Explaining the ‘Richard Hanania phenomenon’

People continue to be taken aback by Richard Hanania’s success:

The ‘Richard Hanania phenomenon’ is discussed in more detail in the March 2025 post, “Explaining Richard Hanania’s Sudden Success“, and 2023 “Socially Optimized Positions, Authenticity, and Weirdness“. In summary, he rose to popularity in early 2021 by catering to a sizable but greatly underserviced or suppressed niche: the alt-middle/center. Imagine it’s late 2020 or early 2021. The only acceptable positions are wokeness, or believing the 2020 election was stolen and that the Covid vaccines are literal poison. Those were the only options it seemed.

But there were many people who opposed Biden’s economic and social policies, but still believed Trump had lost. Or who thought the school closures and mask mandates were insane when there was already a vaccine, whereas the left wanted to keep the Covid restrictions in perpetuity. Or people who believed in race/IQ statistics, but weren’t big fans of Trump or Biden either. Or who opposed the tactics of BLM despite being sympathetic to left-wing social causes. Anyone who wasn’t woke or avowedly pro-MAGA was drowned out from discourse. That all changed in 2022 with the decline of the woke, which was replaced by the middle/center. Elon buying out Twitter was a major catalyst for this.

But I want to expound on some new points. The above tweet says, “He has never written anything compelling, never said anything that was interesting. His takes always seem to be mediocre lukewarm slop.” Yet this is demonstrably untrue. Two of his recent tweets went hugely viral, getting 14k and 3.8k ‘likes’, so evidently many people do find at least some of his content interesting. Moreover, the ratio was ‘low’, signifying considerable agreement, not a dogpile. So what to make of this? Even if his content is bland or bad according to @politicalmath, evidently there is still a large market for it.

A common source of confusion among critics of Hanania and other popular but polarizing pundits, is such critics don’t understand the nuance of how audiences are created. They view popularity through the lens of ‘correctness’ or ‘consensus’, but those are wrong framings. The correct framings are ‘credibility’ and ‘niche’.

The first is credibility. Reading through the comments of the above tweet, a lot of people praise his book and writing ability, even if they don’t agree with all of his points. This matters a lot. Being able to communicate effectivity is necessary for building intellectual credibility in an internet otherwise flowing with slop or nonsense. Even if he’s often wrong, by being articulate he is seen as credible, which matters more.

Writing ability is highly g-loaded and has a steep learning curve despite outwardly appearing easy (“it’s just words”), in much the same way the rules of chess are easy to learn, yet the game is hard to master. This brings me back to my defense of the humanities. Yes, to belabor the point, STEM pays more and is seen as ‘rigorous’, but erudition and the ability to communicate well, is rewarded online with status, much like how knowing math or coding is rewarded by earning more money.

I’m not saying ‘STEM people’ cannot be good writers, but it’s more about priories or tradeoffs, as I discuss in “‘Thought leader’ is just another form of elite status“. Outside of AI, political discourse tends to dominate on Twitter, favoring those individuals who have prioritized the study of social issues compared to STEM.

It also helps he can entertain contrarian or taboo ideas, like the connection between race and crime or gender gaps in IQ, but without coming off as batshit crazy or an ignoramus. This comes back to being able to communicate well and having a broad repertoire of knowledge, which conveys the necessary invaluable intellectual credibly for his content to succeed among individuals who also value those attributes and who will be inclined to ‘like and share’ it.

Regarding niche, assuming a third of Americans are online, if even a tiny percentage of them are compelled to to pay for his Substack newsletter, that is enough to make a decent living, on top of other revenue sources. It’s not about being liked by everyone, but being liked by enough people. There is also the skew: It’s better to have 9 bad tweets and a single banger, than 10 mediocre tweets.

People who are successful at the influencer/pundit game typically have at least a single redeeming quality that offsets all their flaws and makes them stand out. This is especially true if their success is organic, meaning minimal promotion from outside organizations. ‘Water carriers’ can succeed with connections, but without connections, requires some sort of edge or special quality to fill an intellectual niche, compared to the generic or bland content that comes with branding or media connections. No one needs someone else to parrot Ben Shapiro talking points when he is the best at that.

Yarvin’s qualities are his high intelligence and strong grasp of history to frame contemporary issues in a historical context. For Hanania, it’s also his high intelligence and strong grasp of policy, but also a willingness to entertain the flaws of his own team/side, which makes him interesting or conveys humility even if he’s also wrong a lot too, like his predictions in April/May of the Trump tariff dooming the US economy.

Yarvin and Hanania despite their stark ideological differences, what they have in common are filling specific intellectual niches for a more discriminating audience, which although small relative to mainstream content, is still enough to amass a decent sized following and income that comes with it. Such content goes viral with minimal connections or promotion, because it goes viral with other high-IQ people who have large social networks, like academics and pundits, who will share it.

Thus, correctness is less important than being interesting, as too much predictability can also be boring (unless you’re Catturd or Ben Shapiro, who pull this off by having a large built-in audience receptive to repetitive, generic talking points). In conclusion, conveying intellectual credibility and filling a niche are much more important than just being right or ideological consistency.