Is it? Because I feel like I've been seeing this "turn our backs" attitude for at least 10 years, and by the article's own admission, it doesn't seem to have affected any of the "bad" people mentioned in the article in anyway.
>There is no room for debate or argument, here—only hard, absolute lines in the sand.
Ok. Here's the line.
Leftie types have played fast and loose with language, rules, behavior and decency. All in the name of role playing the empathetic enlightened intellectual who would never commit the egregious sins of the past.
In doing so, they've been racist against whites, sexist against men, homophobic towards LGBs, fascist against COVID skeptics, naive regarding intellectual frauds, apologetic about criminals, and pliant towards manipulative bullies.
While this was going on, left wing activists and organizations have installed themselves as the defacto moral authority and channeled enormous amounts of other people's money to their comfortable faux rebellion.
Now enough people are wise to that that this will not work anymore. The magic words have no power. Their reputations are sinking. The cry-bullying is despised. And the funding is drying up.
The absolute worst part is that they still can't for the life of them tell you what their opponents actually believe, even if you held a gun to their head. Because they're mediocrities and lightweights parroting ideas, as narrow-minded as the caricature they have of others.
I'll quote a previous article I wrote, as it seems relevant here.
A lot has changed over the past decade, and corporate social media now blatantly allows awful, harmful takes in a way that you could only get away with on truth.social or Gab or whatever the fuck years ago. You do not need a tiny, independent platform to say whatever you want, now. A vaccine skeptic is the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. You are no longer anti-authority when the authority agrees with you. You are no longer the little guy fighting in counterculture against the big man in power. You're all on the same team, now.
On January 7th, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg posted a five-minute video called "More Speech and Fewer Mistakes." In it, Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program in the US, replacing it with X-style Community Notes, and framed the whole shift as a return to free expression after what Zuckerberg called a "cultural tipping point" brought on by the 2024 election. In the same breath, Meta rewrote its Hateful Conduct policy to expressly permit describing LGBTQ+ people as "mentally ill" or "abnormal" and calling for their exclusion from professions and public life, loosened its rules around immigration status, and swapped proactive enforcement for waiting on user reports. Days later, the company donated a million dollars to the incoming president's inauguration, added a Trump ally to its board, and handed its global policy shop to a Republican former Bush staffer.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate spent six months on either side of the change combing through eight million Facebook comments aimed at elected officials, and found abusive comments tripled, from 24,000 to 78,000, with violent threats and hate quadrupling and harassment doubling. The ADL tracked the Facebook pages of Jewish members of Congress and found toxic comments jumped more than thirteenfold after February 4, 2025. GLAAD, UltraViolet, and All Out surveyed over 7,000 people across 86 countries and found 92 percent worried about the rise in harmful content, and 77 percent now feeling less safe simply existing openly on Meta's platforms. Even Meta's own first integrity report after the change admitted that violent and graphic content, plus bullying and harassment, both ticked upward.
Complaining about blowback when for the past 15+ years the mainstream cultural narrative has been #killallmen, "COVID-19 vaccines came too early, not enough men died", "religious people should be sent to labour camps" and so on is for sure something.
“mainstream cultural narrative” … I’m not sure where in the world this would be true but do please cite sources to back this claim up if you want to sound in any way credible.
Not sure if honest mistake, but this is what was going on in Twitter and Tumblr for a long while. Obviously in recent years people are trying to walk back on it because of the backlash.
I would suggest not interpreting (your) algorithmic driven social media feeds as the “mainstream cultural mainstream”. As an older white male, at no point in the last 10 years have I felt exposed or subjected to the extreme views you’ve enumerated.
Social media is upstream from beliefs and actions that happen in real life. Not even by mid-2000's, early days of 4chan, could people claim that Internet and real life are separate. The same people who write those kind of things on Twitter and Tumblr and now Bluesky, are the same ones who work at schools and universities, run NGOs, advise local municipality and government policy, and so on. So "you may not be interested in politics, but politics in interested in you", but with social media roots of politics.
Also, what's up with misquoting me? I never used the phrase "mainstream cultural mainstream".
Not sure where this was ever a mainstream narrative.
I guess if by mainstream culture you mean some sort of thin-skinned incel echo chamber. Which, yes, those "men" are pretty weak and pitiful, but I've never seen and calls to kill any of them.
I guess if you want to live in a hateful society, you'd accept it in the interests of hateful free speech. Kind of a race to the bottom, though.
However, if you look, for example, at the history of constitutional amendments over the centuries, turns out they've consistently been to provide more inclusivity/less hate. And that's arguably what made america great.
Seems the maga crowd wants to make America great at being stupid, mean and weak, instead of that inspirational light on the hill.
A "vaccine skeptic" is generally considered to mean someone who is skeptical that vaccinations work at all.
This is very different from having specific concerns about specific products, like the COVID "vaccines", which turned out to:
- not protect against infection
- not prevent transmission
- have numerous side-effects worse than the disease it's supposed to prevent
...all in direct contradiction to the pharma propaganda that was the norm during 2021-2022, for which large amounts were paid to influencers and media.
Indeed, someone who is a proponent of the practice of vaccination ought to be dismayed that such a shoddy product was pushed as belonging in the same category as time-tested vaccines which went through a rigorous and long development process before hitting the market, rather than being foisted on a population under duress. Competing remedies were also ridiculed so as to secure that desirable Emergency Market Authorization, combined with government contracts that removed any liability for the producers, with additional censorship of those contracts before release to the public.
Hence, "You're all on the same team now" is an example of missing the point entirely and turning the issue of vaccination into political team sports and "our guy" vs "their guy", rather than actually debating any of the issues that matter in public health. Do you see what I mean about not being able to state what opponents actually believe?
With loaded terms such as "hate", "toxic" and "harmful" being thrown around like candy, it's exactly the same thing. Hate and harm are supposed to be decided according to objective norms of discourse and behavior, not sentiment. Because what happens is sentiment is decided according to whom the source and target is. The lefties obsessed with these topics decide first who can be a victim and perpetrator based on the tenets of intersectionality, and then interpret the events and actions to fit that preconceived hypothesis. This is largely a result of peer pressure within their own circles. The Jason Arday case is the best recent illustration.
Notice too that the surveys you cite center on "worry about the rise in harmful content" and "feeling less safe". Not about any actual harm that may have been done, nor about whether safety has actually gone up or down.
I'll even add that the distinction between looking at objective behavior and outcomes, vs looking at subjective sentiment, tracks very well with masculine vs feminine norms in social interaction. Feminization of online spaces has been an absolute disaster and the quality of discourse has gone down immensely, because women by and large prefer social cohesion over facing uncomfortable truths. But when the ship is sinking, complaining that someone is rocking the boat is willful blindness.
This is a very dishonest post but it doesn't matter "there is no room for debate or argument, here" this is not a post aiming to convince anyone who might disagree, it's about rallying the troops.
Giving condolences to Charlie Kirk isn't "support", remigration is not the deportation of non-white citizens, Brendan Eich did not donate to the kiwifarms, etc. Everything is skewed and stripped of any nuance.
But keep going, like you say we're not living in the neo-liberal Obama-era anymore. Ten years ago it was a mighty struggle to convince people of how corrosive your ideology was. Keep annoying everyone, keep pushing everyone who doesn't fully comply with your ideology away.
Giving condolences to Charlie Kirk isn't "support", remigration is not the deportation of non-white citizens, Brendan Eich did not donate to the kiwifarms, etc. Everything is skewed and stripped of any nuance.
But keep going, like you say we're not living in the neo-liberal Obama-era anymore. Ten years ago it was a mighty struggle to convince people of how corrosive your ideology was. Keep annoying everyone, keep pushing everyone who doesn't fully comply with your ideology away.
Also the content creators like "theprimeagen" pushes his stuff kind of hard, also had him on his podcast. Combine lex as a guest, and you see full picture. Either REALLY naive or just ignorant.
Why is it anyway that the so called "fascists" are the people who have to address these real issues? Such as DHH on the Gypsy problem in Denmark, or the other week with Nathan Cofnas addressing Jason Arday's plagarism. Why does the left routinely ignore issues that are inconvenient to them? Pretending they don't exist doesn't make them go away.
Most of the names on that list are kinda expected and obvious for any of us who spent any amount of time seriously engaging online outside of social media spaces. I mean, Cloudflare defended literal White Supremacists a la The Daily Stormer, and DHH is a person of immense notoriety for their bigoted views.
What’s disappointing is two-fold: HN greens and miscreants leaping to defend overtly fascist viewpoints as valid (faithfully ignoring the Paradox of Tolerance), and seeing 1Password on that list. Most of that garbage I can avoid to some degree, but 1Password is still the industry leader for enterprise password management by a wide margin, particularly in terms of UX. It’s making me side-eye Proton Vault for a migration for my own credentials, even if it means losing such conveniences as SSH/CLI access.
I’m also going to echo the sentiment of the cooler heads (and the OP) here, in that these people and entities aren’t David fighting Goliath. These are wealthy and powerful people either openly espousing violent ideologies or supporters of said proposals in monetary and/or infrastructure terms. They aren’t the deplatformed, they’re the deplatformers; they aren’t the debanked, they’re the debankers.
I don’t know which of you is part of the lucky 10,000 today, but more people need to internalize that life is inherently political due to its complexity. This rhetoric isn’t empty or hollow, it has meaningful impact and direct harm when left unchallenged. Similarly, the workplace isn’t some mythical apolitical environment, but a melting pot of policy and positions that form better or worse outcomes depending on what levers are pulled. Folks who exist on the “fringe” have no choice but to exist as open political entities until and unless the “fringe” is normalized, at which point we become background signal like everyone else (hence the backlash to “woke” and “DEI” by those whose power is derived from oppression and unalienable attributes like race or sex).
There is a very real problem of wealthy and powerful people leaning heavily on old fascist tropes to promote their own agendas at the expense of everyone else, their supporters included. We need more folks to recognize that their actions and their words are the same thing, and they intend to harm anyone and everyone they can to ensure they never, ever have to grow as individuals.
>Most of the names on that list are kinda expected and obvious for any of us who spent any amount of time seriously engaging online outside of social media spaces.
Those names are "kinda expected and obvious" for only the terminally online.
>Cloudflare defended literal White Supremacists a la The Daily Stormer
Never happened.
>and DHH is a person of immense notoriety for their bigoted views.
Only for the terminally online leftist.
>What’s disappointing is two-fold: HN greens and miscreants leaping to defend overtly fascist viewpoints as valid (faithfully ignoring the Paradox of Tolerance)
Heterodox opinions and anything right of Stalin != "overtly fascist viewpoints"
>They aren’t the deplatformed, they’re the deplatformers; they aren’t the debanked, they’re the debankers.
Always projection and admission. "When we do it, it's (D)ifferent!"
>I don’t know which of you is part of the lucky 10,000 today, but more people need to internalize that life is inherently political due to its complexity. This rhetoric isn’t empty or hollow, it has meaningful impact and direct harm when left unchallenged.
That's what many said about DEI/far-leftism. Anyone not fully aligned were called every -ist and name you could think of.
>Folks who exist on the “fringe” have no choice but to exist as open political entities until and unless the “fringe” is normalized
Everyone is a political entity.
>hence the backlash to “woke” and “DEI” by those whose power is derived from oppression and unalienable attributes like race or sex
It's backlash against boldfaced racism. DEI/wokeism is a racist, sexist, hateful ideology. That's why there's backlash.
>There is a very real problem of wealthy and powerful people leaning heavily on old fascist tropes to promote their own agendas at the expense of everyone else, their supporters included.
There was a very real problem of wealthy and powerful people leaning heavily on old communist tropes to promote their own agendas at the expense of everyone else, their supporters included.
Normalized Communism in Open Source was the norm over the past decade. Now that the pendulum is only starting to swing in the other way, the tankies are freaking out.
What will it take to get these people to understand that the word “fascism” only wields immense power within their own little echo-chambers, as it has been overgeneralized and overapplied to the point where the rest of us have been completely numbed to it such that it elicits an immediate eye-roll rather than any sort of urgency or call to action?
_people have different personal opinions. You believe in your heart that DHH is evil, that you have the moral high ground, and that nothing will change your mind._
_However, not everyone believes that. It is not fair to claim a monopoly and ostracize team members who might disagree with you. There are people who are afraid to speak up simply because they will be personally attacked._
33 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 23.9 ms ] threadIs it? Because I feel like I've been seeing this "turn our backs" attitude for at least 10 years, and by the article's own admission, it doesn't seem to have affected any of the "bad" people mentioned in the article in anyway.
Perhaps a change of tack is in order.
Ok. Here's the line.
Leftie types have played fast and loose with language, rules, behavior and decency. All in the name of role playing the empathetic enlightened intellectual who would never commit the egregious sins of the past.
In doing so, they've been racist against whites, sexist against men, homophobic towards LGBs, fascist against COVID skeptics, naive regarding intellectual frauds, apologetic about criminals, and pliant towards manipulative bullies.
While this was going on, left wing activists and organizations have installed themselves as the defacto moral authority and channeled enormous amounts of other people's money to their comfortable faux rebellion.
Now enough people are wise to that that this will not work anymore. The magic words have no power. Their reputations are sinking. The cry-bullying is despised. And the funding is drying up.
The absolute worst part is that they still can't for the life of them tell you what their opponents actually believe, even if you held a gun to their head. Because they're mediocrities and lightweights parroting ideas, as narrow-minded as the caricature they have of others.
Bye.
A lot has changed over the past decade, and corporate social media now blatantly allows awful, harmful takes in a way that you could only get away with on truth.social or Gab or whatever the fuck years ago. You do not need a tiny, independent platform to say whatever you want, now. A vaccine skeptic is the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. You are no longer anti-authority when the authority agrees with you. You are no longer the little guy fighting in counterculture against the big man in power. You're all on the same team, now.
On January 7th, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg posted a five-minute video called "More Speech and Fewer Mistakes." In it, Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program in the US, replacing it with X-style Community Notes, and framed the whole shift as a return to free expression after what Zuckerberg called a "cultural tipping point" brought on by the 2024 election. In the same breath, Meta rewrote its Hateful Conduct policy to expressly permit describing LGBTQ+ people as "mentally ill" or "abnormal" and calling for their exclusion from professions and public life, loosened its rules around immigration status, and swapped proactive enforcement for waiting on user reports. Days later, the company donated a million dollars to the incoming president's inauguration, added a Trump ally to its board, and handed its global policy shop to a Republican former Bush staffer.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate spent six months on either side of the change combing through eight million Facebook comments aimed at elected officials, and found abusive comments tripled, from 24,000 to 78,000, with violent threats and hate quadrupling and harassment doubling. The ADL tracked the Facebook pages of Jewish members of Congress and found toxic comments jumped more than thirteenfold after February 4, 2025. GLAAD, UltraViolet, and All Out surveyed over 7,000 people across 86 countries and found 92 percent worried about the rise in harmful content, and 77 percent now feeling less safe simply existing openly on Meta's platforms. Even Meta's own first integrity report after the change admitted that violent and graphic content, plus bullying and harassment, both ticked upward.
https://brennan.day/free-speech-and-the-indieweb/
Also, what's up with misquoting me? I never used the phrase "mainstream cultural mainstream".
I guess if by mainstream culture you mean some sort of thin-skinned incel echo chamber. Which, yes, those "men" are pretty weak and pitiful, but I've never seen and calls to kill any of them.
However, if you look, for example, at the history of constitutional amendments over the centuries, turns out they've consistently been to provide more inclusivity/less hate. And that's arguably what made america great.
Seems the maga crowd wants to make America great at being stupid, mean and weak, instead of that inspirational light on the hill.
A "vaccine skeptic" is generally considered to mean someone who is skeptical that vaccinations work at all.
This is very different from having specific concerns about specific products, like the COVID "vaccines", which turned out to:
- not protect against infection
- not prevent transmission
- have numerous side-effects worse than the disease it's supposed to prevent
...all in direct contradiction to the pharma propaganda that was the norm during 2021-2022, for which large amounts were paid to influencers and media.
Indeed, someone who is a proponent of the practice of vaccination ought to be dismayed that such a shoddy product was pushed as belonging in the same category as time-tested vaccines which went through a rigorous and long development process before hitting the market, rather than being foisted on a population under duress. Competing remedies were also ridiculed so as to secure that desirable Emergency Market Authorization, combined with government contracts that removed any liability for the producers, with additional censorship of those contracts before release to the public.
Hence, "You're all on the same team now" is an example of missing the point entirely and turning the issue of vaccination into political team sports and "our guy" vs "their guy", rather than actually debating any of the issues that matter in public health. Do you see what I mean about not being able to state what opponents actually believe?
With loaded terms such as "hate", "toxic" and "harmful" being thrown around like candy, it's exactly the same thing. Hate and harm are supposed to be decided according to objective norms of discourse and behavior, not sentiment. Because what happens is sentiment is decided according to whom the source and target is. The lefties obsessed with these topics decide first who can be a victim and perpetrator based on the tenets of intersectionality, and then interpret the events and actions to fit that preconceived hypothesis. This is largely a result of peer pressure within their own circles. The Jason Arday case is the best recent illustration.
Notice too that the surveys you cite center on "worry about the rise in harmful content" and "feeling less safe". Not about any actual harm that may have been done, nor about whether safety has actually gone up or down.
I'll even add that the distinction between looking at objective behavior and outcomes, vs looking at subjective sentiment, tracks very well with masculine vs feminine norms in social interaction. Feminization of online spaces has been an absolute disaster and the quality of discourse has gone down immensely, because women by and large prefer social cohesion over facing uncomfortable truths. But when the ship is sinking, complaining that someone is rocking the boat is willful blindness.
But keep going, like you say we're not living in the neo-liberal Obama-era anymore. Ten years ago it was a mighty struggle to convince people of how corrosive your ideology was. Keep annoying everyone, keep pushing everyone who doesn't fully comply with your ideology away.
Giving condolences to Charlie Kirk isn't "support", remigration is not the deportation of non-white citizens, Brendan Eich did not donate to the kiwifarms, etc. Everything is skewed and stripped of any nuance.
But keep going, like you say we're not living in the neo-liberal Obama-era anymore. Ten years ago it was a mighty struggle to convince people of how corrosive your ideology was. Keep annoying everyone, keep pushing everyone who doesn't fully comply with your ideology away.
What’s disappointing is two-fold: HN greens and miscreants leaping to defend overtly fascist viewpoints as valid (faithfully ignoring the Paradox of Tolerance), and seeing 1Password on that list. Most of that garbage I can avoid to some degree, but 1Password is still the industry leader for enterprise password management by a wide margin, particularly in terms of UX. It’s making me side-eye Proton Vault for a migration for my own credentials, even if it means losing such conveniences as SSH/CLI access.
I’m also going to echo the sentiment of the cooler heads (and the OP) here, in that these people and entities aren’t David fighting Goliath. These are wealthy and powerful people either openly espousing violent ideologies or supporters of said proposals in monetary and/or infrastructure terms. They aren’t the deplatformed, they’re the deplatformers; they aren’t the debanked, they’re the debankers.
I don’t know which of you is part of the lucky 10,000 today, but more people need to internalize that life is inherently political due to its complexity. This rhetoric isn’t empty or hollow, it has meaningful impact and direct harm when left unchallenged. Similarly, the workplace isn’t some mythical apolitical environment, but a melting pot of policy and positions that form better or worse outcomes depending on what levers are pulled. Folks who exist on the “fringe” have no choice but to exist as open political entities until and unless the “fringe” is normalized, at which point we become background signal like everyone else (hence the backlash to “woke” and “DEI” by those whose power is derived from oppression and unalienable attributes like race or sex).
There is a very real problem of wealthy and powerful people leaning heavily on old fascist tropes to promote their own agendas at the expense of everyone else, their supporters included. We need more folks to recognize that their actions and their words are the same thing, and they intend to harm anyone and everyone they can to ensure they never, ever have to grow as individuals.
Those names are "kinda expected and obvious" for only the terminally online.
>Cloudflare defended literal White Supremacists a la The Daily Stormer
Never happened.
>and DHH is a person of immense notoriety for their bigoted views.
Only for the terminally online leftist.
>What’s disappointing is two-fold: HN greens and miscreants leaping to defend overtly fascist viewpoints as valid (faithfully ignoring the Paradox of Tolerance)
Heterodox opinions and anything right of Stalin != "overtly fascist viewpoints"
>They aren’t the deplatformed, they’re the deplatformers; they aren’t the debanked, they’re the debankers.
Always projection and admission. "When we do it, it's (D)ifferent!"
>I don’t know which of you is part of the lucky 10,000 today, but more people need to internalize that life is inherently political due to its complexity. This rhetoric isn’t empty or hollow, it has meaningful impact and direct harm when left unchallenged.
That's what many said about DEI/far-leftism. Anyone not fully aligned were called every -ist and name you could think of.
>Folks who exist on the “fringe” have no choice but to exist as open political entities until and unless the “fringe” is normalized
Everyone is a political entity.
>hence the backlash to “woke” and “DEI” by those whose power is derived from oppression and unalienable attributes like race or sex
It's backlash against boldfaced racism. DEI/wokeism is a racist, sexist, hateful ideology. That's why there's backlash.
>There is a very real problem of wealthy and powerful people leaning heavily on old fascist tropes to promote their own agendas at the expense of everyone else, their supporters included.
There was a very real problem of wealthy and powerful people leaning heavily on old communist tropes to promote their own agendas at the expense of everyone else, their supporters included.
_people have different personal opinions. You believe in your heart that DHH is evil, that you have the moral high ground, and that nothing will change your mind._
_However, not everyone believes that. It is not fair to claim a monopoly and ostracize team members who might disagree with you. There are people who are afraid to speak up simply because they will be personally attacked._