Policy in the second Trump administration is being driven by a small group of thinkers from the online right. We talk to one of them about how he got DEI dismantled. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan with help from Carla Javier, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Further reading: The deeply online origins of MAGA 2.0 by Andrew Prokop. The Origins of Woke by Richard Hanania. Richard Hanania, Rising Right-Wing Star, Wrote For White Supremacist Sites Under Pseudonym. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Photo courtesy of Richard Hanania. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are DEI policies and why were they ended?
For more than half a century, the U.S. had a rule that said anyone that does business with the federal government, from Boeing to FedEx and Pfizer to Johns Hopkins, had to take affirmative action toward hiring people regardless of race, color or creed. On day one of his presidency, Donald Trump ended that rule.
We've ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and indeed the private sector and our military. And our country will be woke no longer.
As the U.S. exploded following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, a loose coalition of highly online commentators, sub-stackers, and Twitter shitposters set their sights on eviscerating DEI policies. Then they won. Coming up on Today Explained, one of them speaks.
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I'm Andrew Prokop, senior correspondent, Vox, covering politics.
You recently wrote for Vox that the Trump administration is making policy, making policy decisions based on ideas that took hold on Twitter. Say more about what you mean.
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Chapter 2: Who influenced the dismantling of DEI policies?
That was Vox's Andrew Prokop. Coming up next. But it sounds like based on what you're saying that you are able to take credit for killing DEI. Is that how you see it?
Then he started talking about it.
This is Today Explained.
Richard Hanania is a substacker and author of the book The Origins of Woke, Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics. All right, so Richard, 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 IQs might be sterilized. Were those sincere beliefs that you held?
Yes, I can't lie to you and tell you that those weren't sincere beliefs. Some of the ways I phrased it was sometimes getting a rise out of people, but I can't deny that I did hold those views. This, I should note, was around 2010, 2011, so by the time it came out in the Huffington Post, it was about 12, 13 years later.
But yeah, I had some views that I now consider repugnant, and I was actually writing against before – that August 2023 exposition in the Huffington Post. So yes, I can't deny that I did have views like that at the time.
What led to you holding those views?
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