Richard Hanania embodies the moral blindness of centrism
Moral equivocation is moral blindness
I recently saw a Richard Hanania post that ticked me off when thinking about what I call the ‘Both-Sides-Are-Evil’ folks who always try to ride the moral fence of each side’s extremes.
Assuming he was just another anti-MAGA liberal because of his talks with Brianna Wu and Destiny, when I read he voted for Trump, my perspective of him shifted.
How could someone so politically engaged, informed, and popular get Trump so wrong so fast?
For someone who supported Trump to say they didn’t see sheer chaos coming is a giant red flag. I want to be very careful not to scoff it to ignorance. Hanania knows politics; we shouldn’t give him the easy out.
In search of more understanding of his perspective, I watched Hanania’s recent Breaking Points interview with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti. The interview was quite disturbing as Hanania made Krystal and Saagar seem like groundbreaking intellectuals— a difficult task.
Where is Mike Pence?
Hanania’s first explanation for his vote deals with legal institutions and imposed limitations on the new Admin rather than Trump himself.
He correctly argues that in Trump’s first term, he had people around him—advisors, experts, Generals, congress—who would rein him in if he ever wanted to go too far. By too far, he means things like trying to subvert the election to stay in power indefinitely.
This time around, so thought Hanania, Trump would have the same limitations but he’d be surrounded by smarter people. People like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel would be a right-hand man to the president, keeping him on track (within the law and spirit of the constitution) while making even more progress economically than before. He just wanted the government to be more efficient.
For Hanania to believe any of this, in my view, would mean to ignore the last ten years of American politics.
I’ve noticed this problem with many voters from all over the political spectrum, not just from Hanania but also from people like Ben Shapiro and Lex Fridman: the guardrails held in Trump’s first term and they’ll necessarily hold for a second.
But why is he ignoring Trump’s explicit aspiration of breaking down, evading, and ultimately ruling over those guardrails? Why is he incredulous about JD Vance saying he wouldn’t have certified the election if he were Pence and outrightly ignoring Walz’s inquiry on the same matter?
The president told us many times that deep-state bureaucrats around him during his first term were impeding his ability to do what he wanted. He told us a plethora of times who he wanted beside him, like the author of Project 2025 Russell Vought. He chose Vance because Pence was one of those guardrails.
Most knew Republicans had lost most—if not essentially all— of Trump dissidents. And we knew they failed to hold him accountable with those guardrails in place.
What was Hanania’s explanation for Trump deciding not to remove those who weren’t totally allegiant to him and replacing them with groveling sycophants? There wasn’t one.
The starving brain worm
Hanania also said he made a bet with Destiny about whether RFK Jr. would become the Health Secretary. His argument for why it was such an impossible idea to bet once again relied on the guardrails. He thought the Senate would push him in the right direction on his appointees—as though the party of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists is going to have anyone else lead their health department.
And let’s not forget we knew about all of this before the election; it wasn’t rumors from a Russian bot on Twitter or hindsight from April 2025. Hanania instead chalked it up to the invisible limitations of cult supporters.
Coming Soon to a Democracy near you: The Big Lie Part II
When pressed by Krystal Ball about how he couldn’t see Trump’s authoritarianism from a mile away, Hanania’s attempt at dismissing accountability for his vote was my own breaking point.
He said that he’s always taken January 6th and Trump’s part in it seriously, and that’s why he thinks Trump should be in prison. He acknowledges the mental gymnastics needed to get from there to thinking he should also be the leader of the most powerful nation ever.
Hanania’s excuse for this jump-rope of partisan hackery is to claim Trump can’t run again in 2028.
Once again, we need no hindsight. Hanania claims he takes January 6th seriously. Trump told his most fanatic and armed supporters there would be no need for future elections once he’s reelected. Democrats were laughed at, but now Hanania’s preferred candidate is publicly saying “there are methods” of getting around the Constitution.
BUT… BUT… BUT THE DEMOCRATS!
Hanania not only irrationally excuses Trump’s ambitions, he also provides his conservative followers with ideological ammunition—or else they’ll feel the guilt and shame he experiences.
Hanania finally mentions the reason he voted for Trump: he didn’t see much difference in the opposition.
“Look, there's a lot of things that were totalitarian about the left, a lot of the speech restrictions, a lot of the COVID stuff, I think, we still haven't had a full reckoning for what they were doing at the state level. And here in California, they were masking students, high school students, outside for 3 years into 2022. I mean, it really was a kind of leftist authoritarianism too that's worth worrying about, but I agree with you that Trump is kind of just in his personal sort of disregard for any kind of concern with truth or constitutional norms. So yeah, it's something that's concerning.”
Like all ‘Both-Sides’ folks, if he criticizes Trump, he’ll have to make sure to criticize Democrats too, always keeping the moral clarity deluded.
But there’s a big problem. Democrats didn’t do January 6th, Kamala Harris never told you there’d be no more elections, and Hillary Clinton conceded. None of this remotely compares to Trump’s explicit desires and actions to remain in power, his dreams of massively expanding Executive powers, nor his longing to remove and indict political opponents.
Harris said she’d appoint a Republican to the Cabinet. Trump said Democrats were more of a threat than the enemies abroad, like Russia, North Korea, and Iran. There is a moral difference here!
Hanania didn’t think Harris should be in prison for anything yet he chose the vengeful criminal over her because… high schoolers were wearing masks in California two years after the 2020 COVID outbreak—the horror!
Here’s something he forgot to mention: in January 2022, California saw the highest age-adjusted rate of hospitalizations from COVID across every racial group. In February of 2022, 61% of parents of school-age children approved of California’s requirement that students, teachers, and staff in K-12 public schools wear masks while in school. And one month later, California dropped the mandate altogether.
What may be even more disheartening about half-truth telling and moral equivocation is knowing Hanania gives MAGA a huge cultural win every time he makes these nonsensical comparisons. We have to stop normalizing this. It is wrong.
People who exhibit the “Both-Sides-Are-Evil” mentality are the embodiment of the evils from both sides. Moral clarity suffers under such circumstances, especially when its proponents are popular, influential political pundits with tens of thousands of subscribers.
I agree with you, this was all perfectly knowable in advance and it's a pretty glaring blindspot for Hanania not to see it. Other anti-woke writers like Jeff Giesea and Michael Huemer could clearly see it, and Hanania was aware of all their arguments.
The thing is, he's obviously not the only one who made this mistake. There are plenty of pro-Trump writers on Substack, so why go after Hanania? Firstly, because he is somewhat popular of course. Secondly, because he has publicly stated that he changed his mind. If he beligerently maintained course and doubled down, we'd leave him alone because you expect him to be that way. If we all dump on the people who change their mind, that's a pretty strong incentive to never publicly do it, and we don't want to live in that world. While I'm frustrated that he missed the obvious, I'm glad that he did change his mind and I hope he can convince others to do the same who see the world through a similar lens. So I'm more inclined to give him an atta-boy than to complain about him.
I VERY much agree with you about the false moral equivalencies and the way that it degrades all sense of morality. We can see this in the way that Trump and his followers constantly say that all politicians are corrupt. It's pretty tough to push back against that idea, there are different levels of corruption and what politician is perfect? But if you accept it as a premise then the level of corruption doesn't matter, which works to the benefit of whoever maximizes corruption. Claiming that both sides are equally authoritarian excuses and enables the worst authoritarian actions.
I wrote about that once, and specifically called out Hanania for abusing the concept of authoritarianism to describe things that aren't actually authoritarian (so obviously, like you, I can't help but want to talk about Hanania. What is it about him...?). What I also find strange about his belief in the authoritarian is that he complains about masks and school closures but not lockdowns or mandatory vaccinations. Obviously lockdowns are the most authoritarian measure that was taken, masks are almost nothing by comparison. Plenty of people would argue that mandatory schooling is itself an imposition against our rights, so how does shutting them down become authoritarian? Obviously Hanania's problem isn't that masks are authoritarian, it's that he believes they don't work as an intervention. If they worked as well as vaccines, he wouldn't have any problem with it. So it's not authoritarianism at all, it's simply a difference of opinion on how effective interventions are and how much evidence a medical intervention should need in order to make it mandatory. But in our age of hyperbole, everything I don't like must be tyranny, and every little problem is proof that the end of human existence is nigh.
https://open.substack.com/pub/letsberealistic/p/what-is-authoritarianism-actually?r=h4vef&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
The guy got impeached TWICE, not just for January 6th. It beggars the imagination to think of reasonable, thoughtful people, the kind that RH presents himself as being, putting that aside and voting for him over Harris.