Richard Hanania Doesn't Even Try to Hide His Male Supremacism

Richard Hanania, the once covert and then not-so-covert white supremacist and Trump-supporting intellectual, has been on an apology tour since 2023, though he only abandoned his support for Donald Trump in 2025. One problem with that is that it’s not all that clear what he’s sorry for, outside of not being allowed to the right dinner parties and later being had by Donald Trump on tariffs. 

Here’s Hanania’s mea culpa in his own words:

The revelation of my anonymous writing clears up what some consider a mystery, which is why such a large portion of my current work involves attacking right-wing collectivism and illiberal beliefs (see here and here). The truth is that part of it is self-loathing towards my previous life. I all too clearly notice the kind of sloppy thinking, emotional immaturity, and moral shortcomings that can lead one to adopt a quasi-fascist ideology, and am hard on others because I’m hard on myself for once holding such views.

[…]

As far as my intellectual journey, I’ve come to firmly believe in classical liberalism, due to a process of elimination as much as anything else. Since I’ve started paying attention to politics, we’ve seen Iraq, the financial crisis, the rise and fall of ISIS, the continuing growth of China, the increasing relevance of social media, the Great Awokening, the Trump movement, covid-19, and now the Ukraine War. Having gone through all that turmoil, America’s economy remains strong, and for all our problems, each of the potential alternatives from Chinese technocracy to Islamist theocracy to Putinism has to be considered an utter failure.

Despite being a believer in second chances, I do not find this persuasive. As I’ll explore, Hanania seems perfectly committed to a lot of illiberal thinking, not least on gender issues. But the other problem here is that this seems to be working—at least a little. Hanania has been treated to a profile in The Atlantic, continued opportunities to publish in places like the Boston Globe and Houston Chronicle, and offered interviews by places like Vox. The Atlantic piece was noteworthy in that it presented Hanania as a rogue and compelling thinker on the problems of populist politics, even if he’s likely not as reformed a thinker as he claims. 

Hanania still admits to being right-wing in many ways. And he retains right-wing preoccupations like birth rates, as well as a firm belief in hierarchy and the beneficial role of elites. Yet he is clearly also a creature of right-wing pathologies. 

But rather than applying a more generalized theory, like the excellent ones offered here by Cameron Cummins-Smith or here by Samantha Hancox-Li, we can use Hanania as an individual case. I am far from the only person dubious about Hanaia’s new role as a former racist. This August, Christopher Matthias criticized The Atlantic’s profile for letting Hanania off the hook too easily, writing at The Handbasket that “I promise you that [Hanania] does not have a point. His screeching about ‘Elite Human Capital’ is just a not-so-slick recapitulation of the vile eugenicist worldview he espoused as ‘Richard Hoste’ over a decade ago.” That warning is clear enough, and it should be heeded.

Hanania is an early case of the type we will likely face in much greater numbers after Trump is gone. That is, some chunk of the far-right commentariat will try to make safe passage back to mainstream media. We should not let them. But I don’t think this is sufficient analysis of Hanania’s case or the things it has to teach us in this moment. 

I want to push past Hanania’s no-longer-a-racist redemption tour because I think that has been adequately discredited. Rather, I will add here that it’s interesting to me what aspects of his image Hanania is interested in curating for his audience. I suppose it’s a net positive for racists to feel they must pretend to be otherwise in order to ingratiate themselves with mainstream elites. 

What astonishes me in the public treatment of Hanania is how little attention is paid to his inveterate male supremacism. On this front, he has not attempted even a quick costume change. Instead, Hanania is quite simply a rape apologist. His approach to women’s sexuality is that it exists to serve men, both through sexual reproduction and through the maintenance of long-standing misogynist ideas about when and how women can consent to sexual intercourse. 

This manifests in Hanania’s contempt for victims of rape and trafficking and his repeated support for age-gap relationships, even those that would constitute statutory rape in many jurisdictions. When The Bulwark broke news on Monday that Gen-Z looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular had been accused of rape, Hanania sprung into action discrediting the allegations. On X, he posted,

Women who claim to be sexually assaulted or raped and then continue associating with their alleged attackers deserve zero sympathy.

They're either 

1) liars; or 

2) making it impossible to differentiate between real and fake allegations, hurting other men and women and society as a whole

A sane legal system would take this into account and not trust such women in criminal or civil lawsuits. They should also be socially stigmatized as bad people.

Hanania then wrote a post on his Substack. Here, he detailed further why he sees women who keep in touch with their abusers as inherently unbelievable—this, despite a wealth of evidence that victims of assault and abuse frequently maintain contact with their abusers. The reasons are complex and varied, but it is a wholesale lie for Hanania to claim such behavior makes accusers less credible. And it’s a lie in service of a simpler, darker worldview. Hanania clearly sees rape, physical and statutory, as the right and prerogative of men. This is especially true of rich, successful, or powerful men—in other words, elites. 

Take his repeated apologia for statutory rape. Hanania doesn’t even pretend to make this about some sort of free-love egalitarianism. Instead, he argues strictly from the point of view of implicitly older men who want to sleep with girls. Allow me, if you can stomach  it, to quote him at length:

There is no way to call attraction to 17-year-olds pedophilia without also stigmatizing attraction to women who are slightly older than that. We have an age of consent, and it used to be recognized that it was an arbitrary line that we have to set somewhere. But before the last decade or two, there wasn’t this idea that men whose sexual preferences did not exactly line up with the legal minimum in the jurisdiction that they happen to live in were disordered or somehow abnormal. This is a bizarre idea that is frankly inconsistent with people being able to develop realistic understandings of sex differences and human biology. 

If men who are attracted to 17-year-olds are disordered, on what basis can those who like 20-year-olds be considered normal? I’ve noticed that most of the women who are mad at age gap relationships are aggressive middle age types who seem to have a deep personal interest in the issue.

It’s no mistake that this is all entangled with Hanania’s horrific defenses of Jeffrey Epstein and the abuses on his private island. Hanania has posted that “Hating Epstein represents the essence of antisemitism. The resentment of mediocrities, conspiracy thinking, and chud moralism.” He went so far as to baldly assert that some of the women not only had it coming but even benefited in the end from Epstein’s systemic rape operation:

One of the Epstein "trafficking victims" is a prostitute who he met when she was in her twenties, who had sex with him and reported that he gave her an orgasm.

There's more evidence of Epstein being a stud than there is he's what conspiracy theorists claim.

Hanania made these arguments in 2026, three years after he supposedly stopped sucking and adopted classical liberalism. His language here is saturated in male supremacy, treating women as little more than pleasure machines and objects of male desire. But it also does something else that is less often noticed within male supremacist thinking and is key to Hanania’s political philosophy. It places some men above others in a hierarchy whereby they have the best and most access to a population of submission and coyly desirous women (or rather, girls). 

Another male supremacist, Pete Hegseth’s supreme man, is the sinewy, hairless extra from Zack Snyder’s 300 he sees as the ideal American soldier. But Hanania’s is different. It’s a Revenge of the Nerds form of male supremacy wherein the elitism is derived from wealth, intelligence, and the intellectual brio to defy “chud moralism.” 

So when we confront Hanania’s efforts and successes at breaking through as a mainstream thinker, we have to reckon with not only the racism he seeks to obscure but the virulent male supremacist he’s made no effort to hide or soften. That any in our media are willing to look past or caveat these views is a warning sign about the sickly condition of our civic morality. And it’s a blaring warning sign about who and what might be allowed to direct our national conversations even after Trump is gone. 

Featured Image is The Declaration of Love, by Pieter Gerritsz van Roestraten