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Richard Hanania’s 'The Origins of Woke' Is a Gateway Drug for Extremism - The Atlantic
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data-flatplan-author-link="true">Tyler Austin Harper</a></address></div></div></div><div class="ArticleLeadArt_root__nRSLU"><figure class="ArticleLeadFigure_root__Bj81R ArticleLeadFigure_standard__20Izv"><div class="ArticleLeadFigure_media__R1npW" data-flatplan-lead_figure_media="true"><picture><img alt="Trojan horse that's also a bomb" class="Image_root__XxsOp ArticleLeadArt_image__HZS4B" sizes="(min-width: 976px) 976px, 100vw" srcSet="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/7f--U8gekBG1jsa44HbVDqr2b6g=/0x0:2000x1125/750x422/media/img/mt/2023/09/TrojanRacists/original.png 750w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/PymLu6_EVfCzTSOpzTVam4Sd6tM=/0x0:2000x1125/828x466/media/img/mt/2023/09/TrojanRacists/original.png 828w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/llW3pWZBs3q_K828ZwXeYd09C1E=/0x0:2000x1125/960x540/media/img/mt/2023/09/TrojanRacists/original.png 960w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/CsipYvveFrSeKvNHf-1yrtJjTfk=/0x0:2000x1125/976x549/media/img/mt/2023/09/TrojanRacists/original.png 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Source: Getty.</figcaption></figure></div></div><div class="ArticleHero_articleUtilityBar__JbQFj"><div class="ArticleHero_timestamp__bKhcB"><time class="ArticleTimestamp_root__b3bL6" dateTime="2023-09-18T11:30:00Z" data-flatplan-timestamp="true">September 18, 2023</time> </div><div class="ArticleHero_articleUtilityBarTools__ZHw8s"><div class="ArticleShare_root__Mq0RB"><button class="ArticleShare_text__oQKBy ArticleShare_shareButton__X0cIe" aria-haspopup="true" aria-controls=":R1i5ioomm:" aria-expanded="false" aria-label="Open Share Menu" data-action="click share - expand" data-event-verb="shared" data-event-element="share dropdown">Share<svg width="15" height="15" fill="none" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="ArticleShare_shareIcon__G4iq1"><path fill-rule="evenodd" clip-rule="evenodd" d="M7.335.272a.25.25 0 01.337 0l4.623 4.204a.25.25 0 01.017.353l-.336.37a.25.25 0 01-.353.016L8.004 1.926v7.9a.25.25 0 01-.25.25h-.5a.25.25 0 01-.25-.25V1.924l-3.62 3.291a.25.25 0 01-.353-.016l-.336-.37a.25.25 0 01.016-.353L7.335.272zM.5 7.545a.25.25 0 00-.25.25v6.75c0 .138.112.25.25.25h14a.25.25 0 00.25-.25v-6.75a.25.25 0 00-.25-.25H14a.25.25 0 00-.25.25v6H1.25v-6a.25.25 0 00-.25-.25H.5z" fill="#000"></path></svg></button></div><button class="SaveButton_saveButton__7LYFZ" aria-label="Save"><span class="SaveButton_text__fiZgx">Save<!-- --> </span><svg width="12" height="16" fill="none" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="SaveButton_icon__HFNiD SaveButton_unsaved__bP4MN"><path fill-rule="evenodd" clip-rule="evenodd" d="M6 10.828l5 3.31V1H1v13.139l5-3.31zM.776 15.486A.5.5 0 010 15.07V.5A.5.5 0 01.5 0h11a.5.5 0 01.5.5v14.57a.5.5 0 01-.776.416L6.138 12.12a.25.25 0 00-.276 0L.776 15.486z" fill="currentColor"></path><path fill-rule="evenodd" clip-rule="evenodd" d="M5.572 8.75c0 .138.111.25.25.25h.5a.25.25 0 00.25-.25V6.57H8.75A.25.25 0 009 6.32v-.5a.25.25 0 00-.25-.25H6.572V3.25a.25.25 0 00-.25-.25h-.5a.25.25 0 00-.25.25v2.32H3.25a.25.25 0 00-.25.25v.5c0 .138.112.25.25.25h2.322v2.18z" fill="currentColor"></path></svg></button></div></div><gpt-ad class="GptAd_root__pAvcS ArticleInjector_root__I7x9v LeadArticleAd_root__tdCqm s-native s-native--standard s-native--streamline" format="injector" sizes-at-0="mobile-wide" targeting-pos="injector-article-start" sizes-at-976="desktop-wide"></gpt-ad><div class="ArticleInjector_clsAvoider__dqIAm" style="--placeholderHeight:298px"></div></header><section class="ArticleBody_root__2gF81" data-event-module="article body" data-flatplan-body="true"><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">This week, HarperCollins will publish a new work by the conservative intellectual Richard Hanania. Titled <i>The Origins of Woke</i>, it bills itself as the “definitive” account of the rise of <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/09/04/opinion/freddie-deboer-identity-politics/">identity politics</a>. The book makes the case that contemporary “wokeness” is an ideology that has its origins in—and was in fact created by—changes to the legal system that began with the Civil Rights Act, in the 1960s. “Long before wokeness was a cultural phenomenon,” Hanania argues, “it was law.” <i>The Origins of Woke</i> offers a plausible defense of this claim, and it features a smattering of interesting observations about the historical relationship between the legal system, corporate and education policy, and identity politics.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Yet these fleeting virtues are an insufficient counterbalance to the fatal flaw at the heart of Hanania’s book: It is a racist, sexist fever dream, the product of an author whose not-inconsiderable intellect has been warped and distorted—like many young conservatives’—by a noxious mixture of racist pseudoscience and the casual misogyny of the extremely online right.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">That his book marries brief flashes of scholarly acumen with casual, 4chan-style bigotry will not surprise anyone who has followed Richard Hanania closely. A <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/richard-hanania-white-supremacist-pseudonym-richard-hoste_n_64c93928e4b021e2f295e817">bombshell <i>HuffPost</i> exposé</a> published last month revealed that he had previously written for white-supremacist outlets under a pseudonym, where he expressed enthusiasm for eugenics and other racist ideas. For his part, Hanania—who holds a pair of advanced degrees and has been published in a number of <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/opinion/afghanistan-experts-expertise.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare">prestigious outlets</a>, including <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/06/why-clutch-actually-does-matter/258421/">this one</a>—maintains that his days of anonymous white-supremacist proselytizing are long in the past.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">In an autobiographical essay entitled <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://quillette.com/2023/08/07/my-journey-out-of-extremism/">“My Journey Out of Extremism”</a> that he wrote in response to the <i>HuffPost</i> exposé, Hanania professes that those earlier writings were a relic of a time when he “used to suck.” But <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-clown-pundits-are-defending-a-racist-to-own-the-libs">any optimism</a> that Hanania has changed for the better should be swiftly <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/08/richard-hanania-racist-message.html">put to bed</a> with the publication of <i>The Origins of Woke</i>.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Throughout the book, Hanania slips seamlessly from legitimate intellectual history and sober legal analysis to blog-post-style grousing that is peppered with invocations of race science and winks at the <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://globalextremism.org/the-great-replacement/?gclid=CjwKCAjwo9unBhBTEiwAipC115XOtemq1Jz3iLlUqS3H2j81NNQap2xT-R7sNYkxaw8DEnAvcAA5PBoCgoIQAvD_BwE">“Great Replacement”</a> theory. He frequently expresses frat-boy nostalgia for a world where offensive jokes and ass-pinching are part of office life. He asserts that “the workplace has been cleansed of heterosexual relationships” by policies that discourage office romance, laments that hiring and firing women on the basis of hotness is no longer legal, suggests that the idea that bosses cannot solicit sexual favors from their employees rests on a “badly reasoned” interpretation of the law, and heavily implies that sexual harassment should count as free speech. Underlying all this vitriol is Hanania’s assumption—which he takes no trouble to conceal—that Black people and women are less competent, capable, and intelligent than white men.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Put plainly, Richard Hanania remains a white supremacist. A real one. He is also intelligent and rhetorically savvy. Some progressive readers will no doubt be of the opinion that I should not “platform” <i>The Origins of Woke</i> by reviewing it in a mainstream outlet. Yet such an objection leaves us ill-equipped to confront the danger posed by figures like Hanania, who apes the posture of a serious scholar—he holds a law degree from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from UCLA—and uses his credentials, fluency in legalese, and disarming <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://judedoyle.medium.com/richard-hanania-and-the-reasonable-white-guy-voice-93751ce74b34">“reasonable white guy”</a> demeanor to lend a sheen of rigor to regressive politics.</p><p id="injected-recirculation-link-0" class="ArticleRelatedContentLink_root__VYc9V" data-view-action="view link - injected link - item 1" data-event-element="injected link" data-event-position="1"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/christopher-rufo-book-americas-cultural-revolution/674908/">Graeme Wood: What happens when a carnival barker writes intellectual history</a></p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">In other words, Hanania’s smart-guy aesthetic—his adeptness at presenting himself as a dispassionate, fair-minded researcher who is merely “following the facts”—is best understood as a key part of his game plan. <i>The Origins of Woke</i> is a gateway drug, one that smuggles virulent, pseudoscientific racism into the mainstream by dressing up its poison with occasional moments of serious argumentation. His apparent strategy is part of a broader far-right trend that we might call “Trojan-horsing”: using the trappings of scholarship to lure college-educated readers who are put off by the excesses of “woke” culture down a reactionary or racist rabbit hole. In the same way that figures such as Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan use sensible ideas—that men should clean their rooms, and people should have conversations with those they disagree with—to lend an air of intellectual legitimacy to sexism or the anti-vax movement, Hanania uses a few sophisticated observations about the impact of civil-rights law to get buy-in for his racist agenda.</p><hr class="ArticleLegacyHtml_root__WFd2I c-section-divider ArticleLegacyHtml_standard__kC_zi"/><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Both conservative and liberal critics of “wokeness” have tended to argue that identity politics grew out of postmodern philosophies that are often umbrellaed under the catch-all term—and <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/opinion/cultural-marxism-anti-semitism.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare">anti-Semitic conspiracy theory</a>—“cultural Marxism.” These critics argue that the work of philosophers such as <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/4285-herbert-marcuse-and-cultural-marxism">Herbert Marcuse</a> and <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://unherd.com/2022/01/in-defence-of-michel-foucault/">Michel Foucault</a> brought about an ideological paradigm shift on the left by mounting an assault on truth and objective reason, and by encouraging the view that identities are “socially constructed.” Hanania’s primary intervention in the woke wars is to argue that this narrative—that identity politics began in the humanities departments of elite universities before metastasizing into the mainstream—is little more than a fairy tale, one that accords far too much influence and power to eccentric academics and their jargon-filled theories.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Instead, he insists that wokeness originated with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the policy changes that emerged downstream from it. Many of the schools that are now considered “woke” <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.commentary.org/articles/paul-seabury/hew-the-universities/">had to be forced</a> by the federal government to consider race and sex in their hiring practices. As Hanania notes, the case of Columbia University is especially illustrative. “The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was threatening to cut off federal funding unless the university provided employment data based on race and sex and timetables for hiring minorities,” Hanania recounts. Though Columbia’s president wrote an open letter in 1971 blasting the impact of affirmative action on the university’s mission, he was forced to relent to federal demands not because he was persuaded by ideology but because there was no prudent alternative: “‘If we wish to continue to have federal resources, that is what we must do.’” Hanania observes that Title IX, which requires equal treatment for men and women in education, was <i>also</i> initially <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/the-history-and-legacy-of-title-ix">resisted</a> by universities, which <i>again</i> <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1408&context=sportslaw">had to be cudgeled</a> into compliance: “Eventually, after losing in a series of court cases in the 1990s, as with affirmative action decades before, higher education came to identify with and support the costly regulations it once rallied against.”</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">In Hanania’s telling, the transformation of elite institutions into hotbeds of identity politics was largely occasioned by the need to comply with new laws around hiring, “disparate impacts,” and “hostile work environments.” These institutions were motivated not by obscure French philosophies or the carrot of moral progress but by the stick of withheld federal funding. Hanania attempts to show that government-mandated changes to hiring and admissions practices—changes that required corporations and universities to consider and keep track of the race and gender of their employees and applicants—made elite American institutions obsessed with identity because their funding and/or legal compliance depended on it.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Yet compliance wasn’t straightforward. Hanania maintains that the complexity and bean-counting necessitated by the new laws resulted in “<a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-rising-college-costs">bureaucratic bloat</a>.” Universities such as Columbia “simply did not have the administrative capabilities to comply with new mandates coming from Washington, which required painstaking record keeping to prove that the institution was not discriminating against women and minorities.” The complexity of the new legislation and the regimes of data gathering it demanded meant that institutions would need to create human-resource teams devoted to the task: These new “diversity bureaucrats” existed not only to ensure compliance with civil-rights law, but also to <i>justify</i> it within their institutions.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">“Woke” ideas were invented not proactively but retroactively, in Hanania’s account, in order to intellectually legitimate a series of federally dictated bureaucratic overhauls made necessary by laws such as Title IX and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1991. The rise of identity politics is not a tale of moral or philosophical progress, but of policy changes that generated new ways of thinking after the fact.</p><p id="injected-recirculation-link-1" class="ArticleRelatedContentLink_root__VYc9V" data-view-action="view link - injected link - item 2" data-event-element="injected link" data-event-position="2"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/wokeness-definition-social-justice-racism/673416/">Thomas Chatterton Williams: You can’t define <i>woke</i></a></p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">This specific argument has some substance and explanatory power even if the story it tells—that nearly all the blame for identity politics rests with federal law—is far too tidy and discounts other historical factors, such as the role of progressive activism. That being said, I find Hanania’s description of the historical causes of wokeness more persuasive than other <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.amazon.com/Cynical-Theories-Scholarship-Everything-Identity_and/dp/1634312023">right-wing screeds</a> or even the <i>Atlantic </i>contributor Yascha Mounk’s <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/712961/the-identity-trap-by-yascha-mounk/">forthcoming book</a> on the topic. Almost all such books blame identity politics on postmodern philosophy and critical race theory, with some pinch-hitting <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://unherd.com/2023/01/how-tumblr-corrupted-the-new-york-times/">by Tumblr</a>. Although strong overlaps certainly exist between the ideologies found in American humanities departments and contemporary “wokeness,” critics rarely explain how exactly these complex, jargon-riddled philosophies are supposed to have migrated out of obscure academic journals and into mainstream discourse; they mistake correlation for causation. What Hanania proposes is a clear causal mechanism: Changes in federal law necessitated the creation of new HR bureaucracies, which in turn produced “woke” true believers who began peddling ideologies that justify their jobs.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">If Hanania had stuck to this specific argument—“the government mandates came first, and the ideology later”—it would be possible to take <i>The Origins of Woke</i> seriously as a contribution to the generally vacuous culture-war debates over identity politics and its causes. Black social critics such as <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/the-marxist-who-antagonizes-liberals-and-the-left">Adolph Reed</a>, <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://jacobin.com/2018/01/racecraft-racism-barbara-karen-fields">the Fields sisters</a>, and others have long argued that anti-racism is corporate doublespeak that <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://jacobin.com/2015/08/race-relations-civil-war-tuskegee-populism">exists to preserve</a> the status quo. I’ve made similar arguments <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/anti-racist-color-blindness-dei-programs/674996/">in this outlet</a> and <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/opinion/college-admissions-affirmative-action.html">elsewhere</a>. Ironically, Hanania’s legal history lends support to Black leftists like me who are critical of DEI but care profoundly about social justice: It exposes the fact that the kind of identity politics practiced by universities and corporations aren’t a social-justice sea change; they’re CYA (organization-speak for <i>cover-your-ass</i>). Hanania’s alternative history of “wokeness” adds further support to the idea that today’s left cultural politics are only superficially radical: The real substance of “wokeness” is legal compliance and public relations that serve the elites rather than the Black, brown, and poor.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">However, although the narrow history Hanania sketches has some merit, the book does not content itself with mere history. Hanania’s handful of genuine insights are marred by a slow drip of especially stupid bigotry that suffuses the book. This combination—fragments of defensible historical argument that are welded to indefensible conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and incel-culture misogyny—is what makes Hanania’s book so insidious.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">A. J. Bauer, an expert on conservative news and media at the University of Alabama, told me that figures like Hanania often communicate through a dizzying collage of academic research and conspiratorial assertions. One moment he’s picking apart the legalese of an executive order, the next he’s blaming civil-rights law for declining birth rates. Bauer explains that this isn’t just house style; it’s a matter of economic prudence. Far-right intellectuals rarely hold traditional university posts and are typically reliant on two revenue streams: <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/12/opinion/richard-hanania-eugenics-billionaires.html">billionaire donors</a> who fund conservative scholarship and “an audience cobbled together through Substack and <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://x.com/richardhanania/status/1700699421900734628?s=61">Twitter trolling</a>.” <i>The Origins of Woke</i> features a perverse blend of academese and alt-right <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/16/bronze-age-pervert-masculinity-00105427">shitposting</a> not because Hanania is a moron who can’t tell the difference between the two, but because he is trying to appeal to—and profit off of—both normie conservative elites and angry online mobs: He runs a Substack, receives <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/richard-hanania-racism-silicon-valley/">funding from Silicon Valley</a>, and has floated between temporary academic gigs at institutions such as <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://heterodoxacademy.org/authors/richard-hanania/">Columbia</a> and the <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2023/08/10/hananias-name-gone-ut-austin-center-after-expose">University of Texas at Austin</a>.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Hanania has a habit of punctuating dense, judiciously footnoted paragraphs—which cite academic books, law reviews, and government documents—with racist or sexist claims that aren’t backed up with evidence. For example, a section on the paradoxes of “disparate impact” laws provides several pages of properly cited legal history before arriving at this claim: “An employer who wants to use intelligence tests to hire is potentially barred from doing so because whites could do too well.” This claim, that white candidates would be likely to outscore Black candidates on intelligence tests, is not footnoted or otherwise supported with evidence. Another well-footnoted paragraph about the increasing prominence of equity discourse in university admissions, government institutions, and grant-awarding organizations ends with an unsupported, sexist assertion. “While there may be some women able to meet the same standards as men,” Hanania declares, “it strains credulity to believe that, given the gender gap in math and science proficiency, a meritocratic system would produce a perfect equality of outcomes.” Again, a paragraph full of footnotes and well-supported claims ends with a piece of bigotry unsupported by evidence.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">This pattern repeats throughout the book: Evidence-free racist and sexist claims are nestled amidst properly cited history and legal analysis, providing the former with the veneer of scholarly respectability. In the cases where Hanania does go through the motions of tacking on a footnote to one of his racist musings, the source cited tends to be <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/13/us/upenn-law-professor-racism-freedom-speech.html">another white supremacist</a>. That Hanania is perfectly capable of following scholarly conventions and evidentiary standards when it suits him shows that he knows exactly what he is doing: Trojan-horsing white supremacy by glazing his arguments with the signals, but not the substance, of academic sobriety. That HarperCollins published this book without requiring Hanania to back up its most incendiary assumptions is both an intellectual and a moral failure.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">The idea of superior white intelligence that he implicitly and explicitly refers to throughout the book rests on <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/15/15797120/race-black-white-iq-response-critics">bad studies</a> and <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/math/a43862561/why-iq-testing-is-biased/">bad science</a> that have <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/02/the-unwelcome-revival-of-race-science">long been refuted</a>. The <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/ned-block-race-genes-and-iq/">white-Black “IQ gap”</a> that racists such as Hanania latch onto has likewise been <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25867168/">explained</a> by <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/06/heres-why-the-black-white-iq-gap-is-almost-certainly-environmental/">environmental factors</a>. Craig Venter, one of the scientists who helped map the human genome, <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/discoverer-of-dna-forced-to-sell-his-nobel-prize/383288/">summarizes the state of race-IQ debates</a>: “There is no basis in scientific fact or in the human genetic code for the notion that skin color will be predictive of intelligence.” Philosophers such as Mary Midgley and social theorists like Karen and Barbara Fields have demonstrated that notions of measurable abstract intelligence or fixed racial identity are <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/2482-race-racism-and-racecraft">shot through with mythmaking</a>. Yarden Katz and Adolph Reed <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://monthlyreview.org/2022/09/01/intelligence-under-racial-capitalism-from-eugenics-to-standardized-testing-and-online-learning/">have likewise shown</a> that these myths are time-honored capitalist propaganda that <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.thenation.com/article/society/inequality-poverty-unemployment-johnson/">naturalize inequality</a> by suggesting that poverty is a consequence of racial difference rather than economic exploitation. Hanania makes no efforts to engage with the trove of scientific, social-scientific, and humanistic research that would trouble his assumptions about intelligence, competence, and racial difference.</p><p id="injected-recirculation-link-2" class="ArticleRelatedContentLink_root__VYc9V" data-view-action="view link - injected link - item 3" data-event-element="injected link" data-event-position="3"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/richard-hanania-racist-pseudoscience-woke-silicon-valley/675335/">Adam Serwer: Richard Hanania and the allure of racist pseudoscience</a></p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Similarly, Hanania’s naked obsession with office romance is both unsettling and revealing of his mindset. He ends the book by fantasizing of a future where “woke” anti-discrimination and anti-harassment laws have been repealed, and “some corporations start encouraging dating” through “Christian matchmaking” or “a party-like atmosphere.” Such moments are creepy and juvenile.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">In this sense, Hanania is employing the mirror image of the rhetorical tactic championed by Steve Bannon. Trump’s infamous political strategist advised conservatives to pump out a constant stream of disinformation—as Bannon put it, <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/impeachment-trial-trump-bannon-misinformation">“flood the zone with shit”</a>—in order to keep the media in a state of near-constant hysteria, teetering from outrage to outrage while the public grows ever more confused about the truth. But whereas Bannon whipped up a frenzy through a tornado of untruths and fake news, Hanania lulls his audience into a sense of complacent stupor: Dangerous lies are hidden amidst bland scholarship.</p><hr class="ArticleLegacyHtml_root__WFd2I c-section-divider ArticleLegacyHtml_standard__kC_zi"/><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Pushing back against figures such as Hanania requires understanding that the hodgepodge of high-brow theorizing, low-brow racism, and frat-bro misogyny that characterizes their discourse is not a paradox but a precise strategy designed to sneak white supremacy into the mainstream by obscuring the difference between scholarship and its simulacrum. And these tactics aren’t just confined to Hanania; the phenomenon is pervasive.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Until recently, Nate Hochman was another young conservative intellectual cast as a measured thinker. (“He looks like the kind of kid who would offer you granola at a trailhead,” a <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://newrepublic.com/article/164408/young-intellectuals-illiberal-revolution-conservatism">largely positive profile</a> observed.) Yet just a week before the publication of the <i>HuffPost</i> article that outed Hanania as a former anonymous eugenics enthusiast, Hochman was fired from the <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-desantis-pedro-gonzalez/">racist-scandal-riddled</a> Ron DeSantis campaign. <i>Axios</i> reported that he’d created a video that prominently <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.axios.com/2023/07/25/desantis-campaign-video-nazi-symbol-sonnenrad">featured Nazi iconography</a>. Like Hanania, the now-exiled former wunderkind weaponized sober speech to zhuzh up the kind of radical conservatism that <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/opinion/radicalization-republican-party.html">is ascendant on the right</a>.</p><p class="ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW" data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Understanding this strategy matters, because it has proved effective: Jordan Peterson has become one of the most popular right-wing figures on the planet by using Jungian psychobabble and professorial tweed to give the impression of Socratic wisdom, when what he really offers is retrograde sexism to <a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/10/christine-emba-masculinity-new-model/">lost men</a>. If Hanania has so far managed to escape being sent to Siberia—unlike Hochman—it is because he has followed in Peterson’s footsteps: not “flooding the zone with shit,” but rather hiding the shit in pseudo-erudition.</p><div class="ArticleBody_divider__GpNxD" id="article-end"></div></section><div data-event-module="footer"><div class="ArticleWell_root__fueCa"><div data-event-module="author footer" class="ArticleFooter_authorFooter__5NsdY"><div class="SectionHeading_root__3GnqT"><h3 class="SectionHeading_heading__iNkek">About the Author</h3></div><div><div class="ArticleBio_root__ua8zj"><address id="article-writer-0" class="ArticleBio_author__6pDyl" data-event-element="author" data-event-position="1" data-flatplan-bio="true"><div class="ArticleBio_content__O0ZVF ArticleBio_noHeadshotContent__RrLmd"><div class="ArticleBio_bioSection__Hef4P"><div data-flatplan-bio="true"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/tyler-austin-harper/" class="author-link" data-label="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/tyler-austin-harper/" data-action="click author - name" >Tyler Austin Harper</a> is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College and a contributing writer at <em>The Atlantic</em>.</div><div class="ArticleBio_moreStories__LKpwT"><p class="ArticleBio_contentHeading__cmbmT">More Stories</p><a class="ArticleBio_storyLink__xuRiU" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/lazarus-man-richard-price-book-review/680397/" data-event-element="more stories" data-event-position="1"><p>Richard Price’s Radical, Retrograde Novel</p></a><a class="ArticleBio_storyLink__xuRiU" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/harris-campaign-limitations-biden/680556/" data-event-element="more stories" data-event-position="2"><p>Blame Biden</p></a></div></div></div></address></div></div></div></div><div></div></div><gpt-ad class="GptAd_root__pAvcS ArticleInjector_root__I7x9v s-native s-native--standard s-native--streamline" format="injector" sizes-at-0="mobile-wide,native,house" targeting-pos="injector-most-popular" sizes-at-976="desktop-wide,native,house"></gpt-ad><div class="ArticleInjector_clsAvoider__dqIAm"></div></article><div></div></main><div></div><div></div></div></div><script id="__NEXT_DATA__" type="application/json">{"props":{"isLoggedIn":false,"hasPaywallAccess":false,"hasAdFree":false,"pageProps":{"id":"BlogArticle:675348","isTnfCompatible":true,"layout":"standard","hasMeter":true,"url":"https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/richard-hanania-origins-of-woke-book/675348/","dateModified":"2023-09-18T13:00:03Z","__typename":"BlogArticle","notFound":false,"urqlState":{"1800144408":{"data":"{\"article\":{\"primaryCategory\":{\"__typename\":\"Channel\"},\"editorialProject\":null,\"__typename\":\"BlogArticle\"}}"},"1813160897":{"data":"{\"article\":{\"id\":\"BlogArticle:675348\",\"isTnfCompatible\":true,\"layout\":\"standard\",\"hasMeter\":true,\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/richard-hanania-origins-of-woke-book/675348/\",\"dateModified\":\"2023-09-18T13:00:03Z\",\"__typename\":\"BlogArticle\"}}"},"2021745665":{"data":"{\"breakingNews\":null}"},"3904801362":{"data":"{\"article\":{\"__typename\":\"BlogArticle\",\"id\":\"BlogArticle:675348\",\"authors\":[{\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/author/tyler-austin-harper/\",\"displayName\":\"Tyler Austin Harper\",\"__typename\":\"Author\",\"id\":\"Author:38453\",\"biography\":{\"default\":\"\u003ca href=\\\"https://www.theatlantic.com/author/tyler-austin-harper/\\\" class=\\\"author-link\\\" data-label=\\\"https://www.theatlantic.com/author/tyler-austin-harper/\\\" data-action=\\\"click author - name\\\" \u003eTyler Austin Harper\u003c/a\u003e is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College and a contributing writer at \u003cem\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c/em\u003e.\",\"__typename\":\"Biography\"},\"headshot\":null,\"river\":{\"edges\":[{\"cursor\":\"MjAyNC0xMS0xMiAwODowMDowMHw2ODAzOTc=\",\"node\":{\"id\":\"MagazineArticle:680397\",\"title\":\"Richard Price’s Radical, Retrograde Novel\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/lazarus-man-richard-price-book-review/680397/\",\"__typename\":\"MagazineArticle\"},\"__typename\":\"PromoEdge\"},{\"cursor\":\"MjAyNC0xMS0wNiAxNDoxMzowMHw2ODA1NTY=\",\"node\":{\"id\":\"BlogArticle:680556\",\"title\":\"Blame Biden\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/harris-campaign-limitations-biden/680556/\",\"__typename\":\"BlogArticle\"},\"__typename\":\"PromoEdge\"},{\"cursor\":\"MjAyNC0xMS0wMSAwNzowMDowMHw2ODA0ODA=\",\"node\":{\"id\":\"BlogArticle:680480\",\"title\":\"Of Course Black Men Are Drifting Toward Trump\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/democrats-republicans-black-vote/680480/\",\"__typename\":\"BlogArticle\"},\"__typename\":\"PromoEdge\"}],\"__typename\":\"RiverConnection\"},\"slug\":\"tyler-austin-harper\",\"socialMedia\":[{\"platform\":\"TWITTER\",\"url\":\"https://twitter.com/Tyler_A_Harper\",\"__typename\":\"SocialMedia\"}]}],\"authorContext\":null,\"categories\":[],\"content\":[{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"This week, HarperCollins will publish a new work by the conservative intellectual Richard Hanania. Titled \u003ci\u003eThe Origins of Woke\u003c/i\u003e, it bills itself as the “definitive” account of the rise of \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/09/04/opinion/freddie-deboer-identity-politics/\\\"\u003eidentity politics\u003c/a\u003e. The book makes the case that contemporary “wokeness” is an ideology that has its origins in—and was in fact created by—changes to the legal system that began with the Civil Rights Act, in the 1960s. “Long before wokeness was a cultural phenomenon,” Hanania argues, “it was law.” \u003ci\u003eThe Origins of Woke\u003c/i\u003e offers a plausible defense of this claim, and it features a smattering of interesting observations about the historical relationship between the legal system, corporate and education policy, and identity politics.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Yet these fleeting virtues are an insufficient counterbalance to the fatal flaw at the heart of Hanania’s book: It is a racist, sexist fever dream, the product of an author whose not-inconsiderable intellect has been warped and distorted—like many young conservatives’—by a noxious mixture of racist pseudoscience and the casual misogyny of the extremely online right.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"That his book marries brief flashes of scholarly acumen with casual, 4chan-style bigotry will not surprise anyone who has followed Richard Hanania closely. A \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.huffpost.com/entry/richard-hanania-white-supremacist-pseudonym-richard-hoste_n_64c93928e4b021e2f295e817\\\"\u003ebombshell \u003ci\u003eHuffPost\u003c/i\u003e exposé\u003c/a\u003e published last month revealed that he had previously written for white-supremacist outlets under a pseudonym, where he expressed enthusiasm for eugenics and other racist ideas. For his part, Hanania—who holds a pair of advanced degrees and has been published in a number of \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/opinion/afghanistan-experts-expertise.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share\u0026amp;referringSource=articleShare\\\"\u003eprestigious outlets\u003c/a\u003e, including \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/06/why-clutch-actually-does-matter/258421/\\\"\u003ethis one\u003c/a\u003e—maintains that his days of anonymous white-supremacist proselytizing are long in the past.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"In an autobiographical essay entitled \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://quillette.com/2023/08/07/my-journey-out-of-extremism/\\\"\u003e“My Journey Out of Extremism”\u003c/a\u003e that he wrote in response to the \u003ci\u003eHuffPost\u003c/i\u003e exposé, Hanania professes that those earlier writings were a relic of a time when he “used to suck.” But \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-clown-pundits-are-defending-a-racist-to-own-the-libs\\\"\u003eany optimism\u003c/a\u003e that Hanania has changed for the better should be swiftly \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/08/richard-hanania-racist-message.html\\\"\u003eput to bed\u003c/a\u003e with the publication of \u003ci\u003eThe Origins of Woke\u003c/i\u003e.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Throughout the book, Hanania slips seamlessly from legitimate intellectual history and sober legal analysis to blog-post-style grousing that is peppered with invocations of race science and winks at the \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://globalextremism.org/the-great-replacement/?gclid=CjwKCAjwo9unBhBTEiwAipC115XOtemq1Jz3iLlUqS3H2j81NNQap2xT-R7sNYkxaw8DEnAvcAA5PBoCgoIQAvD_BwE\\\"\u003e“Great Replacement”\u003c/a\u003e theory. He frequently expresses frat-boy nostalgia for a world where offensive jokes and ass-pinching are part of office life. He asserts that “the workplace has been cleansed of heterosexual relationships” by policies that discourage office romance, laments that hiring and firing women on the basis of hotness is no longer legal, suggests that the idea that bosses cannot solicit sexual favors from their employees rests on a “badly reasoned” interpretation of the law, and heavily implies that sexual harassment should count as free speech. Underlying all this vitriol is Hanania’s assumption—which he takes no trouble to conceal—that Black people and women are less competent, capable, and intelligent than white men.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Put plainly, Richard Hanania remains a white supremacist. A real one. He is also intelligent and rhetorically savvy. Some progressive readers will no doubt be of the opinion that I should not “platform” \u003ci\u003eThe Origins of Woke\u003c/i\u003e by reviewing it in a mainstream outlet. Yet such an objection leaves us ill-equipped to confront the danger posed by figures like Hanania, who apes the posture of a serious scholar—he holds a law degree from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from UCLA—and uses his credentials, fluency in legalese, and disarming \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://judedoyle.medium.com/richard-hanania-and-the-reasonable-white-guy-voice-93751ce74b34\\\"\u003e“reasonable white guy”\u003c/a\u003e demeanor to lend a sheen of rigor to regressive politics.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleRelatedContentLink\",\"idAttr\":\"injected-recirculation-link-0\",\"innerHtml\":\"\u003ca href=\\\"https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/christopher-rufo-book-americas-cultural-revolution/674908/\\\"\u003eGraeme Wood: What happens when a carnival barker writes intellectual history\u003c/a\u003e\",\"index\":0},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"In other words, Hanania’s smart-guy aesthetic—his adeptness at presenting himself as a dispassionate, fair-minded researcher who is merely “following the facts”—is best understood as a key part of his game plan. \u003ci\u003eThe Origins of Woke\u003c/i\u003e is a gateway drug, one that smuggles virulent, pseudoscientific racism into the mainstream by dressing up its poison with occasional moments of serious argumentation. His apparent strategy is part of a broader far-right trend that we might call “Trojan-horsing”: using the trappings of scholarship to lure college-educated readers who are put off by the excesses of “woke” culture down a reactionary or racist rabbit hole. In the same way that figures such as Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan use sensible ideas—that men should clean their rooms, and people should have conversations with those they disagree with—to lend an air of intellectual legitimacy to sexism or the anti-vax movement, Hanania uses a few sophisticated observations about the impact of civil-rights law to get buy-in for his racist agenda.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleLegacyHtml\",\"tagName\":\"HR\",\"idAttr\":\"\",\"className\":\"c-section-divider\",\"style\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Both conservative and liberal critics of “wokeness” have tended to argue that identity politics grew out of postmodern philosophies that are often umbrellaed under the catch-all term—and \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/opinion/cultural-marxism-anti-semitism.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share\u0026amp;referringSource=articleShare\\\"\u003eanti-Semitic conspiracy theory\u003c/a\u003e—“cultural Marxism.” These critics argue that the work of philosophers such as \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/4285-herbert-marcuse-and-cultural-marxism\\\"\u003eHerbert Marcuse\u003c/a\u003e and \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://unherd.com/2022/01/in-defence-of-michel-foucault/\\\"\u003eMichel Foucault\u003c/a\u003e brought about an ideological paradigm shift on the left by mounting an assault on truth and objective reason, and by encouraging the view that identities are “socially constructed.” Hanania’s primary intervention in the woke wars is to argue that this narrative—that identity politics began in the humanities departments of elite universities before metastasizing into the mainstream—is little more than a fairy tale, one that accords far too much influence and power to eccentric academics and their jargon-filled theories.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Instead, he insists that wokeness originated with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the policy changes that emerged downstream from it. Many of the schools that are now considered “woke” \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.commentary.org/articles/paul-seabury/hew-the-universities/\\\"\u003ehad to be forced\u003c/a\u003e by the federal government to consider race and sex in their hiring practices. As Hanania notes, the case of Columbia University is especially illustrative. “The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was threatening to cut off federal funding unless the university provided employment data based on race and sex and timetables for hiring minorities,” Hanania recounts. Though Columbia’s president wrote an open letter in 1971 blasting the impact of affirmative action on the university’s mission, he was forced to relent to federal demands not because he was persuaded by ideology but because there was no prudent alternative: “‘If we wish to continue to have federal resources, that is what we must do.’” Hanania observes that Title IX, which requires equal treatment for men and women in education, was \u003ci\u003ealso\u003c/i\u003e initially \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/the-history-and-legacy-of-title-ix\\\"\u003eresisted\u003c/a\u003e by universities, which \u003ci\u003eagain\u003c/i\u003e \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1408\u0026amp;context=sportslaw\\\"\u003ehad to be cudgeled\u003c/a\u003e into compliance: “Eventually, after losing in a series of court cases in the 1990s, as with affirmative action decades before, higher education came to identify with and support the costly regulations it once rallied against.”\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"In Hanania’s telling, the transformation of elite institutions into hotbeds of identity politics was largely occasioned by the need to comply with new laws around hiring, “disparate impacts,” and “hostile work environments.” These institutions were motivated not by obscure French philosophies or the carrot of moral progress but by the stick of withheld federal funding. Hanania attempts to show that government-mandated changes to hiring and admissions practices—changes that required corporations and universities to consider and keep track of the race and gender of their employees and applicants—made elite American institutions obsessed with identity because their funding and/or legal compliance depended on it.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Yet compliance wasn’t straightforward. Hanania maintains that the complexity and bean-counting necessitated by the new laws resulted in “\u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-rising-college-costs\\\"\u003ebureaucratic bloat\u003c/a\u003e.” Universities such as Columbia “simply did not have the administrative capabilities to comply with new mandates coming from Washington, which required painstaking record keeping to prove that the institution was not discriminating against women and minorities.” The complexity of the new legislation and the regimes of data gathering it demanded meant that institutions would need to create human-resource teams devoted to the task: These new “diversity bureaucrats” existed not only to ensure compliance with civil-rights law, but also to \u003ci\u003ejustify\u003c/i\u003e it within their institutions.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"“Woke” ideas were invented not proactively but retroactively, in Hanania’s account, in order to intellectually legitimate a series of federally dictated bureaucratic overhauls made necessary by laws such as Title IX and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1991. The rise of identity politics is not a tale of moral or philosophical progress, but of policy changes that generated new ways of thinking after the fact.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleRelatedContentLink\",\"idAttr\":\"injected-recirculation-link-1\",\"innerHtml\":\"\u003ca href=\\\"https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/wokeness-definition-social-justice-racism/673416/\\\"\u003eThomas Chatterton Williams: You can’t define \u003ci\u003ewoke\u003c/i\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\",\"index\":1},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"This specific argument has some substance and explanatory power even if the story it tells—that nearly all the blame for identity politics rests with federal law—is far too tidy and discounts other historical factors, such as the role of progressive activism. That being said, I find Hanania’s description of the historical causes of wokeness more persuasive than other \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.amazon.com/Cynical-Theories-Scholarship-Everything-Identity_and/dp/1634312023\\\"\u003eright-wing screeds\u003c/a\u003e or even the \u003ci\u003eAtlantic \u003c/i\u003econtributor Yascha Mounk’s \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/712961/the-identity-trap-by-yascha-mounk/\\\"\u003eforthcoming book\u003c/a\u003e on the topic. Almost all such books blame identity politics on postmodern philosophy and critical race theory, with some pinch-hitting \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://unherd.com/2023/01/how-tumblr-corrupted-the-new-york-times/\\\"\u003eby Tumblr\u003c/a\u003e. Although strong overlaps certainly exist between the ideologies found in American humanities departments and contemporary “wokeness,” critics rarely explain how exactly these complex, jargon-riddled philosophies are supposed to have migrated out of obscure academic journals and into mainstream discourse; they mistake correlation for causation. What Hanania proposes is a clear causal mechanism: Changes in federal law necessitated the creation of new HR bureaucracies, which in turn produced “woke” true believers who began peddling ideologies that justify their jobs.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"If Hanania had stuck to this specific argument—“the government mandates came first, and the ideology later”—it would be possible to take \u003ci\u003eThe Origins of Woke\u003c/i\u003e seriously as a contribution to the generally vacuous culture-war debates over identity politics and its causes. Black social critics such as \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/the-marxist-who-antagonizes-liberals-and-the-left\\\"\u003eAdolph Reed\u003c/a\u003e, \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://jacobin.com/2018/01/racecraft-racism-barbara-karen-fields\\\"\u003ethe Fields sisters\u003c/a\u003e, and others have long argued that anti-racism is corporate doublespeak that \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://jacobin.com/2015/08/race-relations-civil-war-tuskegee-populism\\\"\u003eexists to preserve\u003c/a\u003e the status quo. I’ve made similar arguments \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/anti-racist-color-blindness-dei-programs/674996/\\\"\u003ein this outlet\u003c/a\u003e and \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/opinion/college-admissions-affirmative-action.html\\\"\u003eelsewhere\u003c/a\u003e. Ironically, Hanania’s legal history lends support to Black leftists like me who are critical of DEI but care profoundly about social justice: It exposes the fact that the kind of identity politics practiced by universities and corporations aren’t a social-justice sea change; they’re CYA (organization-speak for \u003ci\u003ecover-your-ass\u003c/i\u003e). Hanania’s alternative history of “wokeness” adds further support to the idea that today’s left cultural politics are only superficially radical: The real substance of “wokeness” is legal compliance and public relations that serve the elites rather than the Black, brown, and poor.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"However, although the narrow history Hanania sketches has some merit, the book does not content itself with mere history. Hanania’s handful of genuine insights are marred by a slow drip of especially stupid bigotry that suffuses the book. This combination—fragments of defensible historical argument that are welded to indefensible conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and incel-culture misogyny—is what makes Hanania’s book so insidious.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"A. J. Bauer, an expert on conservative news and media at the University of Alabama, told me that figures like Hanania often communicate through a dizzying collage of academic research and conspiratorial assertions. One moment he’s picking apart the legalese of an executive order, the next he’s blaming civil-rights law for declining birth rates. Bauer explains that this isn’t just house style; it’s a matter of economic prudence. Far-right intellectuals rarely hold traditional university posts and are typically reliant on two revenue streams: \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/12/opinion/richard-hanania-eugenics-billionaires.html\\\"\u003ebillionaire donors\u003c/a\u003e who fund conservative scholarship and “an audience cobbled together through Substack and \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://x.com/richardhanania/status/1700699421900734628?s=61\\\"\u003eTwitter trolling\u003c/a\u003e.” \u003ci\u003eThe Origins of Woke\u003c/i\u003e features a perverse blend of academese and alt-right \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/16/bronze-age-pervert-masculinity-00105427\\\"\u003eshitposting\u003c/a\u003e not because Hanania is a moron who can’t tell the difference between the two, but because he is trying to appeal to—and profit off of—both normie conservative elites and angry online mobs: He runs a Substack, receives \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/richard-hanania-racism-silicon-valley/\\\"\u003efunding from Silicon Valley\u003c/a\u003e, and has floated between temporary academic gigs at institutions such as \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://heterodoxacademy.org/authors/richard-hanania/\\\"\u003eColumbia\u003c/a\u003e and the \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2023/08/10/hananias-name-gone-ut-austin-center-after-expose\\\"\u003eUniversity of Texas at Austin\u003c/a\u003e.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Hanania has a habit of punctuating dense, judiciously footnoted paragraphs—which cite academic books, law reviews, and government documents—with racist or sexist claims that aren’t backed up with evidence. For example, a section on the paradoxes of “disparate impact” laws provides several pages of properly cited legal history before arriving at this claim: “An employer who wants to use intelligence tests to hire is potentially barred from doing so because whites could do too well.” This claim, that white candidates would be likely to outscore Black candidates on intelligence tests, is not footnoted or otherwise supported with evidence. Another well-footnoted paragraph about the increasing prominence of equity discourse in university admissions, government institutions, and grant-awarding organizations ends with an unsupported, sexist assertion. “While there may be some women able to meet the same standards as men,” Hanania declares, “it strains credulity to believe that, given the gender gap in math and science proficiency, a meritocratic system would produce a perfect equality of outcomes.” Again, a paragraph full of footnotes and well-supported claims ends with a piece of bigotry unsupported by evidence.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"This pattern repeats throughout the book: Evidence-free racist and sexist claims are nestled amidst properly cited history and legal analysis, providing the former with the veneer of scholarly respectability. In the cases where Hanania does go through the motions of tacking on a footnote to one of his racist musings, the source cited tends to be \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/13/us/upenn-law-professor-racism-freedom-speech.html\\\"\u003eanother white supremacist\u003c/a\u003e. That Hanania is perfectly capable of following scholarly conventions and evidentiary standards when it suits him shows that he knows exactly what he is doing: Trojan-horsing white supremacy by glazing his arguments with the signals, but not the substance, of academic sobriety. That HarperCollins published this book without requiring Hanania to back up its most incendiary assumptions is both an intellectual and a moral failure.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"The idea of superior white intelligence that he implicitly and explicitly refers to throughout the book rests on \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/15/15797120/race-black-white-iq-response-critics\\\"\u003ebad studies\u003c/a\u003e and \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/math/a43862561/why-iq-testing-is-biased/\\\"\u003ebad science\u003c/a\u003e that have \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/02/the-unwelcome-revival-of-race-science\\\"\u003elong been refuted\u003c/a\u003e. The \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/ned-block-race-genes-and-iq/\\\"\u003ewhite-Black “IQ gap”\u003c/a\u003e that racists such as Hanania latch onto has likewise been \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25867168/\\\"\u003eexplained\u003c/a\u003e by \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/06/heres-why-the-black-white-iq-gap-is-almost-certainly-environmental/\\\"\u003eenvironmental factors\u003c/a\u003e. Craig Venter, one of the scientists who helped map the human genome, \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/discoverer-of-dna-forced-to-sell-his-nobel-prize/383288/\\\"\u003esummarizes the state of race-IQ debates\u003c/a\u003e: “There is no basis in scientific fact or in the human genetic code for the notion that skin color will be predictive of intelligence.” Philosophers such as Mary Midgley and social theorists like Karen and Barbara Fields have demonstrated that notions of measurable abstract intelligence or fixed racial identity are \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/2482-race-racism-and-racecraft\\\"\u003eshot through with mythmaking\u003c/a\u003e. Yarden Katz and Adolph Reed \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://monthlyreview.org/2022/09/01/intelligence-under-racial-capitalism-from-eugenics-to-standardized-testing-and-online-learning/\\\"\u003ehave likewise shown\u003c/a\u003e that these myths are time-honored capitalist propaganda that \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.thenation.com/article/society/inequality-poverty-unemployment-johnson/\\\"\u003enaturalize inequality\u003c/a\u003e by suggesting that poverty is a consequence of racial difference rather than economic exploitation. Hanania makes no efforts to engage with the trove of scientific, social-scientific, and humanistic research that would trouble his assumptions about intelligence, competence, and racial difference.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleRelatedContentLink\",\"idAttr\":\"injected-recirculation-link-2\",\"innerHtml\":\"\u003ca href=\\\"https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/richard-hanania-racist-pseudoscience-woke-silicon-valley/675335/\\\"\u003eAdam Serwer: Richard Hanania and the allure of racist pseudoscience\u003c/a\u003e\",\"index\":2},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Similarly, Hanania’s naked obsession with office romance is both unsettling and revealing of his mindset. He ends the book by fantasizing of a future where “woke” anti-discrimination and anti-harassment laws have been repealed, and “some corporations start encouraging dating” through “Christian matchmaking” or “a party-like atmosphere.” Such moments are creepy and juvenile.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"In this sense, Hanania is employing the mirror image of the rhetorical tactic championed by Steve Bannon. Trump’s infamous political strategist advised conservatives to pump out a constant stream of disinformation—as Bannon put it, \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/impeachment-trial-trump-bannon-misinformation\\\"\u003e“flood the zone with shit”\u003c/a\u003e—in order to keep the media in a state of near-constant hysteria, teetering from outrage to outrage while the public grows ever more confused about the truth. But whereas Bannon whipped up a frenzy through a tornado of untruths and fake news, Hanania lulls his audience into a sense of complacent stupor: Dangerous lies are hidden amidst bland scholarship.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleLegacyHtml\",\"tagName\":\"HR\",\"idAttr\":\"\",\"className\":\"c-section-divider\",\"style\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Pushing back against figures such as Hanania requires understanding that the hodgepodge of high-brow theorizing, low-brow racism, and frat-bro misogyny that characterizes their discourse is not a paradox but a precise strategy designed to sneak white supremacy into the mainstream by obscuring the difference between scholarship and its simulacrum. And these tactics aren’t just confined to Hanania; the phenomenon is pervasive.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Until recently, Nate Hochman was another young conservative intellectual cast as a measured thinker. (“He looks like the kind of kid who would offer you granola at a trailhead,” a \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://newrepublic.com/article/164408/young-intellectuals-illiberal-revolution-conservatism\\\"\u003elargely positive profile\u003c/a\u003e observed.) Yet just a week before the publication of the \u003ci\u003eHuffPost\u003c/i\u003e article that outed Hanania as a former anonymous eugenics enthusiast, Hochman was fired from the \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-desantis-pedro-gonzalez/\\\"\u003eracist-scandal-riddled\u003c/a\u003e Ron DeSantis campaign. \u003ci\u003eAxios\u003c/i\u003e reported that he’d created a video that prominently \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.axios.com/2023/07/25/desantis-campaign-video-nazi-symbol-sonnenrad\\\"\u003efeatured Nazi iconography\u003c/a\u003e. Like Hanania, the now-exiled former wunderkind weaponized sober speech to zhuzh up the kind of radical conservatism that \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/opinion/radicalization-republican-party.html\\\"\u003eis ascendant on the right\u003c/a\u003e.\"},{\"__typename\":\"ArticleParagraphContent\",\"subtype\":null,\"idAttr\":\"\",\"innerHtml\":\"Understanding this strategy matters, because it has proved effective: Jordan Peterson has become one of the most popular right-wing figures on the planet by using Jungian psychobabble and professorial tweed to give the impression of Socratic wisdom, when what he really offers is retrograde sexism to \u003ca data-event-element=\\\"inline link\\\" href=\\\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/10/christine-emba-masculinity-new-model/\\\"\u003elost men\u003c/a\u003e. If Hanania has so far managed to escape being sent to Siberia—unlike Hochman—it is because he has followed in Peterson’s footsteps: not “flooding the zone with shit,” but rather hiding the shit in pseudo-erudition.\"}],\"editorialProject\":null,\"primaryCategory\":{\"__typename\":\"Channel\",\"displayName\":\"Ideas\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/\",\"slug\":\"ideas\"},\"reviews\":[],\"embeds\":[],\"preview\":null,\"tags\":[],\"layout\":\"standard\",\"secondaryByline\":\"\",\"dek\":\"Richard Hanania’s new book is a Trojan horse for white supremacy.\",\"url\":\"https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/richard-hanania-origins-of-woke-book/675348/\",\"shareText\":\"Richard Hanania’s new book \\\"is a racist, sexist fever dream,\\\" @Tyler_A_Harper writes:\",\"shareTitle\":\"An Intellectual and a Moral Failure\",\"title\":\"An Intellectual and a Moral Failure\",\"datePublished\":\"2023-09-18T11:30:00Z\",\"editorsNote\":null,\"leadArt\":{\"__typename\":\"LeadArtImage\",\"image\":{\"url\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/llW3pWZBs3q_K828ZwXeYd09C1E=/0x0:2000x1125/960x540/media/img/mt/2023/09/TrojanRacists/original.png\",\"width\":960,\"height\":540,\"srcSet\":\"https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/7f--U8gekBG1jsa44HbVDqr2b6g=/0x0:2000x1125/750x422/media/img/mt/2023/09/TrojanRacists/original.png 750w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/PymLu6_EVfCzTSOpzTVam4Sd6tM=/0x0:2000x1125/828x466/media/img/mt/2023/09/TrojanRacists/original.png 828w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/llW3pWZBs3q_K828ZwXeYd09C1E=/0x0:2000x1125/960x540/media/img/mt/2023/09/TrojanRacists/original.png 960w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/CsipYvveFrSeKvNHf-1yrtJjTfk=/0x0:2000x1125/976x549/media/img/mt/2023/09/TrojanRacists/original.png 976w, https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/V0bApi8o5ajYTC2nZwT0oj2rdWg=/0x0:2000x1125/1952x1098/media/img/mt/2023/09/TrojanRacists/original.png 1952w\",\"reducedMotionSrcSet\":null,\"altText\":\"Trojan horse that's also a bomb\",\"captionText\":\"\",\"attributionText\":\"Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. 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