Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12M Given to DHH

> It is our only way forward.

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.

Perhaps a change of tack is in order.

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.

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.

As Roustem Karimov said:

_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._

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?

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.