As always, Chris Rufo lays the game out in plain terms:
> Rufo had been there all along: “I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right.”
When you try to force ideological conformity with censorship, you end up creating even tighter echo chambers that amplify groupthink and entrench the very ideas you are trying to combat.
The best way to defeat an idea is to publicly tolerate and dispute it.
> They have been doing this for years, and this is how they radicalized themselves into deeply paranoid radical fascists completely detached from consensus reality, who routinely say insane things and pour their billions into attacking innocents.
As tech elites lost their untouchable image of being pure prodigies and visionaries, it became clearer — especially after scandals like Cambridge Analytica — that many of them operate like ordinary, ruthless capitalists. Public trust declined as more people moved online and more abuses came to light. Instead of fully acknowledging this shift, many of these elites seem to interpret the criticism — much of which comes from media and universities, which do lean left — as purely ideological attacks. From my perspective, it’s a textbook case of cognitive dissonance: their self-image as bold innovators clashes with how they are increasingly seen from the outside, and the natural human reaction is to blame the critics rather than adjust the self-image.
We got complaints about your use of the word "rabid" and I think they have a point. That crosses into name-calling in the sense that the HN guidelines ask you not to do.
The disinvitation data is so incredibly small that there's no way on earth we can call this "rabid." In Haidt and Fukuyama's "The Coddling of the American Mind" they present data on disinvitations attempts. And it is in the tens of attempts nationwide. They even have to present the data with Milo Yiannopoulos removed since he made up a considerable portion of all disinvitation attempts.
You can think that students are foolish for doing this. You can choose to stop donating because of a response by an institution. But to use this to claim that the left has "gone rabid" is ridiculous given the actual data.
The students' behavior is not what drove voters towards the reactionary right. Breathless media coverage that blew this behavior completely out of proportion is responsible for this.
This crosses into personal attack and you can't do that here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit out such swipes in the future, as the rules ask, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: this has unfortunately increasingly been a problem with your account lately:
You've made many fine contributions to HN in the past and I don't recall your account having been involved in so much ideological and political flamewar. Could you please fix this? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
IIRC, there was an invited talk at the unversity, and some student organized people to go in to the talk and disrupt it, such that the speaker literally couldn't be heard.
That's not the student exercising their free speech. It's the student denying the benefit of free speech to their fellow students and the rest of the university.
The university apparently hadn't yet educated the student on the basics of university, and there was not yet any sign that the university was going to. Reporting followed up with the student, when they promoted their personal brand, and solicited funding to continue their fight.
(You might be happy to know that, instead of my modest donation going to the university with the student who thought a first-rate university was the place to ignore the fundamentals they teach, and instead play self-promoting influencer... IIRC, that was the year the money went to a homeless trans person, who'd been through more hell than most people can imagine, and who needed a discreet laptop so that they could practice coding job skills, but without the laptop getting violently stolen from them in whatever shelter they could get into. I'm not making this up, and the contrast was striking.)
Regarding your other comments, much of the rabid left didn't seem to be acting as the savvy political operators you suggest: a whole lot of people were mindlessly flinging their poo, and playing right into the hands of some of the worst of their adversaries. Maybe it was partly a combination of crisis mode over the best of intentions (e.g., help those who need help), and anger and fatigue from same (which I certainly felt), but there also seemed to be a whole lot of not knowing any other mode of reasoning or acting. Maybe that's not their fault -- you might blame the deterioration of popular journalism, social media sites preying upon their users, and a dearth of visible role models demonstrating anything else -- but that seems to be where we are, for large slices of the vocal population. And there's been a lot of counterproductive.
I am not saying they are super savy. I am saying they were right about the right.
They were right, because they were not determined to excuse dveryone on the right up to absurdum and because they read what right actually said.
Moderate right and center consistently and always excused far right and refused to beloeve it exists even when it was completely apparent. And consistently deployed double standards where right was excused and left acts massively exaggerated.
> Funny how people like you never ever use the same power to force left or liberal speakers. It is ok to boycott or criticize those.
Do you know OP personally? Do you really think it's reasonable to assume that everyone in the universe (except for you, perhaps) is a hypocrite like this?
There's plenty of people that feel the administrative force of the university shouldn't be used to suppress either side. Let the gun club invite Luigi. Let the trans club invite the Stonewall rioters.
You're welcome to say you dislike the speaker. You don't have to attend. But you shouldn't have the authority to stop other people from inviting them to speak, or to stop other people from listening.
I think we got the far right reality of today by liberals completely ignoring working class pain and appearing to solely focus on a controversial minority. I say appearing because they didn’t seem to do anything else.
This allowed the current administration to step in by promising something different, with no intention of delivering anything but tax relief for the wealthy and unchaining corporations from those pesky regulations that prevent higher profits.
This is a perfect example of the law of American politics that only Democrats have agency. Anything Democrats do is the responsibility of Democrats, and anything Republicans do is the responsibility of Democrats.
It's kind of unreal that in the comments of an article about an actual (successful!) conspiracy between ultra-wealthy tech elite and extreme right activists to undermine american democracy for their own benefit, you're most concerned about liberal campus protests. You may not be as progressive as you think!
Speech is not created equal. What some students say in some college campus has very little power compared to the speech of one of the richest people __in history__.
When someone famous and rich says something fucked up, the reaction to that isn’t deplatforming but rather a basic attempt at defense.
This tracks with my experience here, watching tech thought leaders. Obviously Andreesen went very hard right, as did Musk, but just in general the tech elite suddenly and surprisingly turned Trumpy over the last few years; Ackman being a really good case study.
Note that pg himself took a fairly surpising reactionary turn in right about the 2020/2021 timeframe this article describes. A guy who'd always been a left-center pragmatist suddenly was yelling in public tweets about the Campus Left's Desire for Cancellation and whatnot.
Those of us closer to the trenches never really did get the ire here: I mean, yeah, kids are intemperate jerks, but they've always been intemperate jerks. And the tech community... has always celebrated the idea behind the intemperate jerk and an engine for change and disruption. Let the ideas fight it out and pick winners and all, right? Suddenly these billionaires were all snowflakes looking to a political realignment to save them?
I think you’re right but would also add the nascent tech worker organization during the same period. I think many of these guys were bitterly resentful of the idea of workers trying to unionize or otherwise negotiate on a more even level, and that made the general political concerns very personal.
I've looked at pg:s tweets recently and was surprised that he takes issue with both the genocide in Palestine and the university related disappearings. I had expected him to be more radical and aligned with the current regime.
None of the very left people I know would describe themselves as anti-woke...but they all make it very clear that they find wokeness (or whatever you want to call it) ridiculous.
pg has been yelling about the Campus Left's Desire for Cancellation for years and years (I want to say since 2011?). It's been very frustrating to watch because lots of us identified this as right wing propaganda that (imo) pg was unwittingly participating in.
The "kids" are not the ones kidnapping people who disagree with them.
Bill Maher still has a show, despite having spent more than twenty-five years being a racist POS. There is no such thing as "Cancel Culture": there are just people who are SUPER mad that their kids think their racism is bad.
The idea of shutting down ideas is itself an idea that can be fought by other ideas. Those kids do not actually control institutions that can enforce the shutting down of ideas, even if cultural mores might have temporarily aligned with their positions from time to time.
Soon as Trump's term started he started removing any mention of slavery from the Smithsonian cuz 'merica.
That's really the concerning thing. Liberals and conservatives not only dislike ideas, they dislike history and facts. That's what makes them dangerous.
On the left it seems you at least had a few moderates who had the good sense to keep the wing nuts in line. We tried the right, thinking we might get better governance, and have discovered, to our collective horror, that the right is wing nuts the whole way down. So you get things like tariffs, and purges, and wild 4$$ ravings about plane crashes being caused by too many blacks.
In the US we need to take things back in hand or it really will be way too late to do anything. These extremists will run the nation right into the ground.
HN seems loathe to have any meaningful discussion about or reflection on how and why notable SV figures seemed primed to embrace the Trump/MAGA right (see, for example, quote in OP from Chris Rufo). I don't think it was simply being repelled by the left, as Andreesson has stated before, but an earnest rightward turn.
Also, after articles like these, will calls for "viewpoint diversity" finally apply to conservatives who chase out even the moderates from their spheres? After years of the left being accused of suppressing opposing views, I haven't seen quite the same backlash against conservatives building up ideologically homogenous spaces like the group chats in the article.
There was lots of resentment against unionization efforts from tech workers -- workers who were increasingly seen as ungrateful insurgents trying to mess up a good thing -- and tech oligarchs decided that everyone left of center was exactly like tech workers in Silicon Valley. For them, leftists are infected with a "mind virus", and needing some enlightened elites to save them from themselves. Of course there's no self-reflection about the mind virus that causes folks like Andreesen to use the philosophy of meth addicted neo-Nazis[1] as the ideological basis for their new political order.
> I don't think it was simply being repelled by the left, as Andreesson has stated before, but an earnest rightward turn.
The clear contention in the linked article is that it's neither. It's just plain old group think fed by an echo chamber. You take a genuine-but-isolated affront or conflict[1], tie it to one or two other less important side issues[2], and then just line everyone up on the "good" or "bad" side of a line. Before you know it our community is cheering the return of a regime that literally tried to stage a coup and making tortuous excuses for why we need to be deporting four year old citizens with cancer.
It's 4chan. It's just 4chan all over again.
[1] Ex: the anti-elite current within the lefty political sphere that has never really loved the idea of making common cause with SV billionaires.
[2] Middle aged dudes, demographically, tend to be a little squicked out by trans rights and pronouns and LGBTQ+ issues, think paper straws are dumb as fuck, and really hated seeing stuff burned down in protets.
"Also, after articles like these, will calls for "viewpoint diversity" finally apply to conservatives who chase out even the moderates from their spheres?"
> After years of the left being accused of suppressing opposing views, I haven't seen quite the same backlash against conservatives building up ideologically homogenous spaces like the group chats in the article.
The fundamental difference is that conservative viewpoints support the majority (or plurality), whereas the liberal viewpoints support the minority view. Backlash against the majority view is much harder to come by. And being in the majority and supporting minority perspectives is more uncomfortable, and frankly much easier to opt-out of if there is sufficient discomfort.
If that were true, Republicans would spend a lot less effort on voter suppression & wouldn't have needed to have the Supreme Court repeal the Voting Rights Act in order to win.
So like, is knowing someone who knows someone in these chats the key to getting your family out of the concentration camp, just like knowing someone who knows someone who works at Google is the key to getting your account unlocked?
Post facto, it seems given the monster that these people have actually unleashed and empowered, the preemptive negative reactions to what they had been saying in public were actually pretty fucking justified. And I say this with the perspective of someone who generally believes in open debate, hates cancel culture, and who was reading Yarvin as he was writing under the Moldbug nym and found much of his analysis compelling. But it always struck me that Yarvin came to the exact wrong conclusion wanting to run thermodynamics backwards. Even Urbit, I had thought there was something novel and universal there, until I realized it was actually just describing another Java 1.0 dressed up in fancy equations and four-letter words. Like sure, if you could travel back in time and make all computing equipment run Urbit, Java, or Rust that sure would make a lot of things easy. Except in the real world, other languages already exist and have anchoring utility that is likely to keep them existing.
I keep pondering a steelmanning of this idea of the Elite Jewish Conspiracy, pushing this radical acceptance of non-traditional lifestyles onto our society through various distributed leadership positions. I think that needed to get more mainstream treatment - stepping back and looking at it impartially, does this not seem an awful lot like what one would expect as counterbalance to the cultural memory of the Shoah? An attempt to prevent such an utter industrial-scale waste of human life and potential in the name of uniformity from ever happening again? And maybe the right answer is that we needed to get past its cloying overreactions, incorporate it into our baseline society, and move forward - instead of giving in to the simpleheaded authoritarian powermongers promising to simplify the world for us if only we hand them the power with a mandate to destroy.
Edit: I think I misread the comment somewhat—sorry. I've restored it, and will autocollapse this moderation bit.
---
> getting your family out of the concentration camp
Could you please not take HN threads straight into flamewar hell like this? We're trying for something quite different here, and it's way too aggressive to kick off a thread with rhetoric like that.
I appreciate the reply. My reaction, like most moderation responses, was shallow and limited in scope to what I know about forum dynamics. If you come out swinging with Nazi references, you're turning the knobs to 11 from the start. That's not compatible with the kind of discussion HN is going for. It's particularly troublesome when the thread is new, because threads are so sensitive to initial conditions. Also it's not as if that was the only such reference in the comment.
Reading it the next morning, though, I think I misread what mindslight meant by "getting your family out of the concentration camp". Now that I'm reading it differently, I can see how my reply came across as too heavy-handed. Sorry all!
We’re talking about the group chats that may have “changed America” into a place where our president pays foreign dictators to house criminals in a overcrowded prison, and where they may be debating sending American citizens. When exactly is the aforementioned rhetoric appropriate, when it’s too late?
It seems to me directly in line with the nature of the article as written, the tech context we currently live in, and i don’t think it’s against HN guidelines to speak uncomfortably truths. In fact it seems core to what we’re trying to do here.
Thanks for all you do here, not trying to turn this place into Twitter, but I also think it’s important that we not
fall into the trap of not being willing to confront the outrageous truths of what’s happening in our community because the rational response is outrageous.
This is vile dan. What do you believe we should call a prison complex holding forty thousand humans on the basis of their social affiliations, tried en masse or not at all, never known to have released a single one? I'm flexible on nomenclature but if you're going to veto I think you should suggest an alternative.
It's a straightforward reference that shouldn't be controversial to anyone looking to substantively discuss what is happening to our society. I know there are a lot of true believers and bots that want to shout down uncomfortable truths which makes for flamewar, but if we let that prevent good faith discussion then we might as well throw in the towel because that reality distortion field isn't going away.
I thought the rest of my comment was insightful as well, despite having to trade in some inflammatory terms. We're apparently at a time of pulling on these threads that had remained unpulled. The only way forward is to hash these uncomfortable ideas out in the open. Because as the article describes, they're certainly getting pulled on in less public forums where other uncomfortable truths have an easier time remaining unvisited.
On the other hand, other people would probably have misread it in the same way, so the point still applies, just not as much, and probably not enough to justify my mod response.
This may be a little embarrassing, but I don't read people's comments very closely. There isn't time, and it isn't necessary. It does mean I sometimes guess things wrong, though, (moderation is guesswork*) and that sucks.
GWB didn't strike me as someone who could come up with the idea of prolonged Mideast conflict on his own. The think tanks that infiltrated his mind like the movie Inception is not unlike what is being described in the article. It's tough to accept how impressionable we are regardless of age. Just in tech companies we know salesman get into the ears of leadership and sell them on all sorts of ideas.
Even though Gen Z is under constant assault by Influencers, I think they are probably sharper about spotting it similar to how GenX/Millennials were to crude marketing. They are the generation that can combat this, but at the same time they are also the generation that most likely will perpetuate it.
During the Roman republic the thing that made something like a Ceasar was a standing army. If you had a standing army you had power. Some of these powerful people have standing armies on social media and thus have power over the narrative. It's a few times removed from having men with guns, but it is the same abstraction.
As always, Chris Rufo lays the game out in plain terms:
> Rufo had been there all along: “I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right.”
I hope all the partisans take a lesson from this.
When you try to force ideological conformity with censorship, you end up creating even tighter echo chambers that amplify groupthink and entrench the very ideas you are trying to combat.
The best way to defeat an idea is to publicly tolerate and dispute it.
Relaying a couple choice reactions,
> Elites, in bubbles, protected from the deeply scarring experience of being yelled at by their lessers online.
https://bsky.app/profile/volts.wtf/post/3lnttpsom222z
> Online radicalisation of elites is a significant and yet poorly understood aspect of contemporary politics.
https://bsky.app/profile/drjennings.bsky.social/post/3lnuk2b...
> They have been doing this for years, and this is how they radicalized themselves into deeply paranoid radical fascists completely detached from consensus reality, who routinely say insane things and pour their billions into attacking innocents.
https://bsky.app/profile/anildash.com/post/3lntqc3lmo22o
HN thread about the 2024 post referenced in the OP:
Group chats rule the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40660867 - June 2024 (184 comments)
Two other sets of powerful people in group chats doing bad things:
- https://www.leefang.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-information - https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/05/16/business-le...
Signal chats are the new "clubhouse"?
I have some hot take for this phenomena.
As tech elites lost their untouchable image of being pure prodigies and visionaries, it became clearer — especially after scandals like Cambridge Analytica — that many of them operate like ordinary, ruthless capitalists. Public trust declined as more people moved online and more abuses came to light. Instead of fully acknowledging this shift, many of these elites seem to interpret the criticism — much of which comes from media and universities, which do lean left — as purely ideological attacks. From my perspective, it’s a textbook case of cognitive dissonance: their self-image as bold innovators clashes with how they are increasingly seen from the outside, and the natural human reaction is to blame the critics rather than adjust the self-image.
Turns out the Swamp is Signal group chats.
The fact that these group chats were behind the Chesa Boudin recall campaign should surprise no-one.
[flagged]
We got complaints about your use of the word "rabid" and I think they have a point. That crosses into name-calling in the sense that the HN guidelines ask you not to do.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
You should interpret "not being able to posit your idea" as your idea losing so hard in the marketplace that people refuse to even consider it.
[delayed]
The disinvitation data is so incredibly small that there's no way on earth we can call this "rabid." In Haidt and Fukuyama's "The Coddling of the American Mind" they present data on disinvitations attempts. And it is in the tens of attempts nationwide. They even have to present the data with Milo Yiannopoulos removed since he made up a considerable portion of all disinvitation attempts.
You can think that students are foolish for doing this. You can choose to stop donating because of a response by an institution. But to use this to claim that the left has "gone rabid" is ridiculous given the actual data.
The students' behavior is not what drove voters towards the reactionary right. Breathless media coverage that blew this behavior completely out of proportion is responsible for this.
[dead]
[flagged]
> Funny how people like you never ever
> people like you always
This crosses into personal attack and you can't do that here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit out such swipes in the future, as the rules ask, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: this has unfortunately increasingly been a problem with your account lately:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43261348 (March 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152094 (Feb 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43147710 (Feb 2025)
You've made many fine contributions to HN in the past and I don't recall your account having been involved in so much ideological and political flamewar. Could you please fix this? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
IIRC, there was an invited talk at the unversity, and some student organized people to go in to the talk and disrupt it, such that the speaker literally couldn't be heard.
That's not the student exercising their free speech. It's the student denying the benefit of free speech to their fellow students and the rest of the university.
The university apparently hadn't yet educated the student on the basics of university, and there was not yet any sign that the university was going to. Reporting followed up with the student, when they promoted their personal brand, and solicited funding to continue their fight.
(You might be happy to know that, instead of my modest donation going to the university with the student who thought a first-rate university was the place to ignore the fundamentals they teach, and instead play self-promoting influencer... IIRC, that was the year the money went to a homeless trans person, who'd been through more hell than most people can imagine, and who needed a discreet laptop so that they could practice coding job skills, but without the laptop getting violently stolen from them in whatever shelter they could get into. I'm not making this up, and the contrast was striking.)
Regarding your other comments, much of the rabid left didn't seem to be acting as the savvy political operators you suggest: a whole lot of people were mindlessly flinging their poo, and playing right into the hands of some of the worst of their adversaries. Maybe it was partly a combination of crisis mode over the best of intentions (e.g., help those who need help), and anger and fatigue from same (which I certainly felt), but there also seemed to be a whole lot of not knowing any other mode of reasoning or acting. Maybe that's not their fault -- you might blame the deterioration of popular journalism, social media sites preying upon their users, and a dearth of visible role models demonstrating anything else -- but that seems to be where we are, for large slices of the vocal population. And there's been a lot of counterproductive.
I am not saying they are super savy. I am saying they were right about the right.
They were right, because they were not determined to excuse dveryone on the right up to absurdum and because they read what right actually said.
Moderate right and center consistently and always excused far right and refused to beloeve it exists even when it was completely apparent. And consistently deployed double standards where right was excused and left acts massively exaggerated.
> Funny how people like you never ever use the same power to force left or liberal speakers. It is ok to boycott or criticize those.
Do you know OP personally? Do you really think it's reasonable to assume that everyone in the universe (except for you, perhaps) is a hypocrite like this?
There's plenty of people that feel the administrative force of the university shouldn't be used to suppress either side. Let the gun club invite Luigi. Let the trans club invite the Stonewall rioters.
You're welcome to say you dislike the speaker. You don't have to attend. But you shouldn't have the authority to stop other people from inviting them to speak, or to stop other people from listening.
I don't need to know OP personally. The knee jerk "right is the way they are because of the left" gives the game away.
Left is responsible for ehat they so and never ever excused with "right made them do it". Not even when they were 100% right in the hindsight.
Right is not responsible for what they do. They are victims of circumstances even when they caused the circumstances.
So, you’re saying basic protesting and sitins shouldn’t be allowed?
Nah I’m sorry disrupting other events is a cornerstone of freedom of speech.
I think we got the far right reality of today by liberals completely ignoring working class pain and appearing to solely focus on a controversial minority. I say appearing because they didn’t seem to do anything else.
This allowed the current administration to step in by promising something different, with no intention of delivering anything but tax relief for the wealthy and unchaining corporations from those pesky regulations that prevent higher profits.
The majority of people on the left want M4A, higher minimum wage, less income inequality.
The politicians that represent them do not care. They get their seats secured as long as they toe the billionaire line.
We have no real opposition party in the US.
This is a perfect example of the law of American politics that only Democrats have agency. Anything Democrats do is the responsibility of Democrats, and anything Republicans do is the responsibility of Democrats.
It's kind of unreal that in the comments of an article about an actual (successful!) conspiracy between ultra-wealthy tech elite and extreme right activists to undermine american democracy for their own benefit, you're most concerned about liberal campus protests. You may not be as progressive as you think!
And to add to this.
Speech is not created equal. What some students say in some college campus has very little power compared to the speech of one of the richest people __in history__.
When someone famous and rich says something fucked up, the reaction to that isn’t deplatforming but rather a basic attempt at defense.
This tracks with my experience here, watching tech thought leaders. Obviously Andreesen went very hard right, as did Musk, but just in general the tech elite suddenly and surprisingly turned Trumpy over the last few years; Ackman being a really good case study.
Note that pg himself took a fairly surpising reactionary turn in right about the 2020/2021 timeframe this article describes. A guy who'd always been a left-center pragmatist suddenly was yelling in public tweets about the Campus Left's Desire for Cancellation and whatnot.
Those of us closer to the trenches never really did get the ire here: I mean, yeah, kids are intemperate jerks, but they've always been intemperate jerks. And the tech community... has always celebrated the idea behind the intemperate jerk and an engine for change and disruption. Let the ideas fight it out and pick winners and all, right? Suddenly these billionaires were all snowflakes looking to a political realignment to save them?
This article goes a long way to explaining why.
I think you’re right but would also add the nascent tech worker organization during the same period. I think many of these guys were bitterly resentful of the idea of workers trying to unionize or otherwise negotiate on a more even level, and that made the general political concerns very personal.
I've looked at pg:s tweets recently and was surprised that he takes issue with both the genocide in Palestine and the university related disappearings. I had expected him to be more radical and aligned with the current regime.
Complaining about wokeness doesn't make you right-wing, much less reactionary.
Today, virtually everyone is anti-woke. I give the Trump admin credit for dismantling DEI. It's just unfortunately the only good thing they've done.
"Woke" just means "admitting actual history happened".
It is impossible to be an actual nerd and not be woke. These money-men "founders" have nothing but distain for the geeks that made them rich.
> Today, virtually everyone is anti-woke
I am not a fan of a lot of the tenets associated with "wokeness", but this is just totally wrong.
None of the very left people I know would describe themselves as anti-woke...but they all make it very clear that they find wokeness (or whatever you want to call it) ridiculous.
pg has been yelling about the Campus Left's Desire for Cancellation for years and years (I want to say since 2011?). It's been very frustrating to watch because lots of us identified this as right wing propaganda that (imo) pg was unwittingly participating in.
[flagged]
The "kids" are not the ones kidnapping people who disagree with them.
Bill Maher still has a show, despite having spent more than twenty-five years being a racist POS. There is no such thing as "Cancel Culture": there are just people who are SUPER mad that their kids think their racism is bad.
The idea of shutting down ideas is itself an idea that can be fought by other ideas. Those kids do not actually control institutions that can enforce the shutting down of ideas, even if cultural mores might have temporarily aligned with their positions from time to time.
Well, they're learning from the adults.
Soon as Trump's term started he started removing any mention of slavery from the Smithsonian cuz 'merica.
That's really the concerning thing. Liberals and conservatives not only dislike ideas, they dislike history and facts. That's what makes them dangerous.
On the left it seems you at least had a few moderates who had the good sense to keep the wing nuts in line. We tried the right, thinking we might get better governance, and have discovered, to our collective horror, that the right is wing nuts the whole way down. So you get things like tariffs, and purges, and wild 4$$ ravings about plane crashes being caused by too many blacks.
In the US we need to take things back in hand or it really will be way too late to do anything. These extremists will run the nation right into the ground.
HN seems loathe to have any meaningful discussion about or reflection on how and why notable SV figures seemed primed to embrace the Trump/MAGA right (see, for example, quote in OP from Chris Rufo). I don't think it was simply being repelled by the left, as Andreesson has stated before, but an earnest rightward turn.
Also, after articles like these, will calls for "viewpoint diversity" finally apply to conservatives who chase out even the moderates from their spheres? After years of the left being accused of suppressing opposing views, I haven't seen quite the same backlash against conservatives building up ideologically homogenous spaces like the group chats in the article.
There was lots of resentment against unionization efforts from tech workers -- workers who were increasingly seen as ungrateful insurgents trying to mess up a good thing -- and tech oligarchs decided that everyone left of center was exactly like tech workers in Silicon Valley. For them, leftists are infected with a "mind virus", and needing some enlightened elites to save them from themselves. Of course there's no self-reflection about the mind virus that causes folks like Andreesen to use the philosophy of meth addicted neo-Nazis[1] as the ideological basis for their new political order.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land
> I don't think it was simply being repelled by the left, as Andreesson has stated before, but an earnest rightward turn.
The clear contention in the linked article is that it's neither. It's just plain old group think fed by an echo chamber. You take a genuine-but-isolated affront or conflict[1], tie it to one or two other less important side issues[2], and then just line everyone up on the "good" or "bad" side of a line. Before you know it our community is cheering the return of a regime that literally tried to stage a coup and making tortuous excuses for why we need to be deporting four year old citizens with cancer.
It's 4chan. It's just 4chan all over again.
[1] Ex: the anti-elite current within the lefty political sphere that has never really loved the idea of making common cause with SV billionaires.
[2] Middle aged dudes, demographically, tend to be a little squicked out by trans rights and pronouns and LGBTQ+ issues, think paper straws are dumb as fuck, and really hated seeing stuff burned down in protets.
"Also, after articles like these, will calls for "viewpoint diversity" finally apply to conservatives who chase out even the moderates from their spheres?"
LOL. LMAO, even. Wilhoit's Law applies here.
> After years of the left being accused of suppressing opposing views, I haven't seen quite the same backlash against conservatives building up ideologically homogenous spaces like the group chats in the article.
The fundamental difference is that conservative viewpoints support the majority (or plurality), whereas the liberal viewpoints support the minority view. Backlash against the majority view is much harder to come by. And being in the majority and supporting minority perspectives is more uncomfortable, and frankly much easier to opt-out of if there is sufficient discomfort.
If that were true, Republicans would spend a lot less effort on voter suppression & wouldn't have needed to have the Supreme Court repeal the Voting Rights Act in order to win.
[dead]
So like, is knowing someone who knows someone in these chats the key to getting your family out of the concentration camp, just like knowing someone who knows someone who works at Google is the key to getting your account unlocked?
Post facto, it seems given the monster that these people have actually unleashed and empowered, the preemptive negative reactions to what they had been saying in public were actually pretty fucking justified. And I say this with the perspective of someone who generally believes in open debate, hates cancel culture, and who was reading Yarvin as he was writing under the Moldbug nym and found much of his analysis compelling. But it always struck me that Yarvin came to the exact wrong conclusion wanting to run thermodynamics backwards. Even Urbit, I had thought there was something novel and universal there, until I realized it was actually just describing another Java 1.0 dressed up in fancy equations and four-letter words. Like sure, if you could travel back in time and make all computing equipment run Urbit, Java, or Rust that sure would make a lot of things easy. Except in the real world, other languages already exist and have anchoring utility that is likely to keep them existing.
I keep pondering a steelmanning of this idea of the Elite Jewish Conspiracy, pushing this radical acceptance of non-traditional lifestyles onto our society through various distributed leadership positions. I think that needed to get more mainstream treatment - stepping back and looking at it impartially, does this not seem an awful lot like what one would expect as counterbalance to the cultural memory of the Shoah? An attempt to prevent such an utter industrial-scale waste of human life and potential in the name of uniformity from ever happening again? And maybe the right answer is that we needed to get past its cloying overreactions, incorporate it into our baseline society, and move forward - instead of giving in to the simpleheaded authoritarian powermongers promising to simplify the world for us if only we hand them the power with a mandate to destroy.
Edit: I think I misread the comment somewhat—sorry. I've restored it, and will autocollapse this moderation bit.
---
> getting your family out of the concentration camp
Could you please not take HN threads straight into flamewar hell like this? We're trying for something quite different here, and it's way too aggressive to kick off a thread with rhetoric like that.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Up thread there is somebody who is using the phrase "rabid" multiple times to describe the left. And you comment here?
People being illegally sent to CECOT is a major nationwide story right now that is real and pertinent.
When I commented here, there was only that comment. I can't reply to posts that don't exist yet!
I don’t think I have ever disagreed with you dang, except in this case. The comment seemed thoughtful to me.
I appreciate the reply. My reaction, like most moderation responses, was shallow and limited in scope to what I know about forum dynamics. If you come out swinging with Nazi references, you're turning the knobs to 11 from the start. That's not compatible with the kind of discussion HN is going for. It's particularly troublesome when the thread is new, because threads are so sensitive to initial conditions. Also it's not as if that was the only such reference in the comment.
Reading it the next morning, though, I think I misread what mindslight meant by "getting your family out of the concentration camp". Now that I'm reading it differently, I can see how my reply came across as too heavy-handed. Sorry all!
“Concentration camp” is not necessarily a Nazi reference. The British invented them and the current US administration is reinventing them.
We’re talking about the group chats that may have “changed America” into a place where our president pays foreign dictators to house criminals in a overcrowded prison, and where they may be debating sending American citizens. When exactly is the aforementioned rhetoric appropriate, when it’s too late?
It seems to me directly in line with the nature of the article as written, the tech context we currently live in, and i don’t think it’s against HN guidelines to speak uncomfortably truths. In fact it seems core to what we’re trying to do here.
Thanks for all you do here, not trying to turn this place into Twitter, but I also think it’s important that we not fall into the trap of not being willing to confront the outrageous truths of what’s happening in our community because the rational response is outrageous.
This is vile dan. What do you believe we should call a prison complex holding forty thousand humans on the basis of their social affiliations, tried en masse or not at all, never known to have released a single one? I'm flexible on nomenclature but if you're going to veto I think you should suggest an alternative.
It's a straightforward reference that shouldn't be controversial to anyone looking to substantively discuss what is happening to our society. I know there are a lot of true believers and bots that want to shout down uncomfortable truths which makes for flamewar, but if we let that prevent good faith discussion then we might as well throw in the towel because that reality distortion field isn't going away.
I thought the rest of my comment was insightful as well, despite having to trade in some inflammatory terms. We're apparently at a time of pulling on these threads that had remained unpulled. The only way forward is to hash these uncomfortable ideas out in the open. Because as the article describes, they're certainly getting pulled on in less public forums where other uncomfortable truths have an easier time remaining unvisited.
Looking it at again the next morning, I think I just misread your opening sentence. Sorry! (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43823347)
On the other hand, other people would probably have misread it in the same way, so the point still applies, just not as much, and probably not enough to justify my mod response.
This may be a little embarrassing, but I don't read people's comments very closely. There isn't time, and it isn't necessary. It does mean I sometimes guess things wrong, though, (moderation is guesswork*) and that sucks.
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
You’re ok with the idea of steelmanning the Elite Jewish Conspiracy but you take issue with this? Reevaluate your priorities, man.
I was objecting to all the flamebait in that comment.
But really, this sort of "you're ok with X?" gotcha argument is an internet trope of the kind we don't want here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
GWB didn't strike me as someone who could come up with the idea of prolonged Mideast conflict on his own. The think tanks that infiltrated his mind like the movie Inception is not unlike what is being described in the article. It's tough to accept how impressionable we are regardless of age. Just in tech companies we know salesman get into the ears of leadership and sell them on all sorts of ideas.
Even though Gen Z is under constant assault by Influencers, I think they are probably sharper about spotting it similar to how GenX/Millennials were to crude marketing. They are the generation that can combat this, but at the same time they are also the generation that most likely will perpetuate it.
During the Roman republic the thing that made something like a Ceasar was a standing army. If you had a standing army you had power. Some of these powerful people have standing armies on social media and thus have power over the narrative. It's a few times removed from having men with guns, but it is the same abstraction.