'Chatham House Rule'

Torenberg launched Chatham House the summer of 2024,
naming it after a British think tank that formalized the insight that
trusted conversations require a degree of privacy.

Two of its conservative participants said they see the group as a way to shift centrist Trump-curious figures to the Republican side,
but its founder said he’d begun it to have “a left-right exchange where we could have real conversations because of filter bubble group chats.”

Chatham House includes high-profile figures like the economist
#Larry #Summers and the historian #Niall #Ferguson,
and more partisan figures like #Shapiro and the Democratic analyst #David #Shor.

#Andreessen lurks.

But several participants described it to me as something like a gladiatorial arena with #Cuban most often in the center,
sparring with conservatives.

(“no idea what you are talking about :)” Cuban emailed in response to an inquiry about his arguments on Chatham House.)

The Group Chat Era depended on part of the American elite feeling shut out from public spaces,
and on the formation of a new conservative consensus.

Both of those are now fading
(though Torenberg has invested in a company called #ChatBCC that wants to commercialize the heady experience of sitting in on texts among the power elite).

Since Elon Musk turned X to the right
and an alternative media ecosystem emerged on Substack,
“a tremendous amount of the verboten conversations can now shift back into public view,” Andreessen told Fridman.

“It’s much healthier to live in a society in which people are literally not scared of what they’re saying.”

And Trump’s destabilizing “Liberation Day” has taken its toll on the coalition Andreessen helped shape.

You can see it on X,
where investors joke that they’ll put pronouns back in their bios in exchange for a return to the 2024 stock prices,
and where #Srinivasan has been a leading critic of Trump’s tariffs.

“Group chats have changed on the economy in the last few weeks,”
said #Rufo.
“There’s a big split on the tech right.”

The polarity of social media has also reversed,
and while participants used to keep their conservative ideas off social media,
“now the anti-Trump sentiment is what you’re afraid to say on X,” one said.

By mid-April, #Sacks had had enough with Chatham House:
“This group has become worthless since the loudest voices have TDS,”
he wrote, shorthanding
“Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Then he addressed Torenberg:
“You should create a new one with just smart people.”

Signal soon showed that three men had left the group:
The Sequoia partner #Shaun #Maguire,
the bitcoin billionaire #Tyler #Winklevoss, and #Tucker #Carlson.

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america

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

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america

Over the past eight or so years, I've been asked on numerous occasions how I could be so certain that Trumpworld and the right wing authoritarian tech billionaires that are funding the movement were literally fascists. The simple answer to that question is because I know where the ideas that motivate them and animate their movement come from. As openly fascistic as the Trump regime's exercise of power has been so far, if you peel back a single layer to look at the people providing the ideological framework for those activities, you almost always find literal nazis.

Take for example the Trump regime's frequently self-identified "war on woke." On its face, the collection of policies and activities used to wage the "war on woke" so far have been fundamentally Christian Nationalist, white supremacist, patriarchal, and eliminationist in nature. If however you peel back the top surface of this "war" you find three major ideological propagandists driving the entire agenda: specifically Peter Boghossian, Christopher Rufo, and Richard Hanania; whose frankly odious ideas have had a huge influence on the Republican Party, and the Trump administration. These three have waged a war on higher education, diversity, and the very concept of racial or gender equality, that is expressly endorsed by most of the same far right billionaires who paid to make Trump president; including Marc Andressen, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Vivek Ramaswamy. So what happens if you peel back another layer of this fascist onion to find out who is funding and promoting guys like Hanania, Rufo, and Boghossian? You find a rich cracker tech bro, and a eugenicist running a recently rebranded foundation that supports white supremacists, promotes scientific racism, and was literally founded by Nazis. No, really:

https://bylinetimes.com/2025/02/27/trumps-war-on-woke-and-dei-incubated-by-a-nazi-eugenics-foundation/

Trump’s War on ‘Woke’ and DEI: Incubated by a Nazi Eugenics Foundation

"The ‘war on woke’ did not suddenly appear. It is an idea deeply rooted in a form of scientific racism that has been laundered into the mainstream over decades by the Pioneer Fund and right-wing activists connected with this group.

This nexus of ties to Pioneer Fund entities and ideology throws new light on how the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI are the fruit of a broader white supremacist endeavour inspired by Nazi-aligned ideology.

It also suggests that the increasing normalisation of the Nazi salute by Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and others is not an accident either – but a signal; one we would do well not to ignore."

Unfortunately this article is a long read, and it's easy to get bogged down in the idea that the problem here is the "ancient" history of the Human Diversity Foundation/Pioneer Diveristy fund, but if you keep reading the author is very clear that the politics and priorities of the foundation, haven't changed much in the modern era.

"But last year, Hope Not Hate revealed that a network of white supremacist activists was secretly rehabilitating the Pioneer Fund under the new Human Diversity Foundation brand identity.

The aim has been to normalise the Pioneer Fund’s Nazi-aligned scientific racism in the mainstream through the notion of open debate and ‘free’ inquiry. Scientific racism has been rebranded as the story of ‘human biodiversity’.

The key funder supporting this initiative was revealed to be American technology entrepreneur Andrew Conru, who donated $1.3 million to the HDF. Around the same time, Conru was also funding the most influential conservative voices attacking DEI and ‘critical race theory’ – Christopher Rufo, Peter Boghossian, and Richard Hanania.

HDF’s magazine, Aporia, was founded by British far-right activist Matthew Frost. Conru’s donation provided him with a 15% stake in the group. It has defended Richard Lynn’s pseudoscientific racism, published an interview with Nazi sympathiser Jared Taylor, and in 2024 claimed that racial stereotypes are “reasonably accurate”.

Hope Not Hate’s undercover reporting recorded far-right activists associated with the HDF calling for “remigration” – the ‘mass removal of ethnic minorities’.

Kirkegaard is the long-time editor of the Pioneer Fund-backed eugenics journal Mankind Quarterly, a founding board member of which was Nazi eugenicist Otmar von Verscheur – who taught and mentored Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi SS officer known as the ‘Angel of Death’ for performing medical experiments at Auschwitz.

In 2023, both Kirkegaard and Frost attended a notorious neo-Nazi gathering known as the “Scandza Forum” in Estonia, hosted by Scandinavian neo-Nazi Fróði Midjord. The conference was that year renamed ‘Guide to Kulchur’ after a book by Nazi sympathiser and Holocaust supporter Ezra Pound.

Kirkegaard inherited the assets of the Pioneer Fund from its former long-time president Richard Lynn before he died in July 2023."

Fighting back

Finally, on April 14, something happened:
Harvard decided to resist in far more public fashion.

The Trump administration had demanded, as a condition of receiving $9 billion in grants over multiple years,
that Harvard reduce the power of student and faculty leaders,
vet every academic department for undefined "viewpoint diversity,"
run plagiarism checks on all faculty,
share hiring information with the administration,
shut down any program related to diversity or inclusion,
and audit particular departments for antisemitism,
including the Divinity School.

(Numerous Jewish groups want nothing to do with the campaign,
writing in an open letter that
"our safety as Jews has always been tied to the rule of law, to the safety of others, to the strength of civil society, and to the protection of rights and liberties for all.")

If you think this sounds a lot like government control,
giving the Trump administration the power to dictate hiring and teaching practices, you're not alone;

Harvard president Alan Garber rejected the demands in a letter, saying,
"The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.
Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government."

The Trump administration immediately responded by cutting billions in Harvard funding,
threatening the university's tax-exempt status,
and claiming it might block international students from attending Harvard.

Perhaps Harvard's example will provide cover for other universities to make hard choices.

And these are hard choices.

But Columbia and Harvard have already shown that the only way you have a chance at getting the money back is to sell whatever soul your institution has left.

Given that, why not fight?

If you have to suffer, suffer for your deepest values.

"Resistance" does not mean a refusal to change, a digging in, a doubling down.

No matter what part of the political spectrum you inhabit, universities
—like most human institutions
—are "target-rich environments" for complaints.

To see this, one has only to read about recent battles over affirmative action,
the Western canon,
"legacy" admissions,
the rise and fall of "theory" in the humanities,
Gaza/Palestine protests,
the "Varsity Blues" scandal,
critiques of "meritocracy,"
mandatory faculty "diversity statements,"
the staggering rise in tuition costs over the last few decades,
student deplatforming of invited speakers,
or the fact that so many students from elite institutions cannot imagine a higher calling than management consulting.

Even top university officials acknowledge there are problems.

Famed Swiss theologian Karl #Barth lost his professorship and was forced to leave Germany in 1935
because he would not bend the knee to Adolf Hitler.

He knew something about standing up for one's academic and spiritual values
—and about the importance of not letting any approach to the world ossify into a reactionary, bureaucratic conservatism
that punishes all attempts at change or dissent.

The struggle for knowledge, truth, and justice requires forward movement even as the world changes,
as ideas and policies are tested,
and as cultures develop.

Barth's phrase for this was
"Ecclesia semper reformanda est"
—the church must always be reformed
—and it applies just as well to the universities where he spent much of his career.

As universities today face their own watershed moment of resistance,
they must still find ways to remain intellectually curious and open to the world.

They must continue to change, always imperfectly but without fear.

It is important that their resistance not be partisan.

Universities can only benefit from broad-based social support,
and the idea that they are fighting
"against conservatives"
or "for Democrats"
will be deeply unhelpful.

(Just as it would be if universities capitulated to government oversight of their faculty hires or gave in to "patriotic education.")

This is difficult when one is under attack,
as the natural reaction is to defend what currently exists.

But the assault on the universities is about deeper issues than admissions policies
or the role of elite institutions in American life.

It is about the rule of law,
freedom of speech,
scientific research,
and the very independence of the university
—things that should be able to attract broad social and judicial support
if schools do not retreat into ideology.

In 2022 Vox called Yarvin the “person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly,
the US government could be toppled and replaced”.

Yarvin suggests that a would-be American autocrat should campaign on and win an electoral mandate for an authoritarian program.

They should purge the federal bureaucracy in a push Yarvin has anagrammatized as #RAGE (for “retire all government employees”).

They should simply ignore any court rulings that seek to constrain them.

They should bring Congress to heel,
in part by mobilizing their populist base against recalcitrant lawmakers.

And liberal or mainstream media organizations and universities should be summarily closed.

Given the post-election period and Trump’s preparation for a return to the White House,
Yarvin’s program seems less fanciful than it did in 2021, when he laid it out for Anton.

In the recording of that podcast, Yarvin offers a condensed presentation of his program which he has laid out on Substack and in other venues.

Midway through their conversation, Anton says to Yarvin,
“You’re essentially advocating for someone to
– age-old move
– gain power lawfully through an election,
and then exercise it unlawfully”,
adding: “What do you think the actual chances of that happening are?”

Yarvin responded:
“It wouldn’t be unlawful,”
adding:
“You’d simply declare a state of emergency in your inaugural address.”

Yarvin continued:
“You’d actually have a mandate to do this.

Where would that mandate come from?
It would come from basically running on it, saying,
‘Hey, this is what we’re going to do.’”

Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump promised to carry out a wide array of anti-democratic or authoritarian moves,
and effectively ran on these promises.

Trump has suggested he might declare a state of emergency in response to America’s immigration crisis.

Trump also promised to pursue retribution on individually named antagonists
like representative Nancy Pelosi and senator-elect Adam Schiff,
and spoke more broadly about dispatching the US military to deal with “the enemy within”.

Later in the recording, Yarvin said that after a hypothetical authoritarian president was inaugurated in January,
“you can’t continue to have a Harvard or a New York Times past since perhaps the start of April”.

Later expanding on the idea with
“the idea that you’re going to be a Caesar and take power and operate with
someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd.”

“Machiavelli could tell you right away that that’s a stupid idea,” Yarvin added.

While he has not yet assumed power, Trump has moved against media outlets,
commencing lawsuits against some including the Des Moines Register, CBS and ABC,
with the latter settling a $15m suit that legal experts believed to be winnable for the broadcaster.

Vice-president-elect
JD Vance, meanwhile, and others in the broader Maga orbit like #Christopher #Rufo
have identified universities as primary ideological enemies,
with Rufo helping to remake New College of Florida in the image of Christian nationalism.

In 2022, Vance told Vanity Fair:
“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left
and turn them against the left.
We need like a de-Baathification program,
a de-woke-ification program.”

The Guardian reported in August that Vance said in a podcast recording:
“There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we’re willing to strike at the heart of the beast.

That’s the universities.”

-- Jason Wilson