Hanania Derangement Syndrome
they hated him, because he told the truth.
Why does Richard Hanania make the right-wing so deranged?
Left-wing derangement is different from right-wing derangement. When left-wingers get deranged, they cry and hysterically shriek. For a “centrist” example of this kind of derangement, see David Portnoy’s response to antisemitism, where he is literally shaking.
Derangement is not a moral state, but an emotional one. Like trauma, good people can be deranged for morally good reasons. But derangement is a sign of weakness, insecurity, or paranoia. Strong, confident people are not deranged.
When the right-wing becomes deranged, they are much more self-aware, masculine, and optical. Right-wing derangement does not take the form of crying, shrieking, and shaking. The right-wing tries to project strength through trolling. He who becomes mad first loses. But this veneer of strength is thin, and below, there is a sea of seething and coping in the form of conspiracy theories.
The funniest right-wing conspiracy theory about Hanania is that he was funded by USAID. The deranged right insinuates the deepest darkest paranoid fantasies to turn their opponents into criminal masterminds. People can’t change their mind: they must be paid shills and feds.
There are thousands of right-wingers posting about how Hanania is controlled by the Jews — they also believe that the moon landing was faked and that dinosaurs are a hoax. But this is low-hanging fruit. Let’s ignore the conspiracy theories for a moment and investigate other reasons for HDS (disguising their obsessive, infuriated, derangement as “light annoyance”).
Criticisms of Richard include:
inconsistency
bad faith
arrogance
“slop baiting”
traitorousness
contrarianism
weirdness
“can’t figure him out” (too nuanced?)
“unwilling to accept that other people have different values” (intolerance)
This was my favorite explanation for Hanania Derangement:
He claims to be a RWer while simultaneously supporting homosexuality, bashing christianity, acknowledging IQ being genetics and racial differences existing while openly supporting 3rd world migration.... loves “elite human capital” and thinks its destined to support liberal ideology while bashing Trump ANY opportunity he gets and giving no credit when its due.
The claim that Richard is disingenuous, sneaky, creepy, or predatory stems from the suspicion that he changes his views for his own personal advantage, rather than standing by the truth come hell or high water.
This suspicion is based on the following:
Richard used to have views which were diametrically opposed to the foreign policy establishment, as recently as 2022.
His views are now much closer to the establishment.
Anyone who is “redpilled” can never go back. Once you escape the Matrix, you cannot “unsee” what you have seen.
Hanania cannot have changed his opinion based on new information or personal development. Instead, he is a Judas who has taken his 30 pieces of silver (USAID money) to enrich himself and has betrayed “the movement.”
Hanania Derangement Syndrome isn’t about hating a “gay liberal who loves open borders and hates Trump.” There are plenty of those, and none of them inspire this level of derangement. HDS comes from an existential crisis of faith: he took the sacred redpill. He should know better. He is an apostate from Trumpism.
You see this in all religions. They will be nice, conciliatory, and friendly with the unconverted, in an attempt to seduce them. But once an established convert apostatizes, there is no mercy. Such a person is bound for hell with no forgiveness.
Matthew 12:32, “Every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven.”
Hanania, in betraying Trumpism, has blasphemed the MAGA spirit.
In the MAGA religion, apostates aren’t accused of being “demon possessed” or “sinful.” They are “gay, cucked, raped,” or “Jewish.” None of these slurs are to be taken literally — one does not have to be ethnically Jewish in order to be “spiritual Jewish.”
Hanania Derangement Syndrome is the product of a tribalistic cult which punishes apostates. MAGA has transcended the milquetoast mannerisms of mainline Christianity, and has even surpassed the apocalyptic snake-handling of Evangelicals. MAGA is full-blown White Sharia.
As in fundamentalist Islam, the individual members of the cult are cowardly, stupid, and unwilling to argue with the apostate on the basis of facts. They refuse to debate, preferring the perverted jeering of the mob, ridiculing, burning virtual effigies in deranged ressentiment, depicting hellish, gruesome, cruel, vengeful torture.1 All arguments can be dismissed a priori as deceptive, traitorous, and motivated by evil, bypassing the need for debate. This psychologically insulates even smart people from questioning the cult, which Hanania describes as the “Catturd to billionaire pipeline.”
Although the theory of “Elite Human Capital” causes mass derangement among populists and nationalists, to my knowledge, there is only one person who has ever bothered to try to critique the theory:
[Hanania] attempts to unify high intelligence, activism, openness, liberal institutional norms, leftism, status-signaling, honesty, anti-conservative and specific moral foundations into a single framework… these traits do not always correlate positively and because of Banania’s aggressive efforts at owning the chuds, he overstretched his definition of EHC to mean often-times contradictory things…
The central claim supporting the EHC thesis is that those on the left are simply more intelligent than those on the Right, citing wordsum, IQ data and educational attainment. This happens to be true…
Most right-wingers do not attempt this kind of nuanced critique.2 They simply call him names, just as all religious fanatics do.
HDS is the tip of the iceberg.
Hanania isn’t alone in his apostasy from MAGA and Putinism.3 He is just the most charismatic and brash figure among them, leading the way and blazing the path for other right-wingers to question their loyalty to “the movement.”
The progression goes something like this:
“I support Trump, but we need to be smarter about these tariffs.”
“Social status on the right is determined mainly by how much attention you can generate, regardless of the quality of that attention. People who appeal to the lowest common denominator rise to the top.”
“The right-wing might be doomed until Trump goes away.”
“Maybe it’s not just Trump.”
“Maybe both sides are equally bad.”
“Maybe the right-wing is worse.”
This “slippery slope” is unlikely to affect the millions of Trump fans who worship him more than Catholics worship the Pope. Hanania can critique Trump, but it won’t move the base one inch. If anything, the hardcore Trump supporters will only double-down and more aggressively police any deviation from absolute loyalty, making the hoops to jump through ever more ridiculous and cartoonish.
Trump’s large and dedicated base wins elections, and it creates a huge mass of rubes ripe for grifting. If you support Trump, there are millions of Americans willing to give you likes and clicks. Trump isn’t just a man, but an entire media-industrial complex.
As Nathan Cofnas argues,
The right won’t be able to attract large numbers of cognitive elites—and therefore won’t be successful—if it doesn’t create alternative tracks for people and ideas to gain influence.
At a certain point, it doesn’t matter if you control millions of voters and get them to say and do ridiculous things if you do not have elite capacity. Even in a democracy, policy isn’t ultimately decided by popular opinion, but by power.
At a given snapshot in history (like an election), it seems like popular opinion is all-powerful. But over time, mass opinions follow elite power. Americans have changed their opinion about all sorts of things: marijuana legalization, gay marriage, and interracial marriage being significant ones. None of that would have been possible without elite leadership.4
Chomsky was right: consent is manufactured, so if you want to get things done, you want to be the one manufacturing it. Academia, school curricula, and ownership of social media are the factories in which opinions are manufactured for the masses. These factories are controlled from the top-down by elites.
This is why the right consistently lost every cultural battle of the 20th century. Elite opinion shifted, and mass opinion followed. The right-wing will claim that “if we don’t win this election, we will lose our country,” and then they will be surprised-Pikachu-face when the culture, once again, shifts to the left. This is a story which plays out repetitively and predictably.
In 2007, neo-reactionaries like Moldbug proposed a long-term strategy for cultivating elites, which would ignore the day-to-day inanities of democratic politics. This strategy was designed to fix a long-standing problem:
“For at least the last 100 years, the vast majority of writers and thinkers and smart people in general have been progressives... not all conservatives are cretins, but most cretins are conservatives.”
But as Scott Alexander argues, Moldbug “got corrupted by power and tried to use his philosophy to endorse right-wing populism.” He became the cretin he swore to destroy. Eventually, the only intellectuals left loyal to MAGA will be those who, like Moldbug, are willing to sell-out on their principles and cash-in to the MAGA grift. Those who are honest will realize that MAGA is superficial and shallow, incompetent and grotesque.
A lot can change in 10 years.
The political elites of America shifted their opinion on racism between 1919 and 1929. During that period, previously racist elites began to sour on the ideas of white nationalism and segregation. This didn’t produce an immediate shift in public opinion, especially in less literate, lower status, and poorer rural areas of the South. But it was these young elites who would later dominate the Supreme Court and deliver the victory in Brown v. Board in 1954.
My study of history proves to me that mass opinions are temporarily everything, but in the long-term, mean nothing. Conversely, fringe minority opinions are temporarily irrelevant, but in the long-term, mean everything.
Right now, MAGA dominates the conservative masses. It is the undisputed champion with no challengers. But what about among the conservative elite? If people like Hanania and Cofnas continue down their current trajectory, this could lead to a cascading loss of faith in the right-wing, and a reformulation of the American Party system.
On a deep level, conservatives are aware of this, and it makes them deeply afraid and insecure. Ironic humor helps them cope, mixed with paranoid, deranged conspiracy theories. Hence this extremely popular satirical essay, “Why I left the Dissident Right,” which attacks people who leave the dissident right as selfish, narcissistic, money-grubbing, attention-seeking, cowardly, weak, with a lack of convictions and principles, motivated by “purely petty or deeply cynical reasons.”
The essay claims that anyone who defies MAGA is part of a “shrinking internet ghetto,” filled with people whose “personal brand has suffered enormously over the last few years.” But this is pure wishful thinking.
The essay is afraid to directly confront the logical arguments made by MAGA apostates. Instead, it conspiratorially suggests that those who apostatize have received “a visit from the FBI where they pointedly asked… about… potentially-illegal contacts with foreign agents,” suggesting that apostates are “feds,” a common right-wing excuse for any deviation from dogma. The other conspiracy theory put forward is that Hanania’s organization received “grants from the Open Society Foundation.” Again, no engagement with the ideas, just attacking motives.
The essay claims that MAGA-apostates have “a humiliation fetish as generating attention for behaving in distasteful or counterproductive ways has gradually become the only way that I receive any attention at all.” This is ironic, because this describes the behavior of Trump and his associates perfectly.
Wearing trash-bags, launching a trade war with Canada, molesting German tourists, bringing Zelensky to the White House just to yell at him… These are all deeply distasteful acts which Trump and his supporters revel in defending, no matter how ridiculous and disgusting they look. Every Trump supporter has to grovel at the feet of a delusional geriatric, singing his praises as the greatest of all time. It’s very clear who has a humiliation fetish, and it’s not the people leaving MAGA.
Finally, the essay attempts to point out a logical contradiction in the MAGA apostate critique: is Trump incompetent, or is he an all-powerful dictator hell-bent on destroying the constitution? Unfortunately, both things can be true at the same time. Trump can both be incompetent at accomplishing good things (like reducing the federal deficit and growing the economy) while extremely destructive in undermining trust in the American government, both at home and abroad. This is because it is hard to do good things, but it is fairly easy to insult allies and advertise malicious stupidity.
There is no contradiction Trump being both incompetent and dangerous, like a toddler armed with a gun.
Conclusion.
Back in August of 2024, I did a podcast with Richard where I asked him the following:5 “How big of a threat do you think there is to our dollar system?” (20:30)
Richard said that the dollar is strong because countries around the world trust America, and this is unlikely to change.
Then I asked, “Do you think the isolationism of the administration could lead to severe economic recession?” (26:00)
Richard said “it’s a reasonable thing to be concerned about,” but, “the fact the Biden administration doesn’t stand with Israel is causing chaos… You’re going to get more normal politics after Trump [goes away].”
When I spoke with Richard, he thought that the people surrounding Trump were smart, competent, and sane, and they would keep things under control. I didn’t dream that Trump would provide me with so much vindication within the first 100 days, but here we are.
It is profitable to run cover for Trump. Most people are not committed to the truth, and will double-down on dogmatic loyalty when their tribe is threatened. They do not have the ability to push through personal biases and reorganize their worldview when confronted with new empirical evidence. That rare ability is correlated with intelligence. Accordingly, as Trump pushes the bounds of logic and reason to their limits, he will maintain his base, but lose a fraction of his most intelligent supporters.
Richard will not be the last apostate from MAGA — he is just the loudest and most effective one at the moment. The more that Trumpists defend insanity, claiming that skeptics are “taking money from Soros,” or “turned by the Feds,” the more that intelligent people will be pushed further toward apostasy.
The MAGA movement today is built out of former Democrats. Let’s call them “trans-Republicans.”
Trans-republicans include:
RFK
Tulsi
Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, two of the most influential men on the planet;
JD Vance, who used to praise Obama and compare Trump to Hitler;
and… DONALD J. TRUMP… the former Democrat turned Republican.6
Just as the MAGA movement is run by former Democrats, the future of the Democratic Party belongs to former Republicans. Trump has started a grand Party Switch, where Republicans become the party of Royce White, and Democrats will become the party of Richard Hanania.
It hasn’t happened yet, just as in 2015, it seemed unlikely that Trump would take over the Republican Party. But here we are, 10 years later, and Trump’s victory is undeniable. Give it another 10 years: the Democratic Party in 2035 will be remade in Richard Hanania’s image.
This is a bold claim to make, and exceeds Hanania’s own expectations for the party. Richard certainly won’t be alone in effecting this transformation, and as bigger players join the fray, his initial intellectual contribution will be overshadowed. In the same way, Goldwater was later overshadowed by Reagan, and Sam Francis was overshadowed by Trump. But historians will look back on Hanania as a pivotal figure. As Trumpism continues to alienate intellectuals, the Hanania faction will swell with new supporters, with each wave getting bigger, smarter, and more politically savvy, until the breaking point is reached and the party is transformed.
Although abolitionists formed minority of the American public in 1860, they were able to engineer the Republican Party as a vehicle to achieve their goals. Intellectual minoritarianism allowed communists in 1932 to infiltrate the Democratic Party and institute a pro-Stalin foreign policy and the New Deal. In 1960, a small fraction of libertarians began to slowly but surely engineer the deregulatory policies of the Reagan Revolution. None of these movements started off as popular, but they all ended up achieving their goals with a small core of elite support.
Each of these transformations was precipitated by political crisis: the Great Depression, the backlash against Civil Rights, and the Iraq War. These threats against the credibility of the political establishment created space for new ideas: the New Deal, the Great Society and the Southern Strategy, and now Trumpism. The Republican Party has already made its transformation, and now the Democrats await theirs.
There is a surge of Hanania Derangement Syndrome because, at this point in time, Democrats have not yet learned how to beat Trump. Hanania is going to be part of the throes of that transformation, which must take place. The DNC will not be the unionist party that it was in the last century. Hanania is going to be at the center of that. It’s a huge transformation for Democrats to make. We are now going into an abundance-mode and Hanania will be resented because of his leading role. But without that leading role and without that transformation, the Democratic Party will not survive.
Depicting your enemies as burning in hell is the common theme of all religious cults. I’m not going to link to these memes here, but they’re all over right-wing Twitter.
I’m not going to make this into an article debating the merits of EHC. It only works in the context of whites and western Europeans, and isn’t broadly applicable to non-whites or non-western populations. It’s not the product of “smart people choosing good ideas,” but of the historical dominance of the liberal priesthood as it expresses itself through academia. EHC is a secular religious phenomenon, not a result of “the efficiency of the marketplace of ideas.” My broader disagreements with EHC are to be found here. We must stay focused, brothers.
For the record, I am not part of this “post-right” wave that emerged after 2020. I’ve publicly opposed Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban and referred to myself as Deep Left since 2018, before I joined Substack. I supported Bloomberg and Biden in the 2020 primaries. My views on the right precede the influence of Anatoly Karlin. It’s encouraging to see people more successful than myself converging on the same ideas.
This isn’t an essay on religious history, but the decline of Christianity was led by elite intellectuals and philosophers, who permeated the upper classes and led to significant changes in policy and media. Hollywood was not founded by Christians; neither was German Idealism, or any other virile philosophical movement of the 19th or 20th century.
The majority of the podcast was unfortunately focused on abortion, which now seems like a totally irrelevant issue and a waste of time. Hindsight is 20-20.
I was not as economically savvy as Richard in specifically highlighting Trump’s power over tariffs as a mechanism of isolationism. I also overrated Trump’s ability to construct a rational tariff policy built around isolating China. Still, the underlying ideology behind tariffs is isolationism, and this has weakened trust in America, our alliances, the dollar system, and increased the risk of recession.
If you go back and listen to the interview, Richard sounds like a swing voter. If I were to go back in time and do the interview again, I could have told a more convincing story, comparing the establishment credentials of Pence with the obsequious sociopathy of Vance. Contrasting Pence with Vance would have been a good way to demonstrate that Trump’s second term would be worse and less restrained than his first term.
I could also mention people like Bill Maher or Mark Zuckerberg, who haven’t become card-carrying members of the Republican Party, but are now openly criticizing Democrats.
I think you have something here, but hanania does not strike me as a person who has learned new facts about the world and therefore changed his views, he strikes me as someone who doesn't really believe in much of anything beside himself and his own social standing. He strikes me as someone who adopts whatever stance is conducive to currying favor with the people he's currently trying to suck up to. What you are here portraying as evidence of personal growth a lot of us consider to just be cynical opportunism. I don't know that's the case, I definitely agree that he is hard to pin down, and not in a good way.
One other nit I have about this otherwise good essay is conflating the dissident right with MAGA. Certainly there is a lot of overlap, but the dissident right is much bigger than the current moment in US politics. Many are critical of the maga movement, and many more agree with it instrumentally but have no real attachment to it. It is a mistake to characterize the entire scene as being part of Trump's cult of personality, it is simply not true.
“Hanania Derangement Syndrome isn’t about hating a “gay liberal who loves open borders and hates Trump.” There are plenty of those, and none of them inspire this level of derangement. HDS comes from an existential crisis of faith: he took the sacred redpill. He should know better. He is an apostate from Trumpism”
Funny how 90% of comments vindicate this statement