‘What really matters is defeating the left’
The messages in “Everything Is Fine” are all long gone from the chats. So are many of the liberals.
By then, Silicon Valley was moving right.
In May of 2022, Andreessen asked the conservative academic #Richard #Hanania to
“make me a chat of smart right-wing people,”
Hanania recalled.
As requested, he assembled eight or ten people
— elite law students and federal court clerks,
as well as Torenberg and Katherine Boyle,
a former Washington Post reporter then at a16z and focused on investing in “American Dynamism.”
Later, Hanania added the broadcaster Tucker Carlson.
The substance of the chats no longer exists, but Signal preserved the group’s rotating names, which Andreessen enjoyed changing.
The tone was jesting, but “Marc radicalized over time,”
Hanania recalled.
Hanania said he found himself increasingly alienated from the group and the shift toward partisan pro-Trump politics,
and he came to see the chat he’d established as a “vehicle for groupthink.”
(A friend of Andreessen’s said it was Hanania, not Andreessen, who had shifted his politics.)
The group continues without him.
Hanania argued with the other members “about whether it’s a good idea to buy into Trump’s election denial stuff.
I’d say, ‘That’s not true and that actually matters.’
I got the sense these guys didn’t want to hear it,” he said.
“There’s an idea that you don’t criticize, because what really matters is defeating the left.”
He left the group in June of 2023.
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:
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."
#Fascism #Trump #Nazis #WarOnWoke #Eugenics #Rufo #Hanania #Boghossian #HDF #PioneerFund #Kirkegaard #Conru #Broligarchs #GOP #Thiel #DEI
These freaks live in a world where clearly seeing what is happening and what powerful people are openly planning to do is "an extreme case of derangement"
There are no words for how fucked up that thinking is.
#ToldYouSo #uspol #USPolitics #journalism #media #socialmedia #ImpeachTheFascist #immigrantRights #MakeThemFight #Hardball #impeach #impeachment #DoSomething #NoKings #NoDo #Trumponomics #Tariffs #Recession #Trump #Hanania
Scientific racism today must be seen and rejected for what it truly is
—a hollow attempt to dress discrimination in the garb of science and reason
Across Europe and the U.S., racist and anti-immigrant groups have embraced
long-discredited ideas that races constitute biologically separate groups
differing in everything from intelligence to birthrate.
With immigration a defining topic in fractious debates on both sides of the Atlantic,
#scientific #racism is now explicit in right-wing discourse.
In October an exposé in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper revealed a network dedicated to proliferating race science worldwide had received years of funding from Silicon Valley.
That same month came Donald Trump’s comment decrying immigration as
“a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
In June it was revealed that a U.K. Reform Party candidate had previously insisted that sub-Saharan Africans were lowering IQ in the country.
But while its modern advocates rebrand scientific racism as “human biodiversity,”
such insidious euphemisms are just attempts to give a veneer of respectability to hateful, pseudoscientific beliefs.
These beliefs have a dark history tied to the racial pseudoscience of #eugenics,
and its popularity sadly continues unabated.
On social media, avowed racists misrepresent genetic research to bolster the narrative that white people are intrinsically superior.
In the rarefied world of Silicon Valley, race science has made a dark renaissance,
elevated by Google and other search engines.
(In response to a request for comment from Scientific American, a representative of Google cited a statement from the company that had been included in a Wired article on this subject:
“Our goal is for AI Overviews to provide links to high quality content so that people can click through to learn more,
but for some queries there may not be a lot of high quality web content available.”)
Last year a then forthcoming book,
"The Origins of Woke", by right-wing author #Richard #Hanania was lauded by tech industry figures
#David #Sacks and #Peter #Thiel.
That same year the Huffington Post reported that Hanania had previously written under a pseudonym for white supremacist websites.
He then wrote an essay in which he claimed to give “an explanation for why I wrote such things,
and why I no longer hold such views.”
But critics suggest those views are reflected in his book and in racist comments he has continued to make,
including his suggestions that people of color need aggressive policing and more incarceration.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/silicon-valley-is-reviving-the-discredited-and-discriminatory-idea-of-race/
What Next TBD: Tech's mask off moment. #podcast from #Slate
When conservative writer Richard #Hanania’s old posts, originally published under a pseudonym, came to light, people were shocked at just how #racist and reactionary they were. Perhaps less shocking were the #TechMoguls who were revealed to be supporting him.
Guest: Anil Dash, technologist and writer, and the head of Glitch
From @parkermolloy:
"The trajectory of Richard #Hanania's career, from hidden extremist to celebrated conservative voice, mirrors a broader trend in American media and politics. As the boundaries of mainstream #conservatism have become more dominated by extreme ideas, mainstream media institutions, in pursuit of 'balance,' have felt compelled to shift rightward as well. This drive to avoid appearing biased in favor of liberal viewpoints has inadvertently opened the door to more radical ideologies, normalizing them within mainstream culture. In other words, it creates a right-wing bias. As the right becomes more extreme, media and society itself are pushed even more to the right."
From the Southern Strategy to essentially neo-Confederate states in 50+ years.
Hanania’s name keeps turning up in the media. He’s one of the loudest, rich, #racist eugenicists in the US.
“[Hanania’s podcast] featured Steven Pinker…Marc Andreessen, [and] Elon Musk, reads Hanania’s articles and replies approvingly to his tweets. A third billionaire, Peter Thiel, provided a blurb to promote Hanania’s book, “The Origins of Woke,” which HarperCollins plans to publish this September.
In October, #Hanania is scheduled to deliver a lecture at Stanford.”
#Richard #Hanania, Rising Right-Wing Star, Wrote For #White #Supremacist Sites Under Pseudonym
Hanania is championed by tech moguls and a U.S. senator, but HuffPost found he used a pen name to become an important figure in the “alt-right.”
Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.”
He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black.
He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.
A decade later, writing under his real name, Hanania has ensconced himself in the national mainstream media, writing op-eds in the country’s biggest papers, bending the ears of some of the world’s wealthiest men and lecturing at prestigious universities, all while keeping his past white supremacist writings under wraps
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