In other ways, though, he’s a typical Texan. He lives with his wife, Chris, on a 39-acre ranch that also is home to three Longhorns, six dogs, two horses, two mini horses and one mini donkey named Edward R. Burro. He has a home office stuffed with awards honoring his journalism and photos documenting his career.

Many days, before he drives to Dallas to tape the 6 and 10 p.m. news, he often plays cards with a group of buddies at a local golf club, gambling maybe a couple hundred bucks and chatting about the world. It is at those tables, he knows, where he hones the arguments that he later presents on TV.

“I’ll say something that gets them mad and they’ll say, ‘You’re nothing but a goddamn liberal,’” Hansen said. “And I laugh and say, ‘Gee, I thought you’d say something really bad.’”

Hansen has done little to promote, or embrace, his rising social media celebrity, though it seems to grow a little every time he opens his mouth. He rarely updates his own Twitter and Facebook accounts, leaving it to his granddaughter, who is 24, to call him and say, “Grandpa, you blew up on Twitter!” It is her opinion of him that matters, he said, her respect that makes him proudest.

Growing up in Iowa, Hansen said, he never would have dreamed he would be the orator he has become, or have the perspective that he shares so freely now. His father, a trucker who owned his own company, thought all black people — except the one black family he knew personally — were basically worthless. Hansen said he “heard the N-word” every day as a kid, so much so, he said, that he thought it was Hank Aaron’s first name.

It makes sense, then, when Hansen tells you he once wrote an English paper titled, “Let’s face the facts: Negroes are just plain troublemakers.” But he says it is those same life experiences that explain his political and cultural evolution.

“I’m attracted to diversity because I had none in my life,” he said. “I like people who challenge me, who aren’t the same as me.”