#Rufo

Chuck Darwin'Chatham House Rule'Torenberg launched Chatham House the summer of 2024, naming it after a British think tank that formalized the insight that trusted conversations require a degree of privacy. Two of its conservative participants said they see the group as a way to shift centrist Trump-curious figures to the Republican side, but its founder said he’d begun it to have “a left-right exchange where we could have real conversations because of filter bubble group chats.”Chatham House includes high-profile figures like the economist <a href="https://c.im/tags/Larry" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Larry</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Summers" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Summers</a> and the historian <a href="https://c.im/tags/Niall" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Niall</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Ferguson" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Ferguson</a>, and more partisan figures like <a href="https://c.im/tags/Shapiro" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Shapiro</a> and the Democratic analyst <a href="https://c.im/tags/David" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#David</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Shor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Shor</a>. <a href="https://c.im/tags/Andreessen" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Andreessen</a> lurks. But several participants described it to me as something like a gladiatorial arena with <a href="https://c.im/tags/Cuban" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Cuban</a> most often in the center, sparring with conservatives.(“no idea what you are talking about :)” Cuban emailed in response to an inquiry about his arguments on Chatham House.)The Group Chat Era depended on part of the American elite feeling shut out from public spaces, and on the formation of a new conservative consensus. Both of those are now fading (though Torenberg has invested in a company called <a href="https://c.im/tags/ChatBCC" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#ChatBCC</a> that wants to commercialize the heady experience of sitting in on texts among the power elite).Since Elon Musk turned X to the right and an alternative media ecosystem emerged on Substack, “a tremendous amount of the verboten conversations can now shift back into public view,” Andreessen told Fridman. “It’s much healthier to live in a society in which people are literally not scared of what they’re saying.”And Trump’s destabilizing “Liberation Day” has taken its toll on the coalition Andreessen helped shape. You can see it on X, where investors joke that they’ll put pronouns back in their bios in exchange for a return to the 2024 stock prices, and where <a href="https://c.im/tags/Srinivasan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Srinivasan</a> has been a leading critic of Trump’s tariffs.“Group chats have changed on the economy in the last few weeks,” said <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rufo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Rufo</a>. “There’s a big split on the tech right.”The polarity of social media has also reversed, and while participants used to keep their conservative ideas off social media, “now the anti-Trump sentiment is what you’re afraid to say on X,” one said.By mid-April, <a href="https://c.im/tags/Sacks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Sacks</a> had had enough with Chatham House: “This group has become worthless since the loudest voices have TDS,” he wrote, shorthanding “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Then he addressed Torenberg: “You should create a new one with just smart people.”Signal soon showed that three men had left the group: The Sequoia partner <a href="https://c.im/tags/Shaun" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Shaun</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Maguire" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Maguire</a>, the bitcoin billionaire <a href="https://c.im/tags/Tyler" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Tyler</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Winklevoss" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Winklevoss</a>, and <a href="https://c.im/tags/Tucker" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Tucker</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Carlson" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Carlson</a>.<a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america</a>

Chuck DarwinAlong 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 <a href="https://c.im/tags/Kmele" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Kmele</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Foster" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Foster</a>, who co-hosts the podcast "The Fifth Column", Persuasion founder <a href="https://c.im/tags/Yascha" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Yascha</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mounk" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Mounk</a>, and the Harper’s letter contributor Williams joined Andreessen and a group that also included the anti-woke conservative activist <a href="https://c.im/tags/Chris" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Chris</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rufo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Rufo</a>.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 <a href="https://c.im/tags/David" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#David</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/French" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#French</a> and the liberal academic <a href="https://c.im/tags/Jason" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Jason</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Stanley" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Stanley</a>, 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 <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rufo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Rufo</a>, 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.” <a href="https://c.im/tags/MarcAndreessen" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#MarcAndreessen</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/LexFridman" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#LexFridman</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/MarkCuban" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#MarkCuban</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/VivekRamaswamy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#VivekRamaswamy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/ErikTorenberg" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#ErikTorenberg</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Krishnan" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Krishnan</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/NoahSmith" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#NoahSmith</a>

AnarchoNinaAnalyzesOver the past eight or so years, I've been asked on numerous occasions how I could be so certain that Trumpworld and the right wing authoritarian tech billionaires that are funding the movement were literally fascists. The simple answer to that question is because I know where the ideas that motivate them and animate their movement come from. As openly fascistic as the Trump regime's exercise of power has been so far, if you peel back a single layer to look at the people providing the ideological framework for those activities, you almost always find literal nazis. Take for example the Trump regime's frequently self-identified "war on woke." On its face, the collection of policies and activities used to wage the "war on woke" so far have been fundamentally Christian Nationalist, white supremacist, patriarchal, and eliminationist in nature. If however you peel back the top surface of this "war" you find three major ideological propagandists driving the entire agenda: specifically Peter Boghossian, Christopher Rufo, and Richard Hanania; whose frankly odious ideas have had a huge influence on the Republican Party, and the Trump administration. These three have waged a war on higher education, diversity, and the very concept of racial or gender equality, that is expressly endorsed by most of the same far right billionaires who paid to make Trump president; including Marc Andressen, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Vivek Ramaswamy. So what happens if you peel back another layer of this fascist onion to find out who is funding and promoting guys like Hanania, Rufo, and Boghossian? You find a rich cracker tech bro, and a eugenicist running a recently rebranded foundation that supports white supremacists, promotes scientific racism, and was literally founded by Nazis. No, really: <a href="https://bylinetimes.com/2025/02/27/trumps-war-on-woke-and-dei-incubated-by-a-nazi-eugenics-foundation/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://bylinetimes.com/2025/02/27/trumps-war-on-woke-and-dei-incubated-by-a-nazi-eugenics-foundation/</a>Trump’s War on ‘Woke’ and DEI: Incubated by a Nazi Eugenics Foundation"The ‘war on woke’ did not suddenly appear. It is an idea deeply rooted in a form of scientific racism that has been laundered into the mainstream over decades by the Pioneer Fund and right-wing activists connected with this group. This nexus of ties to Pioneer Fund entities and ideology throws new light on how the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI are the fruit of a broader white supremacist endeavour inspired by Nazi-aligned ideology.It also suggests that the increasing normalisation of the Nazi salute by Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and others is not an accident either – but a signal; one we would do well not to ignore."Unfortunately this article is a long read, and it's easy to get bogged down in the idea that the problem here is the "ancient" history of the Human Diversity Foundation/Pioneer Diveristy fund, but if you keep reading the author is very clear that the politics and priorities of the foundation, haven't changed much in the modern era."But last year, Hope Not Hate revealed that a network of white supremacist activists was secretly rehabilitating the Pioneer Fund under the new Human Diversity Foundation brand identity.The aim has been to normalise the Pioneer Fund’s Nazi-aligned scientific racism in the mainstream through the notion of open debate and ‘free’ inquiry. Scientific racism has been rebranded as the story of ‘human biodiversity’.The key funder supporting this initiative was revealed to be American technology entrepreneur Andrew Conru, who donated $1.3 million to the HDF. Around the same time, Conru was also funding the most influential conservative voices attacking DEI and ‘critical race theory’ – Christopher Rufo, Peter Boghossian, and Richard Hanania.HDF’s magazine, Aporia, was founded by British far-right activist Matthew Frost. Conru’s donation provided him with a 15% stake in the group. It has defended Richard Lynn’s pseudoscientific racism, published an interview with Nazi sympathiser Jared Taylor, and in 2024 claimed that racial stereotypes are “reasonably accurate”.Hope Not Hate’s undercover reporting recorded far-right activists associated with the HDF calling for “remigration” – the ‘mass removal of ethnic minorities’.Kirkegaard is the long-time editor of the Pioneer Fund-backed eugenics journal Mankind Quarterly, a founding board member of which was Nazi eugenicist Otmar von Verscheur – who taught and mentored Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi SS officer known as the ‘Angel of Death’ for performing medical experiments at Auschwitz.In 2023, both Kirkegaard and Frost attended a notorious neo-Nazi gathering known as the “Scandza Forum” in Estonia, hosted by Scandinavian neo-Nazi Fróði Midjord. The conference was that year renamed ‘Guide to Kulchur’ after a book by Nazi sympathiser and Holocaust supporter Ezra Pound.Kirkegaard inherited the assets of the Pioneer Fund from its former long-time president Richard Lynn before he died in July 2023."<a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Fascism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Fascism</a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Trump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Trump</a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Nazis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Nazis</a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/WarOnWoke" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#WarOnWoke</a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Eugenics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Eugenics</a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Rufo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Rufo</a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Hanania" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Hanania</a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Boghossian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Boghossian</a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/HDF" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#HDF</a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/PioneerFund" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#PioneerFund</a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Kirkegaard" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Kirkegaard</a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Conru" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Conru</a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Broligarchs" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Broligarchs</a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/GOP" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#GOP</a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Thiel</a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/DEI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#DEI</a>

Chuck DarwinAt a moment when the regime is systematically waging war on diversity initiatives of every kind, it has simultaneously discovered that it is really concerned about both "viewpoint diversity" and "antisemitism" on college campuses —and it is using the two issues as a club to beat on the US university system until it either dies or conforms to MAGA ideology.Reaching this conclusion does not require reading any tea leaves or consulting any oracles; one need only listen to people like Vice President JD <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Vance</a>, who in 2021 gave a speech called "The Universities are the Enemy" to signal that, like every authoritarian revolutionary, he intended to go after the educated."If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country," Vance said, "and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country." Or, as conservative activist Christopher <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rufo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Rufo</a> put it in a New York Times piece exploring the attack campaign, "We want to set them back a generation or two."The goal is capitulation or destruction. And "destruction" is not a hyperbolic term; some Trump aides have, according to the same piece, "spoken privately of toppling a high-profile university to signal their seriousness."Consider, in just a few months, how many battles have been launched: The Trump administration is now snatching non-citizen university students, even those in the country legally, off the streets using plainclothes units and attempting to deport them based on their speech or beliefs. It has opened investigations of more than 50 universities. It has threatened grants and contracts at, among others, Brown ($510 million), Columbia ($400 million), Cornell ($1 billion), Harvard ($9 billion), Penn ($175 million), and Princeton ($210 million). It has reached a widely criticized deal with Columbia that would force Columbia to change protest and security policies but would also single out one academic department (Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies) for enhanced scrutiny. 💥This deal didn't even get Columbia its $400 million back; it only paved the way for future "negotiations" about the money. 💥And the Trump administration is potentially considering a consent decree with Columbia, giving it leverage over the school for years to come. It has demanded that Harvard audit every department for "viewpoint diversity," hiring faculty who meet the administration's undefined standards. Trump himself has explicitly threatened to revoke Harvard's tax-exempt nonprofit status after it refused to bow to his demands. And the IRS looks ready to do it. The government has warned that it could choke off all international students—an important diplomatic asset but also a key source of revenue—at any school it likes. Ed <a href="https://c.im/tags/Martin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Martin</a>—the extremely Trumpy interim US Attorney for Washington, DC—has already notified Georgetown that his office will not hire any of that school's graduates if the school "continues to teach and utilize DEI."What's next? Project 2025 lays it out for us, envisioning the federal government getting heavily involved in accreditation —thus giving the government another way to bully schools —and privatizing many student loans. Right-wing wonks have already begun to push for "a never-ending compliance review" of elite schools' admissions practices, one that would see the Harvard admissions office filled with federal monitors scrutinizing every single admissions decision. Trump has also called for "patriotic education" in K–12 schools; expect similar demands of universities, though probably under the rubrics of "viewpoint discrimination" and "diversity." <a href="https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/04/resist-eggheads-universities-are-not-as-weak-as-they-have-chosen-to-be/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/04/resist-eggheads-universities-are-not-as-weak-as-they-have-chosen-to-be/</a>

Chuck DarwinIn 2022 Vox called Yarvin the “person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the US government could be toppled and replaced”.Yarvin suggests that a would-be American autocrat should campaign on and win an electoral mandate for an authoritarian program. They should purge the federal bureaucracy in a push Yarvin has anagrammatized as <a href="https://c.im/tags/RAGE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#RAGE</a> (for “retire all government employees”).They should simply ignore any court rulings that seek to constrain them. They should bring Congress to heel, in part by mobilizing their populist base against recalcitrant lawmakers. And liberal or mainstream media organizations and universities should be summarily closed.Given the post-election period and Trump’s preparation for a return to the White House, Yarvin’s program seems less fanciful than it did in 2021, when he laid it out for Anton.In the recording of that podcast, Yarvin offers a condensed presentation of his program which he has laid out on Substack and in other venues.Midway through their conversation, Anton says to Yarvin, “You’re essentially advocating for someone to – age-old move – gain power lawfully through an election, and then exercise it unlawfully”, adding: “What do you think the actual chances of that happening are?”Yarvin responded: “It wouldn’t be unlawful,” adding: “You’d simply declare a state of emergency in your inaugural address.”Yarvin continued: “You’d actually have a mandate to do this. Where would that mandate come from? It would come from basically running on it, saying, ‘Hey, this is what we’re going to do.’”Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump promised to carry out a wide array of anti-democratic or authoritarian moves, and effectively ran on these promises. Trump has suggested he might declare a state of emergency in response to America’s immigration crisis.Trump also promised to pursue retribution on individually named antagonists like representative Nancy Pelosi and senator-elect Adam Schiff, and spoke more broadly about dispatching the US military to deal with “the enemy within”.Later in the recording, Yarvin said that after a hypothetical authoritarian president was inaugurated in January, “you can’t continue to have a Harvard or a New York Times past since perhaps the start of April”. Later expanding on the idea with 💥“the idea that you’re going to be a Caesar and take power and operate with someone else’s Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd.”“Machiavelli could tell you right away that that’s a stupid idea,” Yarvin added.While he has not yet assumed power, Trump has moved against media outlets, commencing lawsuits against some including the Des Moines Register, CBS and ABC, with the latter settling a $15m suit that legal experts believed to be winnable for the broadcaster.Vice-president-elect JD Vance, meanwhile, and others in the broader Maga orbit like <a href="https://c.im/tags/Christopher" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Christopher</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rufo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Rufo</a> have identified universities as primary ideological enemies, with Rufo helping to remake New College of Florida in the image of Christian nationalism.In 2022, Vance told Vanity Fair: “I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”The Guardian reported in August that Vance said in a podcast recording: “There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we’re willing to strike at the heart of the beast. That’s the universities.”-- Jason Wilson <a href="https://c.im/tags/JDVance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#JDVance</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/CurtisYarvin" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#CurtisYarvin</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/MichaelAnton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#MichaelAnton</a>

Joshua HollandAfter all the <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/MarkRobinson" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#MarkRobinson</a>, <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/Rufo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Rufo</a>, <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/Nuzzi" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Nuzzi</a> and <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/RFKJr" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#RFKJr</a> news broke, a late-night filing revealed that 3 witnesses gave sworn testimony that “<a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/MattGaetz" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#MattGaetz</a> attended a drug-fueled sex party in 2017 with the 17-year-old girl at the center of the alleged sex trafficking scandal.”Thursday was quite a news day. <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/media" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#media</a> <a href="https://www.notus.org/florida/new-court-filings-matt-gaetz-dorworth-sex-party" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.notus.org/florida/new-court-filings-matt-gaetz-dorworth-sex-party</a>

Chuck DarwinWith <a href="https://c.im/tags/humanitarian" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#humanitarian</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/catastrophes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#catastrophes</a> unfolding on several continents, the response of the <a href="https://c.im/tags/wealthy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#wealthy</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/world" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#world</a> has been to 💥demand tighter borders and higher fences. ⚠️There is no blockbuster charity single raising money for starving refugees from the civil war raging in Sudan. 🆘And now, the cruel taunts come not just from schoolyard bullies and cranks on the political fringes, but from the lips of a man who stood on the presidential debate stage on Tuesday -- a former president who once again has a coin-flip shot at regaining the most powerful office in the world.And so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by that lowest of moments at the debate, when Donald Trump repeated a vile, baseless claim that Haitian immigrants were killing and eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio. This allegation appears to stem from viral social media posts and statements at public meetings. It was picked up by some of the most rancid figures at the <a href="https://c.im/tags/fringe" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#fringe</a> of the <a href="https://c.im/tags/MAGA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#MAGA</a>-verse, then quickly hopscotched from there to a social media post by Trump’s running mate, JD <a href="https://c.im/tags/Vance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Vance</a>, and finally to the debate stage, sputtered by <a href="https://c.im/tags/Trump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Trump</a> himself.There is something particularly <a href="https://c.im/tags/insidious" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#insidious</a> about this claim, uttered at this time, from that stage. <a href="https://c.im/tags/Food" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Food</a> and <a href="https://c.im/tags/pets" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#pets</a> are, to use a Freudian term, highly overdetermined <a href="https://c.im/tags/symbols" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#symbols</a> in our political life. They are capable of receiving and holding a multiplicity of very potent meanings, transmitting deep messages about <a href="https://c.im/tags/identity" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#identity</a> and <a href="https://c.im/tags/belonging" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#belonging</a>.You can tell how powerful this type of slur is by how quickly and vociferously it has animated so many on the right. Figures who flirt with the mainstream have eagerly jumped into the fray. The conservative culture warrior <a href="https://c.im/tags/Christopher" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Christopher</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Rufo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Rufo</a> has offered a $5,000 bounty for anyone who can find proof that a Haitian immigrant had in fact eaten a cat. It is not hard to imagine how this could quickly escalate into <a href="https://c.im/tags/vigilante" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#vigilante</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/violence" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#violence</a> against Haitians in America. On Thursday, city officials in Springfield, most of whom have pushed back against the false allegations, said they had received <a href="https://c.im/tags/bomb" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#bomb</a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/threats" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#threats</a>, prompting the evacuation of city buildings.MAGA bigotry is far more <a href="https://c.im/tags/sinister" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#sinister</a> and <a href="https://c.im/tags/dangerous" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#dangerous</a> than weird. And disbelieving laughter could, I fear, blind us to moments like this, when truly unacceptable lines are crossed<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/14/opinion/trump-debate-haitians-pets.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ngrp=mnp&pvid=93CE287F-EE40-40AE-B1B3-90B0F13022C0" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/14/opinion/trump-debate-haitians-pets.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ngrp=mnp&pvid=93CE287F-EE40-40AE-B1B3-90B0F13022C0</a>

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