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Chuck Darwin

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
#MarkCuban
#VivekRamaswamy #ErikTorenberg #Krishnan
#NoahSmith

*
Chuck Darwin

On Donald Trump’s first day in office, the Department of Defense announced a spate of hires, including 26-year-old
#Kingsley #Wilson, who will serve as the Pentagon’s deputy press secretary.
Wilson is the daughter of #Steve #Cortes, a longtime Trump advisor and right-wing commentator who promotes Latinos moving to the political right.
Wilson is also a Trump 2020 campaign alum, and until taking the job at the DoD, ran digital media and communications for the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank founded by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought.
She’s also an overt internet troll with a long history of bigoted, xenophobic, and deliberately provocative shitposting. 

Wilson in many ways embodies the face of the new Trump administration:
she’s worked in the MAGA world for seemingly her entire, very short career;

besides her roles in the Trump campaign and at the Center for Renewing America,
she also served as the national committeewoman for the DC Young Republicans.

She also briefly worked at Gettr, the social media platform founded by former Trump aide #Jason #Miller and with deep links to fugitive Chinese mogul #Guo #Wengui.

When she wasn’t doing any of that, Wilson was busy reeling off an endless tweets excoriating immigrants and trans people,
advocating for what she called “zero immigration and mass deportations,”
and bemoaning the “death of the West,”
a term popularized by Pat Buchanan and often used by nativist, isolationist, and white nationalist groups to argue that immigration dilutes “Western” culture.

At least twice, Wilson also repeated long-debunked lies online about the lynching death of Leo Frank,
a Jewish man who was kidnapped from a Georgia prison and murdered in 1915,
claiming he was guilty of the murder for which most modern historians agree he was wrongly convicted.

She also claimed the Black Lives Matter movement had an “affinity for race-based violence,”
and derided George Floyd, the Black man murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis,
a “career criminal,” and scornfully called him “Saint George Floyd.”

“If you identify as transgender and/or are undergoing hormone therapy
—you should NOT be allowed to legally purchase a firearm,”
she posted, in one of her many tweets
claiming transgender people are abnormal or mentally ill.

“In a healthy country… transgender people aren’t visible,” she tweeted in 2024 (ellipses hers).

Wilson also explicitly lent her support to Great Replacement theory,
a racist and xenophobic conspiracy theory that holds that non-white immigrants are being lured to the United States to replace white Americans.

“The Great Replacement isn’t a right-wing conspiracy theory… it’s reality,”
she tweeted in 2024, over a screenshot of a Bloomberg article about the growth of the U.S. Hispanic population.

Wilson also called to “make Kosovo Serbia again,”
a particularly weird stance for an American now working in the Pentagon;

the United States has recognized Kosovo as an independent state since 2008 and maintains troops there as part of peacekeeping efforts.

Wilson also lent her support for the German far-right party AfD,
tweeting in 2024, “Globalist elites hate AfD because they put Germans before foreign migrants and radical Islam. Ausländer Raus!”

Wilson has tweeted the phrase
“Ausländer Raus” at least four times,
including the slogan,
“Deutschland den Deutschen. Ausländer raus.”

The phrase, which means, “Germany for Germans, foreigners out,”
is explicitly considered to be an extremist slogan in Germany with neo-Nazi roots;

in fact, a 1992 paper about its use among German skinheads is available on a Department of Justice website.

At least one German prosecutor has said that using the phrase is a criminal offense.

Nonetheless, the chant has been adopted by some young AfD supporters.

A video of the chant being sung at a trendy bar in the holiday island of Sylt sparked an enormous controversy last summer,
and again when it was sung a month later at a village festival in Germany.

(Non-Germans signaling their contempt for immigration, including accused human trafficker Tristan Tate, have also tweeted the phrase.)

Wilson’s career seems to have followed a dual track,
both making the rounds in DC politics and the Trump campaign and flirting with a career as an online provocateur
—though those roles that are increasingly blurred in the MAGAfied Republican party.

During her time at the Center for Renewing America, the Vought-founded think tank, she appeared as a talking head on conservative news sites like The Blaze,
and has appeared multiple times on the podcast of Tim Pool’s, the once “heterodox” streamer who’s become increasingly far-right.

motherjones.com/politics/2025/

Mother JonesThis Pentagon press secretary has a long history of bigoted and xenophobic posts “Be unapologetically right-wing. It will pay off.”
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