A prominent conservative writer, lionized by Silicon Valley billionaires and a U.S. senator, used a pen name for years to write for white supremacist publications and was a formative voice during the rise of the racist alt-right, according to a new HuffPost investigation.

Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name Richard Hoste in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a race realist. He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of low IQ people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed miscegenation and race-mixing. And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of The Turner Diaries, the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.

A decade later, writing under his real name, Hanania has ensconced himself in the national mainstream media, writing op-eds in the countrys biggest papers, bending the ears of some of the worlds wealthiest men and lecturing at prestigious universities, all while keeping his past white supremacist writings under wraps.

HuffPost connected Hanania to his Richard Hoste persona by analyzing leaked data from an online comment-hosting service that showed him using three of his email addresses to create usernames on white supremacist sites. A racist blog maintained by Hoste was also registered to an address in Hananias hometown. And HuffPost found biographical information shared by Hoste that aligned with Hananias own life.

Hanania did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story, made via phone, email and direct messages on social media. (On Sunday, two days after this story was published, he posted an essay to Substack confirming HuffPosts reporting. Recently, its been revealed that over a decade ago I held many beliefs that, as my current writing makes clear, I now find repulsive, he wrote.)

The 37-year-old has been published by The New York Times and The Washington Post. He delivered a lecture to the Yale Federalist Society and was interviewed by the Harvard College Economics Review. He appeared twice on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Fox News former prime-time juggernaut. He was a recent guest on a podcast hosted by the chief writing officer of Substack, the $650 million publishing platform where Hanania has nearly 20,000 subscribers.

Hanania has his own podcast, too, interviewing the likes of Steven Pinker, the famous Harvard cognitive psychologist, and Marc Andreessen, the billionaire software engineer. Another billionaire, Elon Musk, reads Hananias articles and replies approvingly to his tweets. A third billionaire, Peter Thiel, provided a blurb to promote Hananias book, The Origins of Woke, which HarperCollins plans to publish this September. In October, Hanania is scheduled to deliver a lecture at Stanford.

Meanwhile, rich benefactors, some of whose identities are unknown, have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into a think tank run by Hanania. The think tank doles out cash to conservative academics, and produces political studies that are cited across right-wing media.

Hananias rise into mainstream conservative and even more centrist circles did not necessarily occur because he abandoned some of the noxious arguments he made under the pseudonym Richard Hoste. Although hes moderated his words to some extent, Hanania still makes explicitly racist statements under his real name. He maintains a creepy obsession with so-called race science, arguing that Black people are inherently more prone to violent crime than white people. He often writes in support of a well-known racist and a Holocaust denier. And he once said that if he owned Twitter the platform that catapulted him to some celebrity he wouldnt let feminists, trans activists or socialists post there. Why would I? he asked. Theyre wrong about everything and bad for society.

Richard Hananias story may hint at a concerning shift in mainstream American conservatism. A little over a decade ago, he felt compelled to hide his racist views behind a pseudonym. In 2023, Hanania is a right-wing star, championed by some of the countrys wealthiest men, even as hes sounding more and more like his former white supremacist nom de plume: Richard Hoste.

Unmasking Richard Hoste

Starting in 2008, the byline Richard Hoste began to appear atop articles in Americas most vile publications. Hoste wrote for antisemitic outlets like The Occidental Observer, a site that once argued Jews are trying to exterminate white Americans. He wrote for Counter-Currents, which advocates for creating a whites-only ethnostate; Takis Magazine, a far-right hub for paleoconservatives; and VDare , a racist anti-immigrant blog.

In 2010, Hoste was among the first writers to be recruited for AlternativeRight.com, a new webzine spearheaded and edited by Richard Spencer, the white supremacist leader who later organized the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. (Little fucking kikes, Spencer reportedly told his followers at a party after that rally. They get ruled by people like me. Little fucking octaroons. My ancestors fucking enslaved those little pieces of fucking shit.)