The Young Conservatives Trying to Make Eugenics Respectable Again

The pseudoscience of eugenics is making a comeback on the American right. In August, the HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias unmasked the Substack writer and academic Richard Hanania as “Richard Hoste,” a pseudonym under which Hanania blogged for white-supremacist websites about the evils of “race mixing,” advocated for the sterilization of people with a “low IQ” and for the deportation of all “post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America,” and declared that “women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.” He also wrote a tribute to Sarah Palin in 2009, gushing that her candidacy had made the “ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite absolutely mad.” (There’s a lot going on there.)

“White nationalism,” Hanania wrote as “Hoste,” is “the only hope that part of what made the American nation great will survive somewhere.”

Two days after Mathias’s story, Hanania responded, stating, “Over a decade ago I held many beliefs that, as my current writing makes clear, I now find repulsive.” He rejected Mathias’s characterization of his “creepy obsession with so-called race science” as “dishonest,” insisting that he does...