Eventually the Democrats are going to recognize that hardline "if you're not with us, you're against us" progressives are costing more votes than they're worth and show them the door.

> people like you always

This crosses into personal attack and you can't do that here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit out such swipes in the future, as the rules ask, we'd appreciate it.

Edit: this has unfortunately increasingly been a problem with your account lately:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43261348 (March 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152094 (Feb 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43147710 (Feb 2025)

You've made many fine contributions to HN in the past and I don't recall your account having been involved in so much ideological and political flamewar. Could you please fix this? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

That's not the student exercising their free speech. It's the student denying the benefit of free speech to their fellow students and the rest of the university.

The university apparently hadn't yet educated the student on the basics of university, and there was not yet any sign that the university was going to. Reporting followed up with the student, when they promoted their personal brand, and solicited funding to continue their fight.

(You might be happy to know that, instead of my modest donation going to the university with the student who thought a first-rate university was the place to ignore the fundamentals they teach, and instead play self-promoting influencer... IIRC, that was the year the money went to a homeless trans person, who'd been through more hell than most people can imagine, and who needed a discreet laptop so that they could practice coding job skills, but without the laptop getting violently stolen from them in whatever shelter they could get into. I'm not making this up, and the contrast was striking.)

Regarding your other comments, much of the rabid left didn't seem to be acting as the savvy political operators you suggest: a whole lot of people were mindlessly flinging their poo, and playing right into the hands of some of the worst of their adversaries. Maybe it was partly a combination of crisis mode over the best of intentions (e.g., help those who need help), and anger and fatigue from same (which I certainly felt), but there also seemed to be a whole lot of not knowing any other mode of reasoning or acting. Maybe that's not their fault -- you might blame the deterioration of popular journalism, social media sites preying upon their users, and a dearth of visible role models demonstrating anything else -- but that seems to be where we are, for large slices of the vocal population. And there's been a lot of counterproductive.

Do you know OP personally? Do you really think it's reasonable to assume that everyone in the universe (except for you, perhaps) is a hypocrite like this?

There's plenty of people that feel the administrative force of the university shouldn't be used to suppress either side. Let the gun club invite Luigi. Let the trans club invite the Stonewall rioters.

You're welcome to say you dislike the speaker. You don't have to attend. But you shouldn't have the authority to stop other people from inviting them to speak, or to stop other people from listening.

This allowed the current administration to step in by promising something different, with no intention of delivering anything but tax relief for the wealthy and unchaining corporations from those pesky regulations that prevent higher profits.

Speech is not created equal. What some students say in some college campus has very little power compared to the speech of one of the richest people __in history__.

When someone famous and rich says something fucked up, the reaction to that isn’t deplatforming but rather a basic attempt at defense.

For me the cringiest part of all is sudden strong urge to appear strong and masculine. It is always full package.

My understanding of "woke" is levelling the playing field & being aware of your biases so you can be a better human. It's hard for me to imagine someone being against "all humans are equal & deserve equal access to opportunity, if they have the skill & motivation." I know people are out there who don't believe everyone is equal, maybe that's the "anti woke" you speak of?

Either way, "woke" as a term is poorly defined to the point I immediately disengage when someone starts screeching about it, because it means nothing and now the rest of the conversation is pointless.

I have yet to hear a coherent description of what "woke" even fucking means that doesn't ultimately dissolve into a pot-pourri of personal grievances.

It is impossible to be an actual nerd and not be woke. Money-men "founders" have nothing but distain for the geeks that made them rich.

[Edit: I see people don't like this, but are simply down-voting rather than engaging. What is your definition of "woke" then, if not an awareness of America's history?]

I am not a fan of a lot of the tenets associated with "wokeness", but this is just totally wrong.

> Today, virtually everyone is anti-woke.

I'd extend your claim. Tautologically, everyone is anti-woke.

Honestly given the impact, I'd say complaining about "wokeness" pretty much defines "reactionary". Pronouns and flopsy straws never hurt nobody, and kids have been calling their elders racists and rapists and whatnot for generations.

Something happened to convince tech folks that "wokeness" was somehow a threat, when it clearly wasn't and never will be. And that something is interesting, and probably of a piece with whatever was going on in the echo chamber these folks found themselves in.

Out in, "what the F are you idiots doing with our economy"-land. There are exactly zero people who give a mosquito's dick about Woke DEI Trumpanzees or whatever.

These are issues important to elites. We tend to live in an echo chamber here on HN, so we think it's important to the guys working as hired hands during the day and the walmart stock shift at night.

Let me tell you, out here in flyover country, no one working at Taco bell cares about what you care about. Woke, anti-Woke, digital privacy, owning the libtards, stopping the right wing conspiracy, they don't care about any of it. There's a lot of pain out here, and they're way too busy to even worry about that useless crap.

We had an election in Wisconsin recently that the right wingers sailed in with millions on millions of dollars to try to win. Ended up losing handily. Why? Because they talked about a lot of things that, while they may have meaning outside of opioid country, don't mean a whole lot inside of it.

I just don't think elites get it. And that's dangerous.

Bill Maher still has a show, despite having spent more than twenty-five years being a racist POS. There is no such thing as "Cancel Culture": there are just people who are SUPER mad that their kids think their racism is bad.

Soon as Trump's term started he started removing any mention of slavery from the Smithsonian cuz 'merica.

That's really the concerning thing. Liberals and conservatives not only dislike ideas, they dislike history and facts. That's what makes them dangerous.

On the left it seems you at least had a few moderates who had the good sense to keep the wing nuts in line. We tried the right, thinking we might get better governance, and have discovered, to our collective horror, that the right is wing nuts the whole way down. So you get things like tariffs, and purges, and wild 4$$ ravings about plane crashes being caused by too many blacks.

In the US we need to take things back in hand or it really will be way too late to do anything. These extremists will run the nation right into the ground.

Is it that surprising? As a longtime member, this seems perfectly consistent with the general bent of the website. Collectively, HN has long been extremely comfortable with authoritarianism and far right ideologies, as long as those opinions are expressed in a framing that conveys intellectualism and "civility". Those same expectations are weaponized to drive out dissenting voices, which creates a positive[0] feedback loop.

Honestly, if anything, I'm surprised that this comment thread is (reasonably) lucid, because that's not how a lot of other comment threads recently on similar issues have gone.

[0] In the literal (non-normative) sense: a positive feedback loop is one which amplifies the effects, whether or not the end effects are "good" or "bad".

Be specific and put up numbers.

There is a wide, wide swath of issues where the "liberal" position is the majoritarian one.

People being illegally sent to CECOT is a major nationwide story right now that is real and pertinent.

It seems to me directly in line with the nature of the article as written, the tech context we currently live in, and i don’t think it’s against HN guidelines to speak uncomfortably truths. In fact it seems core to what we’re trying to do here.

Thanks for all you do here, not trying to turn this place into Twitter, but I also think it’s important that we not fall into the trap of not being willing to confront the outrageous truths of what’s happening in our community because the rational response is outrageous.

I thought the rest of my comment was insightful as well, despite having to trade in some inflammatory terms. We're apparently at a time of pulling on these threads that had remained unpulled. The only way forward is to hash these uncomfortable ideas out in the open. Because as the article describes, they're certainly getting pulled on in less public forums where other uncomfortable truths have an easier time remaining unvisited.