Four years ago, Richard Hanania was a little-known right-wing intellectual, one of many posters building a brand with tweets and Substack posts attacking “wokeness” and other conservative bugbears.

But in the middle of 2021, one of his ideas took off. In an article called “Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law,” Hanania argued that many issues conservatives worry about aren’t just cultural, but also stem from civil rights law — and specifically from Executive Order 11246, an order signed by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 that requires most federal contractors to take “affirmative action” in their hiring. In 2023, Hanania expanded on the article in a book, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics.

That year, Hanania appeared on Vivek Ramaswamy’s podcast, where he talked to the then-presidential candidate about EO 11246 and suggested that the next Republican president should repeal it and replace it with an order banning affirmative action from government contractors. Ramaswamy said he liked the idea.

On President Donald Trump’s first day in office, he followed Hanania’s blueprint to the letter.

“I was happy,” Hanania recently told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. “I wasn’t anybody special. I didn’t have any reason to think anyone would listen to me. And eventually I saw the outcome that I wanted.”

This episode is not unique. Many Trump 2.0 decisions, from purging the federal workforce to re-hiring a DOGE employee who made racist comments online, have their origins in a small group of ring-wing intellectuals, what Vox’s Andrew Prokop has called the “very-online right.” This group encompasses well-known figures like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, as well as posters like Hanania.

Today, Explained co-host Noel King recently spoke with Hanania about his journey from anonymously posting racist and misogynist diatribes to wielding real political influence in the early days of Trump’s second administration, and why he’s now grown disenchanted with the movement that adopted his ideas.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. Listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

In the summer of 2023, you were a public intellectual. You’d been writing op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic. And then that August, the Huffington Post reported that years earlier you’d written racist, misogynist posts on right-wing websites.

I’m going to read a couple of those here: “For the white gene pool to be created, millions had to die.” “Race mixing is like destroying a unique species or a piece of art. It’s shameful.” “Hispanic people don’t have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first-world nation.” You said Muslims can’t assimilate because of “genetic and IQ differences between them and native Europeans.” And you suggested that people with low IQ might be sterilized.

Were those sincere beliefs that you held?

Yes. I can’t........

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