The Times Rehabilitated This White Supremacist

One of the more gratuitous bigotries The New York Times indulges in is platforming White Supremacists. Three years ago, Huffington Post writer Christopher Mathias identified rising right-wing intellectual Richard Hanania as the White Nationalist blogger Richard Hoste. Hanania had a career as a controversial heterodox thinker in a variety of mainstream publications, including The New York Times, which was moderately derailed but hardly cancelled. I’m unfortunately writing about him right now.

At least after it became apparent that Hanania had called for forced sterilizations and mass expulsion on racial grounds, he lost his bylines in real publications and had to go back to www.Screaming-The-N-Word-On-The-Corner.com.

Right?

Of course not. As Mathias discusses in an analysis article in Marisa Kabas’ courageous independent investigative outlet The Handbasket, the big papers couldn’t wait to rehabilitate their pet Nazi.

All of the places where Hanania had lectured or written—The University of Texas, Stanford, the Yale Federalist Society, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and others — did not take steps to “cancel” or condemn him after my story. But this was actually proof of the thesis at the center of my reporting career, which I later made the foundation of my own book: that the white nationalism of the “alt-right” was going mainstream. Hanania didn’t abandon “Richard Hoste” because he’d actually moderated his views; he just didn’t exactly need to hide his views behind a pseudonym anymore.

Still, in the ensuing three years after my story I watched mainstream, centrist media outlets and figures fall over themselves to legitimize Hanania and accept that he really had left white nationalism behind him. The Boston Globe gave him a monthly column. Reporters at The New York Times regularly called upon him for his analysis, describing him variously as “a political scientist who once wrote for white nationalist publications… before moderating his views”; a “pundit who used to post in favor of eugenics”; and simply “a conservative political scientist and writer.” Times columnist Ross Douthat routinely cited and promoted Hanania, who was sitting down for interviews with Vox and Derek Thompson at The Atlantic.

On the same day Mathias published his article, Hanania made his grand return to the place he feels happiest; measuring skulls and telling everyone why White=Right on Substack.

Now, I’ve never seen the appeal of racist skull-measuring or blaming the wrongs of society on a single ethnic group. I’ve met enough people to realize that there’s more variation within any arbitrary box of the human population than there is between two boxes, especially ones based primarily on skin color. It’s definitely more interesting to celebrate our diversity than cower in a mono-ethnic enclave of wonderbread sandwiches and jello salads while penning screeds about standardized test scores.

I sincerely hoped that racism was one of those bad ideas that could be buried with the 20th century, like leaded gasoline or lobotomies, but The New York Times keeps digging it back up.