denier, just a mismatch of a lot of things. So on the one hand, he, like Hananya, celibate diversity, on the other hand, that Hananya hates blacks and appears to hate blacks, and UNZ hates Jews, not appear, hates Jews, is a hitless, I wouldn't say sympathizer, but apologist. He's got a whole thing about Hitler's misunderstood and Hitler didn't know about the Holocaust which didn't really happen, and Hitler was really a good guy and all this, right, all this stuff, this is UNZ, this is a big shot in Republican politics in California. Well, I wouldn't say a big shot, but at the margins, right? At the margins of Republican politics in California, but has run for office several times and has done, you know, marginally for Republican pretty well. So today I was thinking, oh, I'm gonna wait and see what Richard Hananya actually writes, because you know, if he comes out with this statement of something like a changed, I repudiate all those views, I was wrong, I'm sorry to, I don't know, if he just comes out and apologizes and everything, I would say, okay, do I believe him, that these hints, that these indications maybe hasn't changed? That's one thing. So I was curious, what is he gonna do? Well, he's only posted one thing since this article hit, and by the way, he knew the article was coming because Huffington Post contacted him and asked him for comments, asked him for comments. So he knew he was coming, so he could have prepared. So the one thing he posts today is an article, it's almost like a story, because I don't think this is, I don't think it actually is an expression of something that actually happened. I don't know, he mentions a lot of names here and I don't know if these names are real, I don't know if this event ever happened, but it's something where it's called, one uns confunds the far right. And basically, so in response to Huffington Post's article about him being a racist, he basically posts something where Ron uns goes in front of a bunch of racists, clear-cut and equivocal racist, very influential racist, he names names here, again, I don't know if these are real names, maybe they are. One of them is a former White House official, James Felix, and Ron is defending, is saying, oh you racist, you all, this is dumb, ethnic diversity is a good thing. And your real problem, hint hint, doesn't really say it, but your real problem is those people who've been around here since 1619, right, why 1619? Because of the whole 1619 project about slavery, blacks. So this is basically saying, your real problem is blacks, it's not diversity, we love diversity, diversity is great, diversity is what made this country great, diversity is not a problem. This is what Hananya puts up today. And of course Hananya is bored by the racist, but he thinks Ron uns is really interesting and fascinating. Now you go to the uns review, UNZ, if you might want to shower afterwards. And you can see the horrible, horrific, disgusting, anti-Semitic stuff that he puts up there. So Hananya is basically saying, yep, that's me. I may be more, I'm more sophisticated now. I don't actually argue directly for eugenics. I'm more sophisticated now. I don't directly argue for, I don't know, white supremacy because maybe I think there's value in a diverse society. I still hate blacks, he says. And I mean, he's basically implicitly saying, and you know, by association with UNZ, he's saying, I still hate Jews. Yeah, what they said about me is true. So that's why I felt like I could speak about this today because it seems to me pretty unequivocal what's going on here. The guy is clearly a racist, even if he's a more sophisticated racist now than he was 10, 15 years ago. He still is a racist, even though he couches it now in a much more intellectual framing. He is a racist in spite of the fact that he is, and this is, I guess, true of a racist. Really, really smart. He couldn't have written what he's written if he's not. Really, really smart and actually correct about a bunch of stuff. That is, you can be a horrible racist. You can be truly horrific and disgusting and still be smart and still write things that are true. I don't quite get how that happens. I don't, I have to admit, I find that a little bit of a cognitive dissonance but I guess you can't really keep it up and this like story about, this is called Ron Owens' Confidence to Fall Right, I guess he published it in March, reveals that you can't escape it. And I've seen a bunch of stuff and these are the stuff that I don't retweet of Hananya's that seems just a little off to me, that seems just a little suspicious to me and I guess you can't keep up the facade for very long and even if it might have happened even if the Huffington Post had not done this, this expose, if you will, he would have been discovered. So, yeah, I mean, Hananya, if anything, was a big, looked like he was a serious DeSantis fan because he's a huge anti-woke person. His new book is all about DEI and woke and how evil it is and how it needs to be combated and he was far more sympathetic to DeSantis than he was to Trump, but God. Anyway, he fooled a lot of people. Stephen Pinker was on a show, Mark Andreessen was on a show three times and so on. His new book is about woke, so it's all about woke. So, maybe he thought it was in retreat partially because of what he was doing in order to combat it. I also think it's in retreat. It's factual reality that it's in retreat. It doesn't mean it isn't still damaging. It doesn't mean it's still not out there, but it's clearly in retreat. You saw that and I've said this many times in Virginia. You saw that in San Francisco. You saw that in Minnesota. You've seen it over and over again, but anyway, we're not here to debate whether woke is in retreat or not, but Hananya is, anyway, it'll be interesting to see what happens now. It'll be interesting to see what happens, whether people will distance themselves from him, whether his affiliation, various affiliations will be severed, whether some people on the right will defend him and if so, who will defend him? Yeah, Barry Weiss was one of the people who was affiliated with him in one way or another. Again, I don't know how strongly it's hard to tell. Again, he taught it, he taught it, Austin University of Austin, but I don't know, the Barry Weiss, how involved Barry Weiss is there. I just don't know, but it'll be interesting to see what does Mark Andreessen say? What does Peter Thiel say? These are all people named in the article. What does Barry Weiss say? So far, nothing. I've been surprised. Even people like, I mean, it's interesting because the spillover is pretty wide, even like Matthew Inglisus, who's left, right? Left of Senna, who had some exchanges with Hananya that seemed fairly friendly or positive. He at least has distanced himself from Hananya on Twitter, but he's like the only person I've seen so far who was called out, who's actually said something about Hananya.