The Hanania Show

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comMichael Tracey is at a Senate hearing today like a real journalist, so I’m flying solo.My mood is becoming pretty dark, as reflected in my article on how Trump’s plan is to maintain a North Korea of the right. I discuss why things have gotten this bad, and the necessity of acknowledging where people who supported Trump went wrong. Someone asks about the difference between me today and me on November 5. The big mistake is that I didn’t take my own ideas seriously enough! My opinion of Trump sycophants and assorted rightoids was already extremely low. But it’s sunk even lower, which I didn’t think was possible. There just weren’t any more guardrails. They lasted throughout the first term, but a lot has changed since then. I wrote about this extensively, but thought we’d somehow get lucky. As I was streaming, we learned that Trump is putting a 90-day pause on tariffs, for now placing 125% on Chinese goods and 10% on other countries. This is still an insane policy, but much better than the previous plan. Maybe focusing all of his hatred on China can help spare the rest of the world. I discuss how I’m annoyed by China-bashing. I’m not a fan of the CCP, but I take issue with the belief that the problem with them is the fact that we trade with one another. This idea has taken hold as a form of bipartisan demagoguery, and I expect a lot of the anti-China policies Trump has implemented to stick, even if other tariffs get rolled back.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comMichael joins me again to talk about last night’s election results and Trump’s coming tariff announcement. Democrats won the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin, and over performed in other races. Florida’s First District went from R+32 to R+15 according to the current count, while the Sixth District shifted from R+33 to R+14. We debate whether Elon was rational to put so much money and effort into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. My argument is that Republicans need to do something about the fact that the other side is more energized, along with the fact that Democratic voters are more educated, which makes current trends worse. Elon did not help them win in Wisconsin, but giving away giant checks is at least a strategy. The alternative right now seems to be to just accept that Republicans are going to get crushed in every election from now until 2028. Michael and I do our best to speculate on what might happen with tariffs based on current reporting. We recorded this beginning at 1ET, while Trump’s big announcement is at 4ET, so by the time you listen to this there may be more information. We go on to talk about a blockbuster report in The New York Times from over the weekend: “The Secret History of the War in Ukraine.” Michael and I go over what we learned that is new here, and how the story changed our perspective on the conflict. As for the future of the war in Ukraine, I wonder whether Trump seems to be just getting bored with the conflict. The most likely scenario now looks to me to be a petering out of American support as the Europeans assume more responsibility and the fight continues. Michael, in contrast, seems to find it easier to imagine Trump escalating support to Ukraine.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comMichael Tracey joins me to talk about the crazy groupchat story. We discuss why this has caught on, and whether it tells us anything new about the administration and how it operates. See here for the full release. I argue that the reason that this is such a big story is that it’s the kind of awkward situation people can relate to in their personal lives, except in this case it happened to top administration officials while planning a military strike. Michael and I then debate the logic that was used to justify the attack on Yemen. We go back and forth on the question of whether “deterrence” or “credibility” can be a good reason to do something. Michael says no, but I disagree.I play this hilarious video of Steve Witkoff talking about the special relationship between Trump and Putin. See these articles on Putin’s religious beliefs. Finally, we close with what has been going on with immigration enforcement. Of all the things that the Trump administration is doing, this might be the most disturbing. ICE has apparently been hunting down a Columbia student who is a legal permanent resident and has been in the US since she was 7. Venezuelans are getting sent to a Salvadoran prison camp based on allegations that they have gang ties. We’re not talking about people convicted of crimes, or even arrested for crimes. Simple speculation about who they are means that they get locked up indefinitely! Michael notes that this goes well beyond anything that Bush and Cheney did back when they were criticized for violating civil rights. See here for the latest legal news on this that broke as I was typing these show notes. For the thumbnail, see here.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comMichael Tracey joins me on the livestream to discuss the latest foreign policy news, including on the Ukraine war and Gaza. Late in the conversation we talk about how the Trump administration has gone beyond being pro-Israel, and is more implementing a policy of fighting anti-Semitism across the board, which has reached into education and immigration policy. I note the parallels I see between woke hysteria on college campuses and the narrative that universities are hotbeds of Jewish hatred, namely exaggerated and subjective claims of persecution, along with alleged anecdotes only weakly supported by evidence.Some links that come up in the conversation or are related to its themes:Mikhail Zygar, “Putin Won’t End the War. He Can’t Afford to.” (NYT)Michael with a clip of Laura Ingraham asking Trump about the Putin call, and the seeming contradiction between his account and that of PutinMe, “Too Gay to Rebel.”Wall Street Journal on Israel sending troops back into GazaWall Street Journal, “Columbia Is Nearing Agreement to Give Trump What He Wants.”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comDerek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic (profile, X account), and the host of the Plain English podcast. He joins me to discuss his new book Abundance, co-authored with Ezra Klein. Derek was actually responsible for the first article I ever published in a mainstream media outlet, which was a response to him in The Atlantic in 2012 on the question of whether clutch matters in basketball. He had encouraged me to submit it after I emailed him. I was really proud of the accomplishment at the time, and it got me thinking that I could publish in mainstream outlets, though it would be years until I would do so again. Derek had understandably forgotten about our initial connection, and it was fun to remind him of it here. After a bit of sports talk, we get to the substance of his book. I was already well versed in some of the intellectual currents that flowed into it, including progress studies, state capacity liberalism, and basic free market economics, yet I still learned quite a bit. Thompson and Klein do an excellent job of putting together the data, anecdotes, and anecdata necessary to make a compelling case of where liberalism has gone off the rails.We spend a good bit of time talking about how the authors decide to frame the issues involved. In particular, I wonder why they do not make a full-throated defense of markets, since so much of the abundance agenda involves getting government out of the way. This leads to a discussion of why conservative states do so much better on the housing issue, and whether a pro-abundance agenda can actually make for a popular political program. See Klein’s recent article, “There Is a Liberal Answer to the Trump-Musk Wrecking Ball.” See also my article “Forty Years of Economic Freedom Winning.”I go on to ask Derek something that I’ve always been curious about, which relates to the sociological and demographic characteristics of the people on the left with views contrary to his own. I read outlets like The New York Times and The Atlantic, and I see pro-abundance views, and very little in terms of NIMBYism and favorable coverage of NEPA review. Since elite liberalism, as represented by Klein and Thompson themselves, seems to be oriented in the right direction, why has policy not changed all that much? Near the end, I ask about how much of the abundance/anti-abundance split on the left is reflecting an underlying difference in neuroticism.I’ve written a lot about how pessimistic I am about the trajectory of the right, but the rise of ideas represented by Klein, Thompson, and other thinkers who are pro-progress in the best sense makes me much more optimistic about where the left is going. As we discuss here, I worry about whether there may be difficulty in overcoming vested interest groups, even if Klein and Thompson win in the marketplace of ideas. If liberals are all abundance agenda types in a decade and not much has changed in blue state governance, it seems to me that there perhaps needs to be consideration of whether the left as currently constituted can provide answers in areas like housing and energy. In other words, perhaps those in favor of abundance cannot hope to achieve their goals as long as they find themselves in the same coalition as degrowthers, the highly neurotic, and bureaucratic elites who benefit from complex and open-ended regulations.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comJust did a livestream with Michael Tracey. We talk about the latest news in the Ukraine War. The Ukrainians have accepted a 30-day ceasefire proposed by the Trump administration, and the ball is now in Putin’s court, in Rubio’s words. This seems to us like the minerals deal all over again, where Ukraine hawks are maneuvering in the hopes of getting Trump committed to supporting Ukraine and angry at Putin. We discuss the motivations of the various actors involved and whether anyone has an incentive to stop fighting, or alternatively whether it would make sense for Trump to pull the plug on Ukraine. Our outlook is grim, as it doesn’t seem like we are anywhere near peace. From the outside, it looks as if Putin has every reason to continue the war.Michael tries to convince me to take Trump’s supposedly expansionist aims literally, and argues for a connection between tariffs and promises to make Canada the 51st state. I at first think he’s crazy and ask what evidence he has for that link. Michael delivers by pointing to a recent Truth Social post where Trump makes the association explicit. He moved my perspective on this a bit. On the idea that Trump now sees himself as a kind of messianic figure, I loved this profile of the man and his ear from September by Olivia Nuzzi, which was truly a work of art. Near the end, we take some questions from the audience. Michael explains why he’s “Mearsheimered out,” and we give our overall outlook on the tariffs and what to expect from Trump going forward. We talk about why right-wingers are so pro-Putin these days, and I argue that it actually does mostly come down to gays, fealty to symbols of Western civilization, and a trad aesthetic. I also try to convince Michael to take seriously the idea that Russian propaganda has a major role to play in how the right is perceiving reality. See the thread here for my recent conversation with Tucker and how he has bought into a Russian influence operation regarding Ukraine selling weapons online. See also my article, “Putin as the Patron Saint of Right-Wing Misanthropy.”Note: if you’re listening to this show on your podcast app and it cuts off around 26 minutes in, you’re listening to the free preview. Become a paid subscriber to listen to or watch the whole thing.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comJust did an AMA. I took questions on whether I would ever have another institutional affiliation again, why Substack is so much higher quality than Twitter, Nick Fuentes’ intelligence, what parts of the Trump agenda might be undone by a future Democratic administration, whether I watch Severance, anime, nationalism and immigration restriction, and more. Note that the new time for the weekly show is Wednesdays at 1ET/10PT, rather than 4ET/1PT. Finally, I was on Destiny’s stream on Monday. These always get massive numbers of views, and you can check out our conversation here.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comI did a livestream yesterday after a viral tweet on the Zelensky press conference from hell. I discuss what I saw, scroll Twitter for reactions, and take some questions from the audience. The first hour and a half or so was good, but it dragged out a bit at the end. Yet it’s all here for the superfans.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comI did my first weekly show with Michael Tracey today. Michael begins by discussing his experience at CPAC and his time at a DOGE appreciation party, where I was apparently a topic of contention. The bulk of our conversation is then spent talking about the deal for the US to supposedly take a cut of Ukraine’s resources, to be signed Friday according to Trump. Here is what is reportedly a copy of the current text. We try to read the mixed signals from the Trump administration, and debate what it all means. Near the end, we discuss the big announcement that Jeff Bezos is going to be making sure that the Washington Post editorial page promotes individual liberty and free markets. As announced, this is the first in what is going to be a regular show on Wednesdays at 4ET/1PT. You can join us live for free by downloading the app below or get the whole thing as a paid subscriber later.

I am honored to have New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on the podcast to talk about his new book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious. I’ve always seen atheism as my first intellectual position. Upon learning that many Christian doctrines declare that non-believers go to hell and are tortured for all eternity, I decided I needed to look into whether their claims were true and came to the conclusion that they most certainly weren’t. Yet I don’t completely dismiss the idea that something beyond the natural world might be out there. Bentham’s Bulldog writes pieces on theism and makes arguments that I’m unsure how to think about but don’t strike me as obvious nonsense. A 2020 survey showed that 19% of philosophers leaned towards theism, so it’s not like the position is akin to anti-vaxx or young earth creationism, where none of the trained experts take the claims involved seriously. The fact that people just as smart as me have thought longer and harder about the subject and arrived at the position that God exists is enough to give me perhaps a bit of doubt about my atheism. Debates around theism strike me as similar to those about AI doom. I can develop strong opinions on topics when there is empirical data we can bring to a question. So I have confident views on the best economic system, the role of heredity in determining cognitive and personality outcomes, what causes some voters to support Donald Trump, and whether humans have seen a major increase in living standards over the course of history. When it comes to speculation, trying to follow chains of reasoning, and arguments derived from analogies and thought experiments – which I think is most of what we have in debates over theism and AI doom – I don’t trust myself or other people to be able to do any of this well. Douthat is someone whose political and cultural writings I’ve always found interesting, so I decided to give his new book a try. Believe focuses mostly on attempting to convince the reader that there is something out there beyond material reality, with only the last chapter making the case for Christianity. I found myself dividing the arguments into a few baskets. The best arguments for theism I think rest on fine-tuning and the mystery of consciousness. I found the supposed evidence for the existence of the supernatural – miracles, demons, the power of prayer, near-death experiences, etc. – less compelling. This was much of the focus of his conversation with Tyler, who also sounded very skeptical. I ask Ross to assign probabilities on the supernatural being real, Christianity being true, and Catholicism being true. I then explain my main moral problem with traditional Christian dogma, which is that some portion of humanity will be sentenced to everlasting torture. We tend to think that any punishment should fit the crime one is guilty of. Few would say that an individual who has committed a dastardly act should be held down and tortured for decades, which leads to the question of why an all-knowing, all-loving God would do something similar on a much longer timescale. We talk a good bit about the role of providence in human affairs, which I found quite fun. The conversation swerves into how Ross thinks about someone like Trump playing a preordained role in history. On the surface, this might seem like a somewhat silly part of our discussion, but it actually raises intriguing questions regarding how the mechanics of God intervening in human affairs would actually work.Near the end, we get to the part of Ross’s book I’m most skeptical of, which is the alleged evidence for supernatural experience. If prayer is real, why not conduct a double-blind randomized study? I also bring up the Randi Prize challenge, which offered $1 million to anyone who could demonstrate supernatural abilities but never had to pay out. I have to confess however that I do find the story told by professional skeptic Michael Shermer about how his wife’s old radio started working on their wedding day to be very weird. I do sort of love the idea that God is like a writer for a prestige TV drama, and history has all these A and B list characters that He shuffles around in order to move the plot along. The Roman Empire is maybe its own season. World War II was the finale of the one that began as the Industrial Revolution was taking off. Now we’re in the middle of Season 8, and AI, which started out as a minor character in the background, is about to become the main protagonist. The series finale is of course Judgment Day. People like Trump and Putin are the main characters, the Starks and the Lannisters, while we lesser mortals are akin to the slaughtered hordes left on the numerous battlefields of the War of the Five Kings. The Hanania subplot is a pretty cool one. Five years ago I was nobody, now I at least have a (very bad) Wikipedia page, and can reach hundreds of thousands or millions of people on a daily basis, leading my fans closer to God or everlasting damnation. I start out as a rightoid, move towards rightist-tinged rationalism, become an influential figure among Elite Human Capital as I disparage the existence of the supernatural. Razib uses the tools of modern science to show I am related to Jesus and his neighbors in ancient Palestine, as the Lord starts speaking to me about how God is actually real, hoping to use (knowing he will use?) my biography and background to bring others into His flock. Ross Douthat convinces me to believe in God, I return to the faith of my ancestors, actually my childhood, and they run a big feature in the New York Times about what happened. All thinking people read it and become convinced God is real, helping us shake free of our cultural decadence and existential anxiety as humanity moves towards a new Golden Age. All thanks to me and this podcast. Oh and you get to live in a state of bliss for all eternity. Very seductive! I can see the appeal of this. But as I tell Ross, short of the Lord or one of his angels appearing directly next to me, I have no way of understanding how one would distinguish Him sending me a sign from my own wishful thinking and intoxication with a very cool narrative that gives me an important role to play in a great cosmic story.I did not become a Christian while talking to Ross, but I enjoyed his book, and perhaps some other souls will be saved among the listeners of this conversation. I think I will take him up on his suggestion to read They Flew and hope to also look into the question of the historical Jesus before long. 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