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Continued thread

Along with the tech-centric WhatsApp groups Krishnan had organized out of a16z,
Andreessen joined a slew of others,
including ones that Torenberg set up for tech founders and for more political discussions.

The tech chats tended to be on WhatsApp and the political ones on Signal, which is more fully encrypted,
and they had different settings.

(“Every group chat ends up being about memes and humor and the goal of the group chat is to get as close to the line of being actually objectionable without tripping it,” Andreessen told Fridman.

“People will set to 5 minutes before they send something particularly inflammatory.“)

After a group of liberal intellectuals published a letter in Harper’s on July 7, 2020, some of its signers were invited to join a Signal group called “Everything Is Fine.”

There, writers including #Kmele #Foster, who co-hosts the podcast
"The Fifth Column", Persuasion founder #Yascha #Mounk, and the Harper’s letter contributor Williams joined Andreessen and a group that also included the anti-woke conservative activist #Chris #Rufo.

The new participants were charmed by Andreessen’s engagement:
“He was the most available, the most present, the most texting of anybody in the group
— which shocked me because it seemed like he was the most important person in the group,” one said.

But the center didn’t hold.

The liberal Harper’s types were surprised to find what one described an
“illiberal worldview” among tech figures more concerned with power than speech.

The conservatives found the liberal intellectuals tiresome, committed to what Rufo described to me as “infinite discourse” over action.

The breaking point came on July 5, 2021, when Foster and Williams,
along with the never-Trump conservative #David #French and the liberal academic #Jason #Stanley,
wrote a New York Times op-ed criticizing new laws against teaching “critical race theory.”

“Even if this censorship is legal in the narrow context of public primary and secondary education,
it is antithetical to educating students in the culture of American free expression,”
they wrote.

The conservatives had thought the Harper’s letter writers were their allies in an all-out ideological battle,
and considered their position a betrayal.

Andreessen “went really ballistic in a quite personal way at Thomas,”
a participant recalled.

The group ended after Andreessen “wrote something along the lines of
‘thank you everybody, I think it’s time to take a Signal break,’” another said.

The meltdown of this liberal-tech alliance was, to #Rufo, a healthy development.

“A lot of these technologists hoped that the centrist path was a viable one, because it would permit them in theory to change the culture without having to expose themselves to the risk of becoming partisans,”
he said.

“By 2021, the smartest people in tech understood that these people were a dead end
— so the group chats exploded and reformulated on more explicitly political lines.”

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.”

#MarcAndreessen #LexFridman
#ChrisRufo
#VivekRamaswamy #ErikTorenberg #Krishnan
#NoahSmith

semafor.com/article/04/27/2025

www.semafor.com · The group chats that changed AmericaBy Ben Smith
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Maybe I need to find one good #ChrisRufo monitor because then you know what @FAIR will be complaining about in a few months when some mutation of his trolling passes muster with a half dozen of the more ghoulish editors at the Times.

Sorry to any #ASL Americans with the incredible human capacity to convey language entirely by sign. Which came first? It would be more fun to think about than who the bellwether troll will dehumanize next.

I've been sitting on this post for literally two weeks for two reasons; frankly I'm not sure it's all that newsworthy, and because I really don't have a lot of context or analysis to add to what Deflector's David Roth has said here. Despite this however, I've found myself unable to let it go without sharing the link because not only is Roth absolutely correct about the transformation of modern Republican politics into something akin to the social media influencer business, but he's also hilariously *nailed* the modern reactionary zeitgeist built around Trump to a perfect tee. I guess what I'm saying here is that you should just read the whole fucking article this time, maybe even twice.

web.archive.org/web/2024081721

Men On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown

"Both greasy strivers like Rufo and also your more warped and willful elected officials on the right all understand their jobs this way and behave accordingly. If they seem somehow unlike actual people, if they are too big and too mad and too much, it is because they are now full-time content creators, and so actually not quite like actual people at all. They are all pinned into a deteriorating orbit around the dense collapsing star at the center of the conservative universe, but they have committed to at least make their turns around Donald Trump's imperial bulk as loudly as possible. Again, this is the job.

The result of that work is a chunky slurry of gossip and fantasy and rank bigotry blasting from a thousand gilded hydrants at every hour of the day; it amounts to a grim sort of fan service catering to an even grimmer fanbase. This has limited public appeal, just in the sense of not being the sort of thing that most people are interested in hearing about, let alone to the exclusion of any other topic and in the most vexed n' fervid keening imaginable, and that poses an obvious problem for a political party that has entirely given itself over to the making of this kind of noise. The bigger issue, though, is that these imperatives only run in one direction—louder, uglier, more confrontational, further out, more. If the obvious tactical challenge here is that this shit absolutely sucks and most people hate it, the more fundamental one is that the internal incentives are such that it can only ever get worse."

Now to be absolutely clear here, I think it's ultimately important to recognize the political movement we call Trumpism for what it is; an extremely dangerous expression of unchained, violent reaction drawing on the latent historical embrace of white supremacy and fascist ideology nestled inside American political thought. If I didn't think that was important, I wouldn't write about it so damn often.

By that same measure however, there's nothing wrong with occasionally taking a moment to step back and acknowledge that the unhinged cracker weirdos behind this movement are objectively total assclowns running a pathetic grift based entirely on adult temper tantrums and appeasing the whims of a sadistic, self-absorbed fucking moron reality TV show nazi in Donald Trump. The idea that fascists are all hyper-calculating, super-intelligent political scientists executing a meticulous plan for domination is itself fascist propaganda gifted to us by the jerkstore muppet losers who ran the Nazi Party in Germany; it isn't true, and watching the guys trying to get that bag by sucking up to Trump and herding dipshit cracker edgelords for the cause is a far more apt demonstration of how fascist movements actually work, provided to us in real time. The fact that Roth also takes time to let the air out of the inflated ego balloon that is Chris Rufo's weirdly-shaped head, and slap guys like Ron DeSantis and J.D. Vance around a bit is really just icing on the cake here.

All work and no play make Jill a very dull girl; as such, I'd advise you to grab yourself a coke and check out this article. I'm not making any promises, but if you're anything like me you'll laugh, cry, and maybe vomit - but you'll do it while giggling, and that's a prize worth claiming all on its own.

web.archive.org · Men On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown | Defector“Tim Walz is not trans,” the reactionary influencer Christopher Rufo tweeted on Tuesday. “But he knows about cross-sex hormones. He’s familiar with breast binders. He has a soft spot for tucking.” Rufo’s post goes on like that for a while, in a tone that seems to be aiming for comic escalation and which lands closer […]
Continued thread

Update. If you needed it, here's proof that this wasn't normal library deaccessioning.
insidehighered.com/news/facult

From a tweet by Jeremy Redfern, press secty to #RonDeSantis: “Putting gender studies books in the garbage? Great job, @NewCollegeofFL."

From a tweet by #ChrisRufo, New College board member nominated by DeSantis: “We abolished the gender studies program. Now we’re throwing out the trash.”

Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and JobsNew College of Florida dumping books—and losing professorsThe conservative transformation of the institution continues, with gender studies texts being tossed and the faculty chair, plus other professors, taking leave.

Perhaps the “Great Awokening” is ending after all, just not in the way anti-woke reactionaries like #RonDeSantis and #ChrisRufo had hoped.

It has not, historically, been right-wing traditionalists who have owned a “mind your own damned business” ethos. Au contraire. It looks like the not-right-wing-traditionalists are taking it back now.

Maybe we're also taking back incautious expression, telling it like we see it, chips fall where they may.

See e.g. #AdamKotso itself.blog/2024/08/12/weird-c

An und für sich · “Weird” conservatives and the end of whiny self-righteousnessIn the wake of Biden’s withdrawal from the race and Kamala Harris’s shockingly rapid and decisive ascension, I have begun feeling emotions that I haven’t allowed myself to feel in…

Although I can't say I'm surprised, I most confess that I still find it quite alarming how readily American society and the larger discourse will fall for disingenuous nonsense from a fascist with a university degree; so long as he wears a nice suit and uses a sufficient quantity of five dollar words to hide his odious ideals and beliefs. Indeed, in this case I'm openly asking myself just how many times noted sh*tbag nazi "academic" Chris Rufo has to be exposed, before the mainstream American public stops taking his grievances and observations at face value.

theguardian.com/world/2024/jan

The tl;dr here is that Rufo, who is closely aligned with Ron DeSantis, and helped spearhead the plot to chase former Harvard University president Claudine Gay out of public life, is, to the surprise of no one who has been paying attention, a frothing white supremacist who gleefully supports the work of other frothing white supremacists. Which will undoubtedly shock (sarcastic eyeroll) all the rubes and dupes who keep having him on their TV shows, podcasts, and panels while allowing him to present himself as a proponent of “colorblind equality” and a concerned critic of "wokeism" in our society - as if those things, by themselves, didn't make it extremely clear what side he's on and how reactionary his politics are.

At this point, Rufo's fascist ideology and propaganda has been exposed so many times, it's almost not worth the effort to actually dig down into individual examples of such; but in the interest of informing the larger public, you can toss this Jan 31st Guardian article onto the pile. Please do note however, that there's a lot more examples of why this guy is a fricking nazi available online, and the fact that *anyone* continues to take this muppet seriously, and he's still welcome at academic conferences and in professional life, is in and of itself damning evidence of America's larger embrace of fascism and unwillingness to hold clean-cut white guys with a thesaurus accountable for supporting it.

The Guardian · Activist who led ouster of Harvard president linked to ‘scientific racism’ journalBy Jason Wilson
Replied in thread

@lolennui
I just learned that #ChrisRufo himself benefited from the relaxation of standards at Harvard. He took a course in Government (their name for PolSci) at the Harvard Extension School.

I don't want to offend anyone seeking continuous education at HES, but the requirements aren't the same as if you'd pursue a bachelor's, master's or doctorate degree.

But Rufo wants us to believe his degree is top notch and it's just those other people who took the easier track.

Continued thread

Addendum 4 cont'd

Christopher Rufo, senior fellow, Manhattan Institute

* crusades against wokeness
* wrote essays arguing homelessness should be addressed thru more aggressive policing, not social services & housing subsidies
* his 2021 Heritage Foundation report: stated homelessness is “a human problem, not a housing problem”
* appointed, DeSantis, Board of New College of Florida

Continued thread

Addendum 4
Chris Rufo/Manhattan Institute
Joe Lonsdale /Cicero Institute
Heritage Foundation
Demonization, criminalization, monetization of homelessness

Why the Right Is Winning Its War on Unhoused People
Attitude toward homeless angrier, crueler, more overtly violent
thenation.com/article/society/

The NationWhy the Right Is Winning Its War on Unhoused PeopleAmericans’ attitude toward people sleeping on the street has become angrier, crueler, and more overtly violent. Blame a right-wing propaganda campaign.