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.