Richard Hanania (5:18)

Thanks for having me, Isaac.

Isaac Saul (5:20)

So I think maybe just to start to table set a little bit, I'd love if you could tell our audience a little bit about your personal story. I mean, I think you had maybe one of the more public political evolutions that a lot of political writers I follow at least have had. Can you tell Us a little bit about what, what happened to you and how you sort of landed here sitting here talking to me.

Richard Hanania (5:42)

Yeah, so I, you know, I, I was a, I was an Anonymous writer around 2010. I was part of the original Alt Right 1.0. Nobody knew this at the time. It was under a pseudonym. I stopped, I went off and I became an academic. I got a law degree, I got a research fellowship at Columbia. Then I was at University of Texas and I started writing for the public. Now, 10 years later or so at that point, 2018, 2019, under my Odame appeared in New York Times and Washington Post. A lot of kind of mainstream op EDS had my own substack. I was always a right leaning person. My views had evolved a lot since then. About the same time the alt right was kind of taking over the conservative movement. Trump was their guy. Immigration became an issue they were obsessed with. There became a willingness to tolerate or even embrace kind of open racist or misogynistic ideas that people used to kind of hide behind, hide anonymity to talk about, but now had become a kind of main thing. There's also kind of a conspiratorial angle. That's outlook, that's taken over the right, which I was never into, but this is kind of part of the general story. And then so yeah, I become a writer. I mean I wrote a book on Wokeness and its relationship to civil rights law that came out in 2023. I was mostly considered on the right, although I had an independent streak. I think that a lot of the things I wasn't afraid, say for example, that January 6th was a coup attempt. 2020 was not stolen by the Democrats. The COVID vaccines were a great thing. So I would say these things, I believe these things. But at the same time I was very, very conservative and I believed in free markets. I believed Wokeness was a major problem. I believed in being tough on crime and all that. And then my previous writing comes out in 2023 and it's kind of an interesting place and people are saying, oh well, we knew he was a bad guy the whole time. But I think if you looked was writing before that story came out of the Huffington post, it was August 2023. I had already broken with the right on a lot of things. I mean it wasn't like I changed overnight because of that. By 2024, I have probably the most, I have an endorsement of Trump, but it's basically probably the most anti Trump endorsement you can imagine. It's basically the liberals are completely right about this guy, he's corrupt, he lies. All the movement behind him, there's a lot of rottenness there. But I'm still a conservative and we're going to get conservative policies, and that's what we got in the first administration. It was kind of within the normal range of what you'd expect a Republican president to do, despite some amazing stories that came out. And so I was a reluctant Trump supporter in 2024, by the way. I was tweeting. A lot of people thought I was going in the Kamala direction and I almost got there. I mean, I was kind of so fed up with kind of what the right had become. And then. So that was Novemb October. We're like four or five months later now. Yeah. The worst case scenario, basically what I thought the Trump presidency would be came about even worse than I would have expected, I think these tariff rates. Nobody thought that this was possible. Rfk, I said explicitly at some point, RFK won't be. HHS secretary might get a commission or something, because that's not something that would have happened in the first administration. I was over indexing on what had happened before. I hadn't, I think, paid enough attention to my own arguments that the Trump movement was becoming more and more of a cult of personality and he was less and less restrained as time went on. And so something like RFK becoming the HHS secretary or him just doing tariffs because he feels like was foreseeable, I have to take blame. I understood this at the time. I just calculated the odds wrong. And yeah, I'm here now.

Isaac Saul (9:51)

I'm curious. I really want to hear about some of your evolving views on Trump or how the administration is not sort of matched your expectations. Before we get there, though, I want to stay on the past just a little bit to hear a. I'm interested, like, what it was like for you when some of that past writing came out, what the, what the feelings were like for you, what your immediate reaction was. And then B, also, I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about, you know, how you sort of stepped into the kind of more extreme online. Right. And then how you got out of it. Because I think to me, that's a fascinating story that we don't hear very much as somebody who sort of goes down that rabbit hole and actually comes out to the light on the other side, I guess you could say.

Richard Hanania (10:37)

Yeah. So, I mean, it was interesting. I was on kind of vacation with my family. We were on our way to San Diego from Los Angeles, and I Get a call from the Huffingen Post reporter. He leaves a voice message. And then I check my Twitter DMs. And I always had a fear this would happen. I was kind of flying too close to the sun because I was getting more attention. The reason they wrote the article, the way they justified it was I was getting a lot of attention from Silicon Valley types. So they were saying, like, Peter Thiel blurred my book. Elon Musk was engaging with my tweets at the time. So this was. Andreessen had appeared on my podcast. So this is the way they justified that I was important enough to do this kind of big expose about. And so I always kind of knew that as I was getting more attention, more popularity, that something like this would happen. I had no idea, kind of like I had in my head what I would do in that situation. But you never know until it happens. And a lot of people were like, oh, there's no way he's coming back for. I mean, the best writings were bad. I'm not going to hide. Not going to hide from that. But I mean, people. I had built a reputation. I was lucky. I mean, I was lucky. I had built a reputation at the time so people could see, okay, I'd written a lot of stuff. Some people like, some things people liked, some people didn't like. But, like, if that would have happened, like, at the beginning when I was just writing, I would have been really screwed. So I was kind of lucky that I had three, four years to build up kind of reputation. And it ended up working out fine. I'm still able to publish my book. Still nothing. I'm not canceled in any sense. So I got lucky in that way. Maybe it's a reflection of the culture changing at the same time too. But, yeah, to go back to kind of the beginning and how I kind of fell into that stuff and how I got out of it. Yeah, I mean, I was seeing a lot of the stuff that bec. Kind of the obsession of the Right, the wokeness stuff. I mean, I was kind of an academic, I was into ideas. I was running into college. And these like, kind of proto wokeness, this idea that, you know, that gender was like a social construct, that America was like a white supremacist country. And I just never bought any of that stuff. And like, in 2009, 2010, it was kind of people like the right didn't really obsess over that stuff. They were only talking about economic issues or defending Bush's war on terror, you know, that kind of in the Later. Later days of that. And I kind of went online and I found other people who agreed with me. And I kind of fell into like, these are the people who agree with me. This is what I'm reacting to. It's like I was in college and I just bought kind of the entire worldview. Oh, we have identity politics. Oh, maybe white people need their own identity politics. Maybe we need to. We have feminism that's anti male. Oh, maybe we need misogyny. Maybe we need to. Maybe giving women the right to vote and all these other right wing ideas, maybe that's the way to go. And it was like, that's. I think that's. A lot of people do get there through kind of this kind of negative polarization. They just don't like somebody. And then they go to the other end of the spectrum and they say, okay, this is kind of my home now. And the change was kind of more like. It was more of an intellectual development over time. It was probably personal. At the same time, I think I was just kind of young and unhappy. And I think that a lot of these people who fall into far right ideas are basically, they're looking for something in their lives or something missing. It's kind of too easy. It's too much of a trope to say that, but it is nonetheless true. I mean, a lot of the most. Kind of the people who are most extreme, who are anonymous accounts on Twitter, I've known them, I've been one of them. I know that these people are not happy and well adjusted and everything is going great. Usually, I mean, it's usually that trope about them having problems is usually correct. And so part of it is that. And then part of it is like a lot of these. I saw a lot of kind of contradictions of these far right ideas. So, for example, one thing these frightening people would say is like, oh, our cultural heritage is being threatened. Our institutions are being threatened by immigration. And the things that they would warn about is like, oh, look at Latin America. They have these third world dictatorships. They have these cult of personalities. They don't have concern for truth. And then I see maga pop up like, wait a minute, you told me the third world was coming and our institutions were thrown. And my God. And then the people who were into restricting immigration because they were worried about Western culture were the ones who had bought into the nonsense about 2020 being stolen. And I'm like, okay, wait a. Maybe it's not race or cultural background. Maybe these bad ideas that had a role to play in making the developing world dysfunctional are coming here. And it's like the ideas itself and it's not the people and it's not the deep cultural background. So it's partly personal, partly just kind of of seeing stuff. I mean, the wokeness thing, I mean, it was kind of vindicated because it became such a dominant force in our culture. But then it was like also you didn't need craziness, you didn't need white nationalism or something to push back on it. You could do that kind of through legal democratic channels. And I think that process is working too. And so, yeah, I mean, it was kind of seeing these different things. I mean, over a very long time period, 15 years, it was kind of getting a new perspective on things and just like looking at how our politics developed.

Isaac Saul (16:01)

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean, to me it always whenever I observe political observations and political evolutions changing over a longer period of time, it often appears to me like people are experiencing some sort of intersection of personal changes tied to some kind of like intellectual development being exposed to different ideas. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. One of the things that I'm most proud of in my life is the financial success I've achieved through building this media company tangle. But the only thing more important than achieving that dream is now protecting it. And you can protect your family by securing their future with life insurance from policy Genius. Policy genius makes finding and buying life insurance simple, and it ensures your family has a financial safety net they can use to cover debts and routine expenses or even invest that money, turn interest over time. With policygenius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage. Some options are 100% online and let you avoid unnecessary medical exams. Last year, I actually got life insurance for the first time. And I have to say, now that I'm covered, it's a big weight off my shoulders. You can secure your families tomorrow, so you have peace of mind today. Head to policygenius.com or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com.

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Isaac Saul (18:21)

Something that I see over and over again with public figures like you who change their positions in public is that it has this sort of dual effect of endearing you to some people and making you a pariah to others. I, I open the door to some reader questions, you know, asking people, hey, I'm going to interview this guy. Let me know if you have a question. One of the persistent ones that I got that I'm interested to hear you address is just how do you explain or sell to people the idea that you're undergoing some sort of genuine evolution versus some kind of career opportunism? I mean, like one of the people said, you know, he used to mock people who supported Israel and now has sort of done a 180 on that. So like, is that something that is opportunism because his public status has changed, he's now mainstream, or is that just a genuine real evolution that he can explain? And I'm curious to hear you sort of address that criticism.

Richard Hanania (19:25)

So I'll start with the Israel thing and then go more general. The Israel thing. I mean, I still mock people who are too pro Israel. I mean, I am pro Israel myself, but I do kind of, I think the kind of the Trump administration has been ridiculous with this campaign of kind of this broad spectrum. We're going to just prioritize fighting anti Semitism and break all these kinds of norms in order to do that. Like shipping people kicking people out of the country because they wrote an op ed that the government doesn't like. I mean, the fact that they're cutting off the funding based on the idea that there's anti Semitism in these universities. And maybe there's a little bit of that, but I mean, it's just kind of so disproportionate and so kind of crazy compared to what we actually saw with the protests over the last few years. So maybe my tone has changed a little bit. But I think on the Israel mocking people for being too supportive of Israel and being, I think that's something that stayed consistent. But as a more general matter, I think as far as being a careerist or something like that. I've gone about it in a very strange way, if that was my goal, because when it came out in 2023, the whole point of the article, as I said, of why I was worth talking about was because all these people on the right liked me. Like JD Benz referred to me as a friend. So that made its way to the article. JD Vance, the guy who would become vice president a year and a half later, Elon Musk, followed me a week or two after that story dropped as a shill of solidarity, I guess. And so Musk was following me for a while. And so my career, kind of my best interest at that point was to lean in and people didn't want me to apologize or say I was wrong. I don't think people, your audience might not realize how kind of radicalized a lot of these right wing people are. They might not have liked the stuff I wrote before, but they don't want to see anyone give an inch to the left or apologize to them or anything like that. That kind of overcomes any horror they might feel over racism or sexism. So it was kind of the smart move at that. That was on Project 2025 too. I mean, it was still in good standing with the conservative movement after that. The best thing to do for me, I think, clearly would have been to lean into the tech right thing. That kind of reaction from your audience is common because I said a lot of right wing things or things that are out there, even the things that I'm ashamed of now. And I had a beach. I was kind of there. I was there on the right. I was in good standing with the tech right. I was in good standing with the maga. These two things were merging. I was just kind of horrified with what I saw. And so, yeah, people could read me and they could see kind of how I've evolved and whether that's plausible to them. But I think the general story here is not what you would expect if you had the theory that I was just trying to be strategic. And another thing I do, and I don't blame people for not knowing all of this because people might not follow me that closely. But a lot of my substack and a lot of my tweets are me in deep conversation with these figures that seem kind of obscure. And you're like, why are you talking about these kind of obscure fringe right wing figures? And I'm arguing with myself. That's the thing. So you could actually, if you're really, really interested, you could get into some of my articles, I mean, one of them is called Diversity really is Our Strength. For people who want to Google it, there's another one called. It's something like why youy Should Punch Right. If you Google my name, punch Right. And this is a kind of philosophy that you should never attack, like, racists or people who are too far right wing. I have another one called Nietzsche and Chunnery. So I'm constantly arguing with, like. Like what I was and kind of what I see in other people in ways that are, like, very kind of in the weeds. And probably these discussions are things that, like, most people are not going to be that interested in because it's not their story and it's not that important in the grand scheme of things. But I think people who are really curious as to, like, how I change. There's a lot of material there that you can dig into.

Isaac Saul (23:31)

I'm interested. I mean, you're. As a writer and a public figure, you're known for a lot of things. You just mentioned the Project 2025 stuff, which obviously became a huge story on the campaign trail in 2024, as this administration's first few months have sort of unfurled in front of us. There's been a lot of discussion about to what degree Project 2025 was or wasn't the plan for the Trump administration from the start and how closely they're actually working together. I'd love to hear your sort of. Of, first, I guess, explanation for our readers about what your role was in Project 2025, the parts that you contributed to, and then second, maybe hear you talk about, you know, in the. I guess, in the space of those parts that you contributed to how you think things are going, which is, I understand it was kind of the diversity, equity and inclusion stuff. What you're sort of seeing in terms of what the administration is doing right and what it's doing wrong.

Richard Hanania (24:26)

Yeah. You know, as far as kind of my role, I'm unsure if it's like, it was never explicitly told to me that, like, don't talk about exactly how the sausage is made, but I haven't heard other people talk about it, so I'll honor that. I mean, my name is on there, but I'm happy to talk about kind of generally the ideas and what I'm happy with and what I'm not happy with. So, yeah, the DEI stuff, I mean, I wrote about this in my book. It was kind of, as we talked about before, the idea that you can take these concerns, which are legitimate, about Wokeness DEI affirmative action, and you can be productive, not just kind of have this oppositional culture. But you could say there are some things in the law that we've gotten wrong that's created incentives for businesses and universities to act in a certain way. And so that was one of the themes of my book. And then we get the Trump administration, In the first two days, executive orders basically did, I'd say, 90, 95% of what I recommended. There's still something on the disparate impact standard, which they haven't explicitly gone after, but they've really. I mean, they've done the executive order on affirmative action and contracting DEI in government. I was one of the first people to point out that a lot of this stuff, it doesn't require legislation, even though it's a civil rights act. A lot of it came through executive orders and interpretations of executive departments. And so Trump came into power willing to kind of yield his authority and push boundaries. And unsurprisingly, he did. I think he did mostly good things on the now. I never. The power of the purse kind of thing, where you. The way we got a lot of affirmative action and the diversity stuff in universities in the first place was actually government funding. Government was kind of pressuring the universities back in the 70s to adopt quasi quotas for hiring in professors. And so you could do that kind of in reverse. You could not only have. Have court rulings against affirmative action, but you could have the government just put pressure because the Title six, they say no discrimination based on race. If they're practicing affirmative action or extreme DEI policies or whatever, you could do that. And there's been a little bit of that. It's kind of gone in this weird direction. Again, like I said, it's all about whether your universities allow too much criticism of Israel, and they're using anti Semitism and they're being very crude about it, where they're hitting the hard sciences instead of trying to be a little bit more targeted in what exactly you're doing. And I think the Doge kind of thing follows the same pattern, where it's just not carefully thought out, it's just kind of too destructive, and it's cutting a lot of things that we need, like basic scientific research. And I talk to people in colleges and universities who are in medical departments and the sciences, and a lot of them support a Trump, and they say, this is what we bargained for. This is quite bad. And so, yeah, I mean, there was.

Isaac Saul (27:23)

So.

Richard Hanania (27:24)

I was happy with, like, the initial days of executive order executive orders. The way this kind of civil rights kind of bureaucratic. These bureaucratic tools have been used I haven't been happy with since. I think it's been crude and counterproductive, like a lot of things the administration has done. But, you know, again, I'll give them credit for, like adopting a lot of the ideas that I thought were good. And then, of course, came tariffs and other things that the administration's doing I've been, I've been less happy with.

Isaac Saul (28:01)

We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

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Isaac Saul (29:13)

I'm curious. I mean, this is only occurring to me now, but the, you know, one of the bigger stories, bigger kind of DEI stories of those first few weeks was was the FAA story after the crash at Reagan Airport. Trump sort of pointed to DEI as being one of the causes of the crash. Then this big debate ensued about to what degree DEI was playing a role in hiring at an agency like the faa. Could you talk a little bit about sort of what you were seeing call some balls and strikes there on that debate that was, I mean, for a week was kind of dominating the news.

Richard Hanania (29:47)

Yeah. I mean, yeah, My friend Jack Dispenza goes by Tracy Woodgr. A lot of good reporting on this. I think it's generally right that the FAA there was a lot of kind of putting their thumbs on the scale to get more diversity in hiring. One thing I objected to that's legitimate to look at. One thing I objected to as this was going on was this idea. It's like the right has to be so hysterical. The planes are going to Fall. I don't know if I could get on a plane with a black pilot. I don't know if we can. We're going to survive when the planes start crashing. I don't know how things are. And I just said, said probably not. If you look at data on just plague crashes, we still have to be realistic. It's probably not good that we have these aggressive DEI policies in air traffic controllers. And this is probably a more generalizable point. It's like people are so repulsed by the morality of wokeness that they exaggerate its power. If your thing is like airline safety or making the airports more efficient or working better, it's probably not the number one thing you could do now. Maybe sometimes it's like diversity is really screwing things up and that's something we should think a lot about. But to go to that as the explanation of where things are going wrong in every situation and kind of catastrophizing and saying things are going to. I mean, we're going to have planes. Look, planes are going to fall out of the sky is a testable theory. And we didn't have that. And you looked at the data, we didn't have even an uptick in. I think we might have had it up. We might have had, like, there might have been, like, incidents. There might have been something. But, like, I mean, nobody was dying. It wasn't anything like that. And so, yeah, I think this is kind of a cautionary tale of like, there's often very legitimate issues at the core here. It's just that the right is so kind of obsessed with identity. I mean, they're kind of the other side of the coin of the leftists who are obsessed with identity. They see it everywhere and they see it as the most, necessarily always the most important thing going on in any discussion. And that, you know, if you're taking that perspective, it's kind of, of, you know, it's kind of like you're not even dealing. You're maybe dealing with the problem, but you're like, often overshooting.

D (32:09)

Hey, everybody, this is John, executive producer for Tangle. We hope you enjoyed this preview of our latest Friday edition. If you are not currently a newsletter subscriber or a premium podcast subscriber, and you are enjoying this content and would like to finish it, you can go to readtangle.com and sign up for a newsletter subscription, or you can sign up for a podcast subscription or a bundled subscription, which gets you both the podcast and the newsletter and unlocks the rest of this episode as well. As ad free daily podcasts, more Friday editions, Sunday editions, bonus content, interviews and so much more. Most importantly, we just want to say thank you so much for your support. We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offerings, so stay tuned. Isaac and Ari will be here for the Sunday podcast and I will join you for the daily podcast on Monday. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a fantastic weekend, y'all. Peace.

Isaac Saul (33:09)

Our Executive Editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our Executive Producer is John John Wall. Today's episode was edited and engineered by John Wall. Our editorial staff is led by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman with Senior Editor Will K. Back and Associate Editors Hunter Casperson, Audrey Moorhead Bailey Saul, Lindsay Knuth and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website@retangle.com.

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Richard Hanania (34:18)

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