Confessions of a Former Right-Wing Extremist

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Is changing your mind a sign of intellectual honesty—or betrayal? These days, it can feel like most people think it’s the latter. We live in an age where rethinking a position becomes a gotcha moment—a chance for someone to pull up your old social media posts to prove you’re a hypocrite or a fraud. The pressure to not admit to changing your mind, to stick to your guns, has never been greater.

But the ability to change your mind is a sign that you are thinking for yourself. It takes curiosity, honesty, courage, and humility. And so it is worth understanding how it happens.

That’s why we’re launching a new video interview series called Confessions.

In each episode, I sit down with someone who has abandoned a belief that was once central to who they were: a former climate activist who now thinks the movement has lost the plot; an anti-Israel protester turned Zionist; a body-positivity activist turned Ozempic evangelist. Whatever the subject, the goal every time will be the same: to understand why someone changed their mind—and what it took to walk away from a set of beliefs they once lived by.

We’re kicking off the series with Richard Hanania. Once upon a time, Hanania was an alt-right extremist posting hateful diatribes online. Those pseudonymous posts came back to haunt Hanania years later, after he had found mainstream success as a political commentator thanks to an exposé by HuffPost. Hanania reckoned with his past in an essay titled “Why I Used to Suck, and (Hopefully) No Longer Do.”

In my interview with Hanania, he describes his journey from the fringe to the mainstream.