The Hanania Show

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comI never paid much attention to the Jeffrey Epstein thing. The idea that he was some kind of spy obtaining blackmail material on powerful figures by trafficking young girls to them has for years been pushed by figures like Tucker Carlson, Jack Posobiec, and Eric Weinstein, which convinced me that there wasn’t much to look into, since I can’t recall a situation where this crowd has ever been correct about anything.But until I read Michael Tracey’s recent article on the topic in Compact, I didn’t realize how flimsy the conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein actually are. He joins me to discuss. If anything, it appears that the establishment took sensationalist claims surrounding Epstein’s behavior way too seriously, which led to large payouts for alleged victims while stoking conspiracy theories. As it turned out, our society does not go out of its way to cover for sexual abusers. Especially since the MeToo era began, we’re too credulous about these things. So we have globs of money going to Epstein accusers and their lawyers, while nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system.Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s handling of the issue has caused a major headache for the MAGA movement. As someone who has constantly harped on the misinformed and conspiratorial nature of modern conservatism, I’m enjoying the poetic justice of seeing the chickens coming home to roost. Figures like Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and Trump himself have gained power by playing to the paranoia of their gullible supporters, and now that they’re running the government they have nothing to offer them. I’ve often gone back and forth on whether the problems I point out with the Republican Party will get better or worse after Trump is gone, and this entire episode has convinced me that the next iteration of the right is probably going to be even stupider than the one we have now. The Trump Cult is the relatively non-conspiratorial wing of conservatism!The left seems to see an opening. In an era where more voters appear inclined to prioritize a conspiratorial worldview, it is probably naive to expect Democrats to completely refrain from swimming in these waters. One wonders if we’ll see them continue to harp on Epstein’s connections to Trump, which are more well-sourced than almost everything MAGAs believe about him. Just as liberals have had to inch away from woke in order to be better positioned to win future elections, becoming slightly more conspiratorial might be another way to meet voters where they’re at. After going through the nonsense behind the Epstein story, Michael and I discuss the wider culture of hysteria over pedophilia and sexual abuse. I bring up the online “pedo hunters,” QAnon, Epstein’s role in the cosmology of Rogansphere types, and how all of these things fit together. We also debate how much this will actually hurt the MAGA coalition. On the mood at the Turning Point USA conference, see this story. Also, I speculate a bit on whether there was anything in the Epstein materials that was embarrassing to Trump, based in part on this claim by Michael Wolff that he saw pictures of him with topless girls that were in Epstein’s safe.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comToday, I’m excited to welcome on the podcast State Senator Scott Wiener. He serves as Assistant Majority Whip and chairs the Senate Budget Committee and the Senate Housing Committee.Senator Wiener joins me to discuss AB 130 and SB 131, the newly passed reforms to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).We explore what these laws do, including how they affect single-family and multifamily housing, what density and affordability standards apply, and what else remains to be done. The conversation gets deep into the weeds, as Senator Wiener explains why these reforms passed as part of the budget process and discusses the crucial role played by Governor Newsom, as well as the broader political and activist ecosystem — including YIMBYs, environmental groups, and the influence of public narratives like the debate set off by Abundance. I ask how much of the housing affordability issue could be blamed on CEQA, and he gives me a ballpark estimate. I never cease being amazed at how dysfunctional housing policy has become. Senator Wiener provided me with a surprising new tidbit, explaining that if your porch is rotting in San Francisco, you need to jump through hoops to make sure you do not cause too much damage to the environment when fixing it. Beyond housing, we talk about other abundance issues. He brings up energy and childcare, and I, more excited about the libertarian aspects of the philosophy, ask where occupational licensing and immigration fit into his thinking.This conversation also gave me an opportunity to ask about the nature of power. How exactly do environmental groups influence legislators? Is it persuasion, intimidation, or some combination of the two? And why have environmental organizations been so bad on housing, as seen in the “NASCAR letter”? Given that the abundance movement has prominent spokesmen like Senator Wiener, and the arguments on its behalf are being made in the most prestigious, well-read outlets in the country, where are attempts at persuasion coming up short?Finally, I ask Senator Wiener whether the time he got his cell phone snatched in San Francisco, before he bought it back from the thief, influenced his views on criminal justice issues. As someone who lives in California and is raising three children here, I’m glad to see legislators taking the issues facing the state seriously. I hope you find the conversation as useful and informative as I did. LinksMy interview with Derek ThompsonInstitute for Justice on occupational licensingStory on the cell phone robberyThe “NASCAR letter” from environmental groups

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comMurtaza Hussain (X, Substack) is a journalist who reports on the Middle East and foreign conflicts more generally. He joins me to discuss Israel, Gaza, his travel to Syria, the future of the Muslim world, and immigration to the West. I disagree with Murtaza on most things related to American and Israeli policy, but have always found that his work provides an interesting perspective. We discuss a few of his articles here, including “Did Al Qaeda Win the War on Terror?” and “The Iran War and What Comes Next.” See also his reflections on his time recently spent in Syria. Note that Trump’s ceasefire announcement broke as we were recording this episode.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comTrump just bombed Iran. Here are my initial thoughts. I begin by talking about how “Bombing Iran” has been a meme in the culture over the last two decades. After serving as a nightmare scenario for noninterventionists all these years, it has finally happened. The results are unlikely to be as dire as they’ve always claimed. I discuss why there won’t be American ground troops, why we won’t see World War III, and what the real potential risks are. I also talk about the history of regime change, and what lessons the collapse of the Soviet Union have for today.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comMichael Tracey is back for a discussion of whether we will soon be at war with Iran. Some of you have complained about Michael, but he’s very knowledgeable and the perfect interlocutor for when I haven’t had enough time to follow geopolitical events as closely as I would like. Here, he helps clarify Steve Witkoff’s role in Trump administration policy. When you understand Witkoff as a pro-Israel partisan, the approach to negotiating with Iran begins to make a lot more sense. Michael informed me about his “red line” comment on enrichment, which made all the pieces click. We go into Witkoff’s different postures on Russia and Iran, and how they reflect Trump’s own instincts. We’ve been hearing about Iranian nuclear proliferation and the threat of war for over two decades. Right now, an American strike seems much closer than ever. By the time you listen to this podcast, it may have happened already. Polymarket as I type these words gives a 63% chance of an American attack by July.Near the end, we discuss what American policy should be towards Iran. I lay out my case for regime change, and Michael is unsurprisingly skeptical. My position is based in part on the belief that there is a very small chance that the US would send in ground troops. People keep going back to Iraq and Afghanistan, but I think the way these interventions were conducted should be seen as a historical aberration. Since Vietnam, we’ve never tried to do large-scale nation building in a foreign country under dangerous conditions, except for Iraq and Afghanistan, which were both launched within a year and a half of 9/11. There is simply no appetite for doing anything similar again, anywhere on the right or left. A policy of regime change towards Iran therefore wouldn’t mean American soldiers walking the streets of Tehran, but the attempted toppling of a government from a distance and hoping something better emerges afterwards. Michael and I discuss other times states have fallen, and what the outcomes have been for the nations involved. He surprises me by expressing a bit of skepticism over whether the collapse of the Soviet Union was in the end a good thing, though it seems like I may have been able to convince him that it was.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comNew livestream on the LA Riots, if you can even call them that. I discuss how this is another instance of MAGA desperately trying to create a narrative in which Americans are threatened by foreigners, while reality refuses to cooperate. I go on to talk about how attitudes toward immigration have changed over the last two decades. Immigrants themselves have become much more MAGA since 2016, and I explain why. A lot of new arrivals are simple people not too interested in left-wing status games. The first generation runs a store or works in engineering, the second goes to college, and tries to be a journalist or TikTok influencer. The vibes that the two parties give off matter much more than actual positions on immigration, which are malleable based on which side people feel more attachment towards. There’s an irony here in that all of this tears down yet another nativist argument. Finally, I go into the latest on the Trump-Elon feud, what it tells us about the myth of oligarchy, and take a few questions.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comI just did a livestream where I talked about Yarvin’s bizarre thread on German WWII POWs, the Korean incel election, Trump’s war on Elite Human Capital, and what I think about the Big Beautiful Bill. Korea might be a warning of where we are all headed. Check out these age and gender gaps. Right now, Korea has societal traits that we are observing across the developed world but in a more extreme form due to specific characteristics of the population. See my previous articles “The East Asian Package” and “Why Asia Stopped Having Kids.”I finally got access to a magical new technology called an ethernet cable, so look forward to no more choppy video like in previous weeks. I have no idea why this happened. Nothing changed with my internet. There just started to be problems with Substack Live and nothing else. Anyway, I’m glad that we solved the issue.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comJust did a fun livestream with friend of the show Radical Feminist Hitler (X, Substack). I looked back at our last podcast and realized that it was all the way back in 2023. I’m glad that so much of my life is documented online because I have no sense of time at all. Sorry about the video quality on my end. I don’t know what it is, but the last two livestreams have been really bad, even though I’m using the same internet and nothing has changed. I’ll hopefully figure this out. RFH recently facedoxxed herself, and so I thought it would be a good time for us to talk again. Contrary to the wishes of the haters, she’s actually gorgeous, which makes me happy because watching her terrorize the chuds is one of my great pleasures in life, and this only further humiliates them.There are a lot of people who receive hate on Twitter and you can see that it gets to them. With RFH, I never feel that she’s just pretending it doesn’t bother her. She actually has faced much less personal harassment than I would have thought, which drives home the point that internet trolls really do go after the weak. They don’t sense they can hurt her, and they’re right. We reflect on our alt right days near the beginning, talking about what the mood was like back in the mid-2010s. Over time, the racist part of the movement became deemphasized as the sexism and inceldom took over. A handful of us with higher intelligence, openness, and honesty than the norm became disillusioned with the whole thing, while the vast majority of that old crowd slipped seamlessly into their roles as MAGAs in good standing. RFH and I veer off into discussing drugs, dental health, nutrition, her skincare routine, her hatred of JD Vance, and why Mitt Romney is our ideal politician. Finally, we open things up to the audience at the end, which leads to us answering questions about whether men should ask women to kiss them, the benefits and limitations of evolutionary psychology, and whether it’s even theoretically possible for women to have “grape fantasies.”If you listen to this conversation, I think you’ll see why I consider RFH one of the coolest people I’ve met online. Most accounts with a schtick are predictable. There’s the alt right guy, the “based trad,” the ditzy egirl, and so forth. RFH brings a unique perspective, as a former alt righter who hasn’t gone completely woke but at the same time has seen the truth about the misogynists and the chuds. And she trolls them without any fear, shaming the pro-masculinity types who, in a delightful irony, prove daily that they’re less capable than she is of thinking rationally or controlling their emotions. Ok fine, I know what you’re thinking, and yes it’s true. I like her because she reminds me of myself, just more Asian looking. Articles and podcasts mentioned:Me on Mitt Romney, women’s tears, the autism horseshoe, and overcoming anxietyRob Henderson and I on play-by-play pick up artistry, and on dating more generallyRFH, “The Lazy Man’s Guide to Skincare.”

Just did a livestream discussing Trump’s trip to the Middle East, and a new Free Press piece on the influence of Qatar. I go over the differences between campaigns by foreign governments targeting Elite Human Capital and Low Human Capital. Later, I discuss some further thoughts on my article on Yarvin’s case for populism, and whether we can build a decent case for the idea that something like MAGA is needed to check the power of American elites. I note how Yarvin, at this point perhaps the most prominent independent figure still actively defending Trump on broad intellectual grounds, starts from the premise that his movement is made up of people who are stupid and crazy. I played that role a bit before the election, but I think the difference is I had a plausible case of how the stupidity gets us to better outcomes, while now it’s much harder to see the path. Moreover, I didn’t defend authoritarian populism itself; I thought it was a cancer that could be minimized, and we would otherwise get many sensible right-wing policies in a second Trump administration. Yarvin, in contrast, defends MAGA as preferable to normal conservatism. There was a connection problem here unfortunately and the video quality is not very good. The audio appears unaffected. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comInspired by Scott Alexander’s piece today on how Moldbug sold out, I discuss my Unified Theory of the Far Right. It explains the transition from Moldbug the Monarchist to Yarvin the Right-Wing Populist, and also why Bronze Age Pervert under all his eccentricities always ends up supporting immigration restrictionist politicians and parties. JD Vance can be seen as someone steeped in this world, who fused white identitarianism with electoral politics by taking the white victimization narrative, dropping the human biodiversity component, and leaning more heavily on anti-capitalist messaging. This really should be an article, but articles are something that takes time away from the book, so I’m trying to write fewer of them.There’s a glitch in the Substack system where I could not see the chat, so there was no ability to interact with the audience. Near the end, I discuss the thumbs up/thumbs down feature that they appear to be rolling out on X, and why that could be what finally drives me off the site. LinksDebate with Jared TaylorMe, “Defeat Racism by Hightening the Contradictions.”Me on Nietzschean Chuddery