Tangle - PREVIEW - The Friday Edition: Isaac talks with Richard Hanania

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

In today's Friday edition, Executive Editor Isaac Saul talks with author and political commentator Richard Hanania. They discuss his evolution from being part of the alt-right to becoming a more moderate conservative voice. He reflects on his past writings, the impact of the Trump administration, and the complexities of navigating public perception amidst his changing views. Hanania also delves into the implications of Project 2025 and critiques the current administration's approach to DEI policies, particularly the need for a balanced perspective on identity politics. He also talks about the dangers posed to democracy by the current political climate and assesses the state of the left, its strengths and weaknesses, as well as his regret regarding his political choices.This is a preview of today's special edition that is available in full and ad-free for our premium podcast subscribers. If you'd like to complete this episode and receive Sunday editions, exclusive interviews, bonus content, and more, head over to ReadTangle.com and sign up for a membership.Ad-free podcasts are here!Many listeners have been asking for an ad-free version of this podcast that they could subscribe to — and we finally launched it. You can go to ReadTangle.com to sign up! You can also give the gift of a Tangle podcast subscription by clicking here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Hunter Casperson, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With the Fizz loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit

of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul. Given the nature of Tangle, I am drawn to people whose political views are organically evolving. That's especially true when those people are public figures whose writing and reading is especially influential. Meet Richard Hanana. Over the last few years, Richard has become a well-known conservative voice. Vice President JD Vance has called him a friend. Elon Musk has elevated his tweets and his

posts. He was even a contributor to Project 2025's diversity, equity, and inclusion section. But his story has also been rife with controversy. In 2023, a HuffPost reporter discovered that he had been writing under a pseudonym for a number of alt-right and white supremacist websites between 2008 and the early 2010s. His writing promoted a variety of extremist views. I'm just going to read a few here. He identified himself as a race realist. He said that he supported eugenics and the forced sterilization of low IQ people, which

in his estimation were most often black. He opposed race-mixing and argued that black people cannot govern themselves. He even suggested that if he ever owned Twitter, he would prevent feminist, trans activists, and socialists from posting on the platform because they are wrong about everything and bad for society. His public image predictably and rightfully cratered after news of his pseudonym broke. But then something interesting happened. He owned it, all of it. Instead of denying that he once held

those views or framing himself as a victim or attacking the journalist who wrote the story about him, he started writing about how all of this happened, how he went down the alt-right rabbit hole, and how he came out the other side. He wrote writing about how all of this happened, how he went down the alt-right rabbit hole and how he came out the other side. He wrote about his experience, how his views have changed, and he had an entire decade of public writing to point to, to vouch for a genuine evolution. And he kind of remade his entire image as the guy who was once a white nationalist but came to a more rational, moderate, politics. In the last

couple of years, his writing has once again become very influential. He's in fact even become a conservative critic, someone who writes some of the most biting criticisms of conservative politicians and thought leaders. I reach out to Richard for an interview based on this story, the story of him going down the alt-right white supremacist rabbit hole and coming out the other end. And I was interested to hear about how that happened. And in the time between scheduling our interview and actually doing the interview, something else interesting happened. Richard came forward and said that he regretted his vote for Donald Trump. He was somebody who kind of begrudgingly voted for Trump, but still believed that Trumpism

was better than whatever the left was offering. And apparently that view changed. So in our interview, we also talked about that, his decision to announce on X that he regretted his vote for Trump, why he came to that decision, and all the stuff that contributed to it. I spoke to him for about an hour. You're about to see a pretty much unedited, full picture of that interview. There's a transcript up on our website at readtangle.com

that has been edited for length and clarity. So I hope you guys enjoy. Without further ado, Richard Hanana. ["Ridiculous Love"] Richard Hanana, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Isaac. 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 happened to you and how you sort of landed here, sitting here talking to me? Yeah, so I, you know, I was an anonymous writer around 2009-2010. 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 own name. Appeared in New York Times and Washington Post, a lot 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 open racist or misogynistic ideas that people used to hide behind anonymity to talk about, but now had become a main thing main thing. And 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 to 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. And I, 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, you know, he's a, we knew he was a bad guy the whole time. But I think if you looked at what I was writing before that story came out of the Huffington Post, it was August 20, 23. I was, I had already broken with the right on a lot of, 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, 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 time. 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. That's what we got in the first administration. It was, you know, it was kind of within the normal range of what you'd expect a Republican president to do, despite some, you know, 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 about it 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 November, October, we're like, you know, 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 happen in the first administration. I was over at Dixing on what had happened before. I had it, I think, paid enough attention to my own arguments that the Trump movement was becoming more and more of a cult of 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. So something like RFK becoming the HHS secretary or him just doing tariffs because he feels like it. It was foreseeable. I have to take blame. I understood this at the time. I just calculated the odds wrong.

Yeah, I'm here now. I'm curious. I really want to hear about some of your evolving views on Trump or how the administration has 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 in what it was like for you in some of that past writing came out, 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 how you sort of stepped into the kind of more extreme

on-line 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. Yeah, so I mean, it was interesting. I was on a kind of vacation with my family.

We were on our way to San Diego from Los Angeles, and I got a call from the Huffington Post reporter. He leaves a voice message. And then I checked my Twitter DMs, and I always had a fear this would happen. I was kind of flying too close to the sun. 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, Peter Thiel blurred my book. Elon Musk was engaging with my tweets at the time. So this was the reason it 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, you know, I can't hide 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 from, I mean, the best writings are bad. I'm not gonna, not gonna hide, not gonna hide from that.

And, but I mean, people, I had built a repute, 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 liked, some things people liked, some people didn't liked. But like, if that would have happened like, at the beginning when I was just writing, I would have been really screwed. But if that would have happened 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 a reputation. It ended up working out fine. I'm still able to publish my book. Still nothing about cancelled 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 just, I was seeing a lot of the stuff that became 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. I just never bought any of that stuff. In 2009, 2010, 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, kind of in the later days of that.

I kind of went online and I found other people who agreed with me. I kind of fell into like, these are the people who agree with me, this is what I'm reacting to. I was in college and I just bought the entire world. Oh, we have identity politics. Oh, maybe white people need their own identity politics. Maybe we have feminism that's anti-male. Oh, maybe we need misogyny. Maybe we need to, you know, maybe giving women the right to vote and all these other, you know, right-wing ideas.

Maybe that's the way to go. And, you know, it was like, that's, you know, I think that's, you know, 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, so this is kind of my home now. And you know, the change was kind of more like, it was more of an intellectual development over time.

It was probably, you know, it was 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, you know, 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 the 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 far-right 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. Wait a minute, like you told me the third world was coming and our institutions were threatened. My God. And then the people who were like into restricting immigration because they were worried about Western culture were like the ones who had bought into like the nonsense about 2020 being stolen. And I'm like, okay, wait a minute, maybe it's not like race or cultural background. Maybe these like bad ideas, you know, that have had a role to play in making the developing world dysfunctional are like 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 seeing this 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 like white nationalism or something to push back on it. You could do that, you know, 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.

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 intellectual development being exposed to different ideas. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan. You're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. ["Sweet Home"]

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 opened the door to some reader questions, asking people, hey, I'm gonna 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? One of the people said he used to mock people who supported Israel and now has sort of done a 180 on that. 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? I'm curious to hear you sort of address that criticism. So I'll start with the Israel thing and then go more general. The Israel thing, I still mock people who are too pro-Israel. I am pro-Israel myself, but I do kind of, I think 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, you know, 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, like, it's just kind of so disproportionate and so kind of crazy compared to what we actually saw with them with the protests over the last few years. Maybe my tone has changed a little bit, but I think on the Israel, mocking people for being too supportive of Israel, I think that's something that's 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 they 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 Vance, he 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 show of solidarity, I guess. And so Musk was following me for a while. And so my career, my best interest at that point was to lead 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 like the stuff I wrote before, but they don't want to see anyone give an inch to the left or like apologize to them or anything like that. That kind of overcomes any horror they might feel over racism or sexism. So, you know, 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, you know, the best thing to do for me, I think clearly would have been to lean into the tech right thing. You know, that kind of reaction from your audience is common because, you know, I've said a lot of right-way things or things that are out there, even the things that I, I, I, I, I'm ashamed of now. And it's, it's, I had a, I had a beach. I was, I was kind of there. I was there on the right. I was a good standing with a tech, right. I was a 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, you know, read me and they can, they can see kind of how, 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 you know, I don't blame people for not knowing all of this, because people might not follow me that closely, but a lot of my sub stack 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, right? That's the thing. So you could actually, if you're really, really interested, I mean, you could get into some of my articles. I mean, one of them is called

Diversity Really Is Our Strength. For people who wanna Google it, there's them is called diversity really is our strength. For people who want to Google it, there's another one called why you it's like something like why you 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 Chudery. So I'm constantly arguing with like, what I was that kind with what I was and what I see in other people in ways that are very in the weeds. Probably these discussions are things that most people are not going to be that interested in because it's not their story and it's not that important to the grand scheme of things. But I think people who are really curious as to how I change, there's a lot of

material there that you can dig into. I'm interested. I mean, 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 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. 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. 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 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. My name is on there. But I'm happy to talk about generally the ideas and what I'm happy with and what I'm not happy with. The DEI stuff, I've read about this in my book. It was as we talked about before, the idea that you can take these concerns, which are legitimate about Woknes 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 and government. I was one of the first people to point out that a lot of this stuff, it doesn't require

red 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 DEI. Now I never, you know, what the power of the purse kind of thing where you, you know, like the way we got a lot of affirmative action and the diversity stuff and 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 and professors. So you could do that kind of in reverse. You could kind of not only have court rulings against affirmative action, but you could have the government just put pressure because the Title VI, 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 gotten 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 Doge, 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, you know, 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 supported Trump. And they say, this is what we bargained for. This is quite bad. And so, yeah, I was happy with the initial days of 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 less happy with. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

With the Fizz loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan, you know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today, conditions apply, details at fizz.ca. 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 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? Yeah, I mean, yeah, my friend Jack Despainzal goes by tracing wood grains. We did 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 is, and 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 this idea, you know, it's like the right has to be like so hysterical. Like the planes are going to fall. Like I don't know if I could get on a plane with a black pilot. I don't know if we can, you know, we're going to survive when the planes start crashing. Like I don't know how things are. And like I just said, probably not like if you look at like data on just like plane crashes, like we still have to be realistic. Like it's probably not good that we have these aggressive kind of DEI policies and air traffic controllers. But, and this is probably a more generalizable point.

It's like people are so repulsed by kind of the morality of wokeness that they exaggerate its power. Right. If your thing is like airline safety or making the airports more efficient or working better, it's probably not like 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 like the explanation of where things are going wrong in every situation

and kind of catastrophizing and saying, things are gonna, we're gonna have planes, look, planes are gonna fall out of the sky as a testable theory. And we didn't have that and And you looked at the data. We didn't have even an uptick in acts. I think we might have had it up. There might have been incidents.

There might have been something. But nobody was dying. It wasn't anything like that. And so yeah, I think this is kind of a cautionary tale. 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 leftist 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, you know, it's kind of like you're not even dealing, you're maybe dealing with a problem, but you're like often overshooting. 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 wanna 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. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Law. 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 Kaspersen,

Audrey Morehead, Bailey Saul, Lindsay Knuth and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at retangle.com. With the FIZ loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with FIZ. Switch today. Conditions apply. Details at FIZ.ca.