# Richard Hanania **Richard Hanania** is an American political scientist and right-wing writer who founded the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI) in 2020. He writes a widely read newsletter and published *The Origins of Woke* in 2023. That same year HuffPost revealed that from 2008 into the early 2010s he had written for white-nationalist and alt-right websites under the pen name **"Richard Hoste."** He's on the map mainly through the [[Tech Right Group Chats]]. According to Semafor, [[Marc Andreessen]] asked him to start a chat of "smart right-wing people," and Hanania did. He later said he grew alienated as the group shifted toward partisan pro-Trump politics, and came to see it as a "vehicle for groupthink." The paradox is that one of the network's recruiters to the right later described what it produced as conformity, while the chat he started carried on without him. ## Background and CSPI Hanania earned a PhD in political science from UCLA in 2018. CSPI publishes research and commentary hostile to what it calls wokeness and to much of academic social science. The journalist Jonathan Katz reported that its funders have included the tech entrepreneur Andrew Conru and the [[Mercatus Center]]. Before 2023 Hanania's work appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times and Quillette, and [[JD Vance]] had called him a friend. ## "Richard Hoste" On August 4, 2023, HuffPost's Christopher Mathias reported that leaked comment-platform data tied Hanania's email addresses to "Richard Hoste," a writer for far-right outlets including AlternativeRight.com, the site founded by [[Richard Spencer]]. HuffPost called the persona a formative voice in the rise of the [[Alt-Right]]. The Hoste writings promoted race science and opposed "race mixing." Hanania acknowledged the writings and disavowed them, saying they came from an angrier time in his life. He also cast the exposé as an attempt at cancellation, and critics questioned how far his views had actually changed. The University of Texas's Salem Center removed his visiting-scholar listing within days. ## The group chats Semafor's April 2025 report placed Hanania at a turning point in the network. After Andreessen split with a group of liberal intellectuals linked to the 2020 *Harper's* letter on open debate, he pressed Hanania to start a chat of right-wing thinkers. The chat had no fixed name. Andreessen gave it a series of nicknames. Hanania said members argued over whether to go along with [[Donald Trump]]'s election denial, and that the group became a "vehicle for groupthink." A friend of Andreessen's offered a different account: that Hanania, not the group, was the one whose politics had shifted. ## Trump Hanania was reported in 2024 to be among the hundreds of contributors to [[Project 2025]]. He endorsed Trump in 2024, though in his own description it was a grudging endorsement that conceded much of the case against Trump. He has since said publicly that he regrets the vote, and he has become a critic of Trump and the MAGA movement. [[Tucker Carlson]] has been openly hostile toward him. ## Why it's on the map - **The respectability pipeline.** His career shows how a writer with a white-nationalist past built standing with tech donors and right-wing politicians before the past came out, and kept much of it afterward. - **A builder of the network.** He started one of the chats that, by Semafor's account, moved Silicon Valley's elite toward Trump. - **A witness against it.** His "groupthink" description is one of the few inside accounts of what the chats did to the people in them. ## Connections - [[Tech Right Group Chats]] · [[Marc Andreessen]] · [[Erik Torenberg]] - [[Alt-Right]] · [[Richard Spencer]] · [[Project 2025]] - [[JD Vance]] · [[Tucker Carlson]] · [[Mercatus Center]]