The System: Zak Cheney-Rice - Our Journey Into Extremism

The revealing case of the anti-woke crusader Richard Hanania.

- Zak Cheney-Rice

RICHARD HANANIA, an intellectual muse of the Silicon Valley right, once argued against apologies in a 2015 op-ed for the Washington Post in part because "males who show social dominance are judged more attractively as potential mates." It was perhaps inevitable that Hanania, a writer whose forthcoming book, The Origins of Woke, has been effusively praised by Peter Thiel, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, and the entrepreneur David Sacks, would eventually be forced to apologize himself. The words I'm sorry don't appear in his August 7 essay in Quillette, but his attempts to explain the "repugnant views" he once held, exposed days earlier in a damning HuffPost report, convey a clear sense of regret.

"I truly sucked back then," Hanania admits, confirming that, between 2008 and 2012, he posted pseudonymously on several white-supremacist and misogynistic websites, including VDare and Richard Spencer's Alternative Right. Hanania inveighed against miscegenation, called for the sterilization of Black people with a “low IQ,” and claimed that women “didn’t evolve to be the decision makers in society.” He confesses he “had few friends or romantic successes and no real career prospects” at the time and was projecting his “personal unhappiness onto the rest of the world.”

Hanania’s rise from dweller on racist message boards to right-wing public thinker in good stead—with bylines in the New York Times and