This week, HarperCollins will publish a new work by the conservative intellectual Richard Hanania. Titled The Origins of Woke, it bills itself as the “definitive” account of the rise of identity politics. The book makes the case that contemporary “wokeness” is an ideology that has its origins in—and was in fact created by—changes to the legal system that began with the Civil Rights Act, in the 1960s. “Long before wokeness was a cultural phenomenon,” Hanania argues, “it was law.” The Origins of Woke offers a plausible defense of this claim, and it features a smattering of interesting observations about the historical relationship between the legal system, corporate and education policy, and identity politics.

Yet these fleeting virtues are an insufficient counterbalance to the fatal flaw at the heart of Hanania’s book: It is a racist, sexist fever dream, the product of an author whose not-inconsiderable intellect has been warped and distorted—like many young conservatives’—by a noxious mixture of racist pseudoscience and the casual misogyny of the extremely online right.

That his book marries brief flashes of scholarly acumen with casual, 4chan-style bigotry will not surprise anyone who has followed Richard Hanania closely. A bombshell HuffPost exposé published last month revealed that he had previously written for white-supremacist outlets under a pseudonym, where he expressed enthusiasm for eugenics and other racist ideas. For his part, Hanania—who holds a pair of advanced degrees and has been published in a number of prestigious outlets, including this one—maintains that his days of anonymous white-supremacist proselytizing are long in the past.

In an autobiographical essay entitled “My Journey Out of Extremism” that he wrote in response to the HuffPost exposé, Hanania professes that those earlier writings were a relic of a time when he “used to suck.” But any optimism that Hanania has changed for the better should be swiftly put to bed with the publication of The Origins of Woke.

Throughout the book, Hanania slips seamlessly from legitimate intellectual history and sober legal analysis to blog-post-style grousing that is peppered with invocations of race science and winks at the “Great Replacement” theory. He frequently expresses frat-boy nostalgia for a world where offensive jokes and ass-pinching are part of office life. He asserts that “the workplace has been cleansed of heterosexual relationships” by policies that discourage office romance, laments that hiring and firing women on the basis of hotness is no longer legal, suggests that the idea that bosses cannot solicit sexual favors from their employees rests on a “badly reasoned” interpretation of the law, and heavily implies that sexual harassment should count as free speech. Underlying all this vitriol is Hanania’s assumption—which he takes no trouble to conceal—that Black people and women are less competent, capable, and intelligent than white men.

Put plainly, Richard Hanania remains a white supremacist. A real one. He is also intelligent and rhetorically savvy. Some progressive readers will no doubt be of the opinion that I should not “platform” The Origins of Woke by reviewing it in a mainstream outlet. Yet such an objection leaves us ill-equipped to confront the danger posed by figures like Hanania, who apes the posture of a serious scholar—he holds a law degree from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from UCLA—and uses his credentials, fluency in legalese, and disarming “reasonable white guy” demeanor to lend a sheen of rigor to regressive politics.

[Graeme Wood: What happens when a carnival barker writes intellectual history]

In other words, Hanania’s smart-guy aesthetic—his adeptness at presenting himself as a dispassionate, fair-minded researcher who is merely “following the facts”—is best understood as a key part of his game plan. The Origins of Woke is a gateway drug, one that smuggles virulent, pseudoscientific racism into the mainstream by dressing up its poison with occasional moments of serious argumentation. His apparent strategy is part of a broader far-right trend that we might call “Trojan-horsing”: using the trappings of scholarship to lure college-educated readers who are put off by the excesses of “woke” culture down a reactionary or racist rabbit hole. In the same way that figures such as Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan use sensible ideas—that men should clean their rooms, and people should have conversations with those they disagree with—to lend an air of intellectual legitimacy to sexism or the anti-vax movement, Hanania uses a few sophisticated observations about the impact of civil-rights law to get buy-in for his racist agenda.

Both conservative and liberal critics of “wokeness” have tended to argue that identity politics grew out of postmodern philosophies that are often umbrellaed under the catch-all term—and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory—“cultural Marxism.” These critics argue that the work of philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault brought about an ideological paradigm shift on the left by mounting an assault on truth and objective reason, and by encouraging the view that identities are “socially constructed.” Hanania’s primary intervention in the woke wars is to argue that this narrative—that identity politics began in the humanities departments of elite universities before metastasizing into the mainstream—is little more than a fairy tale, one that accords far too much influence and power to eccentric academics and their jargon-filled theories.

Instead, he insists that wokeness originated with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the policy changes that emerged downstream from it. Many of the schools that are now considered “woke” had to be forced by the federal government to consider race and sex in their hiring practices. As Hanania notes, the case of Columbia University is especially illustrative. “The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was threatening to cut off federal funding unless the university provided employment data based on race and sex and timetables for hiring minorities,” Hanania recounts. Though Columbia’s president wrote an open letter in 1971 blasting the impact of affirmative action on the university’s mission, he was forced to relent to federal demands not because he was persuaded by ideology but because there was no prudent alternative: “‘If we wish to continue to have federal resources, that is what we must do.’” Hanania observes that Title IX, which requires equal treatment for men and women in education, was also initially resisted by universities, which again had to be cudgeled into compliance: “Eventually, after losing in a series of court cases in the 1990s, as with affirmative action decades before, higher education came to identify with and support the costly regulations it once rallied against.”

In Hanania’s telling, the transformation of elite institutions into hotbeds of identity politics was largely occasioned by the need to comply with new laws around hiring, “disparate impacts,” and “hostile work environments.” These institutions were motivated not by obscure French philosophies or the carrot of moral progress but by the stick of withheld federal funding. Hanania attempts to show that government-mandated changes to hiring and admissions practices—changes that required corporations and universities to consider and keep track of the race and gender of their employees and applicants—made elite American institutions obsessed with identity because their funding and/or legal compliance depended on it.

Yet compliance wasn’t straightforward. Hanania maintains that the complexity and bean-counting necessitated by the new laws resulted in “bureaucratic bloat.” Universities such as Columbia “simply did not have the administrative capabilities to comply with new mandates coming from Washington, which required painstaking record keeping to prove that the institution was not discriminating against women and minorities.” The complexity of the new legislation and the regimes of data gathering it demanded meant that institutions would need to create human-resource teams devoted to the task: These new “diversity bureaucrats” existed not only to ensure compliance with civil-rights law, but also to justify it within their institutions.

“Woke” ideas were invented not proactively but retroactively, in Hanania’s account, in order to intellectually legitimate a series of federally dictated bureaucratic overhauls made necessary by laws such as Title IX and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1991. The rise of identity politics is not a tale of moral or philosophical progress, but of policy changes that generated new ways of thinking after the fact.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: You can’t define woke]

This specific argument has some substance and explanatory power even if the story it tells—that nearly all the blame for identity politics rests with federal law—is far too tidy and discounts other historical factors, such as the role of progressive activism. That being said, I find Hanania’s description of the historical causes of wokeness more persuasive than other right-wing screeds or even the Atlantic contributor Yascha Mounk’s forthcoming book on the topic. Almost all such books blame identity politics on postmodern philosophy and critical race theory, with some pinch-hitting by Tumblr. Although strong overlaps certainly exist between the ideologies found in American humanities departments and contemporary “wokeness,” critics rarely explain how exactly these complex, jargon-riddled philosophies are supposed to have migrated out of obscure academic journals and into mainstream discourse; they mistake correlation for causation. What Hanania proposes is a clear causal mechanism: Changes in federal law necessitated the creation of new HR bureaucracies, which in turn produced “woke” true believers who began peddling ideologies that justify their jobs.

If Hanania had stuck to this specific argument—“the government mandates came first, and the ideology later”—it would be possible to take The Origins of Woke seriously as a contribution to the generally vacuous culture-war debates over identity politics and its causes. Black social critics such as Adolph Reed, the Fields sisters, and others have long argued that anti-racism is corporate doublespeak that exists to preserve the status quo. I’ve made similar arguments in this outlet and elsewhere. Ironically, Hanania’s legal history lends support to Black leftists like me who are critical of DEI but care profoundly about social justice: It exposes the fact that the kind of identity politics practiced by universities and corporations aren’t a social-justice sea change; they’re CYA (organization-speak for cover-your-ass). Hanania’s alternative history of “wokeness” adds further support to the idea that today’s left cultural politics are only superficially radical: The real substance of “wokeness” is legal compliance and public relations that serve the elites rather than the Black, brown, and poor.

However, although the narrow history Hanania sketches has some merit, the book does not content itself with mere history. Hanania’s handful of genuine insights are marred by a slow drip of especially stupid bigotry that suffuses the book. This combination—fragments of defensible historical argument that are welded to indefensible conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and incel-culture misogyny—is what makes Hanania’s book so insidious.

A. J. Bauer, an expert on conservative news and media at the University of Alabama, told me that figures like Hanania often communicate through a dizzying collage of academic research and conspiratorial assertions. One moment he’s picking apart the legalese of an executive order, the next he’s blaming civil-rights law for declining birth rates. Bauer explains that this isn’t just house style; it’s a matter of economic prudence. Far-right intellectuals rarely hold traditional university posts and are typically reliant on two revenue streams: billionaire donors who fund conservative scholarship and “an audience cobbled together through Substack and Twitter trolling.” The Origins of Woke features a perverse blend of academese and alt-right shitposting not because Hanania is a moron who can’t tell the difference between the two, but because he is trying to appeal to—and profit off of—both normie conservative elites and angry online mobs: He runs a Substack, receives funding from Silicon Valley, and has floated between temporary academic gigs at institutions such as Columbia and the University of Texas at Austin.

Hanania has a habit of punctuating dense, judiciously footnoted paragraphs—which cite academic books, law reviews, and government documents—with racist or sexist claims that aren’t backed up with evidence. For example, a section on the paradoxes of “disparate impact” laws provides several pages of properly cited legal history before arriving at this claim: “An employer who wants to use intelligence tests to hire is potentially barred from doing so because whites could do too well.” This claim, that white candidates would be likely to outscore Black candidates on intelligence tests, is not footnoted or otherwise supported with evidence. Another well-footnoted paragraph about the increasing prominence of equity discourse in university admissions, government institutions, and grant-awarding organizations ends with an unsupported, sexist assertion. “While there may be some women able to meet the same standards as men,” Hanania declares, “it strains credulity to believe that, given the gender gap in math and science proficiency, a meritocratic system would produce a perfect equality of outcomes.” Again, a paragraph full of footnotes and well-supported claims ends with a piece of bigotry unsupported by evidence.

This pattern repeats throughout the book: Evidence-free racist and sexist claims are nestled amidst properly cited history and legal analysis, providing the former with the veneer of scholarly respectability. In the cases where Hanania does go through the motions of tacking on a footnote to one of his racist musings, the source cited tends to be another white supremacist. That Hanania is perfectly capable of following scholarly conventions and evidentiary standards when it suits him shows that he knows exactly what he is doing: Trojan-horsing white supremacy by glazing his arguments with the signals, but not the substance, of academic sobriety. That HarperCollins published this book without requiring Hanania to back up its most incendiary assumptions is both an intellectual and a moral failure.

The idea of superior white intelligence that he implicitly and explicitly refers to throughout the book rests on bad studies and bad science that have long been refuted. The white-Black “IQ gap” that racists such as Hanania latch onto has likewise been explained by environmental factors. Craig Venter, one of the scientists who helped map the human genome, summarizes the state of race-IQ debates: “There is no basis in scientific fact or in the human genetic code for the notion that skin color will be predictive of intelligence.” Philosophers such as Mary Midgley and social theorists like Karen and Barbara Fields have demonstrated that notions of measurable abstract intelligence or fixed racial identity are shot through with mythmaking. Yarden Katz and Adolph Reed have likewise shown that these myths are time-honored capitalist propaganda that naturalize inequality by suggesting that poverty is a consequence of racial difference rather than economic exploitation. Hanania makes no efforts to engage with the trove of scientific, social-scientific, and humanistic research that would trouble his assumptions about intelligence, competence, and racial difference.

[Adam Serwer: Richard Hanania and the allure of racist pseudoscience]

Similarly, Hanania’s naked obsession with office romance is both unsettling and revealing of his mindset. He ends the book by fantasizing of a future where “woke” anti-discrimination and anti-harassment laws have been repealed, and “some corporations start encouraging dating” through “Christian matchmaking” or “a party-like atmosphere.” Such moments are creepy and juvenile.

In this sense, Hanania is employing the mirror image of the rhetorical tactic championed by Steve Bannon. Trump’s infamous political strategist advised conservatives to pump out a constant stream of disinformation—as Bannon put it, “flood the zone with shit”—in order to keep the media in a state of near-constant hysteria, teetering from outrage to outrage while the public grows ever more confused about the truth. But whereas Bannon whipped up a frenzy through a tornado of untruths and fake news, Hanania lulls his audience into a sense of complacent stupor: Dangerous lies are hidden amidst bland scholarship.

Pushing back against figures such as Hanania requires understanding that the hodgepodge of high-brow theorizing, low-brow racism, and frat-bro misogyny that characterizes their discourse is not a paradox but a precise strategy designed to sneak white supremacy into the mainstream by obscuring the difference between scholarship and its simulacrum. And these tactics aren’t just confined to Hanania; the phenomenon is pervasive.

Until recently, Nate Hochman was another young conservative intellectual cast as a measured thinker. (“He looks like the kind of kid who would offer you granola at a trailhead,” a largely positive profile observed.) Yet just a week before the publication of the HuffPost article that outed Hanania as a former anonymous eugenics enthusiast, Hochman was fired from the racist-scandal-riddled Ron DeSantis campaign. Axios reported that he’d created a video that prominently featured Nazi iconography. Like Hanania, the now-exiled former wunderkind weaponized sober speech to zhuzh up the kind of radical conservatism that is ascendant on the right.

Understanding this strategy matters, because it has proved effective: Jordan Peterson has become one of the most popular right-wing figures on the planet by using Jungian psychobabble and professorial tweed to give the impression of Socratic wisdom, when what he really offers is retrograde sexism to lost men. If Hanania has so far managed to escape being sent to Siberia—unlike Hochman—it is because he has followed in Peterson’s footsteps: not “flooding the zone with shit,” but rather hiding the shit in pseudo-erudition.